The best thing I've read on the election

From Paul Krugman's column "Loans and Leadership," March 28, 2008, New York Times

"All in all, the candidates’ positions on the mortgage crisis tell the same tale as their positions on health care: a tale that is seriously at odds with the way they’re often portrayed.

Mr. McCain, we’re told, is a straight-talking maverick. But on domestic policy, he offers neither straight talk nor originality; instead, he panders shamelessly to right-wing ideologues.

Mrs. Clinton, we’re assured by sources right and left, tortures puppies and eats babies. But her policy proposals continue to be surprisingly bold and progressive.

Finally, Mr. Obama is widely portrayed, not least by himself, as a transformational figure who will usher in a new era. But his actual policy proposals, though liberal, tend to be cautious and relatively orthodox.

Do these policy comparisons really tell us what each candidate would be like as president? Not necessarily — but they’re the best guide we have."

The choice: A good life or doing good in life?

From "For Top Medical Students, Appearance Matters," The New York Times, March 19, 2008

"'It is an unfortunate circumstance that you can spend an hour with a patient treating them for diabetes and hypertension and make $100, or you can do Botox and make $2,000 in the same time,' said Dr. Eric C. Parlette, 35, a dermatologist in Chestnut Hill, Mass., who chose his field because he wanted to perform procedures, like skin-cancer surgery and cosmetic treatments, while keeping regular hours and earning a rewarding salary."

The American Way

From "No Man's Land" by Eula Biss, The Believer, February 2008:

"Every society is threatened by a nearly infinite number of dangers, Glassner writes, but societies differ in what they choose to fear. Americans, interestingly, tend to be most preoccupied with those dangers that are among the least likely to cause us harm, while we ignore the problems that are hurting the greatest number of people. We suffer from a national confusion between true threats and imagined threats. And our imagined threats, Glassner argues, very often serve to mask true threats.

Quite a bit of noise, for example, is made about the minuscule risk that our children might be molested by strange pedophiles, while in reality most children who are sexually molested are molested by close relatives in their own homes. The greatest risk factor for these children is not the proximity of a pedophile or a pervert but the poverty in which they tend to live.

...

The word pioneer betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West—the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited. To imagine oneself as a pioneer in a place as densely populated as Chicago is either to deny the existence of your neighbors or to cast them as natives who must be displaced. Either way, it is a hostile fantasy."

Taxation?

This new article about the richest people in the world has a number of Indians, the Ambani brothers, Lakshmi Mittal, the DLF chairman. It made me curious -- how much of their income do they pay in tax? What percentage of Indian tax revenues comes from its richest people? Is this the best way to earn tax revenues?

Microlending and the Cult of the Entrepreneur

There is an interesting article in the New Yorker's Financial Page online on micro-lending called "What Microloans Miss." Surowiecki argues that micro-loans may help to make individual borrowers better off, but it does not help to bring a country out of poverty. While micro-loans are meant to help small businesses grow, they are usually used for non-business expenses, like education or health costs. Most micro-businesses also only have one employee, the owner. But increased numbers of jobs are what will allow a country to pull itself out of poverty. These jobs will normally come not from micro-enterprises, but small and medium sized firms, which provide 60% of the jobs in developed countries, but are largely missing in developing countries (a phenomenon known as the "missing middle"). He says, "[m]icrofinance evangelists sometimes make it sound as if, in an ideal world, everyone would own his own business." But in fact, only 14% of Americans own their own business, while in a country like Peru that number is almost 40%, not because Peruvians are more entrepreneurial, but because most Peruvians do not have access to the kinds of jobs that Americans have. Surowiecki argues that real poverty reduction strategies should target improving the small and medium sized business sector because these really generate more jobs.

One last one from Hobsbawm

From The New Century

"We should not forget that, whatever yardstick is used, the majority of peoples are better off at the end of the twentieth century, in spite of the extraordinary catastrophes that have marked it....Overall, we have today three times the population there was at the start of the twentieth century, and all these people are physically stronger, taller, longer living and healthier. They suffer less hunger and famine, enjoy a higher income, and have an immeasurably greater access to goods and services, including those which guarantee greater opportunities in life, such as education.... This is also true of poorer countries. After all, there has not been a famine in India since 1943."

From Amita Baviskar's speech at MIDS, 2005

"The cultural politics of environment and development demand that we make the connections between poverty and unbridled consumerism of a privileged class, its sense that it can have it all, aspirations that can never be met without sacrificing someone or something."

Malcolm Adiseshiah Award Ceremony Speech

From David Mosse's "Tank Irrigation in South India"

"If tank systems declined under colonial rule, then it was the result of this isolation of resource management from the wider political relations through which it had been organized." (315)

"The legitimate need to generalize 'design principles' for farmer-controlled irrigation here, no less than the colonial administration's use of 'custom' involves an institutional isolation of resource management from its particular historical and social context, and, in doing so overlooks the importance of political relations and the 'cultural' construction of natural resources." (304)

"The extension of state power which lay behind the regimentation of 'local knowledge' and invention of tradition was hardly disguised." (312)

From my summer notes (from Phil)

From Wallace Stevens' "The Solitude of Cataracts"

"There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over."

From Eric Hobsbawm
"The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of removed decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessities."

From The Age of Extremes

"During the short twentieth century, more human beings had been killed or allowed to die by human decision than ever before in history." (12)

"It is not easy to grasp the extent of the, unfortunately accelerating, return to what our nineteenth century ancestors would have called the standards of barbarism... We forget that an international convention once provided that hostilities in war 'must not commence without previous and explicit warning in the form of a reasoned declaration of war or of an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war,' for when was the last war that began with such an explicit or implicit declaration?" (13)

He quotes the following from Rules as to Bombardment by Aircraft, 1921
"It may be thought better, in view of the allegations of "barbarity" of air attacks, to preserve appearances by formulating milder rules and by still nominally confining bombardment to targets which are strictly military in character....to avoid emphasizing the truth that air warfare has made such restrictions obsolete and impossible. It may be some time until another war occurs and meanwhile the public may become educated as to the meaning of air power." (21)

From The Age of Capital

1848 "marked the end, at least in Europe, of the politics of tradition, of the monarchies which believed that their peoples accepted, even welcomed, the rule of divinely appointed dynasties presiding over hierarchically stratified societies.... Henceforth, the forces of conservatism, privilege and wealth would have to defend themselves in new ways." (39)

The unprecedented economic boom after the revolutions of 1848 "gave the governments shaken by the revolution invaluable breathing space and conversely wrecked the hopes of the revolutionaries." (45) Between 1800 and 1840, world trade did not even double. Between 1850 and 1870, there was a 260% increase. There were two, maybe three, preconditions to this massive increase in trade -- the railroad, the telegraph, and to a lesser extent the gold rushes which provided the capital.

From Sam Bass-Warner's "The Private City," 1968

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Two quotes I recently read on food

From "UN Agency Cuts Food Rations for Sudan Victims," New York Times, April 29, 2007.

"The World Food Program, the United Nations agency responsible for feeding three million people affected by the conflict in Darfur, in western Sudan, announced Friday that it would cut in half the amount of food it distributed there because it was short of money.

The food program said it had received just a third of the $746 million it had requested from donor nations for all of its operations in Sudan. As a result, individual rations that include grain, blended foods, beans, oil, sugar and salt for people in Darfur, where a brutal ethnic and political conflict has raged since 2003, will be reduced from 2,100 calories a day to 1,050 calories — about half the level the agency recommends.

In March, the agency announced an initial cut of sugar, salt and beans to some Darfur residents, but that reduction did not include grain, blended foods or oil, the rations' main sources of calories."

From Graham Hancock's The Lords of Poverty, 1989

Describing the events during the joint annual meeting of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund attended by 10,000 people.

"The total cost of the 700 social events laid on for delegates during that single week was estimated at $10 million..... Ridgewells, a well known Washington catering company, prepared twenty nine parties in one day alone, according to executive Jeff Ellis who added: 'This year the hosts want more expensive menus, and they're inviting 30 per cent more people. No one is stinting -- but, then, they never have." A single formal dinner catered by Ridgewells cost $200 per person. Guests began with crab cakes, caviare and creme fraiche, smoked salmon and mini beef Wellingtons. The fish course was lobster with corn rounds followed by citrus sorbet. The entree was duck with lime sauce, served with artichoke bottoms filled with baby carrots. A hearts of palm salad was also offered accompanied by sage cheese souffles with a port wine dressing. Dessert was a German chocolate turnip sauced with raspberry coulis, ice-cream bonbons and flaming coffee royale." (38)

Quote from the Draft Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2004

The Rural Employment Guarantee Act was supposed to guarantee 100 days of employment to any rural resident willing to do manual labor.

Among the entitlements of labourers according to the 2004 draft of the Act is the following:

"(2) The following facilities shall be available at the worksites: (1) safe drinking water; (ii) shade for small children and periods of rest; (iii) a first-aid box with adequate material for emergency treatment of minor injuries, strokes, body aches and other health hazards connected with the work being performed."

Water and shade? It is astounding to me how minimal these entitlements are.