Link Banana

So says The Economist:

Australians’ response to all this has been overwhelmingly positive. Politicians of all stripes vie with each other to be seen as China’s friend. When John Howard was prime minister, he invited Hu Jintao, China’s president, to make two state visits in the space of four years. The most recent one, which took place just before a big international summit in Sydney last year, was seen as a bid to raise Mr Howard’s standing ahead of an election. But Kevin Rudd, then leader of the opposition, upstaged Mr Howard with his fluent Chinese. Mr Rudd, who went on to win the election, gave an interview to China’s state-owned television network in which he promised to elevate Australia’s relations with China “to a whole new level”.

Australians do not seem to suffer from the faint unease about China’s rapid growth that often afflicts Europeans and Americans. Instead, they see China’s rise as an opportunity. In a poll conducted last year by the Lowy Institute, a think-tank, a majority of Australians said they had positive feelings towards China and saw it as their country’s most important economic partner. Only 19% said they were very worried about China’s growing power.

The Economist argues that trade bans may actually do more harm them good for the animals they seek to protect. They offer these solutions:

A better policy is to make wildlife more valuable to man, not less. One way that suits everybody is tourism. The gorillas in the Virunga mountains of Rwanda attract a lot of money from visitors. They are doing well, unlike their cousins over the border in Congo which do not earn their keep, and are prey to hunters who want to clear them out and take their land. Tourism is one way to help the Indian tiger, which is much rarer than people thought.

A second, less popular way to make money is to exploit animals sustainably. Killing individual creatures need not harm populations. Many animals may be farmed or ranched to create a valuable legal trade. That is what has happened with the vicuña, and with crocodiles and their kind. Rhino horns can be cut off without even killing rhinos.

Stephen Hugh-Jones, like many others, says that the American (and European) embargoes of Cuba are useless at best.

That widespread affection, I’m told, still survives, even if it is more qualified, and these days Raulified, than it once was. For that, Fidel should thank, not least, successive presidents of the United States. He’s faced ten, and not one has had the political nous, or will, or maybe strength, to stop beating Cuba with sticks and try carrots instead. Forget the Bay of Pigs — the American trade embargo on Cuba surely ranks among the longest-lasting geopolicy failures in history.

Yet failure was easily foreseeable, and foresight was swiftly proved right. Surprise, surprise. If the mighty neighbour who used to run your country, and cheerfully backed its previous dictator, first lets loose an amateur invasion, and then for 45 years does its best to impoverish you as a step toward removing the new one — well, how would you feel? And would you have rushed to notice how the Cuban road to socialism was quite capable of impoverishing you by itself?

I don’t know enough about the situation to vouch for Eduardo Porter’s analysis of the free trade deal, but I do think it’s interesting to hear from someone other than knee-jerk protectionists.

Last week, tens of thousands of poor Mexican farmers marched down Mexico City’s fancy Paseo de la Reforma demanding that Nafta be reversed, their cows and donkeys occasionally taking a nibble from the grass along the median strip. Florida’s sugar barons sent their lobbyists to Capitol Hill.

This shared outrage underscores how egalitarian free trade is: undermining inefficient producers who survive behind protective barriers, be they fabulously wealthy sugar producers in Florida or campesinos on tiny plots in Michoacán.

Making a case similar to Mr. Brilliant’s, The Economist argues that the situation in the world’s better than most think, and still improving.

Indeed, for a great many people the way things are is pretty rotten: Burmese monks, for instance, or the Luo in Kenya. Life is not too bright for investors at the moment, either. But is the broader proposition true? Is the world really becoming worse for the majority of mankind? We argue that it is not.

To some extent, our qualified optimism is borne out by impartial data. In this article we look at three pieces of evidence: the underlying social conditions in poor countries; poverty alleviation over the past decade; and the incidence of wars and political violence. By those measures the world seems to be in rather better shape than most people realise.