What’s in store for Egypt

Observers across the political spectrum are divided over the endgame for the putative revolution in Egypt.

Israel’s prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, spoke for many when he said history argued for caution when it came to revolutions:

We know of many examples of anti-democratic forces that co-opted a people's genuine desire for liberty and instead established brutal regimes that snuffed out liberty. In the case of Egypt, there are many possible outcomes beyond the liberal, democratic models that we take for granted in our own countries.

Daniel Pipes put the case for the pessimists in the debate at The Economist  and reiterated his point that the involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood's Islamists will be critical in a society where democracy has no foothold:

If they will foment a revolution along the lines of Iran in 1979, in which their belief in God's sovereignty trumps political participation by the masses. The inherently anti-democratic nature of the Islamist movement must not be obscured by the Islamists' willingness to use elections to reach power. In the prescient words of an American official in 1992, the Islamists forward a programme of "one person, one vote, one time."

What happens if everyone is rich?
Watch out for a new economic thesis that threatens to bury the debate over global warming.

It warns against rapid development and high consumption in Asia, saying these countries should learn from the West and adopt a more ascetic model that uses the world’s resources in a sustainable way and does less damage to the environment.

Chandran Nair, an environmental consultant and founder of the Global Institute for Tomorrow, says in his book Consumptionomics what many think in private and daren’t say in public – that the world is over-populated and cannot cope with every Chinese and Indian becoming as rich as Americans.

“The biggest lie of all is that consumption-driven capitalism can deliver wealth to all,” he writes. “In Asia it can only deliver short-term wealth to a minority; in the long term, it can only deliver misery to all. This is the intellectual dishonesty at the heart of the model the west has peddled to Asia.”

Nair describes what it would like if every Asian owned a car, ate as many chickens as Americans and used as much energy.

He doesn’t accept technology will ultimately provide enough energy or prevent climate change. His political solutions are not attractive either, as they involve greater government intervention in controlling the exploitation of resources, agricultural production and the provision of transport.

You can listen to Nair interviewed by Peter Day’ in the BBC’s Global Business programme.

Pharmac and the physicist
The anti-globalisation lobby, which is funded by the taxpayer in the form of academic salaries, is fond of sticking up for Pharmac and painting the US pharmaceutical industry as little more than denizens of devildom.

Leading physicist and nanotechnologist Sir Paul Callaghan, justifiably named last week as New Zealander of the Year, received his award looking hale and hearty. No thanks to Pharmac.

Among the many state-of-the-art drugs shunned by Pharmac – it prefers New Zealanders to have access to older, cheaper and less effective generic drugs – is Avastin, to which Sir Paul attributes his recovery from cancer.

While Sir Paul is not publicly critical of Pharmac, which wouldn’t fund the drug until after Sir Paul’s successful treatment, he was able to be treated with it privately after winning a rich science prize from – you guessed it – America.

He tells the background on his blog post (April 23 posts). He graciously excuses Pharmac and in a letter to the Dominion Post turns the story round to draw a moral for his own mission (expounded in his 2007 book Wool to Weta):

If New Zealand does not lift its prosperity, the gap between what our health system provides, and what medicine can offer, will widen, and these inequity issues will only get worse. We can lift prosperity by innovation through technology and science.

Meanwhile, there is another happy ending:

An odd postcript to the media story about the cancer was this. My public health system oncologist was really pleased with it, and said it was really helpful to them in keeping pressure on for new drug approvals by Pharmac. So maybe I was embarrassed but the greater good was served!

The winner’s curse
It’s official, there is an Oscar curse for winners of the Best Actress award. This doesn’t augur well for Black Swan’s Natalie Portman, who is Moviefone’s hot favourite.

As gossip followers will know, Ms Portman will need a bigger dess as she is pregnant to the film’s choreographer, Benjamin Millepied, and they have not yet tied the knot.

Oscar Curse stories emerged last year when the media noted divorces of Best Actress winners for 2009 (Sandra Bullock), 2008 (Kate Winslet), 2005 (Reese Witherspoon), 2004 (Hilary Swank) and 2001 (Halle Berry).

Researchers at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management examined the marital histories of 751 movie stars nominated for Best Actor and Best Actress Oscars between 1936 and 2010.

They confirmed that winners in the Best Actress category faced a much greater risk of divorce than those who win Best Actor awards. The women also face a much greater risk than the losing Best Actress nominees. In fact, the researchers found Best Actress winners tended to stay married 4.3 years, while the non-winning nominees' marriages lasted more than twice as long, 9.5 years.

But such a curse doesn’t just belong to the world’s top actresses. A 2008 study by economists Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate at the University of California at Berkeley put award-winning CEOs to the test.

They applied various jinxes (Sports Illustrated Jinx, which holds that athletes featured on the magazine's cover fail to live up to their hype; the "Sophomore Jinx" that says new actors in the entertainment industry can't live up to the qualify of their debuts; and the "Nobel Prize Disease") to  awards made between 1975 and 2002 - predominately from Business Week and Financial World (which ceased publication in 1997) magazines.
The findings confirmed their worst fears:

The [CEOs] underperformed in terms of stock prices and returns on assets for three years following their receipt of an award, recording 15 to 26% drops in stocks prices and returns on assets, above and beyond mean reversion, although their compensation continued to climb during the same period.

You can hear Professor Malmendier expounding on her thesis in this BBC (audio) interview. Meanwhile, if you must know, Moviefone is picking The King’s Speech should win the Best Film Oscar buy Toy Story 3 will win. That leaves True Grit out in the cold.