The topic for the 2004 Shell Economist Writing Prize has been announced, and it’s all about migration:

This year’s competition poses the question: Import workers or export jobs? Should developing nations be allowed to ‘poach’ skilled professional labour from countries who have helped pay for this expertise? Or is the influx of immigrants, whether skilled or unskilled, a positive force, bringing either expertise or ambition and hard work to the host nation?

The history of the movement of people and populations shows how dynamically immigrants can change or benefit host countries. But when and how does it go wrong? Is it a question of balance? Or (and) of matching skills and needs?

The debate on movement of people ranges from the rational to the emotional. What clarity can you contribute to mankind’s choices over the freedom to move? What may it mean for the way we work? What may it mean for our sense of place, of residence, of identity and of local and global belonging?

Write 2,000 words by 20 August, 2004, and you might win $20,000.

I registered for and implemented Google AdSense on this website today. So certain pages will now display advertisements related to the page content, or at least that’s the theory. In practice I’m not too sure how successful it will be. Within seconds of adding the relevant code to my carbon paper essay, Google chose to display two ads for quill pens (the essay does mention the quill pen, but I’d no idea you could still buy them).

I decided to sign up for AdSense because every few weeks someone writes to me via email and enquires about purchasing some carbon paper. Just today I received a request for a box of 500 sheets from someone in Alexandria, Egypt. Egypt was also the source of another request a few months ago, but that one was for 15,000 tons of the stuff!

As much as I’d like to help these people, I’m not in the carbon paper business. So I thought that the relevant ads from Google might prove useful to anyone searching for carbon paper who stumbles across my site. And who knows? It might even generate sufficient revenue eventually to cover the cost of this site.

So if you’re ever in the market for a new quill pen, you know where to come.

Alistair Cooke died last month only three weeks after retiring at the age of 95, and it’s difficult to distinguish cause and effect. Did he retire because the end was so near, or did he lose the will to live because he now had nothing to do? In a prescient statement a few years ago he said “I’ve noticed that if you retire you keel over” (Alistair Cooke’s first letter). “Speak for yourself” is what most of us are probably thinking, and that’s precisely what he did throughout his long career.

Apparently, he started out with ambitions to become an actor, but decided that telling America’s story was far more interesting than anything on the stage. He fell in love with America’s dynamic spirit of free enterprise, and became a US citizen in 1941. Given his subject, it’s highly ironic that he should succeed largely through non-profit, public broadcasting. Would his career have lasted as long had he been exposed to the harsh realities of the commercial world? I doubt it. Despite a publicly-subsidised audience of millions, Cooke still appealed to relatively few. Nevertheless, he clearly knew how to make the best of both his worlds: dynamic, aggressive America and inquisitive, but world-weary Britain.