Nov 20,2012

UP Links 20 November 2012

+ Kari Kohn

Prisoner Offshoring (ht: Marginal Revolution)

There may be a trend here – call it Gaolbalization. Sending prisoners to the cheapest justice provider really went global in the past few years with Somali piracy. Dozens of nations have sent warships to catch the pirates. Piracy is a universal jurisdiction crime that can be tried by any country, and the Law of the Sea Treaty gives precedence to the capturing state. The problem is, piracy prosecution is time-consuming (at least in Western legal systems) and expensive, and leaves one with a permanent pirate population.Thus European nations, the U.S., and other countries have worked out deals with Kenya and the Seychelles to transfer pirates caught by the former nations to be tried and imprisoned in the latter. There seems to be implicit compensation in these deals, with donor countries and the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime modernizing the prisons and courts of receiving countries, getting them new “kit,” grants and other foreign aid. The stories of these dealings, often done on a case-by-case basis, would be fine reading in itself.

Changes in Rules that Led to “The Last Laughing Death”

“We made a list, Carleton and I, and there were lots of changes. The introduction of new foods, new animals, the cessation of certain activities. But the one that was biologically the most relevant was the mortuary practices, at least in my view.” A couple of years later, field surveys confirmed the disease had died out in children younger than 10 — which fitted with the kiaps effectively administering new rules of behaviour through the district. The rules were, says Alpers, “No fighting, build roads, no cannibalism, no child marriage, and plant coffee. And they did it.”…The humbling lesson for scientists and doctors was that while their labours might have helped solve the puzzle, they had not halted the disease. The honour for the life-saving intervention belonged to the officers, both black and white, who administered the new laws of the land.

Michael Spence: President Xi’s Singapore Lessons

The other key lesson from Singapore is that single-party rule has retained popular legitimacy by delivering inclusive growth and equality of opportunity in a multi-ethnic society, and by eliminating corruption of all kinds, including cronyism and excessive influence for vested interests. What Singapore’s founder, Lee Kwan Yew, and his colleagues and successors understood is that the combination of single-party rule and corruption is toxic. If you want the benefits of the former, you cannot allow the latter.Coherence, long time horizons, appropriate incentives, strong “navigational” skills, and decisiveness are desirable aspects of continuity in governance, especially in a meritocratic system managing complex structural shifts. To protect that and maintain public support for the investments and policies that sustain growth, Singapore needed to prevent corruption from gaining a foothold, and to establish consistency in the application of rules. Lee did that, with the PAP supplying what a full formal system of public accountability would have provided.

Atlantic Cities on the Impact of Density on the Recent Election

…Cities do demand, by definition, a greater role for government than a small rural town on the prairie. But the return on investment can also be much higher (in jobs created through transportation spending, in the number of citizens touched by public expenditures, in patents per capita, in the sheer share of economic growth driven by our metropolises).Density makes all of these things possible, and it requires its own kind of politics.