Tyranny of numbers

Today the New York Times published my letter to the Editor (posted here on April 9), in which I made the point that mothers focused on educating two children tend to think more long term and be less apocalyptic.  

There is a lot more good that happens when families change their primary role from procreation to production of human capital–economic development, for example.  (Robert Lucas explains this beautifully in a non-technical article.)  This process took place in rural Iran starting in the late 1980s, thanks in large part to government-provided health care and family planning for rural families.  We do not know which way the causation goes here: is having fewer children the impetus to invest more in children, or does the desire to invest in children cause lower family size?  Economists have spent a great deal of time disentangling the relationship between the quality and quantity of children.  There is a lot of evidence globally that greater desire for education, often because its rewards have increased, is necessary to lower fertility. (more…)

Today’s New York Times has an excellent opinion piece by Roger Cohen (“Israel Cries Wolf”).  In his columns since his visit to Iran in February, Cohen has been busy countering the myth of Iran as a failed state and failed society.  In this piece he is exposing Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s Iran paranoia who has labeled Iran’s leaders a “messianic apocalyptic cult”. Cohen wonders if this is the same leadership that, “has survived 30 years, ushered the country from the penury of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, shrewdly extended its power and influence, cooperated with America on Afghanistan before being consigned to “the axis of evil,” and kept its country at peace in the 21st century while bloody mayhem engulfed neighbors to east and west and Israel fought two wars.”  

I wonder to what extent the inaccurate portrayal of Iran also as a failed economy has contributed to the image of Iran as a backward, poverty-stricken, failed state.   For example, last October Tom Friedman wrote in NYT, “as a real nation-building enterprise, the Islamic Revolution in Iran has been an abject failure.”

If the answer to my question is a partial yes, there is a lot of work to do to set the record straight about Iran’s economy. (more…)