Links for 2011-04-01 [del.icio.us]

• Industrial Policy: Chris Blattman Reviews the Excellent Dani Rodrik – Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality with All Ten Tentacles
  I felt a different lack in Dani’s book: the “industrial policy” prescriptions Dani recommends were the ideology underpinning the disastrous post-WWII economic policies of the Southern Cone of South America–and underpinning the the professed growth strategies of post-WWII initial African leaders like Ghana, Zambia, and Kenya. Dani would say, correctly, that these countries’ governments preached but did not practice. But that simply kicks the can down the road: we need a theory not of market failure–we understand that well–but of government failure to understand why policy ideologies that work very well in western Europe and eastern Asia have a strong tendency to fail elsewhere.
• Falkenblog: Detroit Implodes
  American minorities don’t need money, pity, or special rights, they need temperance, diligence, thrift and other bourgeois virtues, exactly what their community leaders are telling them are orthogonal to their position. The last thing you should tell someone in really bad straights is that his problem is the indifference, if not cruelty, of others, because it doesn’t help him.

  Democrats and black leaders bear most of the blame for the Detroit, and this should be a teaching moment. Yet, I see no such re-evaluation, and so I have little hope for American Cities, which I assume in a generation will be like the favelas of Brazil, places the police won’t even go.

• The Pathos of Robert Gates – NYTimes.com
  Gates is right: The United States has no business wading any deeper into the morass of Libya’s civil war. But McCain is right: Staying at arm’s length leaves us without a coherent strategy to actually accomplish any of our supposed goals in Libya. And so here we sit — hoping the regime cracks (and it might!), hoping we’ll get lucky, and hoping that God still looks after fools, drunkards and the United States of America.
• And the beat goes on… | PoliPundit.com
  COLUMBUS, Ohio — Labor stronghold Ohio assumed center stage Wednesday in the fight over collective bargaining rights for public workers as the state Legislature passed a bill that was in some ways tougher than that seen in Wisconsin and sent it to the governor.
• Super-Economy: David Brooks and Malcolm Gadwall wrong about I.Q, Income and Wealth
  The strong link between I.Q and earnings is well known by labor economists, but perhaps not by the affluent and high-I.Q readers of the New York Times. Obviously most of it goes through education. As technological development makes I.Q more valuable and unskilled labor less valuable, this disparity is increasing.

Read more at Hispanic Pundit