China: A Macrohistory

China: A Macrohistory

a book review

AN AMBITIOUS WORK

Ray Huang's “China: A Macrohistory” is an excellent work of general history, as well as a daring application of a novel theory of how societies become modern, or what the author describes as “mathematically manageable”.

Huang's book is notable first of all for its ambitious scope. He treats over 2000 years of Chinese history in about 300 pages. The author employs a narrative, almost conversational style that is rare in serious history books. I initially missed the citations I would expect in any historical treatment. Indeed, there isn't even a bibliography as such, but rather a bibliographical note at the end of the book. However, this note makes it clear that much of the research that informs “China: Macrohistory” comes from hard-to-manage original sources such as the 76000 page “Twenty-four Dynastic Histories”. So I understand why Huang doesn't pepper his book with frequent, redundant references to obscure sources that would be inaccessible to most readers.

Because of its wide coverage of most of China's recorded history, Huang's work is a great orientation to the reader with little prior knowledge of China. A series of timelines and maps at opportune moments also greatly aids understanding.

What follows is a summary of some of the book's main themes, as well as my own commentary on Huang's approach and some of his conclusions.

MODERNIZATION AND MONETIZATION

Much of Huang's life work to understand Chinese history involved research of early modern Europe, particularly the transition in England from agrarian to mercantile society. He started by researching why China ceased to be a world leader in science in the 15^th century, which is what led him to research the rise of science in early modern Europe. Eventually Huang's mentor led him to believe that Reformation, Renaissance, and modern commerce-based management are a package, trends that occur together and define modernity. In the European case as in the Chinese case, many seemingly ideological struggles (the English Civil War, Mao's rural guerrilla) are underlain by this economic transition, and the final settlement tends to be economic in nature. The ideal of egalitarianism gets transformed into an idea of equal opportunity under the law, and the end point balances old and new cultural and economic forces through new laws.

Huang even lost his National Science Foundation funding because they wondered why a proposal to research Chinese history involved his spending all his time in Europe! In the latter part of “China: A Macrohistory”, there are frequent references, indeed an entire section, dealing with the process of monetization and modernization in the West, with parallels or divergences in the Chinese case. To a postmodern thinker insisting on the uniqueness and ungeneralizability of every culture and every moment, this is anathema, but I feel that Huang more than justifies the utility of his approach.

Huang speaks of the human instinct for self-preservation as giving rise to the accumulation of goods. This drive to accumulate goods has become a governing principle in the modern age, the basis of the commercial system of organizing society. The term “capitalism” is problematic for Huang. It was never used by Marx and rarely by Adam Smith. In fact, like Huang, Smith speaks mainly of the opposition between an agriculture-based system for running society and a commerce-based, modern system. For Huang, socialism and capitalism are just gradations of a single, modern, commercial (or mathematical) system for managing society's affairs.

Huang defines a modern, commerce-based, “monetized” or “mathematically manageable” nation as one possessing rights and obligations of government and people defined by law, a division of labor, and an interchangeability between goods and services. As a society goes from an agrarian base to a commerce base, there must be an interchangeability between its social and economic components. These conditions allow the development of a pluralistic society, because equal opportunities and the possibility of exchange allow citizens to try new things that weren't allowed before. He gives the example of new artists, professionals, and even religions, all competing for patrons, clients, and acolytes. A modern system increases not only how much wealth there is, but how it can be transferred, reinvested, and grow. It represents a transition from running society along a stable, agrarian logic, to running society on a dynamic, commerce-based logic.

Huang looks to the West for the precedents of how such a transformation plays out. In the West the transition from agrarian feudalism to a modern, commerce-based society was favored by both the wealth of the towndwellers, as well as their political franchise. Their relative political freedom allowed merchants to win over landed interests and government to their way of thinking.

Late Medieval Venice was the first place to run itself along a commerce-based logic. The whole city-state was run like a trading company. But it had no real production base of its own, so it faded in time. The 17th-century Dutch then became the vanguard of commercial organization of society. Though the agrarian logic was replaced by a commercial logic in Holland, agriculture itself in fact benefited, as accumulated commercial wealth was reinvested in things like cattle breeding and land reclamation (which today define our vision of rural Holland). England underwent the same transition from agrarian to commercial society during the 17^th century's wars and chaos. Sheep farming become tied to commerce through wool exports, and the “rationalization” of agricultural land (taking it from peasants and communal management) created a rural entrepreneurial class and an urban proletariat. The landed gentry became the new bourgeoisie. According to Huang, a comprehensive, universal world history should profile the agrarian-commercial transition in its many iterations throughout the world. The macrohistorian must then illustrate the link from Venice to Holland to England to China.

MACROHISTORY IN CHINA

Huang defines macrohistory as the description of mega-trends, a following of the general direction of history as opposed to smaller details. He tries to tie past traditions to present realities in China. Macrohistory implies a long-term logic to the grand sweep of history. The long-term rationality of history means that even odd turns of events make sense. A macrohistorical perspective may seem deterministic and even amoral, but Huang asserts that human agency and values have a place in his scheme; the path of human history is made by millions of tiny thrusts, actions of free will inspired by values and ideals (though also shaped by the past).

Huang's macrohistory avoids packaged, dogmatic interpretations such as the concept of Oriental despotism. Rather the author asserts that a condition long present in China, as in all pre-modern societies, was the lack of mathematical or commercial management of society, and that this has had repercussions throughout China's recorded history.

This idea of mathematical manageability serves as Huang's central thesis that unifies and makes sense of two thousand meandering years of Chinese history. The author asserts that China's early unification under centralized rule bore consequences that defined the country's underlying tensions for two millennia, and that are still in the process of resolution. Essentially China came under centralized rule long before the rulers had the tools to manage a large, complex population.

The peasantry in China has always been huge, so centralized governments had to treat and move the population in blocks. Practical problems were turned into abstract maxims, which then had to be translated back to the practical at the village level. In such a system of bureaucracy, form was often more important than substance. Truth and authority came from above, and bureaucrats pushed for homogeneity and uniformity in governance and military management. It was impossible to promote a division of labor either among the peasants or among the bureaucrats. For lack of management capabilities, the State treated the entire country as if it were a collection of villages of undifferentiated small farmers, though on the ground this rigid treatment from above ignored and even facilitated the exploitation of the poor by wealthier landholders.

China's centralized government had no practical way to sustainably manage its huge, populous empire until the introduction of “monetary” or “mathematical management”. The State could not accommodate complexity in its government. Without a generally-accepted, standardized interchangeability between products and services, and a division in people's labor, China's governments always had to strive for homogeneity in society, and a series of taxation schemes that always eventually proved insufficient. Already hundreds of years ago, Adam Smith believed that perhaps China's laws were putting limits on the formation of capital. He saw that China's way of ruling itself was keeping it economically stagnant.

Huang makes a convincing case that most of China's history moved in cycles between dynasties. Every dynasty in China's history started with a new or modified system for governing land, taxes, trade, and war. Over time society evolved, but the governance system, created based on conditions that no longer prevailed, could not adjust to the new realities, at which point the dynasty would fall, to be replaced by another. This cyclical template for Chinese history repeated itself time and again until the past century, when China's governments finally began to manage the country mathematically. However, even today the historical problem persists. An example of the tension caused by non-monetized management in modern China is the free or almost-free public housing built in the 1980s. Eventually maintenance costs and administration of these buildings demand either raising rents or privatizing in some other way, and monetization becomes a necessary measure that makes the unmanageable manageable.

If Huang's interpretation is correct, many things about China's history and present become clearer. Confucianism is a governance system that is well-adapted to the attempt to govern an unwieldy mass without a modern bureaucracy. The disparity between reality and official claims in today's China has roots in the millenarian tension between neat schemes for governance and the messy reality of hundreds of millions of people. Even incidents the West decries as human rights violations can be understood as the logical actions of a government valuing order and coherence over diversity and individual rights.

“China: A Macrohistory” was written in 1987, with a new edition published in 1997. The newer edition is mostly unchanged, save for a new foreword and an epilogue about China at the dawn of a new century. Huang argues that his methodology of macrohistory aims to describe large trends that do not change much in the light of this or that recent event. I would agree, and argue furthermore that despite the fifteen or more years that have transpired since the book's two editions, its remove from the onslaught of daily news gives it an astounding explanatory power for the developments of the past ten years or so.

I was initially shocked to read Huang's pronouncements on macrohistory, and his methodology throughout the book. It has been a long time since I've seen large-scale, almost mechanistic visions of human history in the academic realm. Granted, I read a fair amount about the Neolithic agricultural revolution and other prehistory, and much of this writing employs a fairly mechanistic view (for example Jared Diamond or Marcel Mazoyer). However, this work is usually classed as natural history, archeology, geography, or the like, and as such employs an approach closer to the natural sciences. But I can't recall the last time I've read a straight historian employing a sort of universal template to describe history's progression. Indeed, in our postmodern, deconstructionist era such thinking is almost automatically discounted as lacking in seriousness.

Huang is influenced by Marx in his analysis of long stretches of history through a sequential, progressive lens: “all societies pass through phase A, followed by phase B, etc”. Huang is not a Marxist however, so he traces not a progression from feudal to capitalist to socialist, but rather from agrarian, in-kind societies to commerce-based, mathematically-managed societies.

In the light of Huang's macrohistorical thinking, China's history makes sense, especially the last hundred turbulent years. Huang asserts, “Much of the clamor about Chinese absurdity can now be put aside.” This is to say that what Westerners have long seen as silly or backwards about China can now be understood as a coherent trajectory of history and people's rational responses to their reality.

CHINA'S REAL REVOLUTION

Having described the defining problem in Chinese history as the lack of mathematical management in society, Huang claims that the 20^th century's revolutions (which he regards as a single, unified phenomenon, encompassing more than 50 years and passing through Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao's Communists) were what brought modernity to China. The major result then of the 20^th century in China was to overturn the system of undifferentiated peasants in undifferentiated villages, in order to make possible the rational use of land and labor. Huang claims that this created an “equal opportunity for betterment” among the peasantry, which marked the end of the Chinese revolution.

This march to modernity has not been smooth. In fact, much of the past century and a half in China seems like a series of failures and false starts. Since the Opium Wars China has tried to adjust, to make a settlement between Chinese culture and foreign influence arriving from afar. The Japanese did this in the 1800s, which is why they became modern and prosperous well before the Chinese. In fact, commercial-style organization in Japan's government and military led to victory over China in the war of 1894. The so-called “Self-strengthening Movement” in 1860s and 1870s China tried to imitate Western military technology, but couldn't do so without adopting Western efficiency and precision, the opposite of China's timeless bureaucracy aiming to maintain internal cohesion. There were no inter-business links to make this modernization attempt work, so the Self-strengthening Movement was the first in a series of seeming failures in the modern age. Even after the 1911 revolution, the new written constitution didn't quickly change culture, neither in the countryside, the schools, or among factory workers. Only in 1919 did the bureaucrats and students start to shift their way of leading.

The egalitarian streak of the civil war in China laid the groundwork for mathematical management. It reorganized villages and ended local usury, which had the unexpected consequence of enabling mathematical management. Egalitarianism doesn't suffice to modernize a nation, because according to Huang things would eventually revert to the prior state of inequality. So for China to become modern it was necessary to diversify livelihoods and enable interchangeability. Even the much-reviled Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century fit into Huang's thesis. The Great Leap Forward looked to decrease transport and technology needs and to replace capital with labor. It was another failed experiment, but it led to the capital savings that enabled the subsequent economic growth of the 1970s onward. Huang feels that the official history written by the Chinese Communist Party in the late 1980s, which touched much on Mao Zedong, was in fact one of the frankest looks at any leader by official historians in China's history. For Huang this is another indication that China is firmly on the way to modernity.

When Huang says “The Chinese revolution is over”, he means that from now on the tensions between modernity and tradition will no longer be resolved through violence and bloodshed. China is now becoming mathematically manageable, and is finding links to the Western and world history. It's impossible now for China to manage its current growth through centralized planning, because there are so many actors involved. Any single economic product involves a plethora of subcontractors and suppliers.

Nevertheless, despite the end of the revolution, there remain problems with land, population, and ecology to work out.

REFLECTIONS OF AN AGRARIANIST

In the end Huang's thesis can be summarized thus: all societies go through a transition from agrarian, in-kind management to commerce-friendly interchangeability of goods and services (ie monetization). To someone like me this is hard to swallow because I devote lots of effort to militating for a more agrarian, less monetized society. But this is all the more testament to the strength of Huang's argument—I am forced to accept it, despite my ideological preferences to the contrary. It's a good thing I didn't read this book when my dad first gave it to me in my teens. I might have been converted into a rabid neoliberal!

Huang's book has convinced me of the need for monetary management in society. Indeed, as a child of the modern age, even my calls for agrarianism take for granted a monetary framework for society. The organizational principle of interchangeability is here to stay. It has broadened science and technology and enriched human life. The excesses of the present age, when money and our very economy are based on ephemeral abstractions, when commerce and even finance represent greater (though often fictitious) value than the production of concrete goods and services, often inure us to the positive values of a modern, monetized society. With a mathematical, monetized system we can more easily diversify to engage in non-agricultural pursuits, better meet the needs of buyers and sellers, and enjoy increased social and physical mobility.

While Huang's arguments on modernization are compelling, I find myself wondering if the world is as neat and sequential as he implies. Huang asserts, “Modernization is always accompanied by economic growth and expansion”. In the 21^st century can we still claim that modernization always goes hand-in-hand with increased well-being? I agree with Huang that Mao's revolution in China, or the French or Russian Revolutions, fit into the framework of struggles to modernize, to transition from agrarian to commerce-based societies. But what about recent wars in Yugoslavia, Cuba, or Colombia? These are already-modernized states that fought or continue to fight, not in order to modernize and monetize society, but because other problems persist during the modern age or are even caused by modernization. Modernization in the course of the early to mid-twentieth century did not eventually lead to a just, progressive, egalitarian society in these cases, which is why wars arose even after modernization was firmly established. Likewise, what about the US? We modernized long ago, and our current problems will not be solved by more monetization. Indeed, problems like clinical depression, crime, inequality, and now economic decline and joblessness are in large part caused by our rabid drive to monetize every aspect of our individual and collective lives. The aberrations of complex financial derivatives, or creating an economy based on outsourcing most tangible activity, have their roots in purely economic, mathematical, commercial logic. Such logic seems to be leading the US to regress in terms of well-being right now, not to advance.

Huang makes the case for a certain monetization of society and its interactions. Perhaps the lesson from the past few decades of rampant monetization in the US are that, while we're all happy not to live an a feudal age, the current age when even food, shelter, childcare, and love and birth are monetized is equally horrid (and creates a similar gap between haves and have-nots). My lesson from Huang is thus that I should moderate my agrarian boosterism. Informed by Huang, I must admit that we shouldn't return to a totally agrarian, non-monetized age. But we as a society would certainly benefit from becoming a bit more agrarian, and reclaiming our most intimate spaces from the rule of the marketplace.

MORE AGRARIAN NOTES

There are a few observations I have relating to Huang's treatment of agriculture. While he has convinced me that the transition from agrarian organization to commercial organization is a real and necessary trend in the history of all countries, his flippant, almost disdainful treatment of agriculture in general is misled. It's common for modern thinkers to downplay the importance of agriculture in everyday life in the modern world, but it's nevertheless a silly and irresponsible attitude. Farming is, after all, the basis for all of our continued existence.

I don't know what to say about the supposed backwardness of Chinese agriculture, which Huang claims reached a technological apex in the 13^th century and advanced little thereafter until the middle of the 20^th century. That may be, but the productivity per hectare of Chinese farms, even at the beginning of the 20^th century, put to shame the productivity of most other regions of the world. F.H. King documents with wonder the agricultural techniques employed in China at the turn of the century in his “Farmers of Forty Centuries”. It's clear that modern, mechanized agriculture is usually more productive per man-hour but less productive per acre than small-scale peasant farming. So perhaps the modernization and monetization of a state doesn't entail increasing agricultural productivity per se, but rather permitting some people to leave farming so as to diversify and grow the economy,

In another part of his book, Huang speaks of land consolidation and integration as leading to a more efficient agriculture than is possible with small plots. This is an unfounded assertion, and makes me wonder if other assertions (in areas I'm not as familiar with) are likewise somewhat idealized or ideologized. All this said, Huang admiringly references Taiwan's Agrarian Reform of 1953, which was modeled on Japan's post-war reform under MacArthur. Both of these agrarian reforms were followed by industrial expansion and generalized, society-wide prosperity. Perhaps this is my meeting-point with Huang. I certainly don't have a theory as coherent and all-inclusive as Huang regarding how a society becomes modern and prosperous, and I don't wish for societies to get too far away from their agrarian roots. But in any case we both agree that a farmer-friendly reform in land and agricultural policies is crucial in order for any nation to develop itself economically.

The dish on pizza

This is an article from Men's Health detailing the ecological, economic, and social trends behind big, multinational pizza companies like Domino's and Pizza Hut. It's really a discussion of the world's industrial food system, using pizza as a vehicle to understand it all.

United States: the problem is the economy

Below follows my translation of Francisco Thoumi's excellent article outlining the roots of the current economic woes in the US:

Globalization is causing the dominant world power to lose its competitive advantages, but the US government refuses to tighten its belt. This is a straight explanation of the major economic story of the decade.

A new challenge

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US has been enjoying its status as the world's only superpower, but as always happens in history, this is a temporary situation that is untenable in the long term.

In the past, the United States' main challenge came from Communism. Today the challenge comes from a globalized economy in which it is necessary to simultaneously collaborate and compete with other market economies. This requires important changes in the vision people from the US have of themselves and their role in the world, but these changes are difficult to bring about.

The US has benefited from historically exceptional economic conditions, but these conditions are being undercut by changes in the rest of the world.

The advantages of the United States

The theory of American exceptionalism has been popular in many circles, and has been justified by authors that underline the differences between European societies, with stratified institutions and Medieval roots, and the liberty and democracy of the US, which have permitted individual creativity and innovation, as well as the great industrial development of the late 19th century.

It's true that US institutions liberated the creativity of the citizens, but the United States also benefited from a set of factors that favored economic development. However, these factors have changed drastically in the last decades.

Historically the United States has been a country with a scarcity of labor as compared to other productive factors. The US is endowed with a wealth of natural resources, the population density is very low; the country was able to accumulate capital rapidly, generate great technological change, and had a good educational system. Furthermore, it has not suffered a [recent] war in its territory. Hence during the first and second World Wars, the US accumulated capital while Europe lost it.

Surely some of these factors were promoted by US institutions, but others were not.

Magnet for migrants

The privileged factors present in the US resulted in high salaries for those who were willing to work in a disciplined manner, even if they had no special skills. These salaries were not the result of people's working harder in the US, but rather of the aforementioned conditions. If you were born in Colombia and knew how to lay brick very efficiently, you were going to have a low salary, but if you were born [or went to] the US and did the same, you could live well. Because of this the country has been a magnet for attracting immigrants.

The problem, as noted above, is that the advantages of the US have been disappearing, and will continue to decrease. This is the reason why the presence of many undocumented immigrants in the country no longer seems so justified. Their argument that the US has traditionally been a country of immigrants rings hollow to many citizens, especially blacks, who must compete most directly with illegal immigrants.

A shrunken planet

The changes in the comparative advantages of the US have been enormous. The advantage of the traditional manufacturing sector has been lost, and the country has experienced a massive process of de-industrialization.

The development of communications and the decrease in transport costs have "shrunken" the world, and continue to weaken other advantages in parts of the service sector. For example, call centers have been relocated abroad. High medical costs have prompted many in the US to seek care in other countries, a trend that continues to grow.

The point is that while foreign commerce was a small fraction of the country's income and consumption, and the US was relatively self-sufficient, it was possible to maintain high salaries in unskilled jobs, but increasing globalization has totally changed the situation, and these high salaries are now found only in sectors that don't compete with imports, or that export cutting-edge products.

The majority of such jobs are in what are known by economists as noncommercial sectors or internationally non-transferable. Examples are the public sector, education, senior citizen care, and construction. Nevertheless, in these sectors the labor supply is growing, which diminishes salaries.

Inequality and discontent

The above-mentioned trends have caused income distribution in the US to be increasingly unequal. Those who have the education and the skills to participate in high-tech industries can receive a good income, but the rest of the labor force faces stagnant or diminishing salaries.

This has destroyed the myth that each generation in the US has the right to live better than their fathers, and at the same time it has undercut the belief in the consumerist lifestyle. It has often been said that it is important to distinguish necessities from consumer desires generated by the very consumer culture itself. All the above means that in the middle and long term, income and wealth distribution problems will become worse.

As mentioned, in the past whoever was willing to work hard with his hands could live well. Today in the knowledge economy there are other requirements to achieve a decent life. The goal requires an increase in labor productivity, which demands an education that develops analytical capacities, and an industrial development policy in modern sectors like protection of the environment and alternative energy.

Nevertheless, such a policy would not resolve the problems of those who have lost jobs in traditional sectors and who are unable to readapt to jobs with new skill sets.

Boom and crash of finances

During the 90s, the computer tech revolution led to economic growth, increased productivity and standards of living, but it also generated a bubble in the stock market, which collapsed in 2000.

Unlike what happened with IT in the 90s, in the 2000s there was no industry that led to productivity growth.

Changes in financial market regulation were also important. For a long time banks had lobbied for the government to relax Depression-era restrictions on certain financial activity. They successfully overturned these rules in 1995, during the Clinton administration. These changes permitted the surge of derivatives markets, and also facilitated mortgage lending. The idea was to make house ownership more accessible, for which requirements for obtaining loans were lowered. The banks could even grant loans for a value greater than the house price.

The changes in financial regulation promoted the growth of the finance sector and of housing demand. In the long term, housing prices in a city depend on its inhabitants' income. Construction absorbed lots of unskilled labor and paid good wages, and the ease of obtaining mortgages led to an increase in housing prices, but with stagnant productivity in the economy in general.

Furthermore, average salaries didn't rise, and the relationship between housing prices and salaries grew unsustainably, generating a bubble that burst starting in 2007.

The fiscal deficit

Simultaneously, president Bush got the country into a preemptive war in Iraq and a poorly-managed war in Afghanistan. In 2001 he fought for a reduction in income taxes in order to generate employment.

This reduction was programmed to expire at the end of 2010, when the maximum federal income tax rate would rise from 35 to between 36 and 39.4 percent.

During the Clinton years the federal budget arrived at a surplus of 2.37% of the GNP in 2000.

During the first year of the Bush mandate, the surplus decreased to 1.26% of the GNP, and from then on there were large deficits, between 2 and 3.5% of the GNP until 2008. In 2009 and 2010 this deficit grew exorbitantly as a result of the bailout of the finance sector, increases in unemployment payments, transfers to the state governments as part of the stimulus plan, and the growth in health and retirement costs for the aging population. The result was a deficit of 9.91% of the GNP in 2009, and 10.64% last year.

More debts instead of adjustments

During the past decade, when the country declared war on terrorism, the citizenry was not asked to save in order to finance war costs, as happened during the Second World War. Instead, the populace was encouraged to spend more.

Deregulation of the financial system made access to credit easier, and the real estate bubble made many people feel rich, which led to growth in mortgages and consumer spending.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were to a certain degree painless. The number of combatants is very small, weapons are highly advanced, and the families that have lost children are very few.

Meanwhile, the great majority of people in the US increased their consumption and decreased savings to about 1% of the GNP. It was as if someone had said to the people, "your contribution to spread democracy is to spend more". It would seem that the US had misread Descartes: I spend and consume, therefore I am.

In fact, a large part of the financing for the wars has come from abroad, mainly China and Japan, which have bought US treasury bonds.

On the other hand, the US has trade deficits in its balance of payments, which have continued for a long time, and have frequently been linked to the price of imported oil. During the last ten years the commercial deficits have always exceeded 3% of the GNP, and in 2006 and 2007 they exceeded 6%.

More unemployment and more inequality

The macroeconomic house of cards fell in 2008, and since then unemployment has been very high, between 9.5 and 10%. As noted, globalization has made it very difficult to maintain high salaries in the country, a problem that has been accentuated by bad policies and low levels of education.

Income and wealth have become more concentrated since the 1970s, a trend that was aggravated in the last decade and the Great Recession, to the point that today the richest one percent of the US populace receives 20% of income.

The above scenario recalls the majority of Latin American countries during the 1980s debt crisis. The difference is that the currency of the US is the world's major reserve currency, so the country doesn't have to recur to the much-maligned IMF. Hence the US will have to make a structural adjustment, but only via the free market, which raises many questions.

Adjustment without the IMF

Traditionally, structural adjustment programs are seen as coming forcibly from a hostile, exploitative outside world. In the case of the United States, the adjustment is necessary, and the more they wait to enact it, the more painful it will be. Nevertheless, the political system is designed to try to avoid adjustment.

The sad thing is that for a long time the country indebted itself abroad, but those funds were used mainly for consumption and war, which generated no better education or infrastructure, and at the same time the majority of people in the US didn't save for old age.

The reality is that an important part of the external financing was misspent, and now it is time to start repaying. But today the United States has high unemployment, and a grave fiscal problem.

Painful dilemmas

The solution to each of these situations requires contradictory decisions: tackling unemployment requires greater spending, while fiscal problems require higher taxes and lower spending.

Monetary policy in this case is ineffective, because interest rates are already at very low levels and investment isn't increasing. It's a classic case of the "liquidity trap".

The jobs created during the last decade in the construction industry will not come back, because the demand for housing simply will not grow appreciably in the next years.

The financial sector has also shrunken, which means that the two leaders of the prior bonanza won't help to solve the employment problem.

The country needs to strengthen transport and energy infrastructure, develop clean energy, and protect the environment. On the other hand, the aging population will require a larger expenditure in health and care for seniors.

At the same time, the technology gap has increased between those with modern skills and those with traditional skills, so education must make a great effort to address this.

Nevertheless, the aforementioned deficits don't allow the assignation of more resources to solve these problems without raising taxes.

A past that never was

To the above we must add the rise of the Tea Party, a right-wing group that distrusts the government, wants to diminish not only government spending but also market regulation, and dreams of returning to an idealized past of a United States that never existed.

The results of the last election showed the power of this group, and it is expected that the new Congress will block the better part of the reforms that president Obama would like to propose.

In its turn, the left wing of the Democratic party is very disappointed in Obama over the concessions he has made to conservatives. In effect, many young people that voted for Obama in 2008 abstained from the 2010 election.

In Congress the debates are ever-more ideological and there is less possibility of arriving at negotiated agreements.

The expiration of the income tax cuts from the Bush era is a clear example of the challenges facing the government.

The case of the tax reduction

Democrats proposed maintaining the lower tax rates for people whose incomes were below one million dollars, but this was unacceptable for the Republicans, who thus created a dilemma for the President: if he didn't agree to extend the Bush tax cuts to all payers, income tax would increase for everyone on the first of January, and since the Republicans would have the majority in the House starting then, they would make any more progressive option very difficult.

The Republican argument is that those who have high incomes deserve this money, and are the ones that invest and generate jobs. The problem is that in an open, globalized economy, many of them will invest in China and other emerging economies, and not in the US. In effect, during the low-tax Bush years, employment rose much less than in the prior decade, when capital gains taxes were much higher.

In the end, Obama accepted an extension of the tax cuts for two years, in the hope of using the issue of taxes on the rich in the 2012 political campaign, when he will run for reelection.

Today the government economists' line is that it's a bad idea to raise taxes in the middle of a slow, weak recovery from the Great Recession.

Of course, for many politicians it's never a good time to raise taxes, and they will always look to avoid structural adjustments.

A mob of lenders?

To compete in a globalized world, the United States must decrease military spending and end its two costly, useless wars, which waste a lot of resources. People in the US must increase savings and decrease consumption, in order to pay the foreign debt. The society has to control health costs, which now stand at 17% of GNP. And the country must improve its basic education.

On top of this, the country must decrease its dependence on foreign oil, improve infrastructure, and reverse the tendency of concentration of wealth and income.

These are structural problems that, if left unsolved, will weaken the country on the international stage, and generate huge internal tensions. Nevertheless, the solution to these structural problems can be put off as long as there are buyers for US Treasury Bills.

Since the IMF can't demand changes, these demands must come from those who have the bonds, because it is they who will lose if there is a panic in which no one buys US bonds and the dollar depreciates seriously.

China and Japan are the major holders of US debt (aside from the Federal Reserve system). Retirement funds in the US are another important holder of bonds.

History has few examples of dominant countries that indebt themselves too much and end up bankrupt. Some would offer the example of Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries. This might be a good example, as it illustrates how the adjustment process is slow, but in the end the country loses power and enters a grave crisis.

All the same, it is likely that in a globalized world, where there are citizens and not just serfs, and in which governments and not just bankers (like the Fuggers in the Spanish case) buy foreign bonds, pressure from international bondholders and pension funds might rise up and replace the IMF.

But it is unpredictable how this process might play out, and only time will tell.

Mining in the paramos

This is a summary of the environmental issues surrounding the proposed Angostura gold mine. This mine would be operated by the Canadian company Greystar, in an area called the paramo of Santurban. Colombia's paramos are high-altitude wetlands that have great value in terms of biodiversity and provision of clean drinking water for most of our population. Mining is legally forbidden in these areas, but concessions have nevertheless been granted to international mining companies. It remains to be seen whether President Santos will allow the despoiling of the Santurban and other paramos, or will stand up for preserving our country's natural heritage.

Sustainability and consumerism?

This is an article from a great sustainable urban planning website. It highlights a store in Paris called Merci that sells a mix of high-end furniture and crafts, designer and vintage clothes, and other accoutrements of a bohemian bourgeois lifestyle. All proceeds go to a nonprofit benefiting people in Madagascar. The author believes that such a store represents a possible compromise between consumerism and sustainability. But I wonder if compulsively buying a lot of stuff well beyond our basic needs can ever be compatible with living on a finite planet.

Speeches and visions

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This week's State of the Union address was uplifting. It seems like there may be a way out of our decades-long cultural, economic, and political stagnation in the US, if Congress can live up to Obama's vision (and if that vision is really feasible).







This week was also the 50-year anniversary of Kennedy's inauguration. His speech was pretty amazing too, laying out a progressive vision that we'd do well to emulate today. Respect for the UN and the sovereignty of poor countries, a striving for dialogue in the face of conflict, a call for nuclear disarmament--very bold. Of course Kennedy had the benefit of being at the helm of a nation at its economic and political apex, with a healthy mix of farming, industry, and services, not to mention relative economic equality and high education levels, girding its political life. Would Kennedy's vision have been swallowed up and lost in partisan bickering if he were alive today? Would anyone have paid attention amidst the maelstrom of nonstop twittering and infotainment?





Kennedy's speech brings me to the above speech by Rajiv Shah, head of USAID. USAID was created by Kennedy 50 years ago. Shah's vision is interesting, though I'm not entirely sold on the benefit of further "business-izing" development aid. Frankly, part of the problem with international aid is precisely that it is a large enterprise, or even a racket. So tying it even more closely to the private sector and employing more fuzzy MBA pseudo-science in its daily dealings doesn't seem to be a solution. Furthermore, I wonder how with much confidence we in the US can advise other countries on how to create thriving economic conditions, given that a major part of our economy has been a glorified Ponzi scheme for the past 20 years or so, and has now come crashing down. Nevertheless, this speech is also inspiring, and makes me feel like USAID is doing good things.

Ethical investing in Norway

This article details wikileaks cables about Norway's divesting itself of stock in unethical companies. Apparently Norway's petroleum exports have given it vast wealth that it invests in a sovereign fund, which is Europe's largest investor. The Norwegian government decreed that this fund would divest itself of stock in any companies it considered unethical. This means they don't want stock in nuclear arms manufacturers, oil companies that do business with dictatorships, or Walmart. Norway cited Walmart's consistent flaunting of labor standards in its suppliers and its own stores.

I like when the haves of the world use their power and money to inflict hurt on bad guys.

Don't know why I love you

In the next few days I intend to publish my review of Jonathan Franzen's new book, "Freedom", on this blog. In preparation, I thought I'd direct my readers to a song, "Don't know why I love you", which I think alludes well to Franzen's themes of love overcoming pain and reason and disillusion.


Here's a video of a 19-year-old Stevie Wonder singing the song. His version is grinding, soulful, spontaneous.





Here's the Jackson 5 version for comparison. It's much more polished and upbeat. A 12-year-old Michael really pulls out all the stops, and conveys a romantic anguish he surely couldn't have experienced firsthand yet.

Adopting in Haiti

This is a good article discouraging people's adopting Haitian kids. Basically it argues that many children in Haitian orphanages are not in fact orphans but kids whose desperate parents are offering them for adoption in order to save them from poverty. Adopting such kids ends up being a big mess and a heartbreak for everyone involved.

I appreciate reading about the difficulties that can pop up when you adopt kids in poor countries. My wife and I are considering adopting our next kids, and surely in our country riven by civil war and grinding poverty, the same problems detailed in the Haiti article are real possibilities.

A hard winter in Colombia

Contrary to popular belief, we in the tropics do have seasons, even those of us who live close to the Equator. Earth's tilted axis affects us just as it affects those in the temperate latitudes. In our case in Colombia, for example, from May or so to maybe August, the sun is to the north of us, while the rest of the year it's to the south, just as in Chicago the winter sun is much lower on the southern horizon than is the summer sun.

Also contrary to what many believe, even here in Colombia, we are not in the southern hemisphere (except a little slice in our Amazon region). Most of the country is in the northern hemisphere, just above the Equator. So our summer (when we're most angled toward the sun) goes from May to September or so, just as in the US.

Nevertheless, we in Colombia confusingly call our hemispheric summer "winter", and our hemispheric winter "summer". This is thanks to those crazy Spaniards who colonized us. They came from a Mediterranean climate, where winters were cool and rainy, and summers hot and dry. These illiterate conquistadors likely didn't know much about hemispheres or meteorological phenomena, so when they got to Colombia they called our dry season "summer", and our rainy season "winter". But it so happens that in the tropics, the dry season occurs during our planetary winter, and the wet season occurs in summer, precisely the opposite of in the Mediterranean.

Here's a demonstration of how tropical seasons work. We'll call the part of the planet where the sun is directly overhead the "functional Equator". If our planet's axis were at a perfect right angle to the Sun, this functional Equator would correspond exactly to the midpoint between northern and southern hemispheres (the drawn, fixed line identified as the Equator on maps). Since our planet's axis is tilted 23 degrees, the fixed line we normally call the Equator (passing through Ecuador, the Congo, and Indonesia) only has the Sun directly overhead at two times of the year, the March and September Equinoxes. The rest of the year the Sun is either to the north (March to September) or to the south (September to March) of our fixed Equator line, so the functional Equator moves throughout the year.

This functional Equator, the point at which the sun falls directly overhead, is on average the hottest part of the planet. A column of hot air rises at this point, carrying with it lots of moisture from the Earth's surface.

Eventually this hot, moist air hits the stratosphere, which keeps it from going off into outer space. The air bounces off the stratosphere and is detoured to the north and the south. As the air has been rising from the functional Equator, it has been gradually cooling and losing water, which means that the functional Equator at any given time is where the most rain falls on the planet.

The northward- and southward-moving air keeps losing water along its path, so the rainfall diminishes as you move away from the functional Equator. Eventually the now-dry air is so cool that it falls to the Earth's surface again.
This point on the planet, where the dry air falls, is very dry. In fact, it comprises a dry belt running across the entire planet from East to West. Have you ever noticed that most of the Earth's deserts occur around 30 degrees latitude? Namibia, Australia, and the Atacama desert in the south, and the Sonora, Sahara, and Central Asia in the north.


This dry falling air in turn creates another convection cycle, creating other moist regions outside of the dry belts.



Because Earth's axis is tilted, the humid functional Equator and its accompanying dry belts move with respect to the planet's surface. Let's say we're at the northern limit of the tropics, like northern India. Our rainy season would go from around April to October, peaking in June, when the planet's alignment looks like the image above. While northern India is raining a lot in these months, Peru, at the southern limit of the tropics, is very dry. Just beyond these places, Italy's Mediterranean climate is dry in the summer months, while Chile's Mediterranean climate is wet at the same time. The cycle reverses itself during the northern hemisphere winter. This is the reason behind India's famous summer monsoons and very dry winters, and Italy's dry summers and wet winters.
We in Colombia, on the other hand, are located deeper within the tropics. So the rain hits us hard from maybe March to June, has a brief respite in July and August as the functional Equator passes to the north of us, and then the rain returns from September to November or so.

However, due to global climate change, our seasons are less reliable these days. The rainy season isn't always so rainy, and the dry season isn't always so dry. Or sometimes the rainy season is much wetter than normal, or the dry season much drier. Last year we had an exceptionally long and dry dry season, due in part to the seven-year El Nino phenomenon. This year we're in La Nina, which has poured rain down well into December, flooding much of the country. There are millions of weather refugees, mainly in the low, hot valleys surrounding our major rivers.

One quite surreal story that is typical of Colombia's daily magic realism involves the town of Gramalote. This small town in the Norte de Santander province recently disappeared. A combination of plate tectonics and heavy rains did it in. Much of our region of Colombia has weird geological problems. Roads constantly buckle at faultlines, and once our town's airport simply sunk into the ground. I guess this low-level tectonic activity is preferable to being in a hot earthquake zone (though quakes aren't unheard of here either). Anyway, Gramalote was apparently located on an opening faultline, which started moving and cracking all the buildings in the town. Then the heavy rains created landslides and exacerbated the opening faults. So in mid-December Gramalote was evacuated, and as far as I know has been swallowed by the Earth by now.

Here is a more detailed account in English of what happened in Gramalote.

Spoof video on eating healthy

This is a really funny video from the Onion, imagining a Food and Drug Administration official exasperated with people's failure to eat healthy.

Third World Green Daddy Part 12: Ambient Pollution

Recently some friends visited me and my family here in Colombia. We had a great time, and I think they really got to see some special things in the state of Boyaca.

One day as we were running errands, one of my friends commented on the bad air quality in our town. He said the air smelled bad, and he could feel it burning his throat. I was really surprised, because I've never noticed this. When I first came to Colombia some years ago, I certainly took note of the bad air in Bogota. I even got violent allergies whenever I went outside, and these days I still notice the change in air quality when I go to the nation's capital. But in our smaller, windier town, surrounded by green fields and forests, I'd felt like the air was a lot better. Granted, our busier streets smell of exhaust, but for the most part the air seems clean. My friend's observation made me wonder if in fact I'm just accustomed to the pollution in my town. I hope not, because if so, it means my baby son is inhaling polluted air all the time.

What might be behind the ostensibly worse air pollution in my town as opposed to a place like Chicago? It could be that Colombia's emissions regulations are less strict or not well-enforced. This seems unlikely though, because you're required to undergo an emissions test every two years. Maybe there's an exception for trucks and buses, which belch out a lot of black smoke and seem to be responsible for much of the smell and pollution. Two-cycle motorcycles also are common here, which means we've got a lot of burning motor oil in our air, too.

On this note, more of Colombia's traffic is comprised of buses and trucks than in the US. Personal cars are not the norm here. This factor would lower air quality due to the prevalence of big diesel vehicles, but it means that we in Colombia emit less CO2 per person.

Or it could be that my friend is simply exhibiting what seems to be a common practice among people from the US: finding or imagining ways in which the US is better than other places. Maybe this tendency is universal, and everyone thinks his or her country is the best, but we from the US appear to have a real penchant for grading and judging places vis a vis our own homeland.

At any rate, if my town's air quality really is as bad as my friend thinks, then it's a real strike against the way we live. No matter how much personal responsibility my wife and I may take for improving our local surroundings, the overwhelming ambient pollution would be doing us and our baby a lot of damage. This would apply not only to vehicular air pollution, but also to things like lead in paint, toxics used in packaging, etc. We've always known that often environmental and health regulations are not very strict in developing countries, so you are subject to a lot of harmful stuff beyond your control.

My friend's impressions of our town's air quality are a very real illustration of how that increased ambient pollution affects people's lives.

Erratum

A friend recently pointed out to me an error in my last blog post (which was admittedly long ago--with the new baby and work I'm not finding as much time to write). I had sloppily read the cited article on Colombian military casualties, and took "bajas" to mean deaths as opposed to casualties, which is its meaning in this case. So the post should read that there were 2500 military casualties (deaths plus wounded) in Colombia in 2010, not 2500 deaths, and 790 NATO casualties in Afghanistan, not deaths. The figure of 3000 Pakistani military deaths since 2003 still stands.

War casualties in Colombia and Afghanistan

This article presents official numbers that indicate that in 2010 more than 2500 Colombian soldiers have been killed in our country's internal conflict. These deaths have been dealt by a guerrilla that is supposedly much-weakened after eight years of sustained military pressure. As a point of comparison, US and NATO troops in Afghanistan suffered about 700 deaths in 2010. This other article indicates that Pakistan's armed forces have lost 3000 members since 2003 in their fight against insurgents.

Supposedly Colombia is much more peaceful and our conflict has wound down a lot in the past few years. But if more soldiers are dying here than in the chaotic mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, we're in worse shape than the New York Times travel section lets on. I'm torn on the matter. Of course I want Colombia's reputation to improve, and as someone directly involved in tourism I want more people to visit our amazing, fascinating country. But at the same time I don't want to sugarcoat or hide our horrid civil war.

Chinese and Spanish

This is an article from Nicholas Kristof about what languages your kids should be studying. He says that it's good for kids to learn Chinese, but the real go-to language that people in the US should be learning is Spanish. Spanish is all over the US, but more importantly it's the language of most of our country's neighbors, which all happen to be in times of rapid economic expansion and increased political relevance. Beyond this, Spanish is not hard to learn for an English-speaker, at least not compared to Chinese.

This article struck a chord with me for a number of reasons. First off, I speak Spanish, love it as a language, and agree with Kristof that it is ever more relevant in today's world, especially today's US. Secondly, I am studying Chinese myself, slowly but surely. I know about 60 words and their symbols--only about 2940 to go before I'm fluent! And honestly, apart from having to learn lots of symbols, I find Chinese to be an easy language to learn for an English speaker. The grammar, tenses, adjectives, etc. are oddly similar to English--no tricky conjugations to master, for example.

Sadly, Kristof points out that many people are ignoring Spanish in the US. My experience confirms this. Growing up, my public grammar school's gifted program taught us [decadent] French as our foreign language, while the "regular" kids learned [vibrant and relevant] Spanish. These days the gifted program is teaching Chinese! It seems that Spanish is too proletarian, too common, too immigrant-y for high-achieving people to pay attention to. It's their loss though--while the children of the elite are stumbling along in bad Chinese, their Spanish-speaking counterparts will be making new deals and new friends in the US and the hemisphere!

So I urge my readers to go out and learn Spanish. It's not hard to do so in the US--there are schools, neighborhoods, newspapers, libraries, TV shows, and any other number of resources to learn the language. My mother is almost 70, and she's becoming conversational in Spanish after just a year and a half or so of semi-intensive study!

Third World Green Daddy Part 11: Infantile Ramblings, and the Joys of Local

Our Sam's about ten days old now, and we've been busy welcoming him into our life. There have been a lot of things to do, some of them daily affairs and some one-time shots. My wife gives him massages, and I diligently put him face-down as much as I can, because I read somewhere that it's good for a kid's development to spend some of his waking hours on his tummy and not his back.

On that note, my wife and I have arrived at sort of an international compromise as far as sleeping goes. I grew up in the States hearing that it was important to lay babies on their backs when they sleep in order to avoid Sudden Infant Death. But in Colombia, people are more concerned about kids lying on their backs and choking on vomit. I looked into the matter a bit, and found that there isn't such compelling evidence either way. So we've decided to sleep the baby on his side.

Sam is a big, healthy baby. Even in his newborn photos, he looks a bit like the babies they use in movies that are supposedly a newborn in the movie, but the baby actor clearly is a few months old! Sam is low-hassle, like we try to be. He only wakes up once or twice in the night to eat, and only cries when he's hungry. Otherwise he's either sleeping, or awake and looking around inquisitively. This doesn't mean I don't always worry about dropping him, or smushing his fontanelle, or Sam's exploding from overexertion when he has to shit. But I know we lucked out as far as early childrearing goes.

I like to think that Caro's complication-free birth and Sam's being such a good, easy baby have to do with our own merits. We eat well, don't have too many bad habits, sleep well, try not to sweat the small stuff. And of course it's always flattering to think that one's good fortune is actually one's just dessert. But life doesn't work like that. As my mom says, there are plenty of healthy, decent, responsible people who have tough labor or awful kids, and there are some really horrid people that have laid-back, wonderful children. It's sort of a crap shoot.

We had to register Samuel at the local notary. Normally this is done by the father, because in Colombia it's customary for the mother to spend forty days of "diet", basically staying in the house, taking care of the baby, and recuperating and adjusting to life as a mom. But my wife accompanied us to register Sam, much to the consternation of the women working at the notary office. Likewise, when we went to affiliate him to my wife's health insurance, we got a scolding for leaving the house so soon after Sam's birth. My wife explained annoyedly to the health insurance people that in order to get medical attention for the baby, we have to affiliate him, and since the insurance company's procedure involves having both the baby and the mother present, she didn't see any other way of doing things.

We also got a special piece of furniture made for Sam's crib




The crib had been on the floor, but my wife Caro didn't want to have to bend over every time to pick up the baby, so we ordered a sort of stand with a raised border so the crib doesn't fall off. This also has the advantage of numerous other shelves underneath, so now our room is a bit less cluttered with baby paraphernalia.

Normally one buys this style of furniture--pine wood, stained dark--in Puntalarga, a town in Boyaca. In our town there is a store run by Puntalarga carpenters that you can buy direct from. We've already had a desk, a bookshelf, and a shoe rack made to spec by them. But for this crib stand, they said they were backed up with orders until January. We ran across another furniture maker, this one in the town of Arcabuco, and he made the thing for us in a week, for $20US! So it looks like we've found a new go-to furniture maker. In the house we're rehabbing, my mother wants to furnish her room entirely with stuff made by the Arcabuco guy. He sells at about a sixth of the price of the Puntalarga people. I like patronizing local artisans like those of Puntalarga, but if their prices are so high, it means they've already got a lot of demand and renown, so I prefer to switch to lesser-known but equally local sources.

Speaking of local sources, I wanted to talk a bit about the grocery-buying practices of a Third World green family. We eat a lot of fresh produce. Not only fruits and vegetables, but also many of our starchy staples are bought fresh--potatoes, Andean parsnip, plantain, cassava. So we go to the fresh market every week or two. My mother is always amazed to see us bring home fifty pounds or so of fresh produce, often for under $30US! Even our main Western-style staple food, bread, we buy fresh every day or two at the bakery below our house.

In our town there are two marketplaces, each of which operates two days a week. One market is big and bustling, with lots of stalls, peasants milling about, discarded produce on the ground, stray dogs nosing around--what one envisions when one thinks of a typical Third World market. We sometimes go there, but the distance and the dirtiness often discourage us. At this market you can get a wide range of things, and cheap, but you have to go to a lot of stalls to get everything you need. The other market is a bit more upscale, as far as my small peasant city goes. It's cleaner, with fewer, bigger stalls. We like to go there, because we have a stall we always go to, and they have in stock almost everything we need.

For the stuff we don't get fresh, we go to one of a number of supermarkets in our town. There is Carrefour, which is like Walmart but French-owned. I don't like going there. It's expensive, poorly-run, characterless, and any profits go to French shareholders. Really it's only good when we want certain luxury imported items, like Spanish goat cheese, which we're sort of addicted to. There is another big chain store called Exito, which was originally Colombian, but now a large part of it is owned by Casino, another French megaconglomerate.

We have a small supermarket down the block called Fami, and I like going there. It is affiliated with Comfaboy, a local workers' pension fund. When Fami doesn't have what we need, we go to Chispazo, which is a large supermarket chain that I believe only exists in our town. It has the low prices and large selection of a Carrefour, but with better, personalized service, and we know that profits go to our Colombian neighbors and not far-flung capitalists. For quick needs like gummy worms, cookies, or sliced bread, we go to a corner store called Vertice, which also sells little locally-made health foods like quinua pancakes and medicinal supplements.

As if I weren't already convinced of the merits of shopping local, yesterday I was again reminded that local is better. Our car was filthy after days of hauling rotten wood from our house rehab project. I wanted to get it washed before our night drive to the New Year's Eve party, but everywhere I went was closing at noon or so, so they wouldn't take my car. I went to gas stations and large professional-looking car washes all over town, but none would serve me. Finally, as I returned home crestfallen, I remembered a parking lot-cum-carwash nearby, and tried there. Sure enough, there were open and happy to clean my car. It was a father and son team that didn't mind working on New Year's Eve, and I could be confident that my six dollars were going straight to them, not to some big business owner or franchise that doesn't even live in my city.

On that note, one of Sam's cutest little shirts says "Locally Grown" on the front. My cousin got it for me in the States. It's a funny shirt, and a nice acknowledgment of the importance of sourcing locally. The only problem is that it's made in Bangladesh! Such are the ironies of the United States of Outsourcing.

Last night I started to read Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" just before we went to a friend's house for New Year's Eve. Thus far I haven't found it to be a stinging critique of all that is the US, as David Brooks has alleged in a review. I have though picked up on sort of the middle-class guilt, or even self-loathing, that seems to be an important force in the US. Anyway, as my wife and I drove to our friend's party with our child in his newly-installed car seat, I felt sort of thrilled to be young and middle-class, starting a new family. I think this is something nice about being middle-class in the Third World. Because it's somewhat of a rarity, and not taken for granted, you don't feel the type of hand-wringing contrition that some bourgeoisie seem to feel in the US or other wealthy countries. This has its ugly side to, as the relatively well-off in the Third World are often unconscious of their good fortune, insensitive to the systemic poverty around them, or simply insistent on the personal merits that have lifted them up the economic ladder. But I think my wife and I, having seen poverty and wealth in developed countries and the Third World, are well-placed to appreciate what we have without feeling a paralyzing culpability about our life.