By far the most important reason to appoint Okonjo-Iweala is that she has experience on both sides of the table in the international lending negotiations that are the bread and butter of the Bank’s work. As an economist who rose to be the Bank’s Managing Director, she oversaw its lending from 2007 to 2011, helping shepherd it through the global financial crisis. As Nigeria’s finance minister between 2003 and 2006, she represented her government in debt relief negotiations with Paris Club donors, succeeding in reducing the country’s debt burden from $30 billion t0 $12 billion. That remains the only time the Paris Club has allowed a debtor nation to buy back its debt below par.

What’s critical about the experience is that Okonjo-Iweala understood what it meant to face a debt burden that was so beyond repayment as to be punitive, and she worked to have it reduced. But she also understood that the single case of Nigeria didn’t negate the merits of international development lending and she went back to the Bank to provide critical funding to other nations.

She therefore embodies the argument that the Bank desperately needs to make if it is to regain its legitimacy in the developing world: that aid and development lending are powerful forces for good, so long as they are delivered justly. Appointing her turns control of the Bank over to those it serves while re-affiriming the Bank’s underlying mission.

Read it here.

“Giving more to women will to some extent come at the expense of men. People sometimes try to sweep that under the rug by saying you will create so much additional resources that everyone will be better off.” She smiles wryly but firmly. “I don’t think that’s true.”

The comments fly in the face of a wealth of economic data showing that empowering women is a boon for economic growth, some of which I’ve written up for Forbes:

1. A 2007 Goldman Sachs report concluded that closing the gap between male and female employment would add 9% to US GDP, 13% to European GDPs and 16% to Japan’s GDP. Moreover, policies to facilitate female employment – like child care and parental leave rules that make it easier to work and have children – boost low fertility rates in the developed world. That means more women in the work force would actually alleviate one of the heaviest burdens on developed economies: an aging population’s expensive entitlements.

2. The World Bank reports that if women in the Middle East and North Africa were fully integrated into the workforce, average household earnings in the region would increase by 25%.

3. The Economist reports that rising numbers of women in the workforce in the developed world over the past decade have added more to global growth than China has. In the U.S., the State Department says the productivity gains attributable to the increase in female employment account for 25% of current U.S. GDP.

Read the whole post here.

I’ve also archived some tweets from the night, and written up a few highlights for the Public Business blog.

My reaction was one of deep discomfort. These emails are the product of outright theft by Anonymous, and in publishing them, Wikileaks and its partners are taking ownership of stolen goods.

This comes as News International is under investigation for hacking the phones of celebrities, royals, and a murdered teenage girl. How can journalists justify accepting a cache of stolen emails, while calling for the heads of peers who did the same with voicemails?

Because news organizations believed there might be a vital public interest in accessing the Stratfor emails, whereas there was only harm to be done in accessing the voicemails.

But no news organization can know, before they commission a hack or agree to cooperate with one, whether there is going to be a public interest scoop on the other side. This kind of public interest defense can’t inform the ethical decision news organizations have to make, because that decision must be made at the outset.

Moreover, making the argument that news organizations should only break the law when they expect to find an important story assumes that, in the abstract, news organizations can ethically break laws for a scoop. And once that is conceded, News of the World can argue that it anticipated a public interest in hacking phones. The Sun can argue that it anticipated a public interest in bribing officials. Who knows, they could say, we might have found something valuable.

The rhetoric surrounding the phone-hacking scandal argues that News International was wrong to believe itself above the law. But the message sent by editors who accepted the Stratfor emails is different: that News International didn’t use its above-the-law status wisely, that they picked the wrong victim to hack. ‘Good’ journalists would have broken the law ‘better.’ The hypocrisy beggars belief at a time when the press has so egregiously violated its trust that the public is in favor of giving news organizations fewer legal liberties, not more.

The after-the-fact defenders misunderstand, and thereby undermine, the journalistic trust. It’s not about going outside the law to shine light on whatever entities reporters’ idiosyncratic biases cast as villains. It’s about rigorously measuring all powerful entities against both legal and ethical standards, on behalf of the general public. If the press is going to make the case that society needs us to expose powerful wrongdoers, if we are going to ask society to trust us to do that, then our own legal and ethical conduct must be irreproachable. The special status of the press isn’t one of a greater license, but of greater responsibility: that’s why there are whole fields of law devoted to regulating us.

I am willing to grant that there might be extreme exceptions, scenarios in which a reporter already knows of significant and life-threatening wrongdoing and can, by breaking into a home or sneaking across international borders, prevent or end it. That is a public interest defense, but one that has to be concretely in place before the decision to break laws is taken. It’s also a defense that doesn’t rely on any special dispensation for journalism: we do not jail a citizen who breaks down his neighbor’s door to rescue him from a fire.

In claiming rights beyond those held by all citizens, journalists align themselves with the wrongdoers we are meant to scrutinize, and alienate the public we are meant to serve.

The links are, according to Mason:

1. “the near collapse of free-market capitalism,” and in particular the opportunities it presents to the young;

2. rapid demographic growth creating a “youth bulge,” where young people come to represent a growing percentage of a country’s overall population, compounding and amplifying the impact of point 1;

3. growth in educational attainment, which Mason uses to argue that the young people sans opportunity are those who played by the rules and feel their economic loss more acutely as a result. He calls them “graduates with no future”;

4. “an upswing in technical innovation, a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in human consciousness about what freedom means.” Technology and individualism, Mason says, allow protests to assume a networked structure than can overpower traditional hierarchies.

I’ve been skeptical of this argument since it first appeared on Mason’s blog a year ago.

The three core problems Mason identifies – youth unemployment, the youth demographic bulge, and the diminishing returns on education- are real ones. But in Mason’s account, they are depicted as three components of the same, global problem. That’s simply not accurate.

To learn exactly what’s wrong with Mason’s economic assumptions, and how a more rigorous look at the economic data undermines his argument, read the whole thing.

What we have, in other words, is a meta-debate about whether policy options are permissible, instead of a debate about whether they are sound. A debate in which what is permissible is defined narrowly, as whatever is specifically ‘foreseen’ in documents written years ago, instead of broadly, as whatever those documents do not explicitly forbid. And a debate in which it is hard to avoid the conclusion that policy options are being construed as impossible because they are politically unpalatable to the people who would have to carry them out.

More here.

Read the whole post here.

In honor of the World Series, which starts tonight*, I dug out a research paper I’ve been sitting on for a while.

The paper, ‘Productivity, Wages, and Marriage: The Case of Major League Baseball‘ looks at the wages of baseball players and identifies a 16% gap between the wages of married players and unmarried players.

Economists have been documenting the marriage premium – the income boost (anywhere from 10 to 40 percent) married men have over their unmarried counterparts – for decades. But researchers have historically gotten stuck when it comes to providing explanations for the phenomenon: Do married men perform better because their wives are doing more of the housework? Do married men perform better because women tend to marry high performers anyway? Do married men perform about the same, but employers discriminate in their favor because they come across as reliable?  Without data about productivity, it’s hard to say.

That’s what makes the baseball study distinctive: baseball is a geek’s sport, filled with statistics, and – in a post-Moneyball world – increasingly managed by the numbers. That allowed the paper’s authors, Francesca Cornaglia and Naomi E. Feldman, to control for productivity (using both Batting Average and On-Base Plus Slugging) and sorted players into groups by age (early and late career) and ability (low, medium, or high performers). They were not only able to show that there is a marriage premium, but able to test the prevailing theories about why it exists.

Go read.

Yesterday,Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech to the New York Economic Club on ‘economic statecraft’ and its role in American foreign policy. It’s a two-pronged concept – first, how the United States can leverage economic policy to strengthen its diplomatic position abroad; and second, how diplomacy can strengthen the U.S. economy at home.

As Dan Drezner’s already noted, venue aside, the purpose of the speech seemed to be to signal to career diplomats and civil servants that they will need to be savvy about economics, and incorporate it into their work, if they want to get ahead in Clinton’s State Department: “We need to be a Department where more people can read both Foreign Affairs and a Bloomberg Terminal,” Clinton said. Given the link between economics and foreign policy is my main hobbyhorse, it’s gratifying to see it taken seriously at the top like this.

As for policy, the speech was a bit more mixed.

For a detailed look at the speech, read the whole post.

NB: I’m posting this from a phone, so apologies for any typos or odd formatting.

So, as a critique, from the left, of our economic malaise, Occupy Wall Street interests me. But I am frustrated by the way the critique is framed.

The protest seems to have two strains: There are some hardline activists who see corporate power as an ill in itself, and condemn capitalism as a system and the institutions – the companies, the regulators, the politicians – who make it work. And there are a bunch of recent college graduates frustrated by unemployment and mounting debt, who played by the system’s rules and find themselves not as far along as they expected to be because the system is broken. Their complaint doesn’t seem to be that the system is illegitimate and needs to be abolished, but rather that it does not work as advertised and should be fixed.

There is a tension between these two strains, and I would like to see the movement settle on one or the other. But there is a larger problem, which is that the movement makes both arguments badly, and that brings us back to the distinction between culture and economics.

The cultural left wants individual freedom from social and institutional constraints; the economic left wants to build institutions to advance communitarian interests, and protect the weak from the strong.

Both the more radical and more moderate voices of Occupy Wall Street are trying to advance ideas of the economic left – that the interests of the many have been trampled to benefit a privileged few, or that institutions aren’t serving the collective as they ought to be – but they are mired in the language of individualism.

Doug Henwood blames this gap between mission and rhetoric on Reagan, Thatcher, and neoliberalism:

“This is not about left versus right,” said the photographer, Christopher Walsh, 25, from Bushwick, Brooklyn. “It’s about hierarchy versus autonomy.

…

Autonomy in this context sounds like a hipster version of bourgeois individualism…Occupy Wall Street is hardly about autonomy. It’s about living out solidarity and about attracting people to a movement. They’re living a collectivity, even if they’re not articulating it that way.

I suspect the problem is that three decades of neoliberalism have destroyed any available vocabulary for solidarity. My guess is that most of the people in Zuccotti Park were born after Thatcher and Reagan took office. There’s no such thing as society, as the Lady said. But there is, and we need more of it.

And he’s right.

But solidarity, collectivity and building instruments to advance them didn’t become verboten solely because of right wing economics. The process got an assist from the cultural left’s own emphasis on personal autonomy and its mistrust of social institutions. When I hear occupiers say that adopting a more rigorous collective agenda would be an imposition on their personal freedom, and that the point of the protest is to protest, rather than to achieve any goals, I hear a bit of Ayn Rand, sure, but I also hear the obsession with individual expression that has been a feature of the left since the ’60s.

The has me thinking  of Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Freedom, which I reviewed favorably here last year. One of the things Franzen reveals is the hollowness of the social doctrines that left-leaning individualism produces, so that its practitioners cannot rise above selfishness, even when (in the case of the protagonist, Walter Berglund, an environmentalist) they try to address societal ills.

If critics are dismissing Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of selfish, privileged whiners, that is because the protesters are speaking the language of the self instead of the language of the collective. Both left and right are to blame for that.

You can’t go home again, as the saying goes, so it is silly to get nostalgic about the old left and the old right (both of whom believed in society, in their different ways). But it is absolutely imperative to start building a new rhetoric of collectivity, if protests like Occupy Wall Street are to succeed.