Development and Social Goals: Balancing Aid and Development to Prevent ‘Welfare Colonialism’

In the paper the author tries to explain why the Millennium Goals, with which the world community is approaching the social problems in the poor countries, cannot be considered as good social policy in the long run. The key insight of the author is that having an inefficient manufacturing sector produces a higher standard of living than having no manufacturing sector at all.

Development and Social Goals: Balancing Aid and Development to Prevent ‘Welfare Colonialism’

The current development policy focus on poverty reduction is erroneous. Historically, successful development policy—from the late fifteenth century until the beginning of the twenty-first—has achieved structural change away from dependence on raw materials and agriculture, adding specialized manufacturing and services subject to increasing returns with a complex division of labour. In contrast, the Millennium Development Goals are heavily biased in favour of palliative economics: alleviating the symptoms of poverty, rather than attacking its real causes. This creates a system of ‘welfare colonialism’ increasing the dependence of poor countries, thereby hindering, rather than promoting, long-term structural change.Millennium Development Goals, economic development, palliative economics, welfare colonialism

Capitalist Dynamics: A Technical Note

Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School of Economics, had the ambition that economics should be a .map of the forces at workÿ. Standard textbook economics (.neo-classical economicsÿ) takes as its starting point a metaphor of .equilibriumÿ based on the state of the physics profession in the 1880s. This force towards equilibrium is, however, only one of many forces at work. The most fundamental feature of capitalism is change, and this change is only poorly reflected in standard economics. Financial crises are just one of the many things that happen in real life, but cannot happen in standard textbook economics. From the standpoint of Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950), Austrian economist and Harvard economics professor who spent much time at Harvard Business School, .equilibriumÿ is the opposite of economic development. Equilibrium theory therefore fails to reflect many of the mechanisms of industrial and economic dynamics that create economic welfare. This note attempts to outline some of these forces.

Zeitgeist in Transition: An Update to How rich countries got rich and why poor countries stay poor

This article is a forward to French translation of How rich countries got rich and why poor countries stay poor.

Incommensurability Effects in Odd Length J_1-J_2 Quantum Spin Chains: On-site magnetization and Entanglement

For the antiferromagnetic J_1-J_2 quantum spin chain with an even number of sites, the point J_2^d=1/2 J_1 is a disorder point. It marks the onset of incommensurate real space correlations for J_2>J_2^d. At a distinct larger value of J_2^L=0.52036(6)J_1, the Lifshitz point, the peak in the static structure factor begins to move away from k=\pi. Here, we focus on chains with an odd number of sites. In this case the disorder point is also at J_2^d=1/2 J_1, but the behavior close to the Lifshitz point, J_2^L approx. 0.538 J_1, is quite different: starting at J_2^L, the ground-state goes through a sequence of level crossings as its momentum changes away from k=\pi/2. An even length chain, on the other hand, is gapped for any J_2>0.24J_1 and has the ground-state momentum k=0. This gradual change in the ground-state wave function for chains with an odd number of sites is reflected in a dramatic manner directly in the ground-state on-site magnetization as well as in the bi-partite von Neumann entanglement entropy. Our results are based on DMRG calculations and variational calculations performed in a restricted Hilbert space defined in the valence bond picture. In the vicinity of the point J_2=1/2 J_1, we expect the variational results to be very precise.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.