Archive for the ‘ideas’ Category
A brief history of intellectual property
The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which took effect on January 1, 1995, is one of the three "pillars" of the World Trade Organization (WTO), standing alongside trade in goods (already represented by the GATT) and trade in services in supporting the edifice of global commerce. It establishes minimum standards [...]
Understanding economics: International finance, liberalization, etc.
I
Ever since Adam Smith in the 18th century extolled the prospects for mutual gain inherent in free trade between nations, economics textbooks have tended to classify economic policies as either "welfare-enhancing" or "welfare-reducing." One implication of this tradition is that a macroeconomic policy ought to be judged on the basis of whether it provides [...]
Understanding economics: A few basics
About five months ago, I posed myself a few questions, relating to such matters as currency exchange rates, trade deficits, and public debts, in an effort to enhance my understanding of economics. I currently live in Argentina, a country where periodic financial crises have repeatedly thrown the country into disarray and economic depression. [...]
Notes on Graham Greene’s “Getting to Know the General”
Some four or five years after starting to read Graham Greene’s Getting To Know the General, I found the leisure to finish it on a trip to Brazil. Previously, I had brought a copy with me on a trip to Panama (the General of the book’s title is General Omar Torrijos, Panama’s military ruler [...]
Legal threats to the Internet and Open Source
The field of information technology–particularly the rise of the Internet and a related phenomenon, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)–provides an interesting prism through which to view contemporary ideological conflicts in the political and economic realms. Both the Internet and FOSS are powerful testimonies to the fertility of the public domain, at a moment [...]
Reflections on contemporary International Relations
On "The End of History"
In his article "The End of History," written on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama declares an "unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism" and that the "total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism" spell the "end of history." That is, we have arrived [...]
New York Review of Books on pro-Bush media
One of the most pressing questions in contemporary international relations is how the world’s lone superpower, the United States of America, allowed its foreign policy (to say nothing of its record at home) to be hijacked by the ideological extremists of the Bush administration, and whether there’s any possibility of recovery from this situation in [...]
Some alternative economic and political visions
While filing away some readings from the first trimester of my graduate program in international studies–a period that included courses in international relations theory and international trade–I came across two items that concisely present powerful challenges to prevailing orthodoxies in economics and politics. They are, respectively, a summary of Norwegian economist Erik Reinert’s project [...]
The Cash Nexus
Niall Ferguson. The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World 1700-2000. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
In The Cash Nexus, published in early 2001, historian Niall Ferguson endeavors to undermine approaches to history based on economic determinism, replacing them with an interpretation that instead privileges "political events." This approach enables him to dispense [...]
Understanding economics
One of my motivations for enrolling in a course of study in international relations is the opportunity it gives me to fill in the (huge) gaps in my understanding of economics. Studying organizations like the WTO and phenomena like international finance is a good way to get started toward an understanding of how the [...]