It has been pointed out to me that my last blog post, 'What is Urban Resilience?', spent a great deal of time on the phenomenon of resilience, and little time on what is peculiar to resilience in the urban context, beyond a brief discussion toward the end on taxation of urban industries. This criticism is entirely 'fair and balanced.'
However bad a communicator I may have been, though, I believe that at the least my 'Problem 1' is indeed an issue that has particular pertinence in the urban arena. This is because urban areas exist in the first place at least partly because of the concentration of intermediate goods and services. This concentration is one of the three families of agglomeration economies described by Alfred Marshall, and the only one that the New Economic Geography seeks to model. (The other two are 'thick' labor markets and knowledge spillovers.) A large number of intermediate industries by definition imply that any exogenous demand will have greater local knock-on effects -- a higher value of a in the Keynesian model. Moreover, it is only with high values of a that the break points and sustain points even (1) emerge as discontinuities (i.e., exhibit radical jumps up or down in output), or (2) separate from each other. Rural economies -- at least in the model -- are much more likely to exhibit outputs that linearly reflect the exogenous demand; whether that demand is recovering from a low point or coming down from a high point makes no difference.
Regarding 'Problem 2' from the past post, there too I would argue that the discussion was more germane to urban economies than rural ones. The third and least easily modeled Marshallian agglomeration economy -- that of knowledge spillovers -- goes to work in areas of dense social interactions. It might be argued that it is just this sort of networked flow of information, ideas, and experience that allows urban societies to anticipate future market developments and technological innovations, and make adjustments for them. In this view then, it is no accident that urban areas tend to be politically 'progressive' while rural ones tend to be 'conservative.' Urban economies rely more heavily on public goods (e.g., public spaces in which to share knowledge, IT and transportation infrastructure to convey it, public schools and universities to generate and disseminate it, etc.), which require the ongoing commitments of economic and political institutions with long time horizons -- i.e., forward-looking institutions.
So maybe we have an irony: urban economies may be best equipped to anticipate future crises and handle ongoing ones upto an undefined break point. But thereafter, rural economies tend to be less affected, and show greater short-term resilience as the exogenous factors that precipitated crisis creep back above the level that originally triggered collapse in urban areas. At this point, when urban agglomeration economies essentially cease to function and dispersal, not concentration, is the order of the day, rural areas may find themselves relied upon to a far greater extent relative to good times. Rural-urban linkages may become critical to urban industry survival.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Saturday, November 14, 2009
What is Urban Resilience?
It has become standard practice on this barely-managed blog for me to begin each post with an apology/ apologia for not having contributed lately, and I suppose this is no exception. I have been up to my neck in dissertation stuff, workshops, conferences, faculty meetings, etc. I would, however, like to make a habit of contributing small, more manageable snippets of things that I am thinking about from time to time.
To start it off, I'd like to talk about the concept of resilience in conflict studies. This topic has particular significance for me, as a partner in the nascent "Urban Resilience and Chronic Violence" group. During our initial discussions, the definition of resilience (or, in that case, urban resilience) took on predictably critical importance, but it was elusive. There are several questions that were brought up, among which four stand out:
If we say that output, Y, is a function of some exogenous demand, X, multiplied by the inverse of 1-a, where a is the proportion of the knock-on demand resulting from the initial impetus that is to be met internal to the system in question (here, taken to be the city), then we can write:
1. Y = [1/(1-a)] X
The way we have set this up, we can now introduce some dynamics into the model, following the lead of Fujita, Krugman and Venables, positing that a itself, up to a point, will be a function of how much social capital was created in the last round, up to some maximum (say, the maximum number of interactions that can be formed in a group given the number of individuals):
2. a(t) = min [aY(t-1), a(bar)]
We can then rewrite (1) such that
3. Y = X/(1-aY')
with equilibria at
4. Y = (1 +/- root[1 - 4aX]) / 2a
for a < a(bar), and
Y = X/(1-a)
for a >= a(bar).
Again, following Fujita, Krugman and Venables, we then have a function that looks like the following, given a high enough a.
Figure 2. Output as a function of exogenous economic demand in the Pred cumulative causation model (from Fujita, Krugman and Vanables).
Note that there is an overlap of these two functions such that radically different outcomes are associated with the same exogenous demand depending on whether the system is suffering decline from a high performance level (i.e., moving from right to left) or recovering from a crisis that dropped output precipitously from a(bar)/a down to the lower level (i.e., moving from left to right).
Of course, the same sort of argument could be applied to social capital, with X possibly representing some underlying economic driver, with higher levels of economic demand generally yielding more social interactions through production networks or something. Some accommodation would have to be made for the distinction between social capital deepening versus widening (just as in the Solow-Swann model). That is, if we assume that all social interactions are precipitated by some sort of exogenous economic demand, the model still doesn't specify as to whether the resulting interactions are "new" or simply repeated activations of "old" relationships. At this point, the model would have to rely greatly on sociological applications of network theory, in which the morphology of the networked society - for instance, polarized, hierarchical, multi-polar, etc. - play a role in the probability of any one interaction creating "new" social capital.
Leaving all that aside, though, we can still postulate that when the driver of social relationships (be it economic demand or something else) drops from a high level, the "break point" for the society will be found at a lower level than the "sustain point" (or "recovery point"). In the model, above the "sustain point" and below the "break point," both declining and a recovering economies have the same social capital at comparable levels of economic activity. Between the two, however, the declining economy will have higher levels of social capital - and once it dips below the "sustain point," the economy will have to grow quite a lot more to achieve comparable levels of social capital as it had before. In this scenario, it's easier to salvage social capital than it is to build it - and therefore there is a strong argument for preventative measures to forestall economic and social decline in the run-up to violent conflict, rather than applying the proverbial pound of cure.
Problem 2
Arguably, both of the forms of resilience rely upon redundancy. That is, systems that have redundant pathways, organs, functionality, etc., tend to be more resilient to shocks. For instance, the human body has redundant kidneys, eyes, ears, hands, etc. And while having two of each thing has distinct advantages in terms of utility in the here and now (e.g., depth perception, aural directionality, etc.), it also conveys advantages in the event of disaster (if one hand is bitten off by a tiger, the other one is still around, etc.). Ecological systems operate similarly, such that the greater redundancy there is in terms of ecological niches, the less systemically damaging it will be for any particular species to decline in number.
Fine. Point taken. But humans societies are different in one critical way from other ecological systems: its constituents convey complex information on possible ways to structure organizations to one another by way of language, rather than simply via DNA by way of natural selection. That is, humans are strategic animals who have a (possibly limited) capacity to plan for the future. Resilience in human societies - and, by extension, in urban areas - then may not simply be judged as the ability to absorb or respond post facto to a crisis, but also to recognize the signs of a future crisis and envision (and I stress that this is a creative, as much as analytical, process) series of contingency plans.
This creative impulse is often ignored by academics, including myself. Just last week at my doctoral dissertation colloquium, I made an analogy between production firms and the rebel groups that prey on their production networks, likening their relationship to that between a population and a disease, in which over the course of a series of attacks (or outbreaks), the "immune system" of the firms is strengthened by virtue of supply chain adaptations, while the "virulence" of the rebels also decreases so as not to kill the golden egg-laying goose. Roger Petersen, one of my committee members, made the point that firms and their managers have the capacity to strategize; they don't simply happen to have the type of production networks that lessen the effects of predation, but consciously choose to develop them.
And so?
Would it be too trite to sum up with some song and dance about how resilience is composed of preventative, peri-crisis, and post-crisis forms of redundancy? Probably. In the end, resiliency seems like a word that conflates a number of different ideas that are generally considered to be "good." And yet, as Diane Davis at MIT has repeatedly reminded me, resiliency may generate new challenges. She cites the growth of private security forces in many developing countries: they help to fill a vacuum left by the state in property rights enforcement, but they also ultimately undermine the Weberian legitimacy of the state as the monopoly wielder of violence.
I would add that the same might be said of urban industries and economic governance. These firms' production networks become so splintered and reticulated (and de facto localized) that it becomes difficult for a weak state to tax their purchases. If all inputs originally went through a single international port that was easily controlled by revenue officials, the task becomes much more difficult in the event of rebel takeover of the port, when inputs are now being redirected across porous borders or bought from domestic producers and traders.
Economic resiliency in this case is at odds not with the state's monopoly on the use of violence, per se, but with an intimately related would-be (should-be?) monopoly on taxation. Charles Tilly saw these two monopolies as intertwined in state-formation: the monopoly on violence meant that no other actor could force citizens to pay for public goods. State formation then grew out of a sort of protection racket in which citizens' voice and power grew in importance, demanding more and more concessions of public goods provisions on the part of the state.
All of this raises the question of postwar recovery for me. Weak states wishing to regain their twin monopolies will actually have an incentive to ally themselves with international capital and commodities markets, because imported inputs are easily taxed. But the sheltered economies that developed in wartime came to rely on much more redundant and resilient networks of inputs - and ones that thus linked urban areas with rural areas in more mutually beneficial ways, despite the drastic economic decline that war obviously precipitates.
Resilience in this environment pits two very different visions of nation against one another: the nation conceived as economically cohering process, and that conceived as state-legitimating process. It might be posited that not until transportation costs fell in an era of vast production capacity disparities did the two ever come into direct conflict... Wow, that grew into something more than small and manageable.
To start it off, I'd like to talk about the concept of resilience in conflict studies. This topic has particular significance for me, as a partner in the nascent "Urban Resilience and Chronic Violence" group. During our initial discussions, the definition of resilience (or, in that case, urban resilience) took on predictably critical importance, but it was elusive. There are several questions that were brought up, among which four stand out:
- Does resilience refer to the ability of a system to "absorb" shocks without fundamentally transforming or adapting, or does it refer specifically to the ability to adapt?
- In a potentially related question, does resilience refer to how much change or turbulence a system can absorb, or how fast it can rebound after the shock?
- Do all urban "sub-systems" necessarily exhibit resilience in mutually beneficial ways, are do certain forms of resilience compromise others'?
- How does urban resilience in conflict affect the capacity and legitimacy of the state?
Conflict studies has borrowed heavily from environmental science in attempting to define resilience in human societies. It turns out that the second question has already led to two different definitions of ecological resilience among environmental studies folks, as shown in Figure 1:
Figure 1: Two forms of resilience. From Adger, Neil W. (2000). Social and Ecological Resilience: Are They Related? [Thanks to Ami Carpenter of the Kroc School of Peace Studies for introducing me to this.]
In the first conception, there is a threshold of "wellbeing" or "output" or something (on the Y-axis) below which any system will be unable to recover from a shock. The greater the resilience of any given community, then, the closer to zero that threshold will be, such that a shock of any magnitude will still be followed by positive growth to reestablish a status quo.
Problem 1
My first concern with this conception is that it confounds the "break" and "sustain" points. That is, it implies that the threshold would operate in the same way whether you were approaching it from above or (though this isn't specifically shown in the figure) from below. The former would be the case if the system was being adversely impacted, while the latter would be the case in a post-crisis recovery mode, when the system was looking to attain a former high performance level (as in the right-hand side of figure 1, after the initial shock).
In fact, the two aren't necessarily the same. To see this, we might take a well known economic model of economic growth - the Keynesian model used by Pred to demonstrate "cumulative causation" in capital accumulation. Krugman, Fujita and Venables take the model, give it a basic dynamism, and then solve for its equilibria.
Figure 1: Two forms of resilience. From Adger, Neil W. (2000). Social and Ecological Resilience: Are They Related? [Thanks to Ami Carpenter of the Kroc School of Peace Studies for introducing me to this.]
In the first conception, there is a threshold of "wellbeing" or "output" or something (on the Y-axis) below which any system will be unable to recover from a shock. The greater the resilience of any given community, then, the closer to zero that threshold will be, such that a shock of any magnitude will still be followed by positive growth to reestablish a status quo.Problem 1
My first concern with this conception is that it confounds the "break" and "sustain" points. That is, it implies that the threshold would operate in the same way whether you were approaching it from above or (though this isn't specifically shown in the figure) from below. The former would be the case if the system was being adversely impacted, while the latter would be the case in a post-crisis recovery mode, when the system was looking to attain a former high performance level (as in the right-hand side of figure 1, after the initial shock).
In fact, the two aren't necessarily the same. To see this, we might take a well known economic model of economic growth - the Keynesian model used by Pred to demonstrate "cumulative causation" in capital accumulation. Krugman, Fujita and Venables take the model, give it a basic dynamism, and then solve for its equilibria.
If we say that output, Y, is a function of some exogenous demand, X, multiplied by the inverse of 1-a, where a is the proportion of the knock-on demand resulting from the initial impetus that is to be met internal to the system in question (here, taken to be the city), then we can write:
1. Y = [1/(1-a)] X
The way we have set this up, we can now introduce some dynamics into the model, following the lead of Fujita, Krugman and Venables, positing that a itself, up to a point, will be a function of how much social capital was created in the last round, up to some maximum (say, the maximum number of interactions that can be formed in a group given the number of individuals):
2. a(t) = min [aY(t-1), a(bar)]
We can then rewrite (1) such that
3. Y = X/(1-aY')
with equilibria at
4. Y = (1 +/- root[1 - 4aX]) / 2a
for a < a(bar), and
Y = X/(1-a)
for a >= a(bar).
Again, following Fujita, Krugman and Venables, we then have a function that looks like the following, given a high enough a.
Figure 2. Output as a function of exogenous economic demand in the Pred cumulative causation model (from Fujita, Krugman and Vanables).
Note that there is an overlap of these two functions such that radically different outcomes are associated with the same exogenous demand depending on whether the system is suffering decline from a high performance level (i.e., moving from right to left) or recovering from a crisis that dropped output precipitously from a(bar)/a down to the lower level (i.e., moving from left to right).
Of course, the same sort of argument could be applied to social capital, with X possibly representing some underlying economic driver, with higher levels of economic demand generally yielding more social interactions through production networks or something. Some accommodation would have to be made for the distinction between social capital deepening versus widening (just as in the Solow-Swann model). That is, if we assume that all social interactions are precipitated by some sort of exogenous economic demand, the model still doesn't specify as to whether the resulting interactions are "new" or simply repeated activations of "old" relationships. At this point, the model would have to rely greatly on sociological applications of network theory, in which the morphology of the networked society - for instance, polarized, hierarchical, multi-polar, etc. - play a role in the probability of any one interaction creating "new" social capital.
Leaving all that aside, though, we can still postulate that when the driver of social relationships (be it economic demand or something else) drops from a high level, the "break point" for the society will be found at a lower level than the "sustain point" (or "recovery point"). In the model, above the "sustain point" and below the "break point," both declining and a recovering economies have the same social capital at comparable levels of economic activity. Between the two, however, the declining economy will have higher levels of social capital - and once it dips below the "sustain point," the economy will have to grow quite a lot more to achieve comparable levels of social capital as it had before. In this scenario, it's easier to salvage social capital than it is to build it - and therefore there is a strong argument for preventative measures to forestall economic and social decline in the run-up to violent conflict, rather than applying the proverbial pound of cure.
Problem 2
Arguably, both of the forms of resilience rely upon redundancy. That is, systems that have redundant pathways, organs, functionality, etc., tend to be more resilient to shocks. For instance, the human body has redundant kidneys, eyes, ears, hands, etc. And while having two of each thing has distinct advantages in terms of utility in the here and now (e.g., depth perception, aural directionality, etc.), it also conveys advantages in the event of disaster (if one hand is bitten off by a tiger, the other one is still around, etc.). Ecological systems operate similarly, such that the greater redundancy there is in terms of ecological niches, the less systemically damaging it will be for any particular species to decline in number.
Fine. Point taken. But humans societies are different in one critical way from other ecological systems: its constituents convey complex information on possible ways to structure organizations to one another by way of language, rather than simply via DNA by way of natural selection. That is, humans are strategic animals who have a (possibly limited) capacity to plan for the future. Resilience in human societies - and, by extension, in urban areas - then may not simply be judged as the ability to absorb or respond post facto to a crisis, but also to recognize the signs of a future crisis and envision (and I stress that this is a creative, as much as analytical, process) series of contingency plans.
This creative impulse is often ignored by academics, including myself. Just last week at my doctoral dissertation colloquium, I made an analogy between production firms and the rebel groups that prey on their production networks, likening their relationship to that between a population and a disease, in which over the course of a series of attacks (or outbreaks), the "immune system" of the firms is strengthened by virtue of supply chain adaptations, while the "virulence" of the rebels also decreases so as not to kill the golden egg-laying goose. Roger Petersen, one of my committee members, made the point that firms and their managers have the capacity to strategize; they don't simply happen to have the type of production networks that lessen the effects of predation, but consciously choose to develop them.
And so?
Would it be too trite to sum up with some song and dance about how resilience is composed of preventative, peri-crisis, and post-crisis forms of redundancy? Probably. In the end, resiliency seems like a word that conflates a number of different ideas that are generally considered to be "good." And yet, as Diane Davis at MIT has repeatedly reminded me, resiliency may generate new challenges. She cites the growth of private security forces in many developing countries: they help to fill a vacuum left by the state in property rights enforcement, but they also ultimately undermine the Weberian legitimacy of the state as the monopoly wielder of violence.
I would add that the same might be said of urban industries and economic governance. These firms' production networks become so splintered and reticulated (and de facto localized) that it becomes difficult for a weak state to tax their purchases. If all inputs originally went through a single international port that was easily controlled by revenue officials, the task becomes much more difficult in the event of rebel takeover of the port, when inputs are now being redirected across porous borders or bought from domestic producers and traders.
Economic resiliency in this case is at odds not with the state's monopoly on the use of violence, per se, but with an intimately related would-be (should-be?) monopoly on taxation. Charles Tilly saw these two monopolies as intertwined in state-formation: the monopoly on violence meant that no other actor could force citizens to pay for public goods. State formation then grew out of a sort of protection racket in which citizens' voice and power grew in importance, demanding more and more concessions of public goods provisions on the part of the state.
All of this raises the question of postwar recovery for me. Weak states wishing to regain their twin monopolies will actually have an incentive to ally themselves with international capital and commodities markets, because imported inputs are easily taxed. But the sheltered economies that developed in wartime came to rely on much more redundant and resilient networks of inputs - and ones that thus linked urban areas with rural areas in more mutually beneficial ways, despite the drastic economic decline that war obviously precipitates.
Resilience in this environment pits two very different visions of nation against one another: the nation conceived as economically cohering process, and that conceived as state-legitimating process. It might be posited that not until transportation costs fell in an era of vast production capacity disparities did the two ever come into direct conflict... Wow, that grew into something more than small and manageable.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
With Love, from San Diego
My apologies for the radio silence - this summer has been full of firsts for me and I've been treading water.
First in importance: I am the proud father of a mentally prodigious, aesthetically stunning, physically robust, and perfectly proportioned baby boy named Kellan Tyr. Yes, Tyr is the Norse god of war - hence Tuesday and, the Romanized equivalent in French, mardi. For those who think such a choice morbid (or just unimaginative) for a conflict economist's son, I think that there are alternative interpretations of a god of war than simply a harbinger of death. For one, death and destruction are profoundly integral parts to the circle of life - think of Kali the Destroyer, for instance, in Hindu mythology. For another, Tyr was the quintessential warrior, and being a warrior can be a spiritual path. In the works of Carlos Castaneda, don Juan talks of the Impeccable Warrior - a being who struggles perennially against preconception, habit, accepted wisdom... indeed, anything that keeps him from experiencing the wonder of the world and his within it. Besides, my wife and I just call him Kellan.
Second: I am taking up my first academic post as a Lecturer/ Assistant Professor in Economic Development and Peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego. I will be the head of the Development concentration for the MA program in Peace Studies. The slash in title is important because, while I am indeed on the tenure track, I will not officially be given the title of Assistant Professor until my dissertation is completed.
Lastly, and related to the foregoing, I have just moved to San Diego with my family. It's a strange experience for a number of reasons. Most fundamentally, I grew up until the age of 9 in Southern California, and while I still consider myself to be "from" - insofar as my peripatetic generation is "from" anywhere - New Mexico, the smells are strangely evocative of a very primordial time from even before I consider myself to have developed the personality that would stick with me. Now this isn't at all a scientific or psychological statement. It's just personal observation, possibly married in some dark recess of my mind to the notion that character comes of hardship, and that I had very little of the latter as a spoiled young person in Southern California; therefore, my character was forged in New Mexico. This, of course, is somewhat preposterous. In any case, the jacarandas and eucalyptus trees give off such pungent smells that I'm recalled to that primordiality on a regular basis.
This "recall" phenomenon takes on, in turn, even greater importance because I have chosen to move to Southern California with my infant son, and possibly to raise him for a portion of his young life in the same place I was raised. In some ways, this makes parenting easier, since many my preexisting ideas for fun things to do with a small child derive from my own childhood here: trips to Mt. Wilson Observatory or LaBrea Tar Pits, hiking in the Sierras, going to the beach, scuba diving on Catalina... Luckily, with a different city, I am kept from falling into the complacency that is bred of familiarity. And with a little of the warrior's combative spirit, I will forge my own path into fatherhood, professorship, and this rediscovered country.
First in importance: I am the proud father of a mentally prodigious, aesthetically stunning, physically robust, and perfectly proportioned baby boy named Kellan Tyr. Yes, Tyr is the Norse god of war - hence Tuesday and, the Romanized equivalent in French, mardi. For those who think such a choice morbid (or just unimaginative) for a conflict economist's son, I think that there are alternative interpretations of a god of war than simply a harbinger of death. For one, death and destruction are profoundly integral parts to the circle of life - think of Kali the Destroyer, for instance, in Hindu mythology. For another, Tyr was the quintessential warrior, and being a warrior can be a spiritual path. In the works of Carlos Castaneda, don Juan talks of the Impeccable Warrior - a being who struggles perennially against preconception, habit, accepted wisdom... indeed, anything that keeps him from experiencing the wonder of the world and his within it. Besides, my wife and I just call him Kellan.
Second: I am taking up my first academic post as a Lecturer/ Assistant Professor in Economic Development and Peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego. I will be the head of the Development concentration for the MA program in Peace Studies. The slash in title is important because, while I am indeed on the tenure track, I will not officially be given the title of Assistant Professor until my dissertation is completed.
Lastly, and related to the foregoing, I have just moved to San Diego with my family. It's a strange experience for a number of reasons. Most fundamentally, I grew up until the age of 9 in Southern California, and while I still consider myself to be "from" - insofar as my peripatetic generation is "from" anywhere - New Mexico, the smells are strangely evocative of a very primordial time from even before I consider myself to have developed the personality that would stick with me. Now this isn't at all a scientific or psychological statement. It's just personal observation, possibly married in some dark recess of my mind to the notion that character comes of hardship, and that I had very little of the latter as a spoiled young person in Southern California; therefore, my character was forged in New Mexico. This, of course, is somewhat preposterous. In any case, the jacarandas and eucalyptus trees give off such pungent smells that I'm recalled to that primordiality on a regular basis.
This "recall" phenomenon takes on, in turn, even greater importance because I have chosen to move to Southern California with my infant son, and possibly to raise him for a portion of his young life in the same place I was raised. In some ways, this makes parenting easier, since many my preexisting ideas for fun things to do with a small child derive from my own childhood here: trips to Mt. Wilson Observatory or LaBrea Tar Pits, hiking in the Sierras, going to the beach, scuba diving on Catalina... Luckily, with a different city, I am kept from falling into the complacency that is bred of familiarity. And with a little of the warrior's combative spirit, I will forge my own path into fatherhood, professorship, and this rediscovered country.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Oeconomia et Infans
A note from an economist (of sorts) to his newborn son on Father’s Day
Economic agents – of which surely you are one
If only prototypically
And in primordiality –
Concern themselves primarily with what is lost and won,
With each eventuality:
The Law of Marginality!
Ne’er abrogate nor derogate that holy tenet, son!
In such a way you have perceived (to quote a finer poet)
That bawling down the house with thy
Peculiar and quite strident cry
Returns to you a fine reward – your eyes glint that you know it –
With little needed to invest
(And such a rate of interest!)
Your livelihood – this in half-jest – to this tactic you owe it.
But meditate upon the way in which you earn you keep.
You don’t grow the proverbial pie;
You don’t produce a whit, and I
Would say a whit that’s unproduced will not bring in a heap
Of beans nor aught other legume
That hungry infants might consume.
Ricardo’s benefits of trade impossible to reap!
Instead of goods, you fabricate such externalities
That others pay you just to spare them!
Thus extorted, you ensnare them!
And once sated you employ such fraternalities
That all your fussing’s soon forgiven,
And the crania you’ve riven,
Cooing thus, and wooing thus my paternality.
Economic agents – of which surely you are one
If only prototypically
And in primordiality –
Concern themselves primarily with what is lost and won,
With each eventuality:
The Law of Marginality!
Ne’er abrogate nor derogate that holy tenet, son!
In such a way you have perceived (to quote a finer poet)
That bawling down the house with thy
Peculiar and quite strident cry
Returns to you a fine reward – your eyes glint that you know it –
With little needed to invest
(And such a rate of interest!)
Your livelihood – this in half-jest – to this tactic you owe it.
But meditate upon the way in which you earn you keep.
You don’t grow the proverbial pie;
You don’t produce a whit, and I
Would say a whit that’s unproduced will not bring in a heap
Of beans nor aught other legume
That hungry infants might consume.
Ricardo’s benefits of trade impossible to reap!
Instead of goods, you fabricate such externalities
That others pay you just to spare them!
Thus extorted, you ensnare them!
And once sated you employ such fraternalities
That all your fussing’s soon forgiven,
And the crania you’ve riven,
Cooing thus, and wooing thus my paternality.
Friday, April 17, 2009
How to Lose Your Mind in Ten Days
I have been cruising around rural India for the past month now – a month which happens to correspond with months 7-8 of my wife’s pregnancy, I mention somewhat sheepishly. I have done this with the purpose of gaining some sort of intuitive understanding of the Naxal movement - the Maoist insurgency that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described in 2006 as the single largest threat to India's internal security. In a nutshell, so as not to bore my massive readership too greatly, my research looks at the determinants of rebel movement expansion, focusing particularly on the economic ways in which rebel-held territories and (more importantly) the lands surrounding them are incorporated into the wider economy. India is an interesting and tractable case study because it has a number of different states that all grapple with the issue in different ways, have differently integrated rural-urban economic linkages, and (very important) keep tallies of various economic and violence statistics, which most African governments do not.
Then, in the past ten days, it all went to pot. It started when my contact at the next destination - a rehabilitation camp for ex-combatants in the northernmost tip of West Bengal - called off my visit due to fears of election violence. The elections are a vast, complicated affair (or, rather, string of separate affairs) that the Indian government fears bungling so much that they have taken the extreme measure of holding the Indian Premier League cricket tournament out of India in order to concentrate security forces on polling stations. As it turns out, Naxals did indeed try to disrupt the elections, killing around 17 people (mainly poll workers), but overall failing to dissuade most people from casting their votes. The upshot for me was that I found myself in Kolkata, staying with my friend Siddharth at his uncle and aunt’s flat, with little to nothing to do until I could make my way to Patna in Bihar for my next case study. And, after seeing the Victoria Monument, we thought why not take a stroll in the Botanical Gardens?
Your answer in a word: preteens. In two alliterative words: pick-pocketing preteens.
Strange as it may seem, I have never been pick-pocketed before. During my travels to some of the world’s worst shitholes, I have found myself in the crossfire of a gun battle, nearly been run over by an armored personnel carrier, had my computer keyboard eaten by ants, developed dermal boils in 50-degree heat, and had dengue fever, which you treat by lying around delirious, half-hallucinating, feeling like you’re being disemboweled (which you kind of are), and praying it all ends soon one way or another and not really caring which it will be. But I have never been pick-pocketed. Libidinous college students in Cancun on Spring Break get pick-pocketed in alcohol-fueled orgiastic hazes. Overweight men – red-faced, huffing, staggering in pleated khakis, plodding in heinous walking shoes, glistening in the heat – get pick-pocketed at every tourist-trap landmark from the Taj Mahal to the leaning tower of Pisa. Wealthy women with large, open handbags swinging ostentatiously about as they window-shop get pick-pocketed. I don’t get pick-pocketed.
Or at least I didn’t. Then, towards the end (or so I thought) of a long day, as Siddharth and I caught sight of a tree filled with curiously iridescent beetles, a pack of preteens swung our way and gathered round us, jostling for a view of the beetles. To the extent I thought about them at all, I thought: (1) “Why don’t Indians understand the concept of personal space?” and (2) “Isn’t it terrific that these young men are taking an interest in entomology?” Both of these thoughts, you will notice, are thoroughly old-fogeyish. And old fogeys are just the sort of prey that pick-pocketers love, because… well, because they assume that kids give two shits for entomology, for starters, which they clearly don’t. Lesson learned, but a distressing one since I’m about to have a child of my own and would like to be able to guess at his thoughts, and a bit late, too, because by the time I realized my wallet and passport were missing, my naturalist friends had disappeared.
The search for a wallet and passport in that sort of situation is a frustrating experience. For one, you pretty much know you’ll never see it again, yet you keep thinking such nonsense as, “If I were a preteen pick-pocketer who’d just stolen a wallet and passport, would I just grab the cash and jettison the rest?” and “If so, where would I then jettison the passport?” I had already demonstrated that I had no inkling of how were thinking, so why bother to guess now? For another, any friend who’s worth his salt (and Siddharth is worth a lot more) will tell you things in that situation like “It may have just slipped out of your pocket when we sat down over there,” and “Even if it’s lost, things could be a lot worse.” These are the right things to say, because they are - at least hypothetically speaking – true, and they are meant to calm the mind. However in reality, at least for me, they serve as nodes around which torturously obsessive thoughts crystallize, and my stream of semi-consciousness ran something like the following:
“Of course things to be a lot worse. Worse is a relative term, so things could always be a lot worse. Or do humans have some sort of built-in limited capacity for suffering, such that we approach it asymptotically? Are we genetically incapable of infinite suffering? Boy, if I just caught that little shit’s hand when it was in my pocket, I would show him infinite suffering. I would probably break his finger bones Hammurabi-style. No wait, Hammurabi cut off thieves’ hands. I don’t have a knife, though, and cutting off a hand with Sidd’s pen knife would take forever. Yeah, I’d probably just break his fingers. Or would I? Would I – could I – be a bigger person? After all, this is India, the birthplace of two of the world’s great religions. From one we have the idea of karma, from the other, that of worldly detachment. Wouldn’t I honor India by admitting to myself that this theft is the thief’s bad karma, and not mine – I do not suffer unless I allow myself to suffer. Yes, that’s probably the more spiritually mature way to think about this. Still, though. Sucks. Maybe just a pinky.”
Anyway, by that time, the light was fading, so Siddharth and I hauled ourselves to the nearest police station to file a report. Now, I didn’t know this, but in Indian police stations, you don’t file a report. You file an application to have a report filed. Any application can, of course, be denied, and in my case, it was, due to the fact that I claimed my wallet and passport were stolen.
“How do you know they were stolen?” the police officer asked. “If you know that it was stolen now, then you must have known it was being stolen at the time! And yet you clearly didn’t, since you didn’t do anything to stop it from being stolen!”
In the words of Calvin & Hobbes, the forensic marvel had reduced my logic to shambles. Siddharth explained to me in English that police inspectors were reviewed on the basis of the ratio of cases solved to crimes reported (and all reported crimes must be investigated). That ratio can be raised either by upping the numerator (i.e., solving the cases, which turns out to be lots of work) or by lowering the denominator (i.e., not reporting cases, which turns out to be very little work indeed). The Indians, as we all know from Ramanujan, are a very mathematically-oriented people and so they understand these little intricacies. The end result was that I filed an application not for a report of theft, but for a “general diary” entry to be made in a grubby little ledger to the effect that I had “lost” my wallet and passport “while roaming in the gardens.” It all sounds so rococo that way.
You can imagine what the days since have been like, getting an emergency-issue passport from the US embassy, obtaining an exit visa from the government that put the bureau in bureaucracy, etc. I spent the better part of the day today in a government office jockeying to maintain my place in something I'll liberally term a "queue" (though "mob" may be closer to the mark) to get that exit visa. After 2 hours, I was the first in line at the counter, when a random Tibetan dropped the identity cards for an army of exiled Buddhist monks on the desk of the woman about to help me. She obliged him (probably because it's bad karma to ignore an army of exiled Buddhist monks, which just happens also to be the reason I only weakly objected to the queue-cutting), and by the time she was finished, it was lunch hour, so I got to perfect my placeholding skills for another little while, telling people edging up along the sides "back off, I'm first" if they looked obstreperous, and "please let me go first - my pregnant wife is waiting for me at home" if they looked nice.
A pregnant wife who, I might add, now has $30 to live on for the next 10 business days until our credit and debit cards have been reissued.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
The Paternal Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
I’m now just 4 months away from becoming a father, and just maybe an adult to boot. The odd consultancy aside, I’ve been a student for most of my life, and the proposition of fatherhood puts my pending financial responsibility into stark relief. So what are the chances I’ll prove halfway competent at earning a real living for once?
My entrepreneurial pedigree is impeccable. In my childhood, my dad owned the largest real estate consulting firm in the country. I had very little idea what that meant, but it was clear that he was someone to be proud of. All of his friends were equally impressive, as were their offspring. I remember hearing about one of his CEO friend’s sons, who had gone to Princeton, started a student business in his “free time,” scaled it up to a 20-man operation during his undergraduate tenure, and sold it for $125,000 upon graduation. He then plowed the revenue back into some other, equally amazing enterprise, I forget what exactly.
My dad has always been a business prodigy. At 12, he started his own business spray-painting address numbers on the curbs of his suburban neighborhood on the western fringes of Philadelphia. Already, he was exhibiting the business acumen that would make him a rich man, reasoning that spray paint and stencils required minimal overhead costs. He also devised a business plan that entailed performing the service ahead of time and then asking for payment, like those windshield wiper urchins in Latin America. He rightly figured this sequence would draw in more clients, as people would feel too guilty to refuse a handsome little preteen who had just spent his own money on a doing them a favor. By the age of 16, he was a stencil pimp with ten other kids in his employ, all pushing their unwanted service on unsuspecting neighbors, as my dad skimmed a percentage off the top for managerial services.
For the sake of comparison, I will now skip 30 years into the future and across the country to Tesuque, New Mexico, where I grew up from the age of eight. I wanted more money but my parents wouldn’t consent to upping my allowance, and my dad cunningly suggested I start a business. I decided that in a tiny New Mexican town north of Santa Fe, the best I could hope for in terms of a client base were motorists passing through, and so I set up a lemonade stand. I stood behind my kiosk for what seemed like days, but was probably nearly an hour. No one stopped. I grew discouraged and impatient. Maybe I was shooting too low, too low-brow. I needed to tap the fat vein of the Santa Fe art market.
I headed with a shovel and pail down to the river, which ran through one end of our property and where I spent many a summer afternoon slopping around in the muck – I was in search of clay. Yes, I thought triumphantly, I would go into the extractive industries. The river would constantly deposit more of my silty gold at my back door, and I would sell it from my front. I scooped my product into re-sealable plastic bags with a trowel and carted them back up to my stand. “Lemonade!” I scoffed to myself.
Shortly, my dad pulled into the dirt driveway and I beamed proudly at him. “Clay?” I asked.
“What?” He screwed up his eyes like he hadn’t heard correctly.
“Would you like to buy some clay?” I repeated.
“What happened to your lemonade stand idea?” he asked. Of course he would ask about the lemonade. My dad never did have much appreciation for art or artists. He almost always prefaced the word “artist” with the qualifier “starving,” which I thought was demeaning, since I fancied myself a bit of an artist (my specialities were eagle heads in profile and certain species of dinosaur). So it was entirely predictable that my father had no vision when it came to marketing to artists.
“No one was buying lemonade,” I explained in my most sensible businessman’s tone. “I switched out my stock.”
“Oh.” He seemed momentarily at a loss, but recovered, reaching for his wallet. “Sure, I’ll take one bag, please.”
“Great. That’ll be five dollars, please.”
“Five dollars?!” He replaced the bill he had extracted and pulled out a fiver. “You might want to think about readjusting your price point, there.”
“Oh. Alright.” I took the five and handed him a dripping bag of river sludge. He let it dribble for a little while, then drew the bag quickly into the car and over his lap, placing it on the current edition of the Wall Street Journal lying on the floor of the passenger side.
“Thanks. See you at home for dinner…”
“Come again!” I chirped. The car rolled off down the hill to the house.
Within minutes, another car pulled over onto the shoulder. Business was picking up! The window rolled down, and an elderly gentleman asked what I was selling.
“Clay,” I responded. His face was blank, so I specified: “Natural clay from the river.”
“Oh,” he said, still no sign of a thought appearing on his face. “Right, well, maybe another day.”
The window rolled up and the car rolled off. Near miss.
The next half hour or so was slim pickings. Actually, no pickings whatever. The sun was starting to fall behind the hills when a biker dude with a badass handlebar moustache and a black leather jacket pulled up on a Harley. He gunned the engine once or twice for my benefit and smiled.
“I’ll take two cups,” he yelled over the growl of the hog. “It’s been a hot one!”
“Sorry, I’m not selling lemonade, anymore,” I yelled back. Then, very slick and salesman-like: “Do you want some clay, though?”
The biker scanned the kiosk and, sure enough, found no lemonade.
“What’d you say you’re selling, there?” he asked, chinning at the limp, oozing sacks.
“Clay. You know, from the river.”
“Who for?”
“Artists. You know, they make pottery and sculptures and stuff.”
“Well, I’ll take your word for it, Buddy, but all’s I know is that I could sure have gone with a couple cups of cold lemonade this afternoon. I’m THIRSTY. You have a good one, now.” And with that, he readjusted his helmet, gunned his engine again, and was off.
I don’t know if it was the fact that he flatteringly called me “Buddy” or that he talked to me in a such a straight-shooter kind of way, but I immediately packed up shop.
It wasn’t until four years later that I would start up another business, this time with my slightly unbalanced friend. We made Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs filled with shotgun shell gunpowder, and throwing stars from stenciled, cut, and sharpened sheet metal. Don’t worry, from what I heard the pipe bombs were only used to blow up mail boxes. I could have been the next Victor Bout, shuttling arms across porous African borders.
Where did that entrepreneurial spirit go?
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