Just when I was thinking I’d like to dance on the old brute’s grave, along comes Greg Palast and does it for me.

The claim that General Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was one of those utterances whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.

Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of Salvador Allende – who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.

In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.

In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.

Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.

Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor.

Yet, with remarkable chutzpah, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald Reagan’s State Department issued a report concluding, “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management.” Milton Friedman himself coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.” Friedman’s sidekick, economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet’s Chile was, “a showcase of what supply-side economics can do.”

It certainly was. More exactly, Chile was a showcase of de-regulation gone berserk….

You might argue that Greg Palast is not exactly a dispassionate commentator. But, interestingly, his view is largely supported by Oxford academic Alan Angell’s more detached account:

The second justification is that Pinochet created a model free-market economy. It is certainly true that there was massive privatisation and effective reduction of inflation. But the negative features are huge. The overall growth rate of the seventeen years of his rule was dismal – a little over 2% per annum. He engineered two massive recessions – that of 1975 (which could partly be blamed on the situation he inherited), and one of 1982-83 (which was due entirely to the regime’s economic policies).

There was enormous social suffering – unemployment at its peak was over 30%, and over 40% of the population were in poverty at the end of his regime. His government reduced social spending, with dire consequences for the quality of public health and education. Moreover, despite the commitment to neo-liberalism, the largest state asset, the state copper corporation Codelco, was not privatised, and Pinochet’s regime received colossal financial support from a state company nationalised by the Salvador Allende regime.

I could go on: the much-vaunted pension privatisation is now under attack, the central bank only achieved real independence under democracy. In truth, only after the recession of 1982-83 did the regime adopt sensible macro-economic policies.

It must also be stressed that these economic measures were accompanied by corruption which benefited Pinochet’s supporters – and also, we know now, the man and his family himself. The privatisations were used to reward supporters, and there was little transparency or effective regulation. The rich benefited enormously in Pinochet’s government leaving Chile with the legacy of one of the most unequal income distributions in the world.

The claim that Pinochet ruled for the benefit of the country can no longer be sustained. Undeniably, Chile has seen great economic progress since 1990 but this, I would argue, is the product of the policies of the democratic governments and not the legacy of Pinochet.

Silly non-article in WSJ.com. Sample:

As hand-held email devices proliferate, they are having an unexpected impact on family dynamics: Parents and their children are swapping roles. Like a bunch of teenagers, some parents are routinely lying to their kids, sneaking around the house to covertly check their emails and disobeying house rules established to minimize compulsive typing. The refusal of parents to follow a few simple rules is pushing some children to the brink. They are fearful that parents will be distracted by emails while driving, concerned about Mom and Dad’s shortening attention spans and exasperated by their parents’ obsession with their gadgets. Bob Ledbetter III, a third-grader in Rome, Ga., says he tries to tell his father to put the BlackBerry down, but can’t even get his attention. “Sometimes I think he’s deaf,” says the 9-year-old…

Lots more in the same vein. Yawn.

NO REPUBLICAN in Washington is more beloved by social conservatives than the Vice-President Dick Cheney, who with his wife Lynne, has backed and breathed every issue dear to them for six tumultuous years.

News that Mr Cheney’s gay daughter, Mary, is pregnant has therefore touched a raw nerve as advocates for conservative family values struggle to reconcile their loyalty to the Cheneys with their visceral opposition to same-sex relationships – and particularly to raising a child without a father.
“Not only is she doing a disservice to her child, she’s voiding all the effort her father put into the Bush Administration,” said Janice Shaw Crouse, a senior fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, run by Concerned Women for America.

Asked why the Administration played down the news, she said: “This is Cheney’s daughter; anything they say will make the situation worse.”

[Source]

Er, from The Register …

A new study from AirMagnet has demonstrated that Wi-Fi signal strength can drop by up to 25 per cent when seasonal decorations are in place.

Shiny baubles can reflect wireless networking signals, while flashing lights generate all sorts of interference. Sticking to the traditional holly and ivy won’t do you any good either, as plants are notorious for blocking the 2.4GHz signal Wi-Fi relies upon.

Carrying out a full wireless survey or network analysis might be overkill, but AirMagnet recommends that signal degradation can often be mitigated just by moving decorations away from access points, and remembering that every barrier between access point and user will lead to a weaker signal.

Thanks to Bill Thompson for spotting it.

Hmmm. The Gowers Report on Intellectual Property has been published. I haven’t read it through yet (in fact have only read the Press Release). When I started on the Report proper, I was immediately distracted by the Gowers signature:

That doesn’t seem at all safe to me. I mean to say, how do we know that this is the real Andrew Gowers, rather than a cheap counterfeit copy knocked up in Bangkok?

UPDATE: Bill Thompson has been reading the report. His initial impression is one of relieved surprise. Given what could have happened to the document, it seems sensible. And it’s delicious to think that ‘Sir’ Cliff Richard’s er, descendants, will not be able to wax fatly on his royalties after all. Gowers thinks that 50 years is quite enough, thank you very much. Actually, of course, it’s far too much, but we will leave that pass. I’m still trying to work out when Windows 95 comes out of copyright, for example.