Clive Crook

Ricardo Hausmann, director of Harvard University’s Center for International Development, says that biofuels can be (and maybe already are) competitive with fossil fuels at "something like current prices":Brazil has been exporting ethanol to the US at an average delivery price of $1.45 for an amount with the energy equivalence of a gallon of petrol. It is doing so profitably and in increasing amounts, in spite of a 54 cents a gallon tariff to protect… More »

Hillary Clinton has been promising strong action on climate change if she is elected. Now she has made some detailed commitments. (See Edward Luce's report of her latest speech on the subject here. Details of her proposals are here.) Her goal will be to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. She says she will negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol in double-quick time. And that's not all. The plan also proposes: A new… More »

For those following the debate on school choice, a useful reading from an FT correspondent who went to school in both Britain and the Netherlands. The Dutch system combines publicly financed school choice and academic streaming. Dutch parents can indeed choose their children's school. The schools are good, even though the country spends less on education than the OECD average. And, crucially, Dutch schools are selective - something that Britain supposedly lost when… More »

Robert Solow has a lengthy and very interesting review (subscription required) of Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World" in the New York Review of Books. Anything Solow writes on growth is compulsory reading, as far as I am concerned. He summarises Clark's main thesis like this:According to the now traditional view, the presence of institutions with the required qualities serves to create and maintain incentives that… More »

Stuart Taylor on the criticism Michael Mukasey, the White House nominee for attorney-general, has faced over his reluctance to say that waterboarding is torture, and hence illegal. (The whole column is here; it disappears behind National Journal's lofty pay barrier next week.)The surge of Democratic opposition to President Bush's nomination of former Judge Michael Mukasey to be attorney general says a lot about certain Democrats, especially after the initial… More »

My Monday column for the print FT: The best course in dealing with Iran is not hard to see. The difficult thing is having to accept that its chances of success are poor. If the US and others do all they sensibly can, Iran will probably acquire nuclear weapons anyway. This prospect, much as one might prefer not to think about it, is terrifying. How can such a policy be right in that case? All one can say is that the alternatives are worse. The right thing is to… More »

This is from my latest column for National Journal. The piece does not so much as mention Giuliani's prostate.The politics of the issue has moved a long way in the Democrats' favor. Public opinion has shifted, the polls say, in favor of universal coverage as a goal. Worries over the rising cost and availability of health insurance are a big part of the wider trend of rising economic anxiety. Americans' desire to see this problem fixed is greater now than it was in… More »

Occupied elsewhere on Tuesday night, I watched a recording of the Democrats' Philadelphia debate, and by the time I got around to it I had already read a lot of the commentary. That may bias my view, but the consensus seems right to me: Hillary made a hash of it. Under real pressure from the other candidates for the first time, the charm slipped. She was tetchy, evasive and most of all uncomfortable. I recall writing of the first debate that the other candidates… More »

In testimony today to the House budget committee, Peter Orszag, the head of the Congressional Budget Office, makes an interesting point about the fiscal implications of a cap-and-trade regime for carbon emissions. Suppose carbon permits are given away to suppliers and industrial users of energy. The proper way to score them in that event--"a solid case can be made", is how Orszag puts it--would be to count the value of the permits as both revenues and… More »

A third and I pray final post on Rudy Giuliani's prostate. David Gratzer, the doctor who provided Giuliani with his disputed numbers on cancer survival rates in the US and Britain--numbers which provoked an assault from Paul Krugman and others, and a characteristically calm and judicious response from this desk--has posted his reply at City Journal (an excellent publication, by the way). He's not backing down, which I think is a mistake. Nothing he says makes me… More »

My friend Robert Wade censures me in this note (posted with his permission) about my FT column of a couple of weeks ago on globalisation and inequality.I hate to spoil your fun as you throw bricks at "critics of globalisation", but some of your empirical statements are open to challenge. You say (repeating the IMF's International Economic Outlook) that trade barriers inhibit growth and worsen inequality, in rich countries and poor countries. Many… More »

Take a look at this column by National Journal's Jonathan Rauch, for me one of the two or three most consistently interesting writers on American public policy:The Democrats' postwar narrative was Keynesianism: By managing demand, the government would balance the economy instead of the budget. Reagan's narrative was supply-side: He would reignite stagnating productivity by reducing tax rates, deregulating, and shrinking a bloated public sector. Bill Clinton… More »

My earlier post about Paul Krugman's attack on Rudy Giuliani's health-care ad has attracted critical comments [posted at my FT blog] that are making similar points. I argued that Giuliani's numbers were wrong and that his claims were misleading, but that cancer survival rates are indeed higher in the United States (especially for those with health insurance) than for NHS patients in England. Here is one of the comments disagreeing with that post, which states… More »

Paul Krugman has attacked Rudy Giuliani for a dishonest ad on health care--or perhaps an ignorant one, as the case may be. This is a test for the media, as well as a scandal in its own right, Paul says. Will those feckless reporters and editors at The New York Times call Giuliani to account for this? Probably not, seems to be Paul's opinion:OK, Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that the survival rate from prostate cancer is much higher in America than… More »

Much as I agree with the FT's editorial on Charles Rangel's new tax bill, one point bears emphasising. If passed (which, as the leader pointed out, it won't be) the bill would provide a permanent fix for the Alternative Minimum Tax and improve the efficiency of the corporate income tax by broadening its base and lowering its rate. Its distributional implications are modest and, as far as they go, desirable. Which is all well and good. As compared with other ways of… More »

My Monday column for the Financial Times: Between now and the latter part of December, the US Congress and the White House will revive a much-loved theatrical tradition: the battle of appropriations. Back in February George W. Bush set out his budget request for spending in the fiscal year that started in October. Congress then devised a plan of its own, not that different from the president’s. Spending bills conforming to that scheme have duly been passed by… More »

I liked this column by Charles Krauthammer, offering a corrective to the current gloom in Republican circles about the quality of their presidential field. The party longs for another Reagan, the column points out. Republicans hoped that Fred Thompson might be that man, but what little they have so far seen of Thompson has changed their minds. All the other candidates are gravely flawed in one way or another, or so the party thinks. The column reminds Republican… More »

How depressing--but then, not so surprising--to hear Rudy Giuliani say that waterboarding may not be torture, that it all depends on how it's done. He insists that the United States is opposed to torture, as though seeking high moral ground on the issue, and then makes a mockery of that position by saying that waterboarding, done right, might fall outside the prohibition. In the case of electrocution, presumably, it all depends on where you put the electrodes.… More »

With apologies for the delay (time waits for no blog, though it is going to have to make an exception in my case) here's a response to Brad DeLong's comments on a recent column of mine. My article argued that the debate over fuel-economy standards was not advancing the cause of climate-change mitigation, and it made the case (again) for a carbon tax. Brad's take on this was: Clive Crook says: - A stronger CAFE is better than what we have now. - A full-fledged… More »

Warmest congratulations to Amit Varma, winner of this year’s Bastiat Prize. A libertarian outfit called the International Policy Network gives this annually to a writer who “wittily elucidates the institutions of a free society”. Amit writes a column for Mint, a business paper based in Mumbai, and publishes a blog, India Uncut. He is a champion of the new India, and fits the award’s rubric perfectly. He gives a good impromptu acceptance speech too, as I… More »