Tag Archives: Poverty

Location review – Myanmar

By special request, I’m going to try something a little different, and review not a book, but a trip: Myanmar! Summary: post-apocalyptic capital, amazing temples, phenomenal people, all changing at breakneck speed.

I’ve been backpacking for two weeks in Myanmar, and it’s been great. By far the best thing is the tremendous kindness of the locals; tourist infrastructure is a bit thin on the ground, but its more than made up for by the willingness of people to help.

It’s also a fascinating time to visit. Seven years ago, a sim card cost upwards of 5000 dollars. As little as two years ago, they cost $175, well out of the reach of most citizens. Today, they cost $1.50. In the last two years, internet access has gone from almost nonexistent to universal: every single person has a smartphone and uses 3G. It’s an enormous, almost unprecedented, leap, and is fuelling a dramatic country-wide evolution.

And it may change more. In November elections are due, with the results unknown. Regardless, people seem eager to talk about politics, a very positive change.

I can highly recommend Bagan, in particular. A plain littered with 2000 temples, the view at sunrise and sunset is utterly phenomenal. Yangon is quiet for a se Asian city, but rich with history and interesting. Lake Inle, a tourist hotspot, is well-beloved, but for me it was simply a nice lake, similar to ones elsewhere, and not unique to Myanmar like Bagan.

My highlight was the capital of Naypyidaw. Almost no tourists go, so transport is a little tricky, but it is unique. It was built ten years ago, in secret, and civil servants were given two months to pack up and move after the announcement. Apartment buildings are colour coded based on which employees should live there-green for the ministry of agriculture, for example. Though the official count is one million, many still commute, and so wide, ten lane streets are utterly empty of traffic. It feels post-apocalyptic, complete with forests still growing between various ministries.

I recommend it highly, and now is a good time to go. By the time you blink, it will be totally different again.

How Much is Enough – Robert & Edward Skidelsky

“Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.” – Epicurus

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that in the generations to come, the increasing prosperity of the world would mean people would work steadily less: where once it took 50 hours of week to feed the family, it would only take 15, leaving more time for fruitful leisure time. That’s not exactly how it has worked out.

Why not presents an interesting problem. Three broad theses suggest themselves: because people enjoy work, because they feel pressured to, or because they want the things money can buy. The first is almost certainly true for some of the wealthy, and may explain why we see investment bankers working so hard they don’t even have time to spend the money they earn. The second has some appeal, but can’t really explain why the poor work fewer hours than the rich. The Skidelskys find the third the most compelling, however; people today might well make enough to meet their basic needs on 15 hours a week, but to afford the status goods we crave – big houses, iphones, etc. – we must work much more.

That argument, though, hinges on a distinction between what we need and what we want. That’s a tricky line to draw: humans can survive without internet access, obviously, but are they full participants in society without it? And does that make it a need or a want? Where you draw the line is going to depend a lot on your values.

The Skidelskys raise this important question, but don’t really answer it. Indeed, judging by how the first 2/3 of the book is spent, the core component of their good life is criticizing economists. Only at the very end do they outline what they see as the ‘needs’ for a good life: Health, Security, Respect, Personality, Harmony with Nature, Friendship, and Leisure.

Robert Skidelsky is the author of one of the seminal biographies of Keynes, and though I haven’t read it I’ve heard nothing but good things. In How Much is Enough, though, I find him a bit too much of an armchair philosopher: it’s clear they’ve thought a lot about this issue, but it’s not clear they know much about it. They cite Easterlin’s findings on happiness, for example, without mentioning the fact his results have been profoundly questioned: they criticize GDP without discussing the many valuable criticisms other people have made. The book asks important and interesting questions, but as a reader looking for answers and not complaints about economics, I’m not sure it was what I was looking for.

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“His examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.”

I’ve been in something of a Marquez mood recently – perhaps it’s the season. In any case, this one follows on a review of Strange Pilgrims last week.

Choler, one of the Greco-Roman humours, was believed to cause irritation or temper: hence the English word choleric, or the French colerique. The principle of the humours underlay much of medieval medicine, and argued that imbalances between basic bodily fluids led to illness and odd behaviour. Choler was linked to fire, and the temperament of ruling. It also represented passion. Today, of course, the phrase is more commonly linked to the disease cholera, one of the leading causes of infant mortality until the introduction of Oral Rehydration Therapy, a simple mix of water, sugar, and salt that helps prevent dehydration.

Love in the Time of Cholera raises both the idea of passion and of disease in its study of love in an unnamed port city near the Caribbean. Many interpretations of the book are possible: Marquez, apparently, is known to have warned readers to be careful not to fall into his trap. For me, though, it is a reflection on love, particularly flawed love. Many types of love are suggested in the story, but all of them suffer from flaws, no matter how well written or sympathetic the character. One couple matches the societal ideal of love, while struggling to be happy themselves: another man is a philanderer and to some extent sociopath, but believes eternally in the idea of true love.

As usual, meditations on death and stunning visual imagery are par for the course: Marquez is always phenomenal in that respect. A particular strength of LitToC (I couldn’t resist!) is the scope for interpretation by the reader: to my eye, it gives more room for ambiguity of sentiment than some of Marquez’s other work, though not as much as some of the extremes in that area, such as Don Quixote. An excellent read.

Dangling Man – Saul Bellow

“Trouble, like physical pain, makes us actively aware that we are living, and when there is little in the life we lead to hold and draw and stir us, we seek and cherish it, preferring embarrassment or pain to indifference.”

Saul Bellow is a Canadian-born Pulizter Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature winner. In the words of the Nobel Committee, his writing possesses a “subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting.” Dangling Man was his first book.

Dangling Man is a study of a man who cannot find his place in the world, who finds freedom a burden from which he cannot escape. He finds himself growing violent, angry, anything to escape the isolation and monotony of days he cannot seem to fill: he joins the army in order to achieve some blessed regimentation, to eliminate the need for individuality and reflection.

The book is hardly a cheerful one: I would go so far as to call it depressing, painting a picture of the human spirit I do not relish. It’s beautifully written, but as happens with some novels, more interesting after you’ve read it than enjoyable as you do. In a modern world that places an enormous weight on freedom, the idea that freedom might be undesirable presents a dilemma not easily solved. Bellow doesn’t answer the question, but then he doesn’t try to: he paints a vivid portrait of a man trapped in the four walls of his room, not because he cannot leave, but because he doesn’t why he should.

The Great Escape – Angus Deaton

“Life is better now that at almost any time in history…Yet millions still experience the horrors of destitution and of premature death…This book tells stories of how things got better, how and why progress happened, and the subsequent interplay of progress and inequality.”

The movie The Great Escape tells the story of Allied POWs seeking to escape German prison camps. Some of them make it, and some don’t. Deaton argues this makes a general point: that inequality is an inevitable result of progress, because not everyone can escape at the same time. The key, however, is to make sure that inequality is only temporary: that everyone, to stretch the metaphor, escapes in the end.

Deaton focuses on health and wealth inequality, covering their historical evolution and the current state of affairs, before turning to how we might reduce inequality and particularly foreign aid. He is an interesting mix of idealist and pragmatist: he believes strongly we have a moral obligation to eliminate poverty and improve health for the less well off, but also rejects foreign aid as a failed method of achieving those goals. Aid, he suggests, tends to flow from a desire to be seen to be doing something, rather than actually making a difference, which is why so much money is spent to so little effect. Instead, he argues that the most important step we can take is to “work on and within [our] own governments, persuading them to stop policies that hurt poor people, and to support international policies that make globalization work for poor people, not against them.” He recommends we invest in things for the developing world, rather than just in the developing world: R&D on malaria and other diseases, improving country capacity in international negotiations, arms control, and other projects.

Deaton has a gift for making complicated concepts clear, and a book that might feel like a dry compendium of statistics works for that reason, though there are times when sections can feel like a litany of graphs and analysis. He is also good at explaining how statistics might mislead or betray our reasoning: the book may be of particular interest to readers without much background in statistics, but want to understand the debates around wealth and inequality.

The book really comes into its own, however, in the final section. Deaton is passionate and eloquent when it comes to aid, something he feels strongly about. For someone well read in the subject, it won’t add a lot to your understanding (though it will serve as a helpful reminder of the basics), but if you’re willing to do a bit of work to actually understand issues rather than just read results, he’s insightful, interesting, and informative. Worth the read.

Assassins, Eccentrics, Politicians, and Other Persons of Interest – Curtis Wilkie

“In the Klan structure, where Code One called for a crossburning, Code Two a whipping, and Code Three an arson attack, the extreme penalty was Code Four — death.”

In 1963, the civil rights activist Medgar Evans was killed by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens’ Council. De La Beckwith was tried twice in 1964 by all-white juries, both of which result in hung juries; not until 1994 was he found guilty, less than two decades ago. In Bill Clinton’s run for office, coming as he did from Arkansas, he placed an overt emphasis on racial reconciliation, and his decisions affect politics today. In a way that many of us not from the American South may struggle to appreciate, taking civil rights for granted, the strife of the 1960s continues to leave scars on the region.

Assassins opens with the story of De La Beckwith’s third trial. Curtis Wilkie was one of the original Boys on the Bus, the group of journalists following the 1972 election between Nixon and McGovern. Since then, he has become known as one of the best journalists covering the American South, particularly his home state of Mississippi. In Assassins, he takes a selection of his articles from various years and subjects and uses them to paint a broader picture: of the American South, of Israel/Palestine (where he lived for a time), of Carter and (Bill) Clinton, both of whom he knew personally, and even of a gubernatorial race between a playboy and a Ku Klux Klan leader in Lousiana and a lesbian colony in Mississippi.

Wilkie has spent his life covering these issues, and it shows. The book is insightful and entertaining. For those of us who didn’t grow up in the American South, it’s also enlightening. Readers may know about Freedom Summer, when college students from across the US came to Mississippi to help register African-Americans to vote, but reading of the multiple murders of activists and the trials paints a striking picture of the South that seems almost unthinkable now, only two generations later. For readers with little knowledge of the subject, but an interest in understanding what the South was like at the time, well worth a read.

Disclosure: I read Assassins as an advance reader copy.

Capital in the 21st Century – Thomas Piketty

“The overall conclusion of this study is that a market economy based on private property, if left to itself, contains powerful forces of convergence, associated in particular with the diffusion of knowledge and skills; but it also contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.”

This is a longer review than I normally write, so I thought I’d summarize takeaways first (who has the time to read long reviews with all those cat videos?)

  • Overall very good: lots of interesting information on wealth and income inequality.
  • Before world wars, inequality was from wealth inequality; now, it comes from income inequality. Rise of the supermanager.
  • Policy analysis weak – hasn’t really considered other options or read the literature. Still, capital tax may be good idea: can replace the common and unfair real estate tax. WIsh he had discussed a consumption tax.
  • Long run, the only cure to inequality is better education.
  • No big surprises: basically just fleshes out ideas that most people would have believed true intuitively, if without data.

Piketty’s work has been ridiculously popular: for a 600 page economics treatise to outsell fiction on Amazon.com is amazing to me, particularly given that it wasn’t very popular in France, where it was first published. Still, any book that can manage that is worth a read.

Piketty argues that because the interest on capital (r) is larger than the growth rate of the economy (g), capital ends up growing faster than the economy. Over time, therefore, capital owners own a larger and larger share of the whole pie, which leads to inequality. Though there are compensating factors, like the diffusion of knowledge and skills, without comprehensive educational policies and redistributive taxation, this inequality can grow to extreme levels. He uses income tax and estate tax information to study wealth and income inequalities over the past 200 years, finding high inequality pre world wars, low inequality after world wars, and increasing inequality today, though unlike before the wars, it is largely due to income inequality, not wealth inequality (managers with high salaries, not landowners).

His fundamental insight, as anyone who has read a review will know, is the fact that r > g. I think that’s true, and it does have the effects he describes, but speaking as an economist it’s also not surprising. Interest rates on capital are relatively high partly because people are impatient and aren’t good at saving, at least judging by their ability to save for retirement. If society lowers the return on capital, people will save less, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing either, something Piketty doesn’t consider. Still, he’s right that increasing inequality can be a source of stress for society, and it’s definitely an important subject for study.

The book is divided into a section analyzing the data, a section predicting future trends, and a section discussing policy. The first section is excellent; the Financial Times has raised some problems with his data work, but by and large I think it’s well done and the results are unchallenged. Lots of interesting information. The second section has the bad habit of making a prediction then immediately disavowing it as a guess, which is common but I think a bit disingenuous.

The third section I found very weak. The policies he supports may well be good ones, and I think there are good arguments for a capital tax, since most countries have a property tax and that’s basically just a capital tax that’s very unfair to the middle class. It’s clear this is not an area Piketty has thought about much, though, and his discussion of education policy is pretty shallow. Dismissing a consumption tax based on total spending, which is often a popular policy, he rejects it in a single line as never having been done, before advocating a global capital tax that has also never been done before. Long run, as he points out, it appears the only cure to inequality is better education and better skills transfer, and I think almost everyone, left or right, would support that.

Whether when you think of capital you think of landed aristocracy, as the French Piketty does, or of Bill Gates, as I suspect a lot of North Americans do, may play a role in how you feel about the book. In the end, I think the power of Marx’s original Capital is that it provides a new way of thinking about the world. I didn’t find Piketty managed the same: perhaps it’s because I’m an economist, but most of what he said I would have assumed to be true. I also find anyone that introduces mathematical identities (like 2+2=4, things that are defined to be true) as “fundamental laws of capitalism” to be a little pretentious for my taste, but that definitely doesn’t relate to the overall quality of the book. It’s well worth a read, and thinking about inequality and its solutions is definitely an important issue.

You can see the Amazon reviews here.

Scarcity – Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

“Scarcity captures our attention, and this provides a narrow benefit: we do a better job of managing pressing needs. But more broadly, it costs us: we neglect other concerns, and we become less effective in the rest of life.”

Angry Birds, the game in which you lob birds at obstacles, has been phenomenally popular. Angry blueberries, a game created by the authors in which you lob blueberries at obstacles, has been somewhat less popular, but shows an interest result. Some players are given three blueberries per round, others six. People with more blueberries do better, of course, but they do a lot worse per blueberry!

Scarcity, the authors say, focuses the mind. We have finite mental capacity, and when we are forced to focus it, we do much better on that task, but much worse on every other task. They worry that the modern obsession with time management and efficiency makes time a scarce resource. That may help us schedule, but makes us sloppy in other areas, and vulnerable to any sort of unexpected demand on our time: something comes up, and it ripples through our entire week, making everything stressful. A little more slack in our schedule isn’t just wasted time a management consultant can help us fill: it’s a shock absorber, making our work schedule antifragile.

As with most good behavioural books, it does have a lot of fun studies though: pill bottles that beep and then send text messages when they haven’t been opened that day, gift cards for savings, and others. In the end, I’m not sure the book tells us anything any other behavioural economics book doesn’t. Introducing scarcity, though it makes for nice sound bites, doesn’t really add much to the analysis, despite their hard work attempting to use it to explain things.

If your bookshelf is looking scarce, however, you can get a copy here!

The Lays of Ancient Rome – Thomas Babington Macaulay

“All human beings, not utterly savage, long for some information about past times, and are delighted by narratives which present pictures to the eye of the mind. But it is only in very enlightened communities that books are readily accessible…A man who can invent or embellish an interesting story, and put it into a form which others may easily retain in their recollection, will always be highly esteemed by a people eager for amusement and information, but destitute of libraries.”

The Lays of Ancient Rome are a collection of narrative poems, written as if they date from early Roman history. Macaulay’s intention was to recreate the feel of ballads the Romans might themselves have listened to, but are now lost. More recently, Winston Churchill memorized them in their entirety while at school to show that, despite his weak academic performance, he at least had an excellent memory.

The poems are a mix of martial, tragic, and spiritual themes, and are each prefaced with a discussion of the legend that inspired them. As with more modern folk tales, however, he also tries to capture themes of inequality and justice that would colour the telling of history in Roman times. For that reason, they still feel clever, as a poem written for the inventors of satire deserves.

On War

“Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can a man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
and the temples of his gods.’”

On increasing inequality

“Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.
Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than a foe,
And the Tribunes beard the High,
and the Fathers grind the low.”

On Poverty

“Lest, when our latest hope is fled, ye taste of our despair,
And learn by proof, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare.”

The Black Jacobins – CLR James

“They enslaved the Negro, they said, because he was not a man, and when he behaved like a man they called him a monster.”

The most successful slave revolt in history is also one of the least well known. San Domingue (modern Haiti) was the wealthiest colony of France, supplying two thirds of France’s total overseas trade and serving as the largest single market for the European slave trade. In 1791 the slaves rose up, defeating in succession their French masters, British and Spanish armies, and then a 60,000 soldier French force. They would declare full independence in 1804, and remain the only slave revolt to found a state.

The story is best known from CLR James’ 1938 The Black Jacobins, one of the first books to portray slaves not as things to whom atrocities were done, but rather men and women who had agency over their own lives: masters of their fates and captains of their souls, as it were. Their leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, would eventually be arrested on Napoleon’s orders and die in prison, but not before beginning a revolution, inspired by the French ideals of Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité, that would end with the declaration by his lieutenant of full independence.

The book can at times be hard to follow, covering as it does eight independent sides with constantly shifting alliances; the slaves, wealthy whites, poor whites, French royalists, French counter-revolutionaries, Spanish, English, and Mulattoes. Each would make and break treaties with the others while attempting to dominate the island. I also tend to object to Marxist historians: all historians have biases, of course, but I prefer mine to at least try to minimize their biases, instead of reveling in them. If all you want is to know the history, you should read the Wikipedia article. If you want to understand the history, however, and even more understand how slaves and slavery have been seen and portrayed through history, CLR James is the place to start. From how scorched earth tactics and crippling reparations impoverished Haiti, to the end of the British Trans-Atlantic slave trade three years later, to framing 12 Years a Slave’s portrayal of slaves with agency, there is much of modern interest.

“The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings.”