Widgets, Weights and the WHO

I get the occasional bout of hyper-excitement as the temperature starts to drop here in Brisbane.

What? Excited about cold weather? Actually, excited about how cold it isn't going to be. The nights are cooling down and with the mercury (not that anyone uses mercury anymore) dipping below 20C overnight I'm tempted to put on a long sleeve shirt after my post-work/gym evening shower.

The days are still long, brilliant blue skies in the high 20C, with a perfect balance of humidity and dryness in the air. The fragrance of eucalypts and autumn bloom flowers drifts along in the gentle breeze. During the 20 minute stroll to the beautiful St. Lucia Unversity campus I can hear birds twittering and the far off sound of a house being built. I alternate between walking in the direct sunlight and mottled light on the footpath - getting myself to a perfect temperature.

That early morning (8am is pretty early....) walk is one of my limited chances these days to stop and look at the world around me before plunging back into the world of economics, development, governance and international public health......and stationery (being the dedicated bookshop attendant that I am).

The Widgets referred to in the title are those undefined units of production that microeconomists base their lives on. How seemingly neat and intuitive the concepts of demand, supply, marginal costs, optimal firm sizes and indifference curves are. And how easy is it to apply those concepts to the real world and have defined answers to our problems of poverty and underdevelopment. But what seems to screaming out of every book, journal and magazine that I read is that there are no clear cut answers. And the more one tries to find a single solution, or a formula that is based on limited education and ideological underpinnings the further one will find themselves from the solution.

Neoclassical economics is a case in point of a simplified attempt at solving problems with no real effort at addressing the complexity and subtlety of the real world. People do not act as rational agents in accordance with economic theory, that much is obvious, so why the persistence with one dimensional theories? Sure it can be argued that people are inherently rational, but their preferences and decision making processes are too complex for any model or equation.

Strong governments and regulatory insitutions are certainly one of the greatest contributors to the development and economic growth of a nation. The autocratic regimes of Singapore and China (as well as the less autocratic ones of Taiwan, S. Korea and Hong Kong) are examples of strong state leadership and intervention (less so in Hong Kong). Highly protectionist import substituting policies defined these countries in the early stages of their development, only when the industries were strong did the government allow competition with the world market. In this case they had a comparative advantage in terms of the international product cycle (ie. they had large quantities of cheap labour and could specialise in labour intensive manufacturing). The confucianist culture of saving for the future (delay of gratification) also played an important role.

The unmitigated disaster that was the structural adjustment programs for developing countries in the 1980's is further evidence of the failure of neo-liberal economic theory in its application to non-theoretical dilemmas. Anyone who doesn't cringe at the horror committed by the World Bank and IMF in designing, implementing and then excusing themselves from, doesn't realise the tragedy that is occuring in places like Brazil. The inequity is ludicrous, and no level of economic growth will make up for it - no money can filter into the rural sectors when the insitutions are designed in such a way to ensure all profits are captured by the wealthy urban sector.

I'm digressing from whatever I was going to write about initially. But as you can see, the dominant theme occupying my thoughts is economic development - and how it relates to health - which in fact is one of the biggest factors in development. No economy will grow when 25% of the workforce has AIDS and another large proportion are dying of Malaria and TB.

The gym is still being frequented but I can feel in my joints that more care and precision will be required than a few years ago when I could twirl a barbell round my head without fear of straining a back/forearm/shoulder.

We also had our inaugural Tabragalba Grove Olive Picking Festival 2007, a couple of weeks ago. Here is a little montage of the day.

Olive picking