Category Archives: A Fistful Of Euros

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Getting Older, Or Getting Younger?

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Warren Sanderson & Sergei Scherbov had a very interesting article in Nature earlier this year (you can find the full article reproduced here on page 5). The article title really tells the story in itself: average remaining lifetimes can increase as human populations age. Put differently, we may be facing the interesting enigma that the longer we live, the longer we have left to live.

But, riddles aside, what Sanderson and Scherbov actually propose is a new metric: the median age of the population standardized for expected remaining years of life. Now why would that be interesting?
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Nollaig shona daoibh

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Now of course I cannot allow Edward to remain the only afoer offering our readers holiday greetings in an obscure Celtic tongue. And I’ll throw in a nice wee pressie to boot: nazis in disarray!

Back in September 2004 I wrote in a comment to a post about neonazi electoral gains in eastern Germany:

As many have pointed out, electoral support for the extreme right in Germany is a fickle and transitory thing, and the Union has a habit of picking up the strays. The Reps and the DVU have had their 15 minutes, now it’s the NPD’s turn. With any luck, this election will have been their high water mark.

Well, it looks like that is indeed the case, and just in time for Christmas, too.

As the Frankfurter Rundschau reports (auf Deutsch), three NPD members of Saxony’s state parliament have left the party (and its parliamentary fraction) in the past week. Two of them have signed on to a programme for those seeking to escape neonazi circles, and all have requested police protection. The NPD are left, then, with nine of the twelve seats they won in the last elections. Their shrinkage has an immediate and positive result: thanks to the reduced size of the NPD fraction, the party lose half the committee positions to which they are entitled. They also forfeit a portion of the state money every party gets.

The party itself is livid, of course, stamping their booted little feet and fuming about ‘treason’ and ‘conspiracy’. I believe the word they are looking for is ‘Dolchstoss‘.

Nadolig Llawen

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Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda o Barcelona

Which is Welsh (the language of my childhood) for Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year from sunny Barcelona. Well, I just added the sunny part, since the sun is, right now, also rising.

Since I am not religious, and I am not really a dedicated fan of e-commerce, xmas – as I live it – is maybe a time for thinking about roots and origins.

The New Year, however, is a time for looking towards the future. May 2006 be just as interesting as 2005 has been. For all of you. We couldn’t ask for more.

Enjoy yourselves everyone!

Going Too Far

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Last night I went to see the film Luther – which unsurprisingly enough is a biographical epic which focuses on the life and works of Martin Luther. I have always felt a strange attraction to Luther, not for his religion, but for the ‘here I am, I can do no other’ part. This post, however, has little to do with the film, except in that it is about how small changes in our ways of thinking can have big impacts.

You see all through the film I couldn’t help thinking about the recent act of ‘personation’ carried out by the Spanish radio station cadena COPE, and about just how stupid the people behind it really seem to be.
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The end of the world as we know it…

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Just on the day when the French Assemblée Nationale kind of accidentally introduced some kind of “cultural flatrate” (which is obviously opposed to the government’s intent) the Independent has learnt that the British government is demonstrating boldly that digital technology need not be used to free either bits and bytes, or even people.

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years. … Every time you make a car journey already, you’ll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car’s index plates will be read as well,” said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).”

When will the responsible people realise that we are likely to have already passed the point where freedom is enhanced and protected by security measures. When I was at the LSE, I attended a seminar held by David Held called “rethinking the modern polity”. We started by thinking about Hobbes. But we did not think we’d end up there again.

Great Leap Forward II

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Updating on my post from yesterday, Dave Altig at MacroBlog reproduces a map (first posted by Sun Bin) of services as a component of GDP. As Dave points out China has clearly be come a significant outlier among would-be-developed economies in its reliance on manufacturing share. Even with the most recent data added in China is still very services-light. So: yes China needs financial reform, yes China needs to shift to a more domestic-consumption-driven model, and YES China needs to get into services, and bigtime.

Merkelmania

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As Emmanuel rightly noted, “the other big winner of the (EU) summit is of course Angela Merkel”. As he also goes on to note, “the Süddeutsche Zeitung may be overdoing it with a “the Angela-summit” title, but Merkel has emerged, somewhat unexpectedly considering her lack of experience at the European level….”.

Well, it seems that the snowball-effect is working apace. The EU observer informs us today that “German chancellor Angela Merkel has been crowned the queen of the EU budget by the press”, and in another article asks whether our Angela might not in fact become the saviour of the EU constitution.

My reaction to all this is “now just hold on a minute”. Angela Merkel has just been elected to the head of a pretty complicated coalition government in a country which has some hard problems to solve and some difficult decisions to take. My guess is holding all of that together is going to be occupying a lot of Angela Merkel’s energy and attention by the time we get through to 2007, and discussion of her future role in dynamising EU institutions is, to say the least, rather premature. I don’t know if any of our German based readers have any observations to make about this?

The Great Leap Forward

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And this time it’s one that has been achieved in a little under 24 hours. China’s economy is now – officially speaking in any event – 17% bigger than it was yesterday. It will now be a neck and neck race for 4th place in the world economy league this year (the UK is the current holder) and a foregone conclusion next year.

Over the years a lot of people have suggested that China’s growth numbers were ‘rigged’, what they never contemplated howeveris that they may have been rigged downwards.

Also, as I noted here, China is now the world’s number one investment destination, and the number one exporter of ICT products.