Category Archives: economics

by | 13 April 2007 · 6:16 pm

Japan Focus on Ethnic Koreans in Yanbian, China

I’ve been preoccupied with other matters lately and slacked off blogging a bit, but I meant to excerpt a few passages from an interesting portrait of ethnic Koreans in Yanbian, China, that appeared recently in Japan Focus.

The current Korean population in China is of rather recent origin. A wave of migration from the Korean Peninsula began in the 17th century. However, most of the migrants arrived during the tumultuous decades between the middle of the 19th century and the end of the Second World War. Northeast China was first a refuge for poor peasants and later a base for Korean nationalists, who fought against the Japanese colonial rulers in the period 1910–45. After Japan annexed Northeast China in 1931, hundreds of thousands of Koreans migrated to the new Japanese-dominated state of Manzhouguo, including many forcibly sent to work in factories and mines. However, the vast majority of migrants from Korea came allured by the promise of land.

When Japan was defeated in 1945, there were 1.7 million Koreans in Northeast China. When the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, some 600,000 Koreans returned to the Korean Peninsula, while 1.1 million remained in China. China’s ethnic Korean minority presently totals roughly two million people. Most live in Northeast China, with a dense Korean population in Yanbian on the North Korean border. The number of ethnic Koreans in Yanbian is about 200,000, 38 percent of the prefecture’s population. An estimated 80 percent of the Yanbian Koreans have their roots in contemporary North Korea, and 20 percent have their roots in South Korea….

A closer look at certain elements of Koreanness that Yanbian wished to rely on reflects the complexity of ethnic ties as a resource for promoting economic cooperation. Ethnic background or family ties do not automatically generate business. When the Yanbian Koreans won the opportunity to visit South Korea, they were surprised at not receiving a warmer welcome there. Indeed, South Koreans tended to look down on them. For political and cultural reasons, North Koreans were held in even lower esteem in South Korea. As Korean-Chinese were often mistaken for North Koreans when visiting South Korea, due to similar dialect and appearance, they often met rather harsh treatment.

As contacts between Korean-Chinese and South Koreans intensified, the differences in their habits and values also became quite clear. Korean-Chinese and South Koreans had drifted apart during forty years of separation. The resulting differences led to conflicts over values and other misunderstandings between the two groups….

Some Chinese government officials also wanted to avoid the problems which contacts with South Koreans might create. This, especially, seems to have hindered cadres of Korean origin. Due to the strong South Korean connection with Yanbian, and the pan-nationalistic activities aimed at creating a united Great Korea, including Yanbian, Yanbian was classified as one of the four sensitive regions in China where the Central Government fears separatism. The fear is that pan-nationalistic South Koreans might infiltrate Yanbian in the guise of economic cooperation. Some officials, who wished to render their career secure by avoiding all trouble, chose to block cooperation with South Koreans and other foreigners….

In addition to political ideas, religious activities spread through transnational ties. Christianity was not only perceived by the Chinese leadership as a threat to the “Chineseness” of the Yanbian Korean culture, but Christian congregations were considered to be a disguise for political infiltrators who aimed to disintegrate the country through peaceful means. South Korean missionaries worked not only among Korean-Chinese but also among North Korean migrants and refugees. While in South Korea, many Korean-Chinese encountered Christianity. Until the 1980s, the role of religion had been limited among Korean-Chinese, while in South Korea, one-third of the population were Christians. One contact assumed that the Korean-Chinese migrants were initially attracted to Christianity when they got support from South Korean believers while working under adverse social and economic conditions: Christian organisations provided practical help, like free medical treatment, as well as social and political support. Christian organisations also won support by backing Korean-Chinese demands that South Korean authorities guarantee humane treatment.

Korean churches worked among Korean-Chinese actively not only in South Korea but also in China. They sent both money and personnel to local churches and ran welfare projects. Some churches had established congregations in Yanbian and other areas of China. Many returning migrants joined a local Christian congregation. By the year 1996, the Christian community in Yanbian had grown to include nearly 10 percent of the ethnic Korean population. In addition to return migrants, these congregations also appealed to locals who looked for support in the midst of deteriorating socio-economic conditions.

In order to counteract foreign political and religious infiltrators, three measures were taken in Yanbian in the late 1990s. Firstly, education emphasizing patriotism, socialism and religious policy was intensified. Secondly, leadership was strengthened. Thirdly, control of foreign religious activities was intensified.

via Frog in a Well

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Filed under China, economics, Japan, Korea, religion

by | 9 February 2007 · 5:52 pm

The Iron Rooster Reaches Lhasa

The AEI‘s online magazine American.com reports that one can now ride the iron rooster all the way from the Forbidden City to the Potala and back.

The extraordinary technological challenges to building a rail line from scratch in Tibet are consid­erably easier to overcome, especially for a powerful centralized regime like China’s, than the legal and political challenges to improving a key rail connec­tion (like Boston–Washington) in the world’s most advanced economy. Also, at this point in history, the Chinese clearly value public infrastructure more than Americans.

The new western railroad creates a bittersweet reality. It will transform Tibet from a thinly populated nation with a largely nomadic population and exotic, remote tourist destinations into a more common and accessible place. For many Tibetans, especially adaptable youth, opportunities will multiply; the loss of a unique history will seem less troublesome to them than it is to the isolated, older population.

The Lamaist State of Tibet is already a memory. Chinese soldiers invaded in 1950, and Tibet became part of the PRC a year later. After an unsuccess­ful rebellion, the Dalai Lama went into exile in India in 1959, and it is clear that the Chinese will not tolerate the re-emergence of a the­ocracy—especially since the government has endowed the west with so much strategic impor­tance. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping declared that China should get on with development. “I don’t care,” Deng said, “whether the cat is black or white, as long as it can catch mice.”

Whether Tibetans will fare better under the Chinese government than they did under the Lamaist theocracy remains to be seen. The outlook for traditionalists is bleak, but for most Tibetans, the chances for a better future are enhanced by the construction of the rail line to Lhasa.

via RealClearPolitics

The author of the article takes the opportunity to bash the U.S. government for not investing enough in physical infrastructure, while lauding the PRC government for doing so. I suspect few Chinese citizens who live far from the coastal cities would share that view. They would likely be thrilled to have the equivalent of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System instead.

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by | 28 January 2007 · 7:47 am

Sending Cash Home to Eastern Europe, Central Asia

Many newly liberated/orphaned economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia are now depending more and more on remittances from their citizens working abroad, like so many Pacific Island countries whose economies are based on MIRAB (PDF): MIgration, Remittances, Aid, and Bureacracy.

The largest amount of remittances, as a share of GDP, was sent to Moldova.

The study, using data from 2004, indicated that money sent there by migrants was equivalent to 27% of GDP, an estimated 705 million US dollars. Bosnia and Herzegovina (21%; $1.83bn), Albania (16%; $1.16bn) and Armenia (9%; $336m) were among the larger recipients.

Russia attracted migrants from other parts of the former Soviet Union, while poorer Central Asian workers were drawn to countries such as resource-rich Kazakhstan….

About 80% of Bulgarians and 62% of Romanians said they were not sending cash back to their home countries while working abroad….

While the report focused on the ECA nations, the Bank said that Tonga was the nation which had the largest level of remittance income as a proportion of GDP.

In pure monetary value, the latest World Bank figures show that India was the largest recipient of remittances, with about 22 billion US dollars being sent home in 2005. China and Mexico were also at the top end of the table.

In that year, total remittances globally topped 230 billion US dollars of which developing countries received 167 billion, more than twice the level of development aid from all sources.

via Colby Cosh

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by | 14 September 2006 · 9:12 pm

Origins of Sharecropping in Mississippi

THE DELTA had always been too wild for one man or one family to subdue, and from the first, settlers had brought slaves and organization with them. Immediately after the Civil War, Mississippi and other southern states tried to resolve labor and racial questions by passing a “Black Code” that effectively reestablished slavery. One Mississippi provision required blacks to sign annual labor contracts or be arrested for vagrancy; the local government would then sell their services to contractors. Congress reacted to such laws with anger and instituted “Radical Reconstruction,” setting up new state governments that threw out those laws and putting a buffer of federal power between southern whites and blacks.

[MS Senator Charles] Percy recognized both the economic problems and the need to accept a new order, and advocated a solution. Planters had land but no cash. Blacks had labor but no land; they also resisted working in gangs under a foreman, which smacked of slavery and overseers. So Percy, who understood both the capital shortage and the importance of making labor content in order to maximize efficiency, advocated sharecropping. One man even credited Percy with inventing the system, and contemporaneous reports in other southern states did attribute the system’s beginnings to Mississippi. Planters supplied land; blacks supplied labor and gained some independence. Profits were theoretically split fifty-fifty (the cropper got more if he had his own mules), making blacks and whites partners and by implication comparable if not equal. However abusive sharecropping later became, because of the system’s implied partnership of white and black, initially whites resisted it while blacks welcomed it.

Sharecropping may have helped alleviate the Delta’s desperate shortage of labor in another way. Planters and their labor agents were scouring the rest of the state and the South recruiting former slaves, promising—and delivering—better pay and treatment than elsewhere. The new system may have helped attract blacks, for in a steady stream they came. From one Mississippi county outside the Delta, a single Delta plantation recruited 500 workers. From Columbus, Mississippi, near the Alabama line, 100 black workers left for the Delta in a single week. From Uniontown, Alabama, 250 blacks boarded a single train, heading for the Delta. From Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia as well, thousands of blacks came.

SOURCE: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, by John M. Barry (Touchstone, 1998), pp. 102-103 (reviewed here)

My paternal grandfather was a (white) tenant farmer in southeastern Virginia. He sometimes managed the farms of landowning relatives, but never owned a farm himself. Not one of his children remained a farmer.

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by | 19 April 2006 · 8:34 pm

Model Japanese Entrepreneur in Cambodia

The Asahi Shimbun carried a story on 19 April about a model Japanese business entrepreneur in Cambodia.

SIEM REAP, Cambodia–Two years ago, a savvy Japanese tour guide saw her chance to fill a business niche here.

Sachiko Kojima opened a cookie factory. She was soon supplying foreign tourists from Japan and around the globe with souvenir confections from this northern Cambodia city, the gateway to the Angkor Wat Khmer ruins.

Her “Madam Sachiko” cookies, shaped like the ancient ruins, are now the must-buy souvenir for tourists visiting the city.

Kojima, 33, who grew up in Gunma Prefecture, runs her business with Japanese management finesse. But her company, Khmer Angkor Foods Co., procures all its ingredients from Cambodian suppliers. The factory includes a bakery, sales shop and head office….

In the shop and bakery, Kojima follows a Japanese business style. The shop’s interior is attractive and inviting. The factory is clean and sanitary. Her employees follow rules similar to workers in Japan: No sitting down and no eating or drinking while on duty in the shop.

Foreigners in Cambodia rarely start businesses outside of travel agencies and restaurants. Kojima had the choice of starting up as a non-governmental organization (NGO), which would have received tax breaks and other advantages.

However, she was determined to form a privately owned, for-profit company.

“I think the people here need to see examples of basic business ideas, such as how to make a profit and how to pay taxes,” she said.

via Colby Cosh

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by | 11 January 2006 · 5:33 pm

Orwell and Agee as Fieldworkers

David Denby’s review of the collected works of James Agee in the latest New Yorker contains an interesting comparison of Agee and Orwell as cross-cultural fieldworkers.

For Agee, … the point was not that these families suffered from atrocious social conditions. The point was that they existed. In an age concerned largely with the “masses,” Agee was impressed by the notion that other human beings idiosyncratically are what they are, in every ornery fibre. Flesh, bone, desire, consciousness–in almost every way, the farmers were different from him and therefore obdurate in their singleness and as capable of pleasure and misery as he. A young couple sitting on a porch and staring at Agee had in their eyes “so quiet and ultimate a quality of hatred, and contempt, and anger, toward every creature in existence beyond themselves, and toward the damages they sustained, as shone scarcely short of a state of beatitude.” [A little projection of self-hatred here, perhaps?–J.] Agee, born an Episcopalian, and deeply religious as a child, was no longer an orthodox believer. But he had a consciousness of the sacred in people and in ordinary objects that believers associate with God’s immanence. He loved, and took literally, Blake’s proclamation “Everything that lives is holy.”…

Agee’s lyrical gift set him off from other writers of liberal or radical conviction of the day. At almost exactly the same time that he and Walker Evans were in Alabama, George Orwell was exploring living conditions in coal-mining towns in the North of England, and it’s instructive to compare Orwell’s remarkable report, “The Road to Wigan Pier,” with “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Orwell boarded for a while in a little house that took in miners:

The place was beginning to depress me. It was not only the dirt, the smells and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances.

So often in Orwell there is a strong sense of the sordid–­the scandal of meanness, decay, filth. And he was appalled by sloth and inanition. When, with much greater sympathy, he describes the miners and their wives in Wigan and other towns he typically catches them not “creeping” but moving vigorously–working, washing, cooking, or searching a slag heap for usable coal. Orwell is a chronicler of man as actor, and the second half of his book is a call for action in the form of socialist reform. But Agee chronicles being. He evokes the farmers and their families not just in sleep but at rest, sitting on a porch, or staring shyly and saying nothing. And he was incapable of physical disgust. For him, there is only an endless variety of shapes, textures, and dispositions, none of them beyond redemption in words.

In “Famous Men,” Agee is not a political writer but a poetic and metaphysical writer, who wanted to honor reality, and also to abolish it. There is a trap built into his kind of intense receptivity. That a person or a thing is itself and nothing else, and is therefore worthy of notice and celebration, may be the beginning of morality, but it’s also the beginning of tragedy. As Agee sits on the porch or alone in a room in one of the houses, he tries to take in, all at once, everything that the family is, everything that exists in the house–­for instance, Mrs. Ricketts’s dress, which is shaped “like a straight-sided bell, with a little hole at the top for the head to stick through, the cloth slit from the neck to below the breasts and held together if I remember rightly with a small snarl of shoelace.” He stares at a pair of coarsely sewn and nailed work boots, or at a tattered doll, or at the worn-through oil cloth on an old table, and is amazed at how much life went into the making and use of that table, amazed by how much life is going on in similar households, unnoticed, unrecorded. The mood is one of Wordsworthian awe and submission, though Agee extended his sympathies to objects–­even mass-produced, industrial products–­as well as to nature. At the same time, however, he is stunned by how limited the families are. Being so vividly and absolutely themselves, they are unable to be so many other things, and some of the angriest, most eloquent pages of the book are devoted to the deformations wrought on the children by early work and poor schooling. They have been cheated out of the most elementary ways of teaching themselves–­and therefore cheated out of pleasure. When they grow up, and become similar to that disdainful couple Agee encountered on a porch, the fierceness of their pride will be created as much by ignorance as by anger. The rhapsodist of things as they are is necessarily caught in a position of infinite regret. That is why the book, for all its celebratory tone, never falls into bathos. No one could confuse the tenant farmers’ days with a complete mastering of life.

via Arts & Letters Daily

UPDATE: As much as I admire Orwell, I’m beginning to develop an interest in Agee (born in Knoxville, TN), whose works I am far less familiar with. Part of it may be a vague admiration for the chutzpah of Southern writers who manage to invade and colonize New York City on their own terms. Among those I’m most familiar with are Harper Lee, William Styron, Mark Twain, Tom Wolfe, and Richard Wright. (I must confess that I don’t much admire such purveyors of bald stereotypes–northern and southern, respectively–as Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell.) The beginning of a 1964 William Styron review in the New York Review of Books explains what they were up against.

‘There is a saying among the Negroes in Harlem,’ James Baldwin said recently, ‘to the effect that if you have a white Southerner for a friend you’ve got a friend for life. But if you’ve got a white Northerner for a friend, watch out. Because he just might be the kind of friend who decides to move out when you move in.’ This is a sentiment which may be beguiling to a Southerner, yet the fact does remain that a Southern ‘liberal’ and his Northern counterpart are two distinct species of cat. Certainly the Southerner of good will who lives in the North, as I do, is often confronted with some taxing circumstances. There was the phone call a number of years ago in the distant epoch before the present ‘Negro revolt,’ and the cautious interrogation from my dinner hostess of the evening: a Negro was going to be present–as a Southerner, did I mind? If I wished to stay away she would surely understand. Or much later, when Prince Edward County in Virginia closed its schools, the deafening and indignant lady, a television luminary, who demanded that ‘we’ drop bombs on ‘those crackers down there.’ (She got the state wrong, Virginians may be snobs but they are not crackers [you’re wrong, Bill; we’ve got all kinds!–J.]; nonetheless, she was proposing that ‘we’ bomb my own kith and kin.) Or quite recently, a review in The New Yorker of Calder Willing-ham’s [sic] Eternal Fire, a remarkably fine novel about the South which the reviewer, Whitney Balliett, praised extravagantly without knowing exactly why he was doing so, charging that the book was the definitve [sic] satire on Southern writing (through the book is funny it is anything but satire, being too close to the bone of reality), and polishing off Faulkner, Welty, Warren, et al. with the assertion that Southern fiction in general, in which the Negroes had served so faithfully as ‘a resident Greek chorus,’ had now terminated its usefulness. It is of course not important what this particular reviewer thinks, but the buried animus is characteristic and thus worth spelling out: white Southern writers, because they are white and Southern, cannot be expected to write about Negroes without condescension, or with understanding or fidelity or love. Unfortunately, this is a point of view which, by an extension of logic, tends to regard all white Southerners as bigots, and it is an attitude which one might find even more ugly than it is were it prompted by malice rather than ignorant self-righteousness, or a suffocating and provincial innocence. Nor is its corollary any less tiresome: to show that you really love Negroes, smoke pot, and dig the right kind of jazz.

Yes. Familiar types, all.

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by | 6 December 2005 · 9:49 pm

Immigration and Job Growth

A new study by the Harvard Business School suggests links between immigration and job growth, reports Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

A major piece of conventional wisdom about immigrants – that newcomers take jobs away from native Americans – has been questioned in a new study of urban job growth by a Harvard Business School professor and expert on inner-city economics.

The study, in fact, seems to show just the opposite: Cities with higher concentrations of immigrants are the places where the number of jobs is growing the fastest.

The research by Michael E. Porter, founder of the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, found that about half of the 80 largest inner cities in America had job growth between 1995 and 2003.

Inner cities that lost jobs and those that gained them tended to have similar percentages of minority residents, and their residents had about the same level of high school and college education.

But the two groups of cities differed sharply when it came to one demographic measure: immigration. Inner cities that gained jobs had populations that, on average, were 31 percent immigrant. Inner cities that lost jobs had populations that averaged just 12 percent immigrants.

“There is a direct correlation between immigrant populations and job growth in inner cities,” Porter writes. “Immigrants clearly and more readily identify the unique business conditions and opportunities that inner cities offer and are able to capitalize upon them. In addition, they are attractive to small and large businesses seeking willing and available labor.”

A crucial question left unanswered by Porter’s study is the extent to which immigrants cause job growth or are attracted by it. If the presence of immigrants in an economy leads to more business creation and job growth, then that is a very important finding. If immigrants are merely more likely to go to a place that already has a vibrant economy, then the connection between their presence and job growth is not as significant.

via RealClearPolitics

Well, let’s compare the records of Britain, Ireland, and Sweden with that of, say, France, as reported in the International Herald Tribune on 21 October 2005 (via the Dynamist).

It turns out the doomsayers were partly right: Nearly a year and a half after the expansion of the European Union, floods of East Europeans have washed into Britain.

Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and other Easterners are arriving at an average rate of 16,000 a month, a result of Britain’s decision to allow unlimited access to the citizens of the eight East European countries that joined the EU last year.

They work as bus drivers, farmhands and dentists, as waitresses, builders, and saleswomen; they are transforming parts of London into Slavic and Baltic enclaves where pickles and Polish beer are stacked in delicatessens and Polish can be heard on the streets almost as often as English.

But the doomsayers were also wrong: Multicultural Britain has absorbed these workers like a sponge. Unemployment is still rock-bottom at 4.7 percent, and economic growth continues apace.

Since May 2004, more than 230,000 East Europeans have registered to work in Britain, many more than the government expected, in what is shaping up to be one of the great migrations of recent decades.

Yet the government says it still has shortages of 600,000 workers in fields like nursing and construction.

“They are coming in and making a very good reputation as highly skilled, highly motivated workers,” said Christopher Thompson, a diplomat at the British Embassy in Warsaw. “The U.K. is pleased with the way it’s progressed over the first 16 months, and we’re confident it will be a beneficial relationship for both sides in the future.”

Tens of thousands of East Europeans have also moved to Ireland and Sweden, the only other West European countries that opened their labor markets to the new EU members….

Fearing a massive influx of East Europeans after enlargement, other West European countries threw up barriers that will be lowered only gradually over the next decade. A Pole seeking to work in France, for example, still needs to apply for a work permit. France issued 737 such permits to Poles in the 10 months after enlargement; that is the number of Poles who arrive in Britain every two days.

Allowing immigrants access to jobs and business opportunities seems to be key.

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by | 5 October 2005 · 7:40 pm

Impearls on Entrepreneurism and Its Enemies

Impearls is back to blogging more regularly in his trademark long and thoughtful essays with footnotes. His latest post bemoans the derision of all corporate entrepreneurism by too many on the political left.

It’s been obvious and has disturbed me for some time the way in which supposed “liberals” demonize private enterprise and those institutional vehicles which comprise it — companies and corporations — as the veritable Princes of Darkness.

The whole essay is worth reading, but I’ll cite just a couple of his supporting quotes.

Andrew Sullivan:

Thank God for the evil pharmaceutical companies. One day, when the history of this period is written, I have a feeling we will look back with astonishment as we recognize that advances in medical science, particularly pharmaceuticals, were arguably one of the most significant developments of this era. And yet the people who pioneered these breakthroughs were … demonized and attacked. Baffling and bizarre. I’m merely grateful the attacks haven’t stopped the research progress. They’ve merely slowed it.

Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America:

On the left bank of the Ohio work is connected with the idea of slavery, but on the right with well-being and progress; on the one side it is degrading, but on the other honorable; on the left bank no white laborers are to be found, for they would be afraid of being like the slaves; for work people must rely on the Negroes; but one will never see a man of leisure on the right bank: the white man’s intelligent activity is used for work of every sort. […]

The white man on the right bank, forced to live by his own endeavors, has made material well-being the main object of his existence; as he lives in a country offering inexhaustible resources to his industry and continual inducements to activity, his eagerness to possess things goes beyond the ordinary limits of human cupidity; tormented by a longing for wealth, he boldly follows every path to fortune that is open to him; he is equally prepared to turn into a sailor, pioneer, artisan, or cultivator, facing the labors or dangers of these various ways of life with even constancy; there is something wonderful in his resourcefulness and a sort of heroism in his greed for gain. [emphasis added –Imp.]

Virginia Postrel notes related ironies in a recent article in Forbes on Criminalizing Science.

U.S. scientists and their supporters tend to assume biomedical research is threatened by know-nothings on religious crusades. But as the Canadian law illustrates, the long-term threat to genetic research comes less from the religious right than from the secular left. Canada’s law forbids all sorts of genetic manipulations, many of them currently theoretical. It’s a crime, for instance, to alter inheritable genes.

Where do these truly evangelical beliefs of the secular left come from? Medieval agrarian repulsion at urban corruption (like the Moravian Brethren)? High-born disdain for the commoners who produced the surplus wealth that funded noble endeavors? A combination of both?

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by | 21 July 2005 · 8:42 pm

Dr. Paul Farmer’s Marxism

“For me to admire Cuban medicine is a given,” Farmer said. It was a poor country, and made that way at least in part by the United States’ long embargo, yet when the Soviet Union had dissolved and Cuba had lost both its patron and most of its foreign trade, the regime had listened to the warnings of its epidemiologists and had actually increased expenditures on public health….

One time he got in an argument about Cuba with some friends of his, fellow Harvard professors, who said that the Scandinavian countries offered the best examples of how to provide both excellent public health and political freedom. Farmer said they were talking about managing wealth. He was talking about managing poverty. Haiti was a bad example of how to do that. Cuba was a good one.

He had studied the world’s ideologies. The Marxist analysis, which liberation theology borrowed, seemed to him undeniably accurate. How could anyone say that no war among socioeconomic classes existed, or that suffering wasn’t a “social creation,” especially now, when humanity had developed a grand array of tools to alleviate suffering. And he was more interested in denouncing the faults of the capitalist world than in cataloging the failures of socialism. “We should all be criticizing the excesses of the powerful, if we can demonstrate so readily that these excesses hurt the poor and vulnerable.” But years ago he’d concluded that Marxism wouldn’t answer the questions posed by the suffering he encountered in Haiti. And he had quarrels with the Marxists he’d read: “What I don’t like about Marxist literature is what I don’t like about academic pursuits–and isn’t that what Marxism is, now? In general, the arrogance, the petty infighting, the dishonesty, the desire for self-promotion, the orthodoxy: I can’t stand the orthodoxy, and I’ll bet that’s one reason that science did not flourish in the former Soviet Union.”

SOURCE: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder (Random House, 2004), pp. 194-195

My biggest problem with Marxism–apart, of course, from “the arrogance, the petty infighting, the dishonesty, the desire for self-promotion, [and especially] the orthodoxy”–is that it takes wealth for granted (as Farmer does), and therefore assumes that poverty can only be eliminated by transferring existing wealth from rich people to poor people. The best way to destroy poverty is to enable poor people both to create new wealth and to accumulate it–and not just to rely on larger and larger transfers from those who have previously managed (legally) to create and accumulate it.

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by | 30 June 2005 · 8:04 pm

Fiberoptics-dependent Economies

CRMBuyer [CRM = Customer Relationship Management] reported Wednesday on a major blow to offshore service centers in South Asia.

Damage to the undersea telecommunications cable SEA-ME-WE3 (SMW3) Monday initially disrupted most of Pakistan’s international telephone and Internet connections, but the outage spread to India, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Djibouti as repairs were started yesterday.

Call centers in India using connections through the Reliance Group, India’s largest corporate conglomerate, to SMW3 to reach customers in the U.S. were experiencing service outages for the past day, they reported to InternationalStaff.net, a company that specializes in offshore process migration, call center program management, turnkey software development and help desk management….

SMW3 provides Pakistan with its sole high speed cable access. All call centers in Pakistan serving international customers have been without their usual level of telecommunications service since Monday.

The government of Pakistan has provided satellite backup systems to international call centers in that country at no charge to those centers, in order to make them more internationally competitive, and nine international call centers in Pakistan are reportedly operating on satellite backup connections now.

Oil-dependent economies need strategic reserves; connectivity-dependent economies need strategic backup networks.

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