About superpower

People don't understand that, but for me this is very definition of "superpower".

It has "special relation" with virtually every country. Which makes it ridiculous. On many occasions bilateral agreements depends only on personal connections between leaders.

For example. There are two countries in Western Africa, which were bloody awful some years and now its governments has improved greatly: Togo and Liberia.

US foreign assistance for Liberia is regularly above $200m a year. It's less than $0.2m for Togo. There is absolutely no merits in this. It's Togo, which has better rule of law of these two.

There are "special relation" with France or UK too, of course. USA is amazing in its refusal to accept any super-national cooperation. Doesn't matter is it convention about women's rights or biodiversity. you can always expect that USA won't ratify it.

Same history was with USSR, but it has disappeared. Having two superpowers was awful, but having no superpowers would be better.

Mexico is not like Tunisia

Does Mexico has superior public management, infrastructure, healthcare, education and environment practices compared to its own region?

Do Mexico has same president for 23 years and glaring human rights violations?

Don't be mistaken. Mexico doesn't have similar problems to Tunisia. You would find in Tunisia probably all government services better and much more personal intimidation.

People aren't dying

Let me give you an example of Sweden. 50 years ago it has crude death rate about 10 per thousand per year, one of lowest in the world. Today it has one of the highest, 10 per thousand per year.

There is number of countries with crude death rate below 5/1000 per year, like Mexico. It can have no newborn baby for next 20 years and its population will decrease by 10%. But its population increased by 11% in the last 9 years.

Let me reiterate this. If Mexico will have no children whatsoever until 2030 it will have population from 2001.

Japan has fertility rate below 2 for 50 years and in this time its population increased by 34 millions. It will take at least another 50 years for population to decrease to 1960 level, assuming fertility level lower than today, 1 child per woman.

Frequency of words used in books

• cholera,

• typhoid,

• smallpox,

• malaria,

• syphilis,

• obesity,

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=cholera,typhoid,malaria,syphilis,smallpox,+obesity&year_start=1500&year_end=2008&corpus=5&smoothing=3

European politics as seen in 2010/2011

OK. This is crude simplification, but here we go:

This is a map of countries by prevalent political association. [Croatia, Albania and Turkey should be light blue also). Actually Europe is larger, but essentially all Eastern Europe consist of Russia. Let me just say about EU eastern border:

• medium is Belarus, last dictatorship in Europe, its tyrant love Russia without reciprocation,

• larger is Ukraine, smallest is Moldova; they are part of GUAM (with Azerbaijan and Georgia), group countries opposing Russia, but its economies are dominated by Gazprom,

Now lets talk about parties:

• dark blue - conservatives, they don't want to be in Europe at all, they love America, but cannot even agree within themselves what do they represent, generally oppose to anything,

• light blue - centrists, mostly without ideology, "green", pro-education, try to attract workers from outside EU,

• red - socialists, working for creating more jobs, green economy, strengthen labor unions and that someone else should pay for this all,

• dark red - communists, they still believe in communism,

• yellow - liberals, pro-market and pro-freedom,

In Serbia, Ukraine or Russia parties are somehow vehicle to win an elections. They basically shun from extremism. They don't integrate gladly, lets say they are conservatives.

Norway has same party for last 80 years and really doesn't compare to any other European countries. It's politically frozen in the year 1930.

In Switzerland referenda are essence of power, so political parties don't matter much.

Corruption in Nigeria

I'm pretty interested in Nigerian struggle for better governance.

This is amazing, because reformers fighting the crooks really put their lives at stake.

More important Haliburton agreed to pay $579m for alleged brides. This is a matter of establishing rule of law in Nigeria. They are creating form of personal responsibility for higher official and chiefs of big companies, people who tend to pillage resources of Nigeria.

In the last 6-7 years Nigeria puts great efforts into its anti-corruption campaign. Nevertheless starting point for it was miserable, just ahead of Cambodia and Bangladesh (way worse than Iraq or Afghanistan), so it would take 10 years of reforms to be as little corrupted as China or India.

Related: Interview with Nuhu Ribadu, first chief of economic and Financial Crime Commission.

Why should low income countries receive aid?

Well, there is something called enlightened self-interest.

We can find that HIV originated in Democratic Republic of Congo between 1888 and 1924. We can track choloroquine-resistant Plasmodium to Laos-Cambodia border and early 70's. We can find that Polio virus remains endemic at India-Pakistan and Pakistan-Afghanistan borders.

I'm not sure that world is a better place with kidnappings, shipping cocaine and spreading bubonic plague in Sahel.

Several neglected tropical disease can be treated very cheaply. We are talking about 50c per person per year for 7 diseases. Filariasis for example.

Cysticercosis causes millions cases of epilepsy.

Children who are blinded because of measles today will be alive in 2050.

I can argue that there is considerable difference between productivity of person, who is blind and healthy one and social aid could be cost-effective in the longer view. More than improving modern computer, which gives modest return of investment. You can treat 1.4 billion people for 7 popular neglected tropical diseases for less money than Steve Jobs is receiving in shares every year. This presentation from Mayo claims that you can raise GDP in Kenya alone by billions of dollars just by deworming.

I've grabbed low hanging fruit, because neglected tropical diseases are for definition neglected. Part of them don't need any complicated research. They don't need buying drugs either. Pharmaceutical companies give away them for free.