Pie Fight

Expanding trade, the median wage, and wage insurance

Via Drum, a theory that those without uni educations always get screwed by expanding trade. The day before, Kevin had argued that looking at increased GDP as a measure of whether a country's economy is improving is woefully misleading. What we should really be looking for he says, is increased median income. Amen to that, brovvah.

Today, he argues in favour of wage insurance, and cites a study showing that the children of laid off factory workers tend to suffer themselves, well into adulthood.

Bit here, bit there...

John Holbo on a review of Jeffrey Sachs' poverty book.

Posts to read and think

Here, John of Belle fame writes on competing proposals for eliminating world poverty. Must read this over the weekend. Also, a book recommendation that I probably can't pass up:

On this and more, see James Scott's "Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed," in my opinion the most important book written on the left in the last twenty years.

From his better half, a link to a vintage paperback site. The lesbian pulp fiction covers are not to be missed. "Satan was a Lesbian" indeed.

And back on to the boring stuff, here's an older CT post on Wolfesohn, the World Bank, and rights-based lending.

Blaming the brownies fro job loss

At Yglesias, some festive season talk of free trade, job protection, and how to deal with new economic realities. And some poignant thoughts on What We Want From Life.

Daddy cash dollar

Well-reasoned post by Yglesias on why the US should aspire to be one of the more generous nations in terms of aid, as opposed to fairly middling, as it currently is. We see ourselves as world leaders and world shapers, which is why we spend so much on defense. Seeing ourselves thus, should we not be more proactive with aid in an effort to shape the world?

Of course, it's inevitable, at least under a conservative administration, that we'd try to shape it in our own mold, eg by discouraging condom use. So there are some serious disadvantages to us ponying up more. But I'd guess that the advantages to the developing world would outweight them.

Also, Dan Drezner has a long post on Americ's generosity/stinginess. As he sees it, we're 9th out of 21 OECD countries. Comments are a bother, though: a bit too much knee-jerk Anti-Europeanism from an American with a big chip on his shoulder.

Yes we have no

banana producers who can make a viable income. This is largely being driven, I think, by supermarkets' demand to have super cheap bananas as loss leaders in their stores.

Fair trade special

From The Guardian. Plenty to read, and always growing.

Free trade is "a rabbit and tiger in the same cage"

An old CAFOD article gives us a great quote, then makes the case for the "development box", whic h it defines as "a package of exemptions from WTO rules, designed to allow developing countries to protect the poorest farmers."

First, the quote:

When asked his opinion of free trade, a Sri Lankan activist replied that it is like "putting the rabbit and the tiger in the same cage".

Then the box:

It is based on three principles. First, it will only apply to developing countries. Once northern governments get in on the act, lawyers will start twisting the rules to benefit big business.

The EU's common agricultural policy is a prime example - sold as a way of protecting small farmers, the lion's share of spending ends up in the pockets of large corporations. In any case, northern governments have more options for helping their small farmers, through regional development funds and environmental improvement grants.

Second, the development box is targeted at small farmers in developing countries, rather than the south's own agribusiness lobby. Governments could raise tariffs to protect small farmers from being swamped by imports, and would be exempt from commitments to reduce support to small farmers (such as funding transport to get their crops to market). This helps allay suspicions that the proposal is merely special pleading by large agro-exporters in developing countries.

Third, governments will be allowed to identify a list of food security crops, which would be exempted from commitments to cutting import tariffs. These crops are grown by small farmers, and are vital to the way a country feeds itself.

CAFOD papers on trade

This page contains several CAFOD analyses of trade. Should be plenty to learn.

Latino largesse

Commenting on a CT-linked article about Pedro Martinez's remarkable generosity to the residents of his Domican hometown of  Manoguayabo, a Latino notes that while his largesse is fabulous, it's not really all that odd for Latinos, who grow up with a strong cultural sense of the need to help those less fortunate than themselves "back home". This commitment to others less fortunate than oneself is very moving. 

Along similar lines, I wonder if I shouldn't go into the international development end of whatever I end up deciding to pursue as a career, because of the relative impact I am likely to have if I manage to do a bit of good. That is (assuming I go into food policy as a career) if I start out focusing on school lunches and manage to do some good in that realm, I will have benefitted kids who were getting poor food - but even before I benefitted them, they will have been among the richest and luckiest kids in the  world, even if their food supply was, while seemingly endless, relatively crap.

However, if I go into the international development side of food policy and have some success, the people who benefit will be those who really need it. Not those whose lives are, on the whole, fabulous in world terms, despite their crisps-filled diet.

It's a matter of proportions and perspective, I suppose. And certainly something for future thought.

Now back to the Latino largesse

Latin American immigrants are often in a special position to do much good with the opportunities they find in America, and more often than not, they do much good. For instance, the total amount of money flowing from the US to Guatemala—in the form of financial help from immigrants to their loved ones at home—is comparative to the revenue generated by the top industries in Guatemala.

Martinez’s case is a grand manifestation of a very widespread phenomenon. I don’t mean to diminish Martinez’s really remarkable generosity, but I do think that his generosity and the proportionally comparable generosity of other less wealthy Latin American immigrants living in the US is in part the result of social circumstances that have no parallels in the US. African American sports stars coming from impoverished neighborhoods have often contributed most generously to developmental projects, but it is very hard to find someone who has built 40 houses, a hospital, a school, etc.

A buck only goes so far in the US, but it goes a long way back in Latin America. And the knowledge of this commits Latin American immigrants to generous financial aid to their relatives back home. It always strikes me as interesting that American public discourse is plagued with references to the “American dream” when discussing the motivations of Latin American immigrants. The way I understand the concept, the American dream is one of wealth—a dream that is often seen in other cultures as comparatively individualistic. I think that the Latin American immigrant dream differs in important ways. The extent to which immigrants from Latin America in the US are committed to giving aid is quite remarkable, if one judges by the aid that even the poorest of immigrants send back home. I don’t refer to figures here, and I may be proved to have an inflated perception of the relative financial generosity of Latin American immigrants, but I am pretty sure that the way we articulate our dream is strikingly different from the way the ‘American dream’ is articulated in public discourse.

A few years ago, when I was getting ready to go to graduate school in Mathematics here in the US, my undergraduate advisor confessed to me something that only now do I understand completely: he said that when he finished his PhD, he had a choice between being a mediocre nobody in the developed world, and being an inspiring, consequential figure back home—and thus he abandoned his dreams of research, and returned home to do what he could for his country. At first I thought this was a confession of cult of status, a confession of narcissism. There may have been some of that, of course. He chose to go back partly because of status, but now I see he also did so because anything you do in Guatemala has an impact, whereas the impact that your life can have upon your surroundings in the first world is relatively negligible.

There are many Latin American immigrants who stay in the US not simply because that gives them the opportunity to become wealthier. They come here to do what Pedro Martinez has done, only in a smaller scale. They can’t necessarily go back to their countries of origin and become important figures in the national bank—but they can help their families out with the extra dollars they make here.

I guess the experience of having lived in circumstances of profound social injustice marks many of us in a very strong way. Some just happen to be in a place from which it is easier to help others, and that—along perhaps with something of a communitarian suspicion of the individualism of the American dream—commits them to a dream in which social impact weighs more heavily.