Mostly in Estonian, but occasionally in English
21. November, 2009 by Jüri Saar“Cui Bono” as defined by the eternally comprehensive Wikipedia:
“To whose benefit?”, literally “as a benefit to whom?” – is a Latin adage that is used either to suggest a hidden motive or to indicate that the party responsible for something may not be who it appears at first to be.
For the authors of this blog “cui bono?” is also a question that’s remarkably unavoidable when discussing the economic aspects of public policy or questions of political economy more generally. While we never pretend to have an answer to this humble two-word question we believe it’s a question worth asking more often than not and our sometimes specualtive answers are worth sharing with our readers.
The Cui Bono blog will be written mostly in Estonian with an occasional post in English for people outside Estonia who are interested in what classical liberal minded Estonians are writing about. Occasionally there will be posts in English that will provide an alternative point of view for questions that concern Estonia and Estonians for our non-Estonian followers. There are three people – Paul, Meelis, Jüri – writing the blog and you can read more about them on the authors page.
There are already about 10 posts in Estonian as we officially launch the blog. Paul had the honor of the inaugural post with a short piece concerning the schizophrenic editorials of the Estonian leading business newspaper followed by a post, where Meelis points out the difficulties of predicting economic growth and the (un)reliability of forecasts.
Jüri touched on the absolute limits of economic growth, while Meelis looked at the history of economic growth and in a following post on the Nobel memorial prize winner Elinor Ostrom he discussed property rights as they pertain to her work.
In his second post Paul looked at the almost mythic aspects of deflation through an Austrian lens while Jüri offered up a post with an alternative vision of how to organize and finance health care.
In connection with municipal elections in Estonia Meelis had a post on how rational voters actually are that was inspired by public choice insights, which in turn was followed by a post from Jüri on stories and narratives and how they shape our understanding of such economic question as alternative cost.
Finally, Meelis asks, “what’s in a name” and goes on to discuss the confusion, history, and the seemingly tragic question of what geographic region should be called Macedonia.
All of the mentioned posts are in Estonian, but you’ll find in them quotes in English as well as links to external sites, articles or papers that are also in English.
We’ve also provided a special RSS feed for our English posts, which should make following Cui Bono blog a simple matter of adding us to your favorite RSS aggregator.
