Please read this

This article in the NY Times Magazine is one of the most important things I've read this year.

A page from my diary

What am I really afraid of? I am fake. No excuses now. Double 800s on the GRE, professors backing me, 3.7 at Stanford, African experiences. This is all shit.

My cigarette is beautiful. The crepuscular glow is slowly buried beneath flakes of ash. After it burns, you can read the pattern of leaves that made this cigarette unique. The ashes trace tobacco that whorled and wrapped and held itself in, secret. In the progressing burn it releases her energy, smoke, and toxins, and in the ash you see from what is dead what was alive.

Every Sunday I quit smoking. Thursdays I prefer to take a cigarette with my beer.

Today I finished a five-hour playlist called “travel.” A bit more than half are selections of world music I’ve compiled, from Latin America, Africa, and France. Maybe half of the remainder are English songs that explicitly invoke travel or places. The rest for whatever reason I associate with travel—at least I thought that was the criterion I was using, until I realized they were all the songs that actually I associate with my current or past loves. That was when I realized that travel and love are the same phenomenon. Or that travel is a substitute for love, and music is a substitute for both.

I am attracted to the novel and the new, to that which promises to be different and somewhat epic. The moth does not want to reach the fire, knowing it would burn, but trusts the glass bulb to hold it back. That way it can pursue the light with exuberance and innocent disregard, and this is the most heroic and transcendent experience a moth can have.

Dreamt-of love, not even love,
Just hope for love
Is more fantastic than fantasy,
More Edenic than Eden.
When God created us, all He could do
Was replicate the beauty that is
Our dreams of love.

I am not jaded, because I can not work. To be naïve is to believe in the beauty of what you would. To be mature is to accept that this is as good as it gets, to stop waiting for or holding out for some other beauty, something to transcend this dust. It is jaded to find meaning in this life, and it is idealistic to hold it as immaterial. I am idealistic; I can not work. I find it immaterial.

This is when I want to resign. This is when I want to say: You can do this without me. I can work all day and night in a fantasy, but when I turn to bed it will not matter. But this is all there is. I’m not going to get another chance, another world more meaningful. This place has no color, which is to say, it is whatever color we see.

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
She was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That pleasure dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Coleridge died unhappy. He could never regain that song. And may I search though weeks of music, may I sleep with how many women, may I move from continent to continent, may I descend a thousand bottles, I will never find that song, either.

Thus Byron cut a path through Europe of boy-lovers, and came home defeated.

This ugly world.

Could I revive within me…

May I do work tomorrow. May I find the quotidian matter.

It will come as love.

Warning: this is a little sappy

Travel is exactly love.

The first romance is the idyll you imagine. The magic of the place you have never been is far greater in your mind than it could possibly be in reality, and you know this. But it doesn’t really matter.

If you are lucky, you attain it. You visit that foreign place, and everything is fresh and exciting. You explore the city, but just as thrilling is to feel that city explore you. But, it must be said, you don’t get too deep yet. Still, every day is discoveries and everything is joyful.

Your relationship with that city moves faster than a relationship with a human. Somewhere between two weeks and a month that initial lustre fades, and you do not see the city through the same eyes. What you see is more real, more complex, with depth and, probably, a streak of darkness like a fudge swirl.

At this point comes the first disillusionment. You will lose the idyll. You have to make a choice: you can return home now and preserve that idyll in your memories and imagination, which is the only way to hold onto it. Or you can stay and lose this idyll forever, living instead with all the imperfections and dark and dangerous intersections. If you choose to stay, you can never go home again. You can return to the same place, but neither that place nor you will be the same. You could make a new home there, if you do return, but you will never find your old one.

Excess Labor in Uganda, Part I

Part I of II of a paper I'm writing as part of my application for grad school. I find this interesting, and I'm writing it in a more journalistic style than your average econ paper, so I hope you enjoy it:

Every morning I drive over what will become the Northern Bypass, a highway designed to link eastern with western Uganda while avoiding the epic traffic jams of Kampala. Every day, even Sunday, I see trucks working in the long, wide pit that will someday be paved for traffic, and I see a crew of men constructing a concrete overpass which one day my little side road will pass over. I always check the progress they have made, and in the three months since I moved here, I have seen no more than I would expect in three days from a construction crew in America. In this time they have built concrete barriers on the sides of about half the bridge, and flattened a couple-hundred yard stretch of the dirt road below.

This is most annoying to me. I am eagerly awaiting the completion of a route that will halve my morning commute, but every day I see half the work crew sitting or standing around, watching the other people who are working. Some take tea, others read a newspaper, others are just sitting and talking. It does not matter when I pass by, either—at all times, it seems, a large proportion of the workers are not working.
This is not a distinctive feature of the Northern Bypass construction project. I have noticed it also on the slow road improvement project by my office. Paul Thereoux describes the same thing in his book Dark Star Safari, and all of my friends here who I have discussed it with have offered corroborative anecdotes. Although I lack hard data, then, I hope I will be allowed for the sake of this paper to conjecture that the average Ugandan manual labourer is productive for a lower percent of the time for which he is paid than his American on European counterpart.

I have heard a variety of explanations for this. One is that Ugandan culture is not that hardworking—or, phrased more sympathetically, that Ugandans place a higher value on leisure and relaxation. They are not as stressed out, and refuse to join the rat race. To some this appears a virtue, and to others it is a primary reason why Uganda has failed to make progress combating poverty since 2000.

This cultural explanation, however, does not reconcile with either my economic training or my experience. The economist believes that people respond to incentives. Since in Uganda there is no shortage of unskilled labour, employers should be able to replace relatively unproductive workers at a low cost. Soon the employees would recognize that they must work hard in order to keep their jobs, and since jobs are scarce, productivity would quickly be restored. Moreover, although Ugandans do highly value leisure time, I know a lot of hardworking Ugandans and I do not know any Ugandan who is incapable or unwilling to work extremely hard if need be to put food on the table. The cultural explanation simply does not seem likely.

A competing explanation is that a lack of machinery in Uganda means that manual work here is much less capital-intensive, and thus much more labour-intensive. Since ditches are dug with pick-axes, not with a backhoe, it would be inhumane to expect workers not to take more frequent and longer breaks. While there is no doubt some truth to this, though, it does not explain why I observe workers taking breaks from masonry work or pouring concrete barriers, activities involving approximately the same amount of physical exertion both here in Uganda and in developed countries.

Neither the cultural explanations nor more sympathetic claims that they work extra hard between breaks very compelling. Instead, the numerous unproductive workers is directly related to labour’s most salient characteristic here: incredibly low wages.

...

Isn't that a great cliffhanger? What, pray tell, is the causal link between low wages and unproductive labor? Are workers intuitively aware of the worth of their labor, and refuse to be exploited? Do employers find it easier to pay low wages to many workers than to enforce discipline with a few?

Here's a teaser: The mechanism at work here has profound implications for the wisdom of instituting a minimum wage in Uganda.

PS - Part II will be much more hardcore econy.

Apologies

Sorry that I’ve been absent from this page for awhile. Work has gotten busy, and I’m trying to apply for grad school on top of that. I may not be able to post much until the new year. I’ll try to get something up soon, though.

In the mean time, this is a very interesting article that is really optimistic about Tanzania, and makes for some good reading. It just seems to be a little too simple, though...

A Queer Post

Invoking all the outrage of the best linguistic campaigns, I announce my intention to reclaim the word "queer." I don't mean to reclaim it for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, pansexuals, transsexuals, transgenders, intersexes, asexuals, hermaphrodites, or perverts. I mean to reclaim "queer" for those of us who like discussing and, especially, who like writing about queer things. As in, "The Northern Lights have seen queer sights/But the queerest they ever did see/Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge/I cremated Sam McGee." Because a dozen queer things happen to me each day.

The campaign begins now.

Yesterday it was raining, so I took shelter under a concrete awning in front of a shoe store and a bank in downtown Kampala. While I stood there, flâneur-esque, somebody walked by wearing a black 10-gallon garbage bag. He was short, so upside-down it covered his body from head to waist. With his arms straight down, only his hands protruded. I only saw him from the back, so I can't say what sort of arrangement he had in front for which to see his way. It was a queer thing to see.

Some Thoughts on Sweatshops and Child Labor

There stands a young woman, gaunt and ill, sallow, filthy, with hair dirty and dry, just rags for clothes, you can count her bones. She is weary, balanced uneasily on one remaining leg, and that leg is repulsive: oozing, infected, odoriferous, and weak. Although her leg offends you, do not attack it. There are other ways to help that woman.

Election Thoughts

Yesterday was a great day for American democracy. Not because I’m naïve enough to think that the Democrats are fundamentally better people than Republicans, but because political competition and conflict form the stick to keep government in line (re-election being the carrot). Both have been notoriously lacking for the past six years.

Listening to Bush’s press conference yesterday morning, I heard some interesting things. For one, Bush wasn’t just making empty promises of bi-partisanship that were understood to be valid only so long as the opposition agreed to do his biding. He was actually offering congratulations to Democrats—the first tentative steps towards rebuilding bridges burnt long ago. Not to say that he won’t renege, but it was good to see.

Second, Bush uttered a phrase which, although I may be wrong, I believe has been completely alien to all of the President’s prior rhetoric: “the lack of progress in Iraq.” Was this not the man who until quite recently was insisting that we were winning Iraq? President Bush’s denial of the reality so apparent to the rest of us, in Iraq as well as elsewhere, is what has disturbed me most about his tenure. So this, too, is a promising development.

To back this up, he has removed the most (or perhaps second-most, after Cheney) obstinate man in Washington, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld’s leadership has been marked by a complete inability to acknowledge failures, an apparent unwillingness to learn from mistakes, and an ideological disrespect for dissenters.

What we may now be seeing is the re-birth of a new Bush administration, one more responsive to the public and more willing to compromise (if only because it has no choice). The Republican majority that in 2004 seemed impermeable (I heard conservative friends speak, smiling wistfully, of the “enduring Republican majority”) is now in shambles; the President and his crew botched policy so badly over the last two years that on Tuesday local Republicans across the country paid the ultimate political price. National issues dominated this election, as every pundit in the country has pointed out, and Bush lost this one for his team.

What is left for Bush and Rove in their remaining two years is to try to make amends, to rebuild the party to a place where it can compete for the Presidency in 2008 against a Democratic strategy of demanding change. In this election it did not matter much what form that change took—the Democrats did not put forward a cohesive vision for America prior to this election, they simply had to emphasize that they were not Republicans. President Bush’s job is to make sure that the same strategy does not work two years from now. He’ll do that only by beginning change now, and by forcing Democrats to take some responsibility for the direction this country is taking.

Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats must recognize that the strategy of being not Republican (or, as Jon Stewart put it, of slowly backing out of the room while your brother is yelled at for burning down the garage) probably won’t suffice in 2008, and need to come up with something a bit stronger to run on. Pelosi is just the firebrand that the Democrats need to push them into taking some risks. If the Democrats want to become anything other than the impotent party they have been for six years, they’ll have to start some actual leading, and the changes they make will need to make a good impression. If they can point to positive results in two years, and if they can put forward a solid candidate with charisma and a base broader than Massachusetts, they can take back the White House. If they fail to do either, they won’t.