Dua Khalil - teenage girl stoned to death

Here you can find links to this story - complete with chilling eye-witness video of a teenage girl being stoned to death. The girl, it seems, was suspected of abandoning her family's religion by being seen with, possibly marrying or otherwise consorting with a Sunni muslim (or, I should say, the son of a Sunni muslim since we know nothing about the young man apart the fact that he possibly exists and has a Sunni family background). For a woman, abandoning your family's religious ideals, is a crime punishable by public execution (while the cops do nothing, despite witnessing a murder - there is also a Kurdish law against the oxymoronic "honour killing" since 2001 - and being openly filmed witnessing a murder).

Apart from the sheer barbarity of what happened (fortunately the film quality is not good), I was struck by the unanimity of reportage:
CNN website: "Dua Khalil, a 17-year-old Kurdish girl whose religion is Yazidi"
CNN broadcast: "Dua Khalil, a 17 year-old member of the Yazidi sect"
Katha Pollitt: "Dua Khalil, a 17-year-old Kurdish girl whose religion is Yazidi" (she was plagiarized by CNN!)
Joss Whedon: "Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith"

Granted, Joss Whedon might be right, in the sense that she was born of people of the Yazidi faith, but what do we actually know about Ms Khalil's religious beliefs. Nothing at all based on these reports. All we know is that she was suspected of not subscribing to the Yazidi faith.

We are never going to know what Ms Khalil thought about anything at all. We may end up knowing what her brothers and other relatives thought she should think and what the wider community of Kurdish men thinks of what her male relatives thought she should think, and what our media thinks about what the wider community of Kurdish men thinks of what her male relatives thought about what she should think.

The good, the bad and the powerful

Dani Rodrik recently opened a blog entry with the following:

Increasingly, economists are moving away from the Washington-Consensus, rules-of-thumb approach to country-specific strategies based on diagnosing locally-binding constraints. The difficulty is that designing such strategies is more of a craft than a science.

The latest contribution to the literature comes from Wendy Carlin and Paul Seabright.

My initial take was 'what's new here'? But there's an interesting footnote on the first page of the paper that made me giggle:

Gregory Clark (2007 forthcoming) challenges institutionalist explanations of the industrial revolution, on the grounds that a number of medieval economies (such as England from the thirteenth century onwards) had institutions (such as systems of secure property rights in land) that, he claims, would have earned them high marks in any World Bank policy review. Of course, not all researchers who claim that good institutions are important for development would claim that they were either necessary or sufficient. (emphasis added)

This really begs the question of what is a 'good' institution if it is neither necessary nor sufficient. Most economists would, for example, argue that China's massive expansion of the past 3 decades was based on 'bad' institutions. 'Good' institutions clearly were not necessary in this case. Milton Friedman, on the other hand, was famed for pooh-poohing the idea that theory is important - if it works then it must be right. Friedman, of course, was wrong. His understanding of the relationship between money supply and inflation was based on a simple correlation and, without understanding the transmission mechanism, his prescription of reducing the money supply would (and did) wreak havoc on any economy to which it was applied. For the authors of the above paper on the other hand, 'good' institutions clearly come from somewhere in the realm of World Bank thinking which, for half a century now, hasn't worked (at least in terms of its stated - as distinct from possible non-overt - intentions). Where is the difference from the Washington consensus here?

Vietnam's booming economy

BBC's business program the other day had a discussion of Vietnam. Three capital fund managers were interviewed and all three were very up-beat. Two, I would guess, were recent arrivals (even though they were both Vietnamese or Vietnamese-Americans) as they had their history pretty wrong. The third was a British fund manager who has been in the country since 1994 and, according to me anyway, seemed to know what he was talking about. Inter alia, he forecast that Vietnam will be the dominant economic power in ASEAN before long. I agree with him, not because he ranted about how the country is only recently opening up to foreign investment (which is what the others did - they clearly weren't there in the mid-'90s), but because he talked about the growth prospects, the education levels and the brilliant organizing ability of local firms. None of them mentioned the role of the government, which has been crucial (as also in China), but doesn't fit with their glorification of the private sector and the market. Maybe this is because businessmen don't like to talk about how dependent they are on government assistance.

None of it, of course, augurs well for socialism (by which I mean democracy and equity).