Peruvian Presidential Elections

While it is true that the presidential elections in Peru are a long way off, candidates have begun to declare their candidacy. While many things frustrate me about the Peruvian electoral system at the local level, the national system is actually pretty good--a simple first-past-the-post system (that is, winner-takes-all, like we have in the states), but with a runoff (a second round election) between the two highest vote-getters a couple of months after the first round of voting. This allows voters to coordinate in the second round, and though it has some flaws (I would actually prefer an STV system, I think), my complaints with the system are pretty minor.

The biggest weaknesses in Peruvian elections actually seem to be internal to political parties (basically, Peruvian political parties are weak and have little grass-roots, community-level organization, though that may be changing). But that's an issue for another time.

The Peruvian Times notes the following public opinion data regarding the race:

According to the Lima-based polling firm Ipsos & Apoyo, 20 percent of respondents are expected to vote for Keiko Fujimori in the next ballot, down two points since January. Luis Castañeda Lossio – currently the mayor of Lima – came in a close second, with 18 percent, followed by Ollanta Humala, with 14 percent. The poll was based on a July 15-17 survey of 1,000 Peruvians, and has a margin of error of 3 percent.

This is worrying, really. Keiko Fujimori doesn't have much of a platform--a vote for her is essentially a vote for her father, as she promises to pardon him if she wins. It also is a vote for traditional clientelist politics, as most supporters of Fujimori, based on personal conversations, are individuals who remember the spending blitzes of Alberto Fujimori's various campaigns, both as president and as dictator, which resulted in high levels of spending in rural areas.

It doesn't help that Alan Garcia, the current president, pretty much ignores rural Peru.

Of this list, I would personally be happiest to see a race between Fujimori and/or Ollanta Humala and Castañeda Lossio, the mayor of Lima. Castañeda's political star is tied to Lima, where he has developed a reputation for relatively effective and clean management. His connection to Lima, however, is a real shame, because an election between either of these two pairings would probably become a race based around traditional Peruvian urban/rural split (or Lima/rest of Peru). He is, however, an evangelical Christian. This means that he might be successful in garnering some rural support based on his religion, and it is probably more likely to help him with evangelicals than hurt him with Catholics.

Ollanta Humala is another case who deserves a full blog posting. Perhaps I'll leave that for next time, lest this blog posting get too long.

Thomas simply doesn't cut it...

...in the special operations team that is our supreme court.

Tío Hugo and the New Threat

I'm glad to know that Uncle Hugo's government has moved away from demonizing the United States to attacking the far more pernicious bourgeios menace that is golf.

Chinese statistical poetry

Zane and I were just talking about this--turns out it is actually happening in the real world:

Awesome

A couple of weeks ago, I posted homage to Michael Jackson by a ranchero band, if you liked it, you should check this out, via "the Latin Americanist."

Nuclear Subs

Zane notes that India's not got 'em.

It strikes me as ironic that, actually, the Indians probably have more uses for nuclear subs at the moment than the US does. Not only do we have enough weaponry for use against conventional foes without our subs roaming the deep, but we also don't have a major conventional adversary at the moment.

And of course, we're still building them--18 new ones coming off the line from Electric Boat, starting in 2008 (for something like 1.8 billion a pop).

Isn't this money better spent on... I don't know... millions of pounds of jelly beans or massive trampolines in all US elementary schools? Or (more seriously) improved counter-insurgent weaponry or a larger intelligence apparatus?

Libertarianism

Over at the Monkey Cage, they're talking about libertarianism, and it's possible death in the near future.

I don't have much to add on this topic, but as a guy with libertarian tendencies, it has always puzzled me why "libertarianism" is always equated with extremism. I sometimes describe myself as a "moderate libertarian," only half-joking, and people laugh. Why? You can be a moderate Democrat or Republican, but not a moderate libertarian, marxist, or (in the US), a moderate Socialist?

It isn't true that you're either a Marxist or not--there are many different varieties of Marxism, some more radical than others (compare, for example, the mild Marxist tinge of the dependency theorists like Cardoso and Prebisch to the Adolf Hitler grade of insanity of Ariel Guzman and the Shining Path).

Likewise, there are more and less insane versions of libertarianism.

So why does libetarianism need to be an on/off kind of thing. Does libertarianism have to die? Or can it become more moderate?

M. Jackson Tribute

In case I haven't made it abundantly clear, I think the amount of
attention paid to Michael Jackson is ridiculous. Nevertheless, you
should all check out the following M. Jackson tribute, a remake of
Billie Jean. Awesome.

For some reason, Google isn't letting me sign on at the moment, so I
can't make a direct link, but here's the web address:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2009/07/mexico-mourns-mj-with-tribute.html

More on shady missionaries

Blattman turned me on to this post on development blog "Blood and Milk" on missionaries. I agree with much of what they say.

Market prices for lumber and exportation

When I was at ISNIE, Krister told me that one of the things that we have
to figure out is a way to get local market prices for lumber in the
regression model, to satisfy all the economists. However, when I
mentioned that I was looking for a source of lumber prices to my
interviewees today, things didn't look so good for me getting a single
data source on this type of information:

The dude actually reached into the garbage can, pulled out a crumpled up
sheet of paper, un-crinkled it, and read off a list of prices to me.

I was thinking, though, about the rest of the interview. These guys
told me that by far the biggest market for these products is the US
export market--they were describing how lumber prices went down by more
than a third after the ATP-DEA was canceled (I must have written about
the ATP-DEA before...

If this industry is pretty much driven by the cost of lumber in the
United States, therefore, there shouldn't be that much difference in
prices across municipalities for the stuff. However, these guys
explained to me how the biggest cost--the biggest thing affecting their
profitability (or rather, the profitability of the local communities) is
the cost of transportation, and this too has been impacted with the
rising gas of gasoline (which has actually gone down again here, but
which is still pretty expensive, especially for Bolivians).

Therefore, it might make sense to model the profitability of these firms
by modeling transportation costs. I should be able to do this using
ArcGIS, although I might need to track somebody down in the Geography
department. And I need to find out where the lumber actually goes
before it's shipped to the states, so I can trace the shipping route
effectively.