Isaac
In class today, we were discussing schools. As you might imagine, education, or the lack of it, is a big problem here. To the government’s credit, they are trying, but they really don’t have the money to do anything substantial. Abdul Summit told me that many kids are just now getting textbooks, and there’s only 2 months left in the school year. There are some teachers in some of the more far flung provinces that claim they have not gotten paid in a year. My text book claims that there are schools that have over 150 students in a class! It’s one thing to sit through micro 101 in a lecture hall, it’s quite another to try to keep the attention of 150 16 year olds, let alone 7 year olds…
In the places that do have working school systems, a big big problem continues to be kids dropping out. Most of the time it is to work. Girls are the most vulnerable to this, they are often drafted to help the mother with all of the chores and/or take care of younger siblings. A rather novel approach to combating this is to offer poor families food. It has apparently worked pretty well in keeping girls in school longer. The literacy rate among women is around 25%.
My teacher was quite surprised to learn that religion is not taught in public schools in America. That lead to a brief description of our constitution and a word about private schools and voucher programs. I always feel like the ungrateful American whenever I discuss a so called short coming in our country. The Yemenis would kill for our dysfunctional school system. I guess it’s nice having high standards, and it’s even nicer being able reach them sometimes.
Now I know this place needs water, and I know this is the rainy season, but c’mon, can’t a guy do his laundry? I hadn’t realized how spoiled I had gotten having the sun out every day. This morning it was bright and sunny, so I quick did a load of laundry and hung it up to dry. 40 minutes later (and when I had another load soaking), it started to rain. Arg… I’m trying to dry everything in my room but I’ve run out of space to hang things.
There are no coin laundries in Sana’a as far as I can tell. If there are some, they would be on the other, richer part of town. In the US, coin Laundromats are very common in the poorer sections of town, but not here. I have a feeling its because the “poor” in the US have better things to do with their time than wash and dry by hand. Laundry is definitely “woman’s work” here, and what else are they going to do, work at a job? Go to school? Ha! If (when?) women here are able to get out of the house and have the option of doing something else, I’m sure we’ll start to see some Laundromats.
Isaac
They keep coming at me! I think to myself, “Gee, that’s interesting, I’ll have to think more about that,” and then BAM another thing hits me… So here’s some things that some recent podcasts made me think about…
The current president of the Czech Republic gave a speech a little while back. He talked about a bunch of stuff, but he used a memorable phrase. He warned us to watch out for the people that want to “Rule from above.” A great, simple phrase that he was using to refer to any group that wants to impose it’s will over others. One of the things I like about it is that it applies equally to neocons, environmentalists, socialists, PETA, lobbyists, etc. Anyone that feels that they are in the right and feels that the government should compel the rest of us to obey want to “Rule from above.” In a free society, the groups should try to get others to voluntarily come over to their side. I think we do pretty well with this in general, but the President grew up under the Soviet Union and he knows oppression. He warned us to not give up the freedom that his country had only so recently been given.
Another podcast talked about how nations got out of poverty. One of the first things that struck me was that several people suggested that we stop trying to “fight poverty” and instead tried to create wealth. There’s something to be said for that. Often times, the measures used to fight poverty merely hold things in check, keep the status quo and try to prevent any deterioration. Not always, but often times the best that can be hoped for with many programs is that things don’t get any worse. Wealth creation implies an improving situation or at least an improving chance of getting better. Anyway, Tyler Cowen, economics professor at GMU and an author over at Marginal Revolution made the somewhat controversial remark that it is the country’s economic and entrepreneurial situations that were the overriding factors in determining prosperity more so than the cultural baggage that might come along with the country. He used the example of Somolia vs. the US. Obviously, we do a lot better in the US than Somalia does, but is it because of the culture or the economic situation? Being the empiricist that he is, he studied Somalis that came to the US. They did much better than their folks back home. This doesn’t clinch it for me, but I think he’s mostly right.
Of course then I thought about Yemen. What happens if you have a dysfunctional economy and a less than a go getter attitude nation wide (I’m being kind here)? Well, the obvious answer is that you get what Yemen is today. The more interesting question is how do you change it? I think Professor Cowen has the right idea, if the institutional structures are in place that allow people to prosper if they are willing to put in the work, things will eventually change for the better. The key is that they have to see a potential payout for the work. I’m not exactly sure why that’s not there now, but it obviously isn’t…
Isaac
I’m beginning to see why so many op-eds I read that have been written by native Arabic speakers sounds so pompous, it’s kind of how the Arabic language is structured. It’s difficult to describe, but here’s a (very) small example. In English, I might ask “What do you think Randy?”, but in Arabic you would say, “What do you think YA Randy?” The Ya is a way of addressing the person, even in informal speech. In proper Fusa (MSA), you might also say the equivalent of “I my name is Isaac.” (Ana Ismee essak). There is a fair amount “extra” stuff thrown in that could make the translated text sound stuffy. This is good because it gives me a reason to give them the benefit of the doubt when reading. I always assumed that they were pompous windbags, now I think that maybe they’re just windbags:-)
Isaac
There’s an interesting discussion going on over at Cafe Hayek about the so called distribution of wealth. To simplify, the main thrust of the argument is that we are all so much wealthier (as economists determine it, by our options) than we were in the past, quibbling over how that wealth is distributed is downright petty. I’ll try to tackle the main argument in another post (I’ve been saying that a lot recently), but there was an interesting set of points made in the comments. I’ll paraphrase and strip out the technical jargon. As a counter point, one commenter suggested that if we were to divide up a pie between three children and give them one piece each, all of them would be better off. But if we divided it up so that one child got 85%, the next one got 13%, and the third got 2%, the third child would be pretty upset even though he had more than he had before.
Fair enough, the child would be upset, and maybe with good cause. But there’s a big difference between that pie and the output of the economy. First of all, there isn’t a fixed size of “the pie”, it can grow and shrink. So yes, maybe someone is still getting only 2%, but if the pie is the size of Kansas, he might not care. This isn’t as far out as it might sound. Compare Bill Gates with, well, just about anyone with a decent job. Bill Gates makes far more money, but most people don’t really care as long as they get enough to do what they want, and it’s a far smaller piece of the economy than 2%…
Another important difference is that there isn’t anyone that decides how much each person gets. People forget that what we make is dependent on all the other prices in the market, not only for labor, but everything else as well. What we get paid is a result of all of the prices on the market, there isn’t anyone doing the distribution, unless everyone counts as someone…
Another commentator brought up the point that a better analogy would be if one of the children made the pie and the three of them decided how to split it up. Imagine one kid saving up his money, reading like crazy on how to do it, buy the ingredients, fail at a couple of attempts, and finally come up with a decent pie. Then the three would “democratically” decide on how to split it up. LOL, you can be sure who will be happy and who won’t be happy! Ideally, the person could make the pie any size they wanted and could divide it up however they wanted. Of course they would be limited by the available oven size, the pots and pans that they had access to, etc. but they could, within reason, make whatever size they wanted. The bigger it is, the more of a pain it is, but there is a greater payout as well. Anyway, you get the gist of the exercise. The economy is not a fixed thing, and there isn’t a third party that can divide it up without cheating someone.
Isaac
My friend Randy sent me an article from the BBC about the latest report from the UN on Global warming. This is the same report that I had commented on earlier, I had seen the summery of the summery, this is the full blown document (over 1000 pages). My initial ideas still stand, and I was really disappointed in the BBC article (more on that in another post), but I want to address an assumption that all global warming disaster scenarios ignore. As it seems the sea level rising is no longer much of a threat (worst case scenario 25 inches in 100 years, more likely to be around 18 inches), the idea of drought comes to the forefront.
All of the terrible scenarios put forth assume that our technology will stay the same for the next 100 years. Think about the state of the art in 1907 and then think about now. Can you imagine trying to describe an iPod to a person back then? How about a computer or the internet. Most people did not have electricity or running water back then, let alone cars. Around 40% of the population worked on a farm, and if you were a minority or a woman, forget about achieving anything professionally. Hell, women couldn’t even vote! Technology improvements have continued to speed up, there’s no doubt that the next 100 years will see much more progress than the last.
As regards to global warming and it’s (reasonable) consequences, is it such a stretch to think that technologies in desalinization and agriculture won’t improve in the next 100 years? Desalinization plants are here now (see Dubai), so the technology already exists. If it becomes clear that drinking water will be hard to get, you can bet that companies will try like hell to make the best desalinization plants for the least amount of money (because of competition) and that could usher in an entirely new age. With large enough ones, entire countrysides could be irrigated.
All of this is assuming of course that there is nothing done to screw up the progress. A slowing economy will lead to slower rates of technology advances. Government meddling (tariffs, taxes, or granting of monopoly power) in the prices of technology (like desalinization plants) will ultimately lead to higher prices for that technology. The last 100 years is a great example of how far we have come, and I have great faith in our ability to keep improving given the right incentives like profit and real need.
Isaac
global warming economics technology future wealth thrid world development
For those of you that are tech savvy, I now have an RSS feed for the blog. I LOVE RSS, it cuts down on my surfing activities quite a bit, and that’s a good thing when you’re paying by the minute.
Isaac
OK, the site is up, at long last. I waited a couple of days for my account to OK’d, I had expected it to be up in a day. I went to the internet cafe today to check and viola! My account was up! Of course I couldn’t log in or anything… I later found out that there was a DOS attack, but they managed to get it under control in a few hours. My only obstacle after that was the upload speed at the cafe. It varied dramatically from about 5.5 KB per sec to 2 BYTES per second… I would get status bars telling me I had 4 minutes left, 10 seconds later I had 2900 minutes left… The videos might have to wait until I can figure out a faster way of uploading. In any case, I now have my own place on the web! If any of you need an email address, just let me know, I can set you up with no problem.
Isaac
Still waiting to hear back from dreamhost on the validation of my account. To their credit, they have responded to my questions very quickly and say that I will be up and running “later on this afternoon.” Of course since I’m 8 hours ahead, I’ll have to do it tomorrow. Of course you’ll be reading this the day after I get it all done:-)
One other note, the cobblestones in Sana’a are certainly not chosen for wet traction. It has been drizzling all day and the streets are really slick. The motorcycle taxis are still zooming up and down the streets. I wonder how many accidents are going to happen due to the combo of slick pavement and questionable brakes (most cars and motorcycles here look like they are barely running and need significant repair). I try to stay off the roads on days like today:-)
Isaac