Subject: Re: conversations (from Paul Ballonoff)
>I will also be putting up some links to your papers in the development
>anthropology (largely blank) page in the next few weeks ... other
>suggestions welcome
Paul Ballonoff home page
"Rule Bound Systems Analysis as a Tool
for Economic Development" current
extended version
Thanks for the note, and the links! If you can put one up for the SBBay
journal, that would also be nice. I am trying not to fill it with my own
stuff, which I can reasonably well now publish elsewhere. People might
want to publish things there. SBBay is my eclectic publication, but it
is edited (by me --- I have edited stuff since I was a graduate student,
actually). And the internal technical journal MACT (at SBBay) is
seriously edited by a competent Editorial Board and intends to be a fully
refereed quality journal. [Did I give you this site URL?
www.SBBay.com and/or "www.SBBay.com/MACT". Until November 1 this
needs a password and username "Guest" (in both places). But by November
1 we will drop the password protection and anyone can get on and use it.]
- Paul
RE: other suggestions welcome
Subject: 2 or 3 more suggestions
How about this organization, at the University of Vienna
http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/emcsr/
I have attended their biennial meetings since 1980. Since 1990 they have
had a session on "country systems" (with me as co-chair for that
section). We hope to resume them for the 2002 meetings. But for the
2000 meetings, they put me as co-chair of the Y2K post-event evaluation
session.
And, if someone there wants to see Vienna in spring, the papers are due
to be proposed by October 20 this year. It is a refereed conference that
also publishes its papers in a conference volume.
Also, I have a discussion transcript and slide presentation posted, along
with some works by others, on the "Y2K Before and After" site at:
www.gwu.edu/~y2k Click on "before and after studies."
I did not know I knew anything about Y2K till the Austrians appointed me
as an international expert on the subject (at EMCSR), but I have been
trying to use the opportunities posed as a result to do some discussions
on forecasting accuracy, which is pretty much what is posted on this site
under my name.
For that matter, the GWU site just noted might have other items of
interest. Actually, if you wanted to post a page on the systems world,
you could find lots of sites, but much of it is (unfortunately)
peripheral to anthropology or even cognition as a science. Though I
suppose what is now called "cognitive science" is very much a growth from
the general systems theory tradition.
-- Paul.
Subject: more links
Below are a few development anthropology links that might be of interest.
Each of the development banks listed probably has a good set of links
inside their home page, often right on the first page from a link. I put
in the USAID link to organizations, since it is much bigger than the
others. Each of these sites also has some country description and
program description stuff, some in great detail. Most are organizations
doing development or doing advocacy of development.
I dont really know of good scientific sites in this area. In fact, it is
surprising (horrifying) at the extent to which such organizations do not
study (or publish, if they do study) how well they do in development.
There is a huge body of advocacy, and little real science. (That I know
about).
The World Bank Home Page:
http://www.worldbank.org/
The USAID Home Page:
http://www.info.usaid.gov/
The USAID Links Page to Many International Development Organizations:
http://www.info.usaid.gov/about/resources/
The Inter-American Development Bank Home Page:
http://www.iadb.org/exr/ENGLISH/index_english.htm
The Asian Development Bank Home Page:
http://www.adb.org/
The African Development Bank Home Page:
http://Afdb.org/
The European Development Bank Home Page:
http://www.ebrd.com/english/index.htm
Hope this is useful.
-- Paul
From: Paul Ballonoff
Subject: more links - II
Well, actually, I suppose with some work I can find a lot of useful sites
that are thinking about development, but they dont look like what
anthropology usually does. I doubt that most anthropologists have ever
read the very prolific and productive work of Richard Posner (now Chief
Judge of the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals), nor F. A. Hayek, nor
their intellectual progeny. This sort of stuff is available in sites
such as listed below.
And if you are going to list the international organizations, then you
might also want to list some of their more effective critics, some also
found among the listings below.
The Journal of Law and Economics (unfortunately the works of Posner in
the early issues, such as his work on "Primitive Law" -- which is
insightful if slightly naive in some ways -- are not on-line, but most
issues have one or more articles on development topics). See:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JLE/home.html
Cato Institute publications generally, of which several policy studies
are analytical and critical of development banks, accessible from:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/
Especially the Cato Journal, such as this volume with some insights on
legal evolution:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj18n2.html
The Papers of Bruce Benson at:
http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~bbenson/
The Economics Department at Florida State U. generally at:
http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~bbenson/
Or the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, which
also lists many related resources, is a good counter balance to the weird
list of anti-scientific institutions compiled by the USAID site of links
I previously provided you:
http://mason.gmu.edu/~ihs/
-- Paul