More on the World Economic Forum
I was all over the World Economic Forum's competitiveness survey the other day. Today the folks at the WSJ's op-ed page take a crack. This money quote shows why those folks are paid journalists and why I, um, er, just do it for the love:
"Speaking of fiscal discipline, who does the WEF consider star performers? Meet the Algerian Tiger. By the WEF's methodology, this poor Maghreb country that lost 200,000 lives in a 1990s civil war is tops in terms of budget surplus, national savings, public debt, inflation, interest-rate spread and real effective exchange rate. Hearing this, the millions of Algerians struggling to build better lives in Europe will surely rush home."
The underlying point of both critiques though is the World Economic Forum is infected with the academic/bureaucratic mentality, a mindset that is so enamored of the elegance of a theory that they hew to that theory even though stepping outside and observing the world as it is would prove their theory ludicrous.
"Speaking of fiscal discipline, who does the WEF consider star performers? Meet the Algerian Tiger. By the WEF's methodology, this poor Maghreb country that lost 200,000 lives in a 1990s civil war is tops in terms of budget surplus, national savings, public debt, inflation, interest-rate spread and real effective exchange rate. Hearing this, the millions of Algerians struggling to build better lives in Europe will surely rush home."
The underlying point of both critiques though is the World Economic Forum is infected with the academic/bureaucratic mentality, a mindset that is so enamored of the elegance of a theory that they hew to that theory even though stepping outside and observing the world as it is would prove their theory ludicrous.
posted by Donny Baseball at 10:03 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home