Ben Muse

King Island and the Great Sickness: the Terrible Summer of 1900

In the summer of 1900 King Island was hit hard by disease.  R. Newton Hawley, surgeon on the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear, visited the island in July and again in August and published a short account in 1901 (The World's Work, search for "Arctic Cliff Dwellers").

The Bear off Cape Romantzoff in early June, 1900.  About a month before she reached King Island.  Source: U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office.  

The Bass River Road Net - Late 1832

The towns of Massachusetts were systematically mapped in the early 1830s in response to a state mandate.  Forested and open areas, roads, and significant buildings were identified (although the surveyors and their methods differed somewhat across the state).  Harvard University's Harvard Forest program has created a free online tool that makes it possible to overlay information from these 1830 surveys on a modern USGS topographic map. 

You can access the mapping tool here: 1830 Massachusetts Map Viewing Instructions (but pay attention to caveats - reproduced at the end of this post).  This is easy to use, here I've used it to create a map of Bass River - between Dennis and Yarmouth on Cape Cod - in the early 1830s.  The river appears rather faintly in a modern USGS topo map.  The 1830s roads are superimposed as brown lines, wooded areas in the early 1830s are superimposed as dark green areas:

Alaska's recession so far

Source: Alaska Department of Labor

So far, Alaska has gotten off relatively lightly.  Good times or bad, Alaska's unemployment rate is normally higher than the national rate.  But not this recession.  Eleven possible reasons:

The Ticket Economist

A new blog about the economics of ticket scalping: The Ticket Economist:

I used to hate ticket scalpers and the practice of scalping until I applied the age old lesson ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’ to scalpers. Following this I became interested in figuring out whether scalping was really good or bad. Decision: before the Internet, it was bad, now it is good. If you follow the writings on this site you will eventually understand why (I am not crazy).

Briefly, I am not an economist. I earned a social sciences degree from a small liberal arts college in the Boston area.  From 2006 to 2007 I researched and wrote a thesis paper examining the economics of ticket scalping on the internet with the exceptionally patient guidance of an economist at Harvard Business School. When I am not writing about ticket stuff and purporting to know a lot about buying tickets, I run a small technology company that has nothing to do with event ticketing....

Writings on this blog should cover ticket scalping, ticket resale, translating academic babble into terms people like you and I can understand.

Hat tip to Michael Giberson at Knowledge Problem.

Edits: July 14 - added text to block quote, corrected title of Knowledge Problem.

The End of the Bass River Bridge Corporations

In 1869 there were two carriage bridges running east-west across Cape Cod’s Bass River.  A lower bridge connected the villages of South Yarmouth and West Dennis where Route 28 crosses the river now; an upper bridge connected South Yarmouth and South Dennis higher up the river, at the location of the current Highbank Bridge. These were both toll bridges built and operated by private corporations created by the state in the early 1830s. They were the only toll bridges on Cape Cod in 1869 (Swift, 1897).

In 1870 the state made Barnstable County, and the towns of Yarmouth, Dennis, and Harwich, responsible for buying out the corporations and maintaining the bridges. Why did it do this after almost 40 years of private operation? Were the benefits of this greater than the costs? Who gained and who lost? I may never be able to answer these questions fully but here is a progress report (Here's a pdf version: The End of the Bass River Bridge Corporations):

King Island and the American fur traders

Americans began trading in the Pacific in the 1780s. Trade was interrupted by Jefferson’s embargo and the War of 1812, but subsequently small American ships crisscrossed the ocean with cargoes of furs from the Pacific Northwest, sandalwood from Hawaii, copper from Chile, ginseng from the U.S. Appalachian Mountains, and silk and tea from China (Old China Trade).

Far to the north, beyond the Aleutian Islands and the Bering Sea, Eskimos, Chukchis, and Russians traded across the Bering Strait. Furs from America moved west, in exchange for glass beads and iron. Coastal and island Eskimos were active intermediaries.

Briefly, in 1819 and 1820, Americans from the Pacific tested the waters in the Bering Straits: two American brigs, the General San Martin and the Pedlar, explored regional trading opportunities. King Island flits into sight in journals and reports of these visits.

Sled dogs to snowmobiles

In the early 1990s, Alaska's Board of Fisheries had to address a controversy over the feeding of subsistence fish to dogs used for commercial purposes.  To provide some background, David Anderson prepared a paper on the use of dog teams in the Yukon River drainage, and their fish consumption, for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's Division of Subsistence.    Anderson described the evolving role of dog sledding in the regional economy: The Use of Dog Teams and the Use of Subsistence-caught Fish for Feeding Sled Dogs in the Yukon River Drainage, Alaska.

Coastal Eskimos had been using sled dogs for a long time prior to contact with the West:

Integrating Peanuts

From The Edge of the American West: Black people can’t swim, &c. Don't skip the comments.

Stronger individual property rights do reduce overfishing

Christopher Costello, Steven D. Gaines, and John Lynham find that fisheries with individual fisherman's quotas are less susceptible to overfishing: Privatization prevents collapse of fish stocks, global analysis shows.  The actual title of the article in Science is "Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse?" I haven't found a link to the original article or an earlier working paper yet.

The "privatization" here is the assignment to a right to a share in the seasonal or annual harvest.    A fisherman with an individual and transferable quota has an asset whose value depends on the long-term health of the fish stock, and a greater incentive to care about that stock.

The abstract:

Recent reports suggest that most of the world’s commercial fisheries could collapse within decades. Although poor fisheries governance is often implicated, evaluation of solutions remains rare. Bioeconomic theory and case studies suggest that rights-based catch shares can provide individual incentives for sustainable harvest that is less prone to collapse. To test whether catch-share fishery reforms achieve these hypothetical benefits, we have compiled a global database of fisheries institutions and catch statistics in 11,135 fisheries from 1950 to 2003. Implementation of catch shares halts, and even reverses, the global trend toward widespread collapse. Institutional change has the potential for greatly altering the future of global fisheries.

And in conclusion:

Although bioeconomic theory suggests that assigning secure rights to fishermen may align incentives and lead to significantly enhanced biological and economic performance, evidence to date has been only case- or region-specific. By examining 11,135 global fisheries, we found a strong link: By 2003, the fraction of ITQ-managed fisheries that were collapsed was about half that of non-ITQ fisheries. This result probably underestimates ITQ benefits, because most ITQ fisheries are young.

The results of this analysis suggest that well designed catch shares may prevent fishery collapse across diverse taxa and ecosystems. Although the global rate of catch-share adoption has increased since 1970, the fraction of fisheries managed with catch shares is still small. We can estimate their potential impact ifwe project rightsbased management onto all of the world’s fisheries since 1970 (Fig. 2). The percent collapsed is reduced to just 9% by 2003; this fraction remains steady thereafter. This figure is a marked reversal of the previous projections.

Despite the dramatic impact catch shares have had on fishery collapse, these results should not be taken as a carte blanche endorsement. First, we have restricted attention to one class of catch shares (ITQs). Second, only by appropriately matching institutional reform with ecological, economic, and social characteristics can maximal benefits be achieved. Nevertheless, these findings suggest that as catch shares are increasingly implemented globally, fish stocks, and the profits from harvesting them, have the potential to recover substantially.

The Environmental Defense Fund reports here: Catch Shares Key to Reviving Fisheries.  New Study Shows Innovative Approach Can Help Solve Overfishing.  Here's Costello's website with background information on the study: Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse?

Revised Sept 19 to add a comment about how individual quotas give fishermen a greater interest in the long-term health of the fish stock.

From Kandahar to Kijaki

The Chinese built the generator, the Russians flew it into Kandahar, the British negotiated for permissions to transit, the British and the Danes created a diversion, the Canadians, Americans, Australians, Afghans, and British fought their way with it for 100 miles through the Taliban, the Americans and French provided air support, and the Chinese will install it.  Development in Afghanistan: how to install more generating capacity in a dam: Development through combat.

Revised Sep 5.

The old aerial polar bear hunt in Alaska

From the late 1940s until the early 1970s hunting guides in Alaska took their clients in airplanes out over the Chukchi and Beaufort Sea sea ice.  When the guides found a bear on the ice, they would try to land and give their clients a chance to hunt.  At times the planes were used to herd the bears towards the waiting hunters. 

The hunt and some of its economics were described by U.S. delegations to early (1965-1974) international meetings on the status of the polar bear.  I think that much of the following material was prepared by Jack Lentfer, a government bear biologist who attended these meetings. 

Here is a map for orientation.  The hunts originated in six or seven small communities in Northwest Alaska.  Little Diomede Island, which you will read about, is right in the Bering Strait.

The aerial sport harvest began sometime in the late 1940s.  In the years before that most hunting had been by Alaska Natives for subsistence and income (Polar Bear Management in Alaska; Jack Lentfer, Third International Conference on Bears, 1974):

King Island, 1880

A few days ago I posted on a visit to King Island by the U.S. Revenue Cutter Corwin in 1881 (A Visit to King Island, July 12, 1881). 

The Corwin, under Captain Calvin Hooper, also visited in 1880.  Hooper's report was published in 1881: Report of the Cruise of the U.S. Revenue-Steamer Corwin in the Arctic Ocean .

Hooper supplied his own illustrations - here's his picture of King Island from about four miles to the south:

 

Hooper's description:

A Visit to King Island, July 12, 1881

The U.S. bought Alaska in 1867, but it really didn't have much of a presence there, and especially not in more remote areas like the Bering Sea, for many years.  The Treasury sent a revenue cutter into the Bering Sea in 1870, and again, nine years later, in 1879.   

In 1880, the revenue cutter Thomas A. Corwin entered the Bering Sea under Captain Calvin Hooper.  At Hooper's recommendation, regular annual cruises by revenue cutters were began in 1881.  Hooper and the Corwin made the 1881 cruise.

In the late 19th Century these patrols were the face of the U.S. government in the Bering Sea.  The cutters had a lot of jobs.  They tried to interrupt the regional trade in liquor and rifles, investigated vessel disappearances, conducted search and rescue efforts, provided logistical support for the census, moved people around within the region, helped the shipwrecked get home, suppressed fur seal poaching, shipped reindeer from Siberia to the U.S., and carried out geographic and scientific research. 

Science was important right from the start  In 1881, John Muir was the cruise glaciologist.  On a shore stop at the western Alaskan port of St. Michael, the Corwin picked up an employee of the U.S. Signal Service, the naturalist and ethnographer, Edward Nelson.    The Coast Guard, a successor agency to the Revenue Service, dates its participation in oceanographic work from this trip.  Captain Hooper, made several attempts to gather information about currents from the Bering Strait (Oceanography in the Coast Guard).

 

The Corwin in 1885.

The Corwin had left San Francisco on May4 and arrived at Unalaska in the Aleutians on May 17.  Thereafter she performed various missions in the Bering Sea and Arctic, arriving at St. Michael in Norton Sound on July 4.  She departed St. Michael on July 9 and sailed north and then west along the south side of the Seward Peninsula.  She arrived at King Island on the morning of July 12.

Arctic Economics

I've pulled various posts dealing with the Arctic and copied them into a new site called Arctic Economics.  I'm going to use that weblog to explore the economics of global warming induced Arctic climate change.

The Senate Would Like an Investigation of the Coconut Road Earmark

In 2005 the President signed legislation that Congress hadn't passed. 

The bill in question authorized money for transportation projects and earmarked a lot for particular projects. Sometime after Congress passed the legislation, and before the President signed the bill, someone secretly rewrote one of the earmarks.  This was the Coconut Road earmark for highway work in Florida (Allocating scarce resources among competing transportation projects, Ben Muse, August 25, 2007).

There's some reason to believe Alaska's only Congressman, Republican Don Young, who was Chairman of the House Transportation Committee at the time, was involved. 

I'm reminded of this because the Senate voted 64 to 28 yesterday (Apr 17) to ask the Justice Department to look in to what happened: Justice asked to probe Young earmark (Erika Bolstad, Anchorage Daily News, Apr 18).

Thursday, support for the Justice Department investigation, sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., drew an unlikely coalition of Democrats and Republicans, many of whom said they were concerned about the integrity of their legislative process. Twenty of the votes of support came from Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the Senate minority leader.

House leaders had a muted response to the Senate vote, but indicated they were concerned about what had happened. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Thursday that the matter should be taken up by the House ethics committee. The Republican House leader, Rep. John Boehner, said he also had no objections to an investigation....

Young is connected to several ongoing investigations.  He has spent $1.1 million from his campaign fund recently on lawyers: Young's legal fees surpass $1 million (Erika Bolstad, Anchorage Daily News, April 16).

The "Justice asked to probe..." story above notes an interesting constitutional question:

Fewer Fishermen

Sport fishing isn't as popular as it used to be in the U.S. 

The Fish and Wildlife Service conducts national surveys of fishermen and hunters every five years.  The surveys from 1991 to 2006 have been done in a consistent manner.  Here are the key numbers for total anglers, freshwater anglers (Great Lakes and non-Great Lakes) and saltwater.  All measured in thousands:

Climate Change and Outdoor Recreation

What  will we do for fun outdoors, as global warming increases average temperatures, rainfall, snowfall, and sea levels?  John Whitehead at Environmental Economics reads the tea leaves in a series of three posts:

Over-Exploiting the Arctic Animal Commons

Robert McGhee (The Last Imaginary Place. A Human History of the Arctic World) doesn't think the original Arctic peoples were modern Western conservationists:

A Land of Milk and Honey (If You Know Where to Look)

Lots of explorers entered the Arctic and died there because - among other things - they couldn't find anything to eat.  Sir John Franklin led two expeditions to disaster; on the first his followers ended up eating each other for lack of anything better. 

That wasn't a problem for the locals.  Robert McGhee (The Last Imaginary Place. A Human History of the Arctic World) points out that the Arctic had real productivity advantages for a hunting people:

Antarctic Tourism Is Way Up

Hugo Ahlenius of the United Nations Environment Program summarizes trends in Antarctic tourism in recent years (Trends in Antarctic tourism).  Here's the annotation for the figure:

"The Economic Value of Teeth"

I liked the title of this one: The Economic Value of Teeth (Sherry Glied and Matthew Neidell, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 13879, March 2008).  Here's the abstract:

Where have all the hunters gone?

The numbers of hunters in the U.S. have been declining. 

Ian Urbina reports on state efforts to encourage young people to take it up (including hunters education, apprenticeship programs, lower minimum age requirements, agency sponsored hunting trips for women, children under 15, and the disabled, hunting classes for single mothers, youth hunting weekends):  To Revive Hunting, States Turn to the Classroom (New York Times, March 8).

Thin Ice

In March the Arctic ice cap reaches its greatest annual extent.   And this year's March ice cover only a little smaller than it's been it the past.

But look at this:  red indicates one-year old seasonal ice.

Mason Inman reports on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center showing that perennial or multi-year ice has dropped by half since the 80s and early 90s: Shrinking Arctic Sea Ice Thinner, More Vulnerable (National Geographic News, March 18, 2008)

That's important because the seasonal ice is thinner and melts faster.  The ice cap is smallest in September and last September it was as small as we've ever seen it.  We still don't know what will happen this summer, but the ice cap is starting the season with a big strike against it.

King Island Enters History

Of course Alaska's King Island had a long history before it entered the written record.  During the Ice Age, when the land bridge connected Asia and America, the island's cliffs must have risen dramatically from the surrounding plain.  Maybe it had a magical significance for the people who lived near it or passed it.  Later the sea rose around it, cutting it off from the mainland.  Later still, it became a platform from which people could harvest seals, walrus, polar bear, fish, and birds.  The people who lived on it, or who traded or raided with it, certainly had an oral history and tradition.

But the written record begins in July 1732.

This Google map of the Bering Straits shows the key places in the story.  On the left is Cape Dezhnev on the Russian mainland.  The white line is the current U.S.-Russia boundary.  There are two islands in the upper part of the picture astride the international boundary.  Big Diomede is on the Russian side, Little Diomede is on the U.S. side.  The point of mainland on the U.S. side is the end of the Seward Peninsula, culminating in Cape Prince of Wales.  South of this Cape is a small island - King Island.  To the southeast of King Island, just off the southern shore of Seward Peninsula is another small island - Sledge Island.

 

"The new Strait of Malacca"

US Coast Guard Admiral Brooks may have exaggerated somewhat in his comparison of the Bering Strait and the Strait of Malacca, but he does expect a lot more traffic through the Bering Straits in the next 10 to 20 years: U.S. needs to prepare for Arctic traffic surge (Tom Kizzia, Anchorage Daily News, Feb 14).

That's the tip of Russia's Chukchi Peninsula on the left, and the tip of Alaska's Seward Peninsula on the right.  The shortest distance across is about 55 miles. The big island on the Russian side of the international boundary is Big Diomede, and the U.S. island next to it is Little Diomede. You can't see Fairway Rock, a small island to the southeast of the Diomedes. King Island is under the Seward Peninsula south of the straits.

Obama/Clinton Tiptoe Around NAFTA in Texas

There are parts of Texas where they like NAFTA.  Consequently, despite poll results showing that a plurality of likely Texas Democratic voters disapprove of NAFTA, Clinton and Obama have toned down there rhetoric: Nafta Bashing Ends at Texas Line (Amy Chozick and Nick Timiraos, Wall Street Journal, March 3):

After weeks of hammering the North American Free Trade Agreement on campaign stops in Ohio, the Democratic presidential candidates are singing a different tune in Texas.

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have had to adjust their messages as they have shuffled between hard-hit Ohio and robust Texas, where Nafta is largely seen as an economic boost to the state's border communities.

Saturday, Sen. Clinton dedicated her stops in Fort Worth and Dallas to talk of national security. Friday, she focused a speech in Waco on veteran's rights, because Texas has a large military population. Sen. Obama is keeping his Texas message squarely set on uniting the country. He omitted mention of Nafta at a rally here Friday night that attracted 8,000 people....

We're not playing as much golf

People aren't getting outside and playing golf as much as they used to: More Americans Are Giving Up Golf (Paul Vitello, New York Times, Feb 21):

Back From Back-to-Nature

Thoreau, Muir, and T.R. would be appalled!  Oliver Pergams and Patricia Zaradic write that there is Evidence for a fundamental and pervasive shift away from nature-based recreation (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 8, 2008).

Here's the abstract:

"Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?"

Violent movies increase aggression but during the movie violent people are in the theatre watching.  They're not drinking while they watch either.  Crime rates are down during the movie and for a while after.  On balance?  Violence drops on the weekends violent blockbusters come out.

That's what Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna find in this analysis of short-run impacts: Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime? (NBER, , January 2008).   Here's the abstract:

Income and Religiosity

The most recent Pew Global Attitudes Survey report (The Pew Global Attitudes Project, October 4, 2007) has this neat graphic (click on it to see a much larger version):

The King Island Commute

King Island is a small rocky island in the Bering Sea, just south of the Bering Straits.  For many years it was home to a small group - perhaps 200 people - of Inupiat Eskimos.

When they were on the island, they lived in the village of Ukivok, which clung - impossibly - to the sheer rocky south side of the island.

But they didn't spend the whole year on the island.  In June they migrated to the mainland where they lived in a summer camp at Nome, hunted, fished, gathered, and worked and sold carvings to raise money. 

In October, when the weather began to get really cold, of all things, they left the relatively large and modern support network in Nome and migrated back to their barren rock to spend the winter largely isolated from contact with others. 

During the winter they lived an unexpectedly comfortable life in homes perched on stilts (to level them out on the steep slope).  The Bureau of Indian Affairs supported a small school and coop store, and the Catholic church maintained a priest and church. 

They exploited a wide range of resources - fishing for fish and crab through the ice right in front of town, harvesting seals, polar bear, and walrus from the ice around the island, and harvesting small plants, birds, and bird eggs from their rock once the spring and early summer had come.

How to Squeeze the Most Happiness from a Gift Card

In 1994 you couldn't buy one of those plastic retail gift cards with magnetic strips to track the balance of the gift.  The Mobil Oil Company sold the first ones in 1995.

Jennifer Pate Offenberg pulled some research on gift cards from her Ph.D. thesis and reported on the market place in the Spring 2007 Journal of Economic Perspectives (Markets. Gift Cards).  Look at how the business has grown:

Dr. Raster Sounds Like a Cool Customer

Alaskan's love a good bear attack story.  We have books composed of nothing but. Here's a December 1 story from local Juneau radio station KINY:

Trade posts will be going elsewhere

I didn't plan to post on trade or related topics when I started this blog, but I do so quite a bit.

I've decided the best way to handle trade and related posts is to create a new blog for them, taking advantage of the one additional blog that Typepad offers me on my current subscription plan.  This will provide a weblog with more focus and better organization - particularly a more meaningful and useful set of categories for archiving.  Here's the new location: The Custom-House.

All the existing trade related posts from this blog have been moved there.  From now on I'll send trade and related posts there, reserving this blog for other topics.  I am not deleting the old posts from this blog so existing links will still work.  However I will gradually revise the categories here so that they will be clearer and more focused.

All posts on the Korea-U.S. trade agreement will continue to be placed on the Korea-U.S. FTA weblog.

Down to the Sea in Dirty Ships

The ships that carry 90% of world trade (by volume) are a major source of air pollution:

Ships release more sulfur dioxide, a sooty pollutant associated with acid rain, than all of the world's cars, trucks and buses combined, according to a March study by the International Council on Clean Transportation. That study also found that ships produced an estimated 27% of the world's smog-causing nitrogen-oxide emissions in 2005. Only six countries in the world emitted more greenhouse gases -- which trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the globe -- than was produced collectively in 2001 by all ships larger than 100 tons, according to the study and United Nations statistics....

At current rates of growth, oceangoing ships will generate 53% of the particulates, 46% of the nitrogen oxides and more than 94% of the sulfur oxides emitted by all forms of transportation in the U.S. by 2030, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates. That compares with levels for the same pollutants in 2001 of 17%, 12% and 49%, respectively, according to the EPA.

Bruce Stanley reports on the issue in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal: Danger at Sea.  Ships Draw Fire for Rising Role in Air Pollution (Nov 27).

Why Are Trade Agreements So Important to Smaller Firms?

Leon Trammel of Witchita-based Tramco (a conveyor-belt manufacturer) explains (Smaller Companies Grab Bigger Share of Surging U.S. Exports , Courtney Schlisserman, Bloomberg, Nov 23):

How the Presidential Candidates Are Addressing Trade-Angst in Iowa

Wednesday's Wall Street Journal has an article on Iowa voter unease about foreign competition and the different ways the Presidential candidates are responding: A Globalization Winner Joins in Trade Backlash (Deborah Solomon and Gregg Hitt, November 21).  The title refers to the irony of trade-angst in a state that's done relatively well by globalization.  No new poll results.

Here's the discussion of candidate positions (note the commentary by Robert Reich, Clinton's Secretary of Labor):

Not as many hunters as there were a while ago

The Economist reports that fewer people are hunting in the U.S.:  The declining Nimrod (Nov 8)

Environmentalists Petition EPA to Reduce Air Pollution from Shipping

Oceana, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, and EarthJustice have petitioned the EPA to regulate marine shipping so as to reduce emissions.  Here's the petition: Petition for Rulemaking Under the Clean Air Act to Reduce the Emission of Air Pollutants from Marine Shipping Vessels that Contribute to Global Climate Change (October 3, 2007). 

Here's the Oceana website on the petition: No More Free Ride: Global Warming Pollution from Ships Must be Regulated.  Oceana notes:

• This fleet releases between 600 and 900 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, an amount equivalent to emissions from at least 130 million cars -- about the number of cars operated in the United States.
• A single container ship emits more global warming pollution than 2,000 diesel trucks.
• By 2020, these emissions could double 2002 levels, and they could be triple those levels by 2030.
• Ships also are major releasers of nitrogen oxides – contributing nearly 30% of the world’s releases. This amount too is expected to triple by 2030.

Pollution from marine shipping

The November Bridges Trade BioRes reports on a new study documenting adverse health effects of marine shipping:

U.S. FTAs and the WTO Declaration on Access to Medicines

When Congress passed the Trade Act of 2002 it gave the United States Trade Representative (USTR) potentially conflicting instructions for negotiating agreements governing drug patents. 

The USTR was to negotiate strong drug patent rules and facilitate access to foreign markets for firms that depended on patent protection (to be done for intellectual property in general, but my interest here is in medical drugs).

But the USTR was also supposed to respect the objectives of the WTO's 2001 Declaration on Access to Medicines, which recognized problems drug patents could sometimes pose when cheap drugs were needed in a public health emergency.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has just taken a look at how the USTR responded to the potential conflict: Intellectual Property: U.S. Trade Policy Guidance on WTO Declaration on Access to Medicines May Need Clarification (September 2007)

William Gleadell goes to war

 

William Gleadell was born in 1864.  He did well in business, and in 1907 he married a wealthy woman.  He had a son and a step-daughter.   When World War I started he joined the army.  The notes below were written by his son:

Mitt Romney's Trade Views

Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the former Governor of Massachusetts, believes that America must aggressively pursue trade agreements with other countries.

He recently traveled to South Carolina to outline his trade program: Romney Agenda: A New Vision To Open Markets And Help U.S. Workers To Succeed.  Key points:

Clinton on Trade

Simon Lester continues his useful series on the trade positions of the U.S. Presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton's Trade Vision (International Economic Law and Policy Blog, November 9).

See also What Clinton Said About Trade on Monday (Ben Muse, October 11).

FDR's 1941 Armistice Day Speech

Brad DeLong has posted FDR's November 11, 1941 Armistice Day speech in full: Armistice Day 1941: "The Czechs too Know the Answer. The Poles. The Danes. The Dutch. The Serbs. The Belgians. The Norwegians. The Greeks." (November 10).

Less than a month before Pearl Harbor:

How do Americans think they should respond to globalization?

Which candidate's approach to globalization would you support? 

• Candidate A is more defensive, focusing on responsive actions to protect the middle class.  "A" doesn't really say anything that precludes Candidate B's more proactive focus. 
• "B" proposes to protect workers (without going into specifics, and the proposals don't preclude any of the more detailed actions suggested by "A") but suggests that the primary focus should be on vauge proposals to encourage innovation, and unspecified health, energy, and education reforms to create new jobs. 

(see the more detailed descriptions of A and B in the slide below - I think the blue text at the top is commentary, not a part of the question that was asked, actual text is in small print at the bottom of the slide).

I assume the respondents were read the stands of the two candidates and were then asked, "Given what you've just heard, would you be more likely to support Candidate A, who says we need to protect American workers in new trade deals, or Candidate B, who says we need create new jobs through development of new ideas and products?"

The results are from a poll of U.S. voters in early October on their attitudes towards globalization conducted by the Benenson Group and sponsored by the liberal New Democratic Network (NDN): Americans unhappy with economy, looking for strong leadership from Washington.  Edward Luce reported on this Friday for the Financial Times: For US voters, it’s still the economy.

Debate over how to implement the CFIUS reforms

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times reported this week on apparently intense debates within the Administration over how to implement the new legislation to reform the CFIUS process for national security vetting on foreign direct investment: Foreign business gets a Bush assist (Nov 6). 

The CFIUS process refers to the review process conducted by the inter-agency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

A second story discussed Capital Hill reaction to the first story: Security review changes panned (Bill Gertz, Nov 7).

Gertz reports that a draft executive order implementing the new Foreign Investment and National Security Act (FINSA) gives a great deal of authority to the Treasury, and that other key agencies - Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice - represented on the CFIUS have circulated a joint memorandum indicating that the draft doesn't give their agencies a sufficiently large role in the revised process. 

Gertz has evidently been leaked the draft executive order and the memorandum.  His story provides some, but not many, details from these.  The leakers chose a reporter and a paper that appear to have a strong economic nationalist bent (so the title of the story is "Foreign business gets a Bush assist" and the tenor of the story is strongly sympathetic to the security elements in the new legislation, and skeptical of Treasury's motives).

I don't know much about the reporting conventions for leaks.  The article cites an anonymous national security official involved in the debate as a source and notes that Justice and Homeland Security officials referred questions to the White House.  Does that suggest the leak is at Defense?

The WT didn't post copies of the draft executive order or the memorandum along with the story.

Editorial revisions Nov 10.

What do academics think about predicting exchange rates?

Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin, and the Econbrowser blog, surveys academic thinking on the future of the U.S. dollar: Modeling Exchange Rates: What Does Current Academic Thinking Have to Say about the Dollar's Future? (November 8).

Dani Rodrik of Harvard and Dani Rodrik's weblog asks "Is a "science" of exchange rates possible?"

What Registered U.S. Voters Think About Trade

U.S. voters rank trade issues relatively low on the list of things they're worried about, but they don't think foreign trade has been good for the U.S., suggests an early November poll of registered voters conducted by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal: Poll Suggests Clinton Is Vulnerable (John Harwood, November 8).  Here is the detailed summary of poll results: Study #6077.

Dennis Kucinich on Trade

Simon Lester on Dennis Kucinich's Trade Vision (November 8).