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Around the web

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I read a bunch of really cool stuff this weekend. The highlights: This Salon interview is old, but the gist is that a professor realized that as young, innocent children most victims of sexual abuse don’t feel that traumatized while the abuse is happening. In contrast to an event like a rape, where the victim immediately feels terror, pain and shame, and does not consent to the event the feeling most often expressed by child sex abuse victims (at the time of the abuse) is confusion (the upset and anxiety comes when they grow older). So when sexual abuse is described by the media and popular culture as a traumatic event, sexual abuse victims believe that what happened to them doesn’t fit the bill, and don’t tell the relevant authorities. The author also believes that repressed memories are a myth; around the world, people remember traumatic events vividly. Because these events are not really traumatic, people forget about them and then recall them when asked later, which is natural, and has nothing to do with repression. Note that the author is not condoning or excusing sexual abuse; merely observing that for many children, the event is not traumatic or painful (at the time), merely confusing, and because their experience doesn’t match up with the description of sexual abuse in the media they don’t come forward, even though the crime is horrific. Colin Marshall shares thoughts on interviewing after having done 100 of them. In essence, his advice is to go with the flow of the conversation, don’t prepare questions (but do your research) and ask questions about things about which you are genuinely interested in reading the answer. I keep meaning to start interviewing people; I should start right now but I doubt I will. Here’s a good review of Center City, the new gigantic development in the center of the Strip in Vegas. I agree that it lacks personality, and two bits in particular reminded me of my own experience there (excepting the suicide bit):
“I start to feel claustrophobic and duck out of the event. For a certain type of person, Vegas is a non-stop party. For me, it induces a kind of persistent low-grade anxiety. There’s something dystopic about the place generally, and CityCenter is starting to feel like the world of Blade Runner come to life. I head back to my room, shut the black-out curtains and lie in bed. More people commit suicide in Las Vegas than in any other city in the United States.” […] “Realistically, this place is as much an artifice as anything on the Strip, a re-imagining of a 19th-century saloon, complete with polished bar, antique typography, Edison bulbs. Why, then, does it feel so much more honest? Because its aesthetic is filtered through a contemporary sensibility? Because it seems a natural part of a vibrant neighborhood? Is this all bullshit I invent to make myself feel more comfortable? Could the real problem with Las Vegas — my real problem with Las Vegas — be that its commercial imperatives are simply too transparent?”
Here's an illustrated post describing 10 reasons to avoid talking on the phone. I don’t enjoy talking on the phone; on days like my birthday when lots of people call I get stressed out. It must show because people say I sound very funny when I talk on the phone. Many Republican governors made a big show out of repealing the stimulus but as Jonathan Chait points out, Republican states generally get more federal money in than they give to the federal government in tax revenue than Democratic states. He also profiles Mitch Daniels, whose Indiana country bumpkin-ism is phony, as a former pharmaceutical company CEO, but who has generally governed Indiana from the middle, expanding health care and increasing taxes. My preferred Republican candidate is still Jon Huntsman, but he won’t be back on the national stage until around 2014, probably.

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Voluntourism: Overseas volunteer trips often hurt more than they help

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Daniela Papi has a great post on the many problems with “voluntourism,” or traveling to a foreign country to do volunteer work. She points out that most volunteers don’t know much about the local culture, you don’t speak the language and don’t have relevant skills, and this makes it very difficult to find work that’s useful. Given these constraints, it’s entirely possible that the work you’re doing overseas (for example, painting or building houses) is displacing local labor, and that the money you’re spending can be put to much better use.
“I really did travel with a tour company that decided to allow us to paint the school that was on their bike route. We painted it poorly, I must say, as we rushed to complete it in one day (and most of us felt too tired to put in a big effort). We probably spent $200 on paint (25% of which we dropped on the floor). The project was in rural Thailand, and $200 could have probably bought a lot of educational resources, hired a few teachers for a month, or done a list of other things which would have added more educational value than our patchy blue paint job. If they insisted on painting, if they had instead funded $3000 towards a locally identified educational need (for example, a weekly life-skills training course), plus bought $200 worth of paint, at least then our combined efforts would have been more than just the blue paint on the floor.”
Voluntourism creates an unhealthy culture:
“As Saundra has told us over and over again and as I have learned through seeing the negative effects of an unbridled tourism culture of giving things away “to the poor people”, giving things to people is never going to solve their problems. Instead, it can destroy local markets, create community jealousies, and create a culture of dependency.”
Tour companies don’t monitor projects effectively:
“A tour company in India allowed tourists to hand out goats to families on their tours. In the middle of the tour, a person from a nearby village came and told the director that the man who had been put in charge of choosing which poor families should get the goats had been charging the families for the goats for years. The tour company had been making their English speaking tour guide rich, were not helping “the poorest of the poor” that they claimed to be, and had furthered corruption and mistrust in the village.”
“There are many orphanages in Cambodia which take volunteers to teach English. Some come for a few weeks, others for a few days. When they leave, the classes have no teacher, there is no curriculum to ensure that the students aren’t learning “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” every day, and the school is not better able to solve its own problems in the future because of the volunteer’s visit. If skilled teachers had spent time teaching English teachers English, they would have improved the system at least slightly, but sadly, everyone just wants to pet the cute kids.” Last but not least, the tours “foster moral imperialism” among volunteers:
This one is the biggest problem I think, but the least talked about. We assume, because we come from wealthier places with better education systems, that we can come into any new place without knowing much about the culture or the people, and we can fix things. We can’t! THEY, the people who live there and know the place well, can. Our job in the development world can and should be to support them in doing so. So, we can’t assume we can come do it for them and “save the babies” by visiting an orphanage for a few hours on our trip to India. And we sure shouldn’t think that our time is oh so valuable that we should fundraise money to pay for OUR flights to go paint a school poorly. My job, in running a tour operation, is to educate travelers on at least these two points: improvements take time, and the people we are visiting have just as much—if not more—to teach us as we have to teach them.
The bottom line is that “voluntourists” are more interested in showing that they care than in actually helping make a difference. This is one reason why I could never be a college admissions officer; I would reject outright any student that wrote about this sort of work in glowing terms (and I know many do). I was pretty careful in vetting organizations at the beginning of the trip, and I know that the organization I’m working for does things the right way. I don’t have any illusions about the value of the work I’m doing. I tend to think of the main point of my trip as spending time traveling, learning about a different culture and trying to learn several specific skills. It became clear very quickly that I don’t know much about the culture, and I definitely don’t know enough Hindi to get by. I do have some useful skills; I’ve been spending more than my fair share of time doing things for the NGO that I am good at, in particular redesigning their website to attract more money in donations (the revenue from which, when complete, will far exceed the cost of the plane flight), and writing grant proposals in English. Traveling to a foreign country is an excellent experience and I recommend it, if you or your parents have the means. The longer you can stay the better, but even if you can only go for one week, don’t pay for one of these trips though. Aim for one of the smaller cities, then a month before you leave, buy a phrasebook and practice. Once you get there, rent a bike/car and get out into the countryside, eat the local food and try your best to make conversation.

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Good incentives are fragile

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Two articles today show how difficult it is to maintain good incentives in poor countries. The first was from Madagascar, one of a handful of countries in Africa which was exempt from U.S. tariffs under a special program, the AGOA program. The textile industry in Madagascar was thriving, employing over 100,000 workers and also employing hundreds of firms that supplied the raw inputs to the textile shops. The AGOA ran out at the end of 2009, forcing thousands in Madagascar and the surrounding countries to find other work. The results have not been pretty; there have been riots in the streets, and increased stress on profits in other professions, like street sales. Ostensibly, Congress ended Madagascar's inclusion in the program because of a military coup in March. But there isn't really much evidence that imposing sanctions on the workers has had or will have any effect on the authoritarian leadership. Indeed these sanctions tend to hit the working classes much more than they hit the people in charge. Growth and good governance go hand in hand, but it doesn't make sense to kill a country's growth because the government changed.
Robert Strauss, head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Madagascar, told IRIN that a quarter of the jobs in the formal economy were dependent on AGOA, and the reintroduction of US import duties of up to 34 percent had made keeping factories open unprofitable. The rapid decline of the textile industry was also having a knock-on effect in other countries in the region, including Mauritius, Swaziland, Lesotho and South Africa, where many of the materials used in Madagascar's textile factories, such as zips, were produced, Strauss said. [...] Fabien Rakotonirina, a textile factory machinist who lost his job in December 2010, told IRIN: "Here on the street there is not enough profit. In the factory I earned 10,000 ariary ($4.65) a day, now I earn 6,000 ($2.80)."
The second story is from India, whose farmers this year will produce less rice per hectare than Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The Indian government has long subsidized the use of different types of fertilizer in agricultural production, which has by and large stimulated crop yields and reduced India's need to import food. As government revenues wax and wane, subsidies have gone up and down - but the urea (a type of fertilizer) manufacturers are politically powerful and have prevented the urea subsidy from being touched. Because urea is so much cheaper than other fertilizers and nutrients, farmers are spreading way more urea on their crops than is recommended (32-to-1 ratios of nitrogen to potassium, which should be about 4-to-1) and the soil quality is deteriorating. As a result India may soon have to increase its dependence on importing food.
India has been providing farmers with heavily subsidized fertilizer for more than three decades. The overuse of one type—urea—is so degrading the soil that yields on some crops are falling and import levels are rising. So are food prices, which jumped 19% last year...Farmers spread the rice-size urea granules by hand or from tractors. They pay so little for it that in some areas they use many times the amount recommended by scientists, throwing off the chemistry of the soil, according to multiple studies by Indian agricultural experts...The government has subsidized other fertilizers besides urea. In budget crunches, subsidies on those fertilizers have been reduced or cut, but urea's subsidy has survived. That's because urea manufacturers form a powerful lobby, and farmers are most heavily reliant on this fertilizer, making it a political hot potato to raise the price.
These are both examples that demonstrate the fragility of good incentives and growth, and the power of special interests and far away people to destroy it. Throwing money or sanctions at these problems is not very helpful, but encouraging trade and denying special interests are. Politics always has winners and losers; the winners here are textile manufacturers in America and other countries, and urea manufacturers, and the losers are producers in Madagascar, taxpayers in the US (who bear the cost of the subsidy as well as the market price of the food) and farmers in India.

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Good writing in The Count of Monte Cristo

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I'm almost finished rereading The Count of Monte Cristo, one of my favorite books. It involves a prison escape, buried treasure, delicious revenge and a reversal of status. One thing I've noticed now is how egotistical the Count is: taking pleasure in others' misfortune, being convinced of his complete superiority over everyone else, believing that he is a messenger of God, sent to deliver justice for a crime committed twenty-five years hence. However the other characters are so evil that he's totally justified. I wanted to share some good quotes from the book. Abbe Faria, a priest locked up in prison for 15 years, is asked by Dantes, "What would you not have accomplished if you were free?" and replies,
"Possibly nothing at al; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated into a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced-from electricity, lightning, from lightning, illumination."
Here's another one, about the career-driven M. de Villefort and society:
Ordinarily M. de Villefort made and returned very few visits. His wife visited for him, and this was the received thing in the world, where the weighty and multifarious occupations of the magistrate were accepted as an excuse for what was really only calculated pride, a manifestation of professed superiority - in fact, the application of the axiom, "Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think well of you," an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays than that of the Greeks, "Know thyself," a knowledge for which, in our days, we have substituted the less difficult and more advantageous science of knowing others

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Kumbulgarh & Ranakpur

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Kumbulgarh
  • Kumbulgarh is a giant fort, in the middle of nowhere, on top of a plateau, with huge walls and a series of gates and walls leading up to a castle on a hill on the plateau. Given the fortifications and technology at the time I guessed it would have taken around twenty invaders for every defender to storm the thing. Which begs the question, why would any invading army bother capturing the fort? Just surround the whole plateau and steal all the food and messengers coming in, and you’ve effectively captured all of the land. For a fort to be effective, everyone must have had their huts/houses inside, but there wasn’t that much room on the top of the plateau, to support an army or otherwise. Sure, giant fortifications can keep people out but they can also make it really tough to maneuver.
  • There’s a passage in one of the Michael Crichton books that talks about the eerie silence in the Middle Ages, when there are no buzzing airplanes, cars or electronics emitting ambient noise. Crichton’s wrong on this point, because there are always animals around, and stuff like the wind that rustles trees, but it gets noticeably quiet when you are out in rural areas.
  • There were clearly different levels to the fort, with the palace at the top, so back in the day, you could tell someone’s status really easily by what level of the hill they lived on. People probably went their whole lives without getting to the top of the fort. Now you can get to the top of the fort for 5 rupees.
  • Tourist traps and historical sites can only make so much money charging admission, licensing guides and selling merchandise. I think tourist sites can go further nowadays in selling an experience to visitors, and especially selling exclusivity, to people that demand those sorts of things. Only a Westerner would say this, but I couldn’t help looking around and thinking about how cool it would be to have a giant paintball tournament or other battle-type event at the fort. Take the Tough Mudder competition for example – a 24 hour competition designed to test endurance and strength, and push people to their limits. Tough Mudder sells a story about toughness to people; complete this and you will have higher confidence and something to boast to your friends about. Why hasn’t someone thought to do the same at some of our coolest historic sites (at least the less reputable ones)? No question you could earn more revenue with a 1000-person, 5-day-and-night paintball tournament (biodegradable, washable paint, of course). All it would take is a blatant disregard for the reverence due to history. Historic sites only sell an experience so much; they could do a lot more if they were willing to be a little more entrepreneurial (and less respectful). Maybe I underestimate the tourism options available for the ultra-rich.
  • We hired a cab driver for the day (good decision) but he stopped at a restaurant that was, on reflection, a complete tourist trap. Not only was the food overpriced, but as a restaurant that caters to tourists, the food was geared to the lowest common denominator, e.g. a tourist who hates spicy food. Why people who can’t eat spicy food come to India is a mystery, but the lesson remains; any place that caters to (foreign) tourists is going to have bad food (and a big menu). While we ate the cab driver disappeared in the back, to eat lunch, no doubt. He probably ate way better than we did for about a twentieth of the price. Note to self: In the future, pack lunch.
Ranakpur
  • Ranakpur was a series of three awesome Jain temples, in the middle of the jungle. The temples were very beautiful, peaceful, and cool, decorated in marble on the inside and out. The temples were supported by many pillars (again, awesome for paintball); any one of the pillars by itself could have been an extremely valuable work of art, together they were overwhelming, and almost made you underestimate the amount of work that must have gone into any particular one.
  • It’s interesting to see how the ideal human form changes from religion to religion and culture to culture. In Buddhism the ideal is a smiling, fat Buddha; in Catholicism, a lean, suffering Jesus Christ; in Islam there are no pictures of faces. The Jain idols had very wide faces. Maybe this is just a relic of the sculpting style back in the day.
  • The temple is very much still active and there were many ascetics sitting crosslegged, praying and walking around the temple. There were many visitors just watching the Jains. I think it would be difficult to pray, or reach any sort of positive mental state, with so many people watching.
  • Every religion allows people to tell the difference between believers and non-believers. Believers seek out clothing, rituals, audible prayers and other visible actions that distinguish themselves from non-believers. In this case the Jains were wearing white almost-togas. It would be pretty awful to believe in something and not let others know that you believed it.
Photos when I get a more reliable internet connection...

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Is laissez-faire capitalism such a good thing?

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From Poverty to Prosperity is full of excellent quotes. Here’s one from Robert Solow:
It is far from obvious to me that the way to foster competition is to leave the private sector alone. The private sector does not much like competition; it has its own ways of creating monopoly power, restricting access to wealth (and therefore to political rights), and preserving vested interests. It is no easy matter for a society to get the benefits of competition without the disadvantages of oligarchy, and there is no reason to believe that laissez-faire will do the trick.

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Hernando De Soto’s The Mystery of Capital

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The holy grail of development is a resource that explains why the West has grown so far ahead of the rest of the world in terms of income per worker and productivity. Hernando De Soto makes a good case in The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else that property rights are one of the main reasons why the West has gone so far ahead of other countries. Every neighborhood in the world has property rights, in the sense that if I build a shack or house, the neighbors agree that it’s mine and that the space is mine. But only in the West are the property rights likely to be registered with the government, and the owner of the property able to use his land or house as collateral to secure credit from banks or strangers (people who are not family or friends, in other words). To start a legal business, or establish a formal claim to property, is an onerous process in most Third World economies. For example, in India, “about 90 percent of land titles are unclear as to who actually owns the land…[this] causes competition among real estate developers to be over finding and acquiring land with clear titles rather than over construction productivity,” according to William Lewis. Apart from explaining, for example, the number of megastores and car dealerships I’ve seen in low-traffic locales, this can explain why it’s so hard to get growth; there are a number of problems that arise when your property is on land that you don’t own. You can’t get credit, because it’s hard to use land as collateral when you don’t own it (and the bank probably can’t sell it either). When you might not be able to sell your property for very much, and the government could kick you out at any point, then you don’t have a huge incentive to make lasting improvements, either. The poor around the world own a surprising amount of capital; according to one estimate, the world’s poor collectively own $9 trillion in assets, between the land they own, the improvements they’ve made on the land and their savings. The problem is that in the absence of a formal system of property rights that’s consistent across the country, they’re unable to leverage that capital in a meaningful way. Most attempts to establish systems of property rights have failed, because of fears from entrenched parties (lawyers, the rich, special interests) about change. In Peru, De Soto’s country of specialty, the government’s tried to provide property rights to the poor on multiple occasions, and failed to help the poor in any meaningful way; sometimes the problem was in implementation and sometimes the rich hired lawyers to subvert the system and claim land that wasn’t theirs. Governments have spent billions on GPS and mapping technology, without making it any easier for the poor to own the land on which they sit; America managed to integrate property by 1900 without any of that technology. Businesses and squatters face tradeoffs; De Soto argues that many of them would like to become legal, but the costs of doing so in some countries are so high (sometimes requiring 200 steps and as many as 15 years) that most small businesses have no choice but to operate outside the law. In Peru De Soto set up a simple alternate registration system for businesses, and generated $1.2 billion in revenue for the government, by making it easier to become legal (and enjoy all of the protections of a working legal system). Capitalism, to many of the entrepreneurial poor around the world, is a series of stupefying laws, and necessary innovations to create agreements in the absence of any recognition or protection from the government. In the absence of a functional legal system, the poor in every part of the world have their own arrangements for assigning property. De Soto gives the example of walking through a field in Indonesia, where he could tell who owned the land because a different dog would bark at him when he crossed an invisible property line. The key for governments is to transform those extralegal agreements into formal agreements that foster trust and capital generation among the poor.

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Seva Mandir project description

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This is one of a few projects I am working on at the moment. Connecting Rural Teenagers with High-Paying Jobs Kevin Burke, Seva Mandir The problem The first step on the economic ladder for most citizens is a job requiring skills slightly more advanced than day labor. For rural villagers, the economic and personal returns on these jobs are quite high; workers may be able to get a high-paying job without having to migrate to Gujarat, for example. Seva Mandir, in partnership with Ajeevika Bureau, offers trainings in areas like plumbing, electrician, auto repair, stitching etc. but take-up for these courses is low. The goal The goal is to investigate the reasons why take-up is low, and after a field survey has been completed, to propose solutions or possible training modules to increase take-up among rural teenagers. Implementation A)   Get information from Abhay (Seva Mandir employee), members of Ajeevika Bureau (training organization) to estimate the education level, amount of training, job opportunities and pay schedule for various possible jobs like plumbing, auto repair, etc. Research Government of India statistics on the average salary for a worker with no primary education, a worker with primary, secondary, and a high school degree. B)   Conduct field surveys in 8 villages. The goal is to conduct 15 surveys per day, and 30 surveys per town. Visiting two towns per week will allow us to complete the survey portion of the study in 4 weeks. C)   Analyze data D)   Propose solutions/possible randomized experiment Tentative Hypotheses 1)    Some workers do not sign up because have the required skills to even sign up for a 2 month training course. There is no quick fix for this problem. 2)    Workers are credit constrained; to sign up for trainings they would have to forgo two months worth of wages and possibly pay part of the cost of the training. Loans are one possible solution, although collecting the loans has been tough; there’s no easy source of collateral to secure the loan. 3)    Workers do not properly estimate the returns to education, or the possible salary in a city job. If their internal estimates of future pay are too low, then they would not sign up for training or education that has a high present cost. Fortunately, Trang Nguyen (2008) found a quick solution to this problem; hold a meeting and display the statistics about how much a 25-year old can make in various professions and with various education levels. She used a graphic with bags of rice; no primary education means avg. pay is 3 bags of rice, a primary education means 6, etc. After the intervention the local people estimated the return to education correctly and their test scores improved. 4)    The teenagers possess the skills but have difficulty applying for available jobs, or there are not jobs available. 5)    Workers are not aware of the Seva Mandir training programs. We will test these hypotheses in the survey, and propose an appropriate course of action.

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The end of a DVORAK experiment

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Today I popped all of the keys off of my laptop keyboard and rearranged them in the QWERTY format. In the name of efficiency, I switched my keyboard to the Dvorak system during my sophomore year of high school. It only took about a week and a half to learn how to use it at full speed, and I’ve been using it ever since. I haven’t measured whether I type faster using QWERTY or Dvorak, and from what I’ve heard, studies don’t really show any improvement in typing speed. I would guess that I type faster in Dvorak, although it’s been several years since I’ve typed any long document in QWERTY still use Dvorak. The keyboard shortcuts with Dvorak are also in generally better positions, especially the close window and quit application commands (Apple-W and Apple-Q, respectively). The small gain from typing with Dvorak, though, is outweighed by the tedium of explaining to everyone who peeks over my shoulder why my keyboard is funky. Telling people that my laptop was assembled at a facility that provides jobs to the mentally retarded got old quickly. It’s also frustrating for people who want to borrow my laptop and are not used to looking away from the keys. If everyone used a Dvorak keyboard, we all would be slightly better off, but the cost of switching (alternate keyboard layouts, retraining, reprogramming old machines, etc) probably outweighs the productivity gain. I’m able to type without looking at the keys in both Dvorak and QWERTY layouts. The feeling of switching between the two layouts is very interesting, and I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s unlike language, where you would never make the mistake of responding to a Frenchman in English on purpose; many times on public keyboards I start typing in Dvorak, then erase the keys and flip a switch in my head so the words show up correctly.

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Clusters of identical sellers in a crowded city

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In and around downtown Udaipur, you run into clusters of merchants selling exactly the same thing. There’s a block with ten pharmacies in a row, all selling roughly the same goods and another block with five banks in a row. In Delhi Gate, there are about twenty women sitting next to each other who all sell flowers. Hotelling’s law says that on a 2-dimensional street with two shops, they will rationally converge at the middle. And I remember reading somewhere that McDonald’s spent a ton of money figuring out the ideal locations for its stores, and Burger King just built a restaurant wherever there was a McDonald’s. But with ten shops all in a row, common sense says a shop in the middle of the row could make more money by moving to the end, or to a different part of town. I can think of a few reasons: 1) The shop-owners all purchase from the same distributor. Perhaps they get a discount by purchasing together. 2) Maybe everyone in Udaipur knows the place to go for flowers or pharmaceutical drugs and so there’s a big market in that particular location. This is similar to the distribution of car dealers in the US. However, car dealers sell differentiable products and you can find pharmacies and flower sellers regularly in other parts of town. 3) Everyone in Udaipur knows everyone else, so buyers spread out their purchases between sellers. The sellers are selling indistinguishable products so it’s hard to stand out as the best. 4) The sellers are colluding and sharing profits. That, or the margins would be low anyway and they enjoy each other’s company. 5) Flowers, drugs and banks are just a front for some kind of illegal business. Not likely as cultural norms against alcohol, gambling and prostitution are quite strong. 6) Peculiar zoning laws mean that pharmacies/banks that set up in a specific spot got a special tax break. I have heard as well that in India the laws favor small businesses, opposed to big business. 7) I hesitate but maybe the sellers have a weak grasp of business concepts, or lack the desire to make higher profits for whatever reason. 5, 6, and 7 are particularly unlikely, and 1 and 4 are the most likely, None of the arguments here are particularly persuasive. Hotelling's law may be more powerful than I thought. I will investigate further.

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