Ben Muse

Dean Acheson

In a recent Sunday NY Times, Henry Kissinger reviewed a new book about former Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Dean Acheson, A Life in the Cold War by Robert Beisner): Cold Warrior (New York Times, October 15, 2006).

The book sounds good ("sweeping and thoughtful account of Acheson’s tenure"). 

Kissinger says that the Secretary of State has five important tasks:

...Acheson dealt with the five principal tasks of any secretary of state: the identification of the challenge; the development of a strategy to deal with it; organizing and motivating the bureaucracy in the State Department and in other agencies; persuading the American public; and conducting American diplomacy toward other countries.

Modeling vampire-human interaction

Michael Stastny at Mahalanobis reviews the literature on dynamic predator-prey models of vampire-human interaction: Representative Vampires (Michael Stastny, Oct. 24):

As a predator-prey scenario, we can model the dynamics of the population using some differential equations. The problem for the vampires is to set a bloodsucking rate (humans per vampire) so as to maximize a utility function subject to the dynamics. However, the model has to be made more sophisticated to account for the cyclical bloodsucking patterns found in real vampires...

Stastny notes a literature pointing to additional applications of the model in political economy.

At the University of Florida: Vampires a Mathematical Impossibility, Scientist Says (based on an alternative predator-prey model). 

Joel, at Far Outliers, has been running a series of posts inspired by the original Count Dracula:

• The Real Dracula's Contemporaries
• San Juan Capistrano, Defender of Belgrade, 1456
• Dracula vs. the Transylvanian Germans
• A Vlach, Impaled

He [Dracula] took as many captives as he could find and impaled them "lengthwise and crosswise," according to Beheim's narrative. Their bodies were strung on Tîmpa Hill above the chapel. Dracula meanwhile was seated at a table having his meal; he seemed to enjoy the gruesome scenario of his butchers cutting off the limbs of many of his victims. Beheim tells us the additional detail that the prince "dipped his bread in the blood of the victims," since "watching human blood flow gave him courage." The stage was thus set for Dracula's later reputation as a blood drinker or vampire, and his subsequent fictional reincarnation as Count Dracula. As we will see, this episode at Tîmpa Hill did more to damage Dracula's reputation than any other act in his whole career.  (From Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times, by Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally (Back Bay, 1989), pp. 120, 123-124)

The Institute for International Economics at 25

The widely respected Institute for International Economics is 25 years old.  It's changed its name (now the "Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics," or "Peterson Institute") to honor the former Secretary of Commerce, and long-time Institute Board Chairman.

Its Director, C. Fred Bergsten, has written a history of the Institute (The Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics at Twenty-five), with lots of insights into the strategy it's pursued.  Here is future Institute Board Chairman Peterson, identifying a market niche (based on the time frames held by different institutional participants in the policy process): 

Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones is denied tenure

BACK FROM YET ANOTHER GLOBETROTTING ADVENTURE, INDIANA JONES CHECKS HIS MAIL AND DISCOVERS THAT HIS BID FOR TENURE HAS BEEN DENIED.  (McSweeney's)

I learned about this from Dan Drezner: Those fools.... those tenured, bureaucratic fools (October 23)

The Wreck of the Princess Sophia

The worst shipwreck in Alaska's history took place on October 25, 1918.

The evening of October 23, the Canadian Pacific Railroad steamer Princess Sophia left Skagway Alaska for Juneau.  Early the next morning she ran aground on Vanderbilt reef, about 30 miles north of Juneau.  In the early evening of October 25, she sank. 

Although she sat on the reef for about 40 hours, her crew and passengers were never taken off and all died.  There were over 350 men, women, and children on board.

The Sophia sank in Alaskan waters, but she was a Canadian ship, and a large proportion of her passengers were residents of Canada's Yukon, heading south for the winter.  In 1918 the gold rush to the Yukon's Klondike was long over.  The Yukon had since settled down.  Each fall, a large part of the non-Native population emptied out of the territory.  Residents could come up the Yukon on stern paddlewheelers to the head of navigation at Whitehorse.  There they could take a train to the port at Skagway, and catch a ship south, through Southeast Alaska's Inside Passage.

Here's a shot of the Sophia in happier days.

Source: University of Alaska, Anchorage

How did Botswana avoid the "resource curse"?

Little, land-locked Botswana has had one of the best growth records in the world (What happened in Botswana?, Ben Muse, Jan 9, 2004).

Finding diamond mines didn't hurt.  But many countries have been unable to leverage rich natural resource endowments into growth.  Many think that under some conditions resource riches can lead to lower growth rates.  This is the resource curse.  Why was Botswana different?

Her President, Festus Gontebanye Mogae, laid out his thoughts recently at the Center for Global Development.  Michael Clemens reports: