Ya vieron el mecanismo de votación del TUCOM? La ponderación de los votos fue como sigue:

–10% con base en los votos de los ocho tucomistas
–40% con base en 1400 notables encuestados (dicen que como la mitad contestó–un muy alto nivel de abstencionismo, considerando que los notables son gente informada, cívica y patriótica).
–50% con base en una encuesta a 6000 no notables o meros mortales.

Esta votación es un híbrido curioso de votos anónimos pero no idénticos: el voto de un tucomista valía más de diez veces más que el de un notable, y el de éstos a su vez valía mucho más que el de un mero mortal. ¡Ni siquiera Big Brother hubiera cocinado tal fórmula!

Dice “Transparencia Mexicana” que de acuerdo a sus muy transparentes cómputos ganó Montiel.

Y claro, en aras de la transparencia no se puede saber el nombre y número de los notables que SI contestaron, ni los porcentajes de ganadores y perdedores tanto entre notables como entre meros mortales. No vaya a ser que, sabiendo tales porcentajes, los tucomistas decidan romper su pacto o le vendan sus market share a Madrazo.

Preguntas del ácido: ¿Si tuvieras que elegir entre eliminar a los notables o a los meros mortales, a quién descartarías? ¿Madrazo vs. Montiel?

Stiglitz is going at it again.  This is a very nice paper where the authors tackle not only Shleifer & Co. but also Coase and many Coasean wannabes…

The Creation of the Rule of Law and the Legitimacy of Property: The Political and Economic Consequences of a Corrupt Privatization
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Karla Hoff
NBER Working Paper No. 11772
November 2005
http://papers.nber.org/papers/w11772.pdf

ABSTRACT
How does the lack of legitimacy of property rights affect the dynamics of the creation of the rule of law? We investigate the demand for the rule of law in post-Communist economies after privatization under the assumption that theft is possible, that those who have “stolen” assets cannot be fully protected under a change in the legal regime towards rule of law, and that the number of agents with control rights over assets is large. We show that a demand for broadly beneficial legal reform may not emerge because the expectation of weak legal institutions increases the expected relative return to stripping assets, and strippers may gain from a weak and corrupt state. The outcome can be inefficient even from the narrow perspective of the asset-strippers.

From the paper conclusions:

“At the end of communism in the former Soviet bloc, the states owned assets of immense value that had been created in some cases by collective efforts over a period of 70 years. The privatization of state enterprises increased private opportunities for wealth creation, but also—given the absence of effective corporate governance systems—for theft. We showed that even when all agents are better off building value in the rule of law state than stripping assets in a lawless environment, once agents have engaged in asset stripping, at least some of them will have in an interest in prolonging a weak, corrupt state that does not interfere with their theft. Thus, the path of institutional change can be inefficient even from the narrow point of view of the asset strippers, who do not internalize the effect of their economic choices on how the political environment evolves.”

This is Brad DeLong on Easterly’s book, The Elusive Quest for Growth:

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/Easterly_neoliberal.html

Today the industrialized world as a whole is embarked–half-heartedly, I admit–on yet another crusade to try to make the poorer parts of the world rich. The ideology behind this crusade–an ideology that I believe in–is called “neoliberalism.” It has two guiding principles. The first is that close economic contact between the industrial core and the developing periphery is the best way to accelerate the transfer of technology which is the sine qua non for making poor economies rich (hence all barriers to international trade should be eliminated as fast as possible). The second is that governments in general lack the capacity to run large industrial and commercial enterprises (hence save for core missions of income distribution, public-good infrastructure, administration of justice, and a few others, governments should shrink and privatize).

However, this neoliberal crusade is not the first such crusade for economic development. Since World War II there have been at least six such crusades: the “building socialism” crusade, the “financing gap” crusade, the “import substitution” crusade, the “aid for education” crusade, the “oil money recycling” crusade, and the “population boom” crusade. All of them failed to spark rapid economic development. Does what went wrong then have any lessons to tell us about the future of the crusade we are undertaking now? Yes–and now is a good time to take a look back at the history of crusades-for-development since World War II, for World Bank economist Bill Easterly has just written The Elusive Quest for Growth (published by MIT Press), his own take on the largely dismal history of government-led programs to spark development.

(…)

In Easterly’s view, there are a few big lessons from the history: “Prosperity happens when all the players in the development game have the right incentives. It happens when government incentives induce technological adaptation, high-quality investment in machines, and high-quality schooling. It happens when donors face incentives that induce them to give aid to countries with good policies where aid will have high payoffs, not to countries with poor policies where aid is wasted. It happens when the poor get good opportunities and incentives… It happens when politics is not polarized between antagonistic interest groups, but there is a common consensus to invest in the future. Broad and deep development happens when a government that is held accountable for its actions energetically takes up the task of investing in collective goods like health, education, and the rule of law…”

It is clear that the neoliberal policy prescriptions–try to make government honest and smaller (so it doesn’t have its fingers in as many economic decisions), try to keep the macroeconomy stable, and boost world trade and thus cross-border economic links as much as possible–affect only a small proportion of these requirements for successful economic development. Neoliberal policy prescriptions have little ability to create governments that energetically invest in collective goods, a political system that enforces accountability, a national consensus for growth, and a commitment by donors to reward success only.

Thus there is a sense in which neoliberalism as we know it is a counsel of despair. Most of what is needed is beyond its reach. The hope is that privatization and world economic integration will in the long run help create the rest of the preconditions for successful development. But we are playing this card not because we think it is a winner, but because it is the last one in our hand.

Más sobre el tema:

• “Globalization” and “Neoliberalism” | Brad @Delong (1999) http://ow.ly/nBfIc 
• Neoliberalism: The last development crusade | Brad @Delong (2001) http://ow.ly/nBfKH 
• Has Neo-Liberalism Failed Mexico? | Brad @DeLong (Sept. 2006) http://ow.ly/nBfN6 
• Problema: las alternativas al neoliberalismo no son tan liberales http://ow.ly/nBg8G 

Food for thought

Beware of Economists Bearing Advice: “Beware of Economists Bearing Advice

Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson

(Policy Options 18, no. 7 (September, 1997): 16-19.)

(comments in brackets are mine)

“Beware of economists bearing advice. Though some of it is valuable, the framework of theoretical welfare economics from which economic advice usually issues has serious normative limitations and distortions. When economists go beyond identifying consequences of policies to making recommendations, they typically rely on a theory whose only normative concern is welfare and its distribution and that mistakenly identifies welfare with the satisfaction of preferences [what if your preferences are bad for you?, or if you do not know what is best for you?]. Their advice about how to increase welfare must accordingly be regarded with caution, and policy makers must not forget that increasing welfare should not be their only goal. [what about the other dimensions of freedom and happiness other than preference-satisfaction?]”

“The sensible policy maker needs to understand the limitations of welfare economics and to regard its policy recommendations with skepticism. Welfare economics vulgarizes the problems of policy making by its limited concern with only one moral objective — the enhancement of well-being — and by its distorted identification of well-being with the satisfaction of preferences. The pronouncements of welfare economics must therefore be treated with caution. The recommendations — like providing cash in favor of in-kind benefits — seem so straightforward, and the arguments — like the one we have examined — so watertight. But what makes welfare economics so clear cut is that so much has been left out and that what has been left in has been distorted. Sometimes the omissions and distortions may not matter, but policy makers had better understand the limitations of the framework economists employ.”

Beyond constitutional design at large and economic policy, the devil is in the details of the budgetary process.  This paper has a nice dataset for 28 countries.

Who Controls the Budget: The Legislature or the Executive?
Ian Lienert
URL:http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:05/115&r=pol

Country-specific factors prevent a strong linear relationship between the legislature’s budgetary powers and the extent of its separation from the executive. Electoral and voting systems, bicameralism, constitutional and legal constraints, voluntary contracts of political parties, and long-standing traditions all influence the relative budgetary powers of executives and legislatures. Differences in the legislature’s budgetary authority in twenty-eight countries with five different forms of government are examined. It is concluded that differences in budgetary powers within a particular form of government are as great as those between different forms of government.
Keywords: Budgets , Legislation , Budgetary policy ,

Culture is something like the “final frontier” for the most empirically-minded social scientists.  International migration provides interesting evidence and proxies for beliefs, social capital, and similarly “unobservable” factors.  When you (or your parents) migrate, you bring along your human capital, but most social capital stays behind in your home country… unless you settle in an ethnic neighborhood. 

“Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs, Work and Fertility”
RAQUEL FERNANDEZ, New York University
ALESSANDRA FOGLI, New York University
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=776764
Date: May 2005

Given the different time and place, only the beliefs embodied in the cultural proxies should be potentially relevant to women’s behavior in the US in 1970. We show that these cultural proxies have positive and significant explanatory power for individual work and fertility outcomes, even after controlling for possible indirect effects of culture (e.g., education and spousal characteristics). We examine alternative hypotheses for these positive correlations and show that neither unobserved human capital nor networks are likely to be responsible. We also show that the effect of these cultural proxies is amplified the greater is the tendency for ethnic groups to cluster in the same neighborhoods.

Dos buenos papers para entender, entre otras cosas, las causas y consecuencias de la disciplina partidista y, por otro lado, de dónde vienen (y cuánto tardarán en irse) las preferencias redistributivas del electorado que vivió bajo el socialismo.

BY:  GENE M. GROSSMAN, Princeton University
ELHANAN HELPMAN, Harvard University
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=754085
July 2005

ABSTRACT:
 Preferences for redistribution, as well as the generosities of  welfare states, differ significantly across countries. In this  paper, we test whether there exists a feedback process of the  economic regime on individual preferences. We exploit the  experiment of German separation and reunification to establish  exogeneity of the economic system. From 1945 to 1990, East  Germans lived under a Communist regime with heavy state  intervention and extensive redistribution. We find that, after  German reunification, East Germans are more in favor of  redistribution and state intervention than West Germans, even  after controlling for economic incentives. This effect is  especially strong for older cohorts, who lived under Communism  for a longer time period. We find that East Germans’ preferences  converge towards those of West Germans, and we calculate that it  will take one to two generations for preferences to converge completely.

American taxpayers spend nearly $100 million a year to fund the Congressional Research Service, a “think tank” that provides reports to members of Congress on a variety of topics relevant to current political events. Yet, these reports are not made available to the public in a way that they can be easily obtained. A project of the Center for Democracy & Technology, Open CRS provides citizens access to CRS Reports that are already in the public domain and encourages Congress to provide public access to all CRS Reports.

CRS Reports do not become public until a member of Congress releases the report. A number of libraries and non-profit organizations have sought to collect as many of the released reports as possible. Open CRS is a centralized utility that brings together these collections to search.

Unfortunately, there is no systematic way to obtain all CRS reports. Because of this, not all reports appear on the Open CRS web site. CDT believes that it would be far preferable for Congress to make available to the public all CRS Reports.

All of our students at CIDE should take a look at this nice article:

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/051010crat_atlarge

GETTING IN
by MALCOLM GLADWELL
The social logic of Ivy League admissions

A few excerpts:

“In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation for a school that historically had been the preserve of the New England boarding-school complex known in the admissions world as St. Grottlesex.

As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They misplaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. (…)
The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s first idea—a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body—was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit.
(…)
In the wake of the Jewish crisis, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton chose to adopt what might be called the “best graduates” approach to admissions. France’s École Normale Supérieure, Japan’s University of Tokyo, and most of the world’s other élite schools define their task as looking for the best students—that is, the applicants who will have the greatest academic success during their time in college. The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance. “Should our goal be to select a student body with the highest possible proportions of high-ranking students, or should it be to select, within a reasonably high range of academic ability, a student body with a certain variety of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds?” Wilbur Bender asked. To him, the answer was obvious. If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered). “Above a reasonably good level of mental ability, above that indicated by a 550-600 level of S.A.T. score,” Bender went on, “the only thing that matters in terms of future impact on, or contribution to, society is the degree of personal inner force an individual has.
(…)
If you are sick and a hospital shuts its doors to you, you are harmed. But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not sick. Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.”