DanKohn.com

Classic WSJ story on the Chinese bringing competition to the gravestone indusrty. Rednecks, hard working Chinese physicians, gravestone plants in China going up next to Boeing plants, it’s all here:

“I wanted to see how Americans are buried,” she said, wandering again through another graveyard here on a recent afternoon. She crouched before various graves to study their finish and cut. “Ah, this one is nice,” she said, admiring a marker depicting a pickup truck and Jesus on opposite sides of a lake.

NYT on Ghanaians entering NY traffic tickets in Accra:

Data Management workers said they were surprised — but grateful — for New Yorkers’ apparent willingness to break the law.
“They know the rules and they still are always violating them,” Ms. Mensah said. “Maybe they don’t understand simple instructions. But they have to keep doing it, because it’s how we make our money.”

NYT reports that the Dow hit a 4 year low: “Since President Bush came to Wall Street to reassure the markets on July 9, the Dow is off 13.5 percent and the Nasdaq composite index is down 6.1 percent.”

The WSJ reports on venture capital cutbacks for telecom startups. It’s not surprising that GenBand couldn’t sell to the big incumbent phone companies, since no one is buying soft switches and they never paid for OSMINE compliance, a necessary (if extortionate) requirement for network management.

The Economist describes how both parties (but especially the Democrats) remain hopeless on the voucher issue:

It is only a small exaggeration to describe the Democratic Party as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the teachers’ unions. Throw a brick into any large gathering of Democrats and you are sure to hit a teacher or two. It is impossible to win a nomination for national office without pledging allegiance to the unions on vouchers.

This means that the job of championing vouchers falls by default to the Republicans. But Republicans are hardly the ideal champions for a measure that primarily benefits poor blacks in the inner cities — not least because their own base, the middle-class suburbs, are perfectly happy with their local schools (which are often the reason why they live where they do). Very few think “their” schools really need a large influx of poor black children using vouchers to flee from inner-city schools.

Besides, few if any Republicans are serious enough about vouchers
to increase them as Milton Friedman suggests:

Raise the voucher amount to $7,000 — the sum that Ohio state and local governments now spend per child in government schools — and make it available to all students, not simply to students from low-income families, and most private schools accepting vouchers would no longer be religious. A host of new nonprofit and for-profit schools would emerge. Voucher-bearing students would then be less dependent on low-tuition parochial schools.

So, I remain an independent.

Germans are upset that prices have appeared to go up during the transition from mark to euro:

They have even invented a new word, combining teuer — expensive — and euro, to make “teuro,” pronounced, TOY-ro…. When told inflation is down, Ingrid Ernst, a theater director, said emphatically: “This has nothing to do with inflation! Everything is just more expensive.”

The only political issue more important to me than campaign finance reform is free trade (and specifically Trade Promotion Authority for the president), which it appears my representative, Silicon Valley’s Anna Eshoo, is about to help kill. Although there are obvious economic benefits to high-tech companies like those funded by my venture firm, my real reason for backing free trade is a moral one.

This story, China Races to Replace U.S. as Economic Power in Asia, includes some of the worst economics ever written in the NYT:

Some see China’s economic thrust, more apparent now under its newly minted membership in the World Trade Organization, as the beginning of an inescapable process of China replacing the United States as the dominant power in Asia.

There are many things about China to worry about, such as their increasingly aggressive military posturing and their almost complete lack of respect for human rights. However, if you want China to become prosperous and democratic, support their economic engagement in the world, don’t use meaningless scare phrases such as “hungry importer”, “siphon of other nations’ foreign investment”, and a “surging exporter” that is “forcing its Asian neighbors to adjust.” One of the most basic lessons of the last 500 years of economic development is that economics is not a zero-sum game.

Martha Stewart seems humble:

Asked what effect the stock sale had had on her, Ms. Stewart said: “When I was a model– and I was all during high school and college — you always wanted to be on the cover of a magazine. That’s how your success was judged. The more cover, the better. Well, I am the C.E.O. of a New York Stock Exchange-listed company and I don’t want to be on any covers of any newspapers for a long, long time. That’s the story. Thank you very much.”

In related news, hell froze over today.

In his NYT opinion column, Nicholas Kristof suggests a new banner for clothing: “Proudly Made in a Third World Sweatshop!” I would buy it. Seriously! This brings to mind two of Krugman’s best ever pieces, In Praise of Cheap Labor and Enemies of the WTO:

Critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for [globalization] is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad. But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development this past century — every case of a poor nation that worked its way up to a more or less decent, or at least dramatically better, standard of living — has taken place via globalization; that is, by producing for the world market rather than trying for self-sufficiency. Many of the workers who do that production for the global market are very badly paid by First World standards. But to claim that they have been impoverished by globalization, you have to carefully ignore comparisons across time and space — namely, you have to forget that those workers were even poorer before the new exporting jobs became available and ignore the fact that those who do not have access to the global market are far worse off than those who do.

If you seriously think that “fair wages” or the banning of sweatshops will help those in the third world, you owe it to yourself to read these two pieces.