The Licence Raj

In lieu of a proper post, I'm going to point you at an article about India on the BBC news website, written by one Kaushik Basu. He asserts that employment regulations in India, designed to combat unemployment by making it difficult to lay off workers, have had the perverse effect of slowing employment growth. he maintains that this has happened because risk averse employers are loth to take on workers that they can't easily get rid of should times change.

I think the article has something going for it, and comparisons with the recent attempts to change employment law in France might be instructive. At the same time, I am curious as to what the guy says squares with the commercial and sci-tech boom India has recently experienced.

Essays are fun

Yeah, sorry. Spy School has been keeping me busy, making it hard for me to update this. I have recently been researching essays on Pinochet's foreign policy, Honduras' suckass attempts to achieve equitable insertion into the world economy, and the distinctively post-communist (or not) political systems of eastern Europe. I may eventually share this knowledge with you, but I am still writing the third one so it may be a while.

In the meantime, here is an engagingly idiosyncratic blog post about Zionism. Mike likens the creation of the state of Israel to the ghettos of the Middle Ages, with Israel representing a bizarre instance of self-ghettoisation.