Chatham House rules for election fraud
Someone has put up a $10,000 reward for anyone who can prove that the Iranian election was “stolen”, but I don’t think that Chatham House (CH) is likely to win. A Chatham House report prepared by political scientist Ali Ansari claims to have statistical evidence that the election was rigged. I had not planned to write on non-economic issues here but this one qualifies because it deals with numbers. (more…)
On the election aftermath
Here is the second installment of my commentary on the election crisis that appeared in NYT’s “room for debate” today.
On the election
This site is about issues related to Iran’s economy, so I prefer to stay away from purely political topics, such as the controversial election outcome and its more recent tragic consequences. However, since one reader asked for my take on the election, I refer here to a short piece that I wrote last week for the New York Times blog, “room for debate.”
I received some critical email responses to this article, which were mostly motivated by the title that NYT had picked for the piece (not entirely misleading). A longer companion article is to appear shortly in the same place.
Roger Cohen on Iran’s presidential election
I thought his latest piece which appeared yesterday in the NYT was very perceptive and moving– Iran Awakens Yet Again. As its title suggests, he considers the movement in 2009 to be similar to the one that swept Khatami into power in 1997. I think there are important differences between Iran in 1997 and 2009. In a commentarywhich appeared on the Brookings site yesterdayI discuss this briefly: http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/0610_iran_election_salehi_isfahani.aspx.
Is the election pitting the poor vs. the middle class?
Every day this seems more like the real story of the 2009 election. Class lines are more clearly drawn in this election than in the past. The common political narrative of reformers vs. conservatives is good description but not good political analysis. Political leanings have social and economic roots that makes them sensitive to the internal dynamics of the society. There are two fault lines that run deep in the Iranian society–the rural vs. urban and the poor vs. the middle class–both of which seem to be reflected in the political divisions that have come to the fore in this election. Crude personal observations (backed by TV images!) suggest that the supporters of the two leading candidates are socially diverse: the poor (and the rural?) are more likely to vote for Mr. Ahmadinejad and the middles class in either location is for Mr. Moussavi. (more…)
The Ahmadinejad-Karrubi debate: and the loser is …
Statistics. Between the two of them it was hard to tell who won that debate on June 6, 2009. But statistics was a certain loser. Mr. Ahmadinejad provided a series of charts to defend his economic record (which, by the way, was not under attack that night) but Mr. Karrubi dismissed them by simply saying that his numbers were wrong. Most of the numbers I was able to see on the television screen seemed right to me. But, unfortunately, numbers were not the point of the debate. (more…)
Distributing the oil wealth? Don’t hold your breath
Presidential candidates in Iran are racing to promise giving people back their oil money. According to the BBC Persian, Mr. Ahmadinejad plans to even include Iranians living abroad (like me). Holding my breath, I reached for a calculator. (more…)
What is wrong with Iran’s unemployment data?
As I wrote in another post a few weeks ago, every time a western reporter writes about unemployment and inflation in Iran, he or she seems obligated to say that the actual rates are twice the official rates. Often an “expert” is present to give this made-up claim an air of expertise. (See examples for unemployment here and here, and on inflation here and here.) I have not seen the claim repeated for inflation in 2008 ( I guess President Ahmadinejad took care of that in 2008 by doubling the actual inflation rate!), but for unemployment it is still being reported.
It is easy to dispel the myth that actual inflation has been always twice the official rate. If you take a calculator and punch in the price of anything in 1990 and then increase it every year at twice the rate of official inflation, you would know what I am talking about. But what about official unemployment data? Is there a way to check their veracity? The answer is yes. (more…)
Jobs, poverty, and Mr. Moussavi
A news item on Iran’s “Worker’s news agency” (ILNA), in Persian, which belongs to the workers’ organization House of Workers, reads, “A wealthy country in which people are poor is not Islamic.” This is a curious title for a report of a speech by Mr. Moussavi which is entirely about jobs, unemployment and productivity (delivered to the organization’s annual congress). Why would something mentioned at the end of a speech (and reported in the last sentence of the news report) become the headline? I think I know why. (more…)
Choosing a college
I was not able to write on this weblog last week because I was visiting colleges with my daughter to help her choose where she will enroll next year. Having grown up in Iran, it is impossible to have your children go through the US system without thinking about how different they are, even though Iran’s is more or less modelled after the western education system. So, it seems appropriate to write something about the big contrast in the transition from high school to college in the two countries, which happens to be on my mind this week and which is what I do in my research. (See my commentary on concour reform, on women in universities, and a longer paper on Iranian youth.)
There is no greater contrast between the two systems of education than in how they select students for college. We know how this is done in Iran. Students work hard to get good grades, which helps them go into successively more selective schools which is all to increase the chance of getting a high score in the Big Test–Iran’s infamous concour. Iran’s system receives praise for its objectivity (computers not humans grade the test) and for its selectivity (more than a million take the test and the top universities pick from the top 1% (hear a Chronicle of Higher Education reporter visiting Iran praise the concour’s selectivity–past minute 8). What proponents of Iran’s concour miss are the costs of objectivity and selectivity. (more…)
Tyranny of numbers 
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