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Truth, Errors, and Lies: Politics and Economics in a Volatile World resources

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2. How Things Happen 427 22 . Albrecht Fölsing, Albert Einstein: A Biography (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 457. 2. How Things Happen 1 . Jim Crace, The Pesthouse (London: Picador, 2007). 2 . Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage International, 2007). 3 . Tobias Buck reports in an article dated March 5, 2007, that “The Euro- pean Union’s economic development is only now reaching the level achieved by the US more than two decades ago. . . . The US reached the EU’s current level of gross domestic product per capita in 1985, according to [a] report by Eurochambres, the pan-European business lobby.” “EU Economy Is 20 Years Behind US, Says Study.” http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9ebc7f02-cb3e-11db -b436–000b5df10621.html (accessed July 31, 2009). 4 . The Fespaco (Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou) has been organized in Burkina Faso every two years since 1969, and has become a cultural event of signifi cance for the whole continent and an engine for the emergence of the young African cinema onto the world scene. At the twentieth anniversary festival in February-March 2007, the Nigerian fi Ezra by Newton Aduaka won the grand prize, the Yen- lm neng Golden Mustang. The fi lm recounts the fate of a boy soldier in the Si- erra Leone civil war, which has left the country one of the poorest in the world, with a per capita GDP of about $900 by purchasing power parity, which equated to a mere $200 at the exchange rate in 2007, enough to pay for one night’s stay at the best hotel in the war-ravaged country’s capital, Freetown. 5 . Louis Armstrong, Black and Blue in The Louis Armstrong Collection , vol. 2 (St. Laurent, Quebec: Excelsior-St. Clair Entertainment Group, 1995). 6 . Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Crown Publishers, 2007). 7 . Purchasing power parity, or PPP, is frequently used in international com- parisons. It takes account of the wide differentials in price structure and level as a way of indicating the amount of goods and services that can be purchased in the local currency. For instance, if the same representative “shopping bas- ket” of consumer goods could be purchased in China for 2 yuan as could be bought with $1.00 in the U.S., then $1.00 would be worth 2 yuan by PPP, rather than 8 yuan by the offi cial exchange rate. This example is close to real- ity, since the GDP of China calculated by PPP is about four times higher than when it is calculated by the offi cial exchange rate. The Chinese GDP is in fact equal to 78 percent of that of the E.U., instead of 18 percent by the offi cial ex- change rate. In the case of Poland, the ratio is about 1.5 to 1.

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