Whoring, and Shakira sings the World Cup song

This is a disgrace to all the fantastic South African musicians. There are at least five groups that could easily come up with a better and more popular song than that one.

If that song and video did not do enough to perpetuate African stereotypes we have this, the Roberto Cavalli designed outfit for the opening show:

 Could we conceive of an African skirt that is not made of grass!? Could we? All she needs is a bone through her nose.

It is as annoying to see so many Africans lending a hand to the media creating this pantomime. A perfect example is all the West African football stars in commercials acting like they are going home to Africa to play football. It could not be further from the truth. First of all South Africa is nothing like West Africa. Not in language, nor style, nor climate, nor ethnicity nor... ok wait, their skin color may be the same at times. Also, quite unfortunately, an overwhelming number of South Africans hate other Africans. Its like a Chinese person saying they are going home, home to Indonesia!

It reminds me of when I was a young lad staying at a cheap all-inclusive resort at the coast of Kenya. I was fortunate enough to witness the hotel entertainment for one evening. It consisted of several Kenyan men and women dancing on stage with green plastic grass skirts and fake animal skin to some kind of obnoxious, over-produced Kenyan music. Even at that tender young age, and after a few too many rums, I knew there was a reason why I especially did not enjoy that particularly uninspired piece: for the entire audience, it justified their ignorance and ill-founded prejudice.  


It is increasingly clear that this World Cup, contrary to the lyrics of that song, is not for Africa the burlesque, nor South Africa, nor the majority of South Africans.



(That being said, I am still excited for the World Cup!)

A dollar a day keeps the doctor away

The arbitrary measure of poverty that the World Bank concocted out of thin air several decades ago, and the language that surrounds that famous "dollar a day", is unfortunately stuck in our discourse on poverty.


Widespread efforts have been made to redefine poverty, focusing on access to basic amenities such as health care, habitation and education. A broader view, as encouraged by Aramrtya Sen among others, would analyze poverty in terms of an "individuals potential to function", which is to focus on what can be achieved with a certain level of income and the barriers to opportunity. This highlights constraints beyond access to basic necessities, such as broader monetary conditions and power relations.


These ideas, although pushing the concept in the right direction, often miss the blaring problem that the language of the World bank has created. 


"A dollar a day": doesn't it sound like a magic dollar arrives at the doorstep every day? Ok, perhaps you don't explicitly think like that, but the phrase certainly misses the biggest problem with income for the poor; the risks associated with uncertainty and inconsistency. 


As Eleni G. Medhin, the director of the Ethiopian Commodities Exchange, once suggested, the risks that a poor farmer must bear are greater than any speculator, investor or human being on earth. If the rains fail, people will die. (For those relying on income from medium sized firms, unpredictable policy changes seem to be most crucial.)


Buzzing around the Kenyan countryside with my friend Teddy, I came upon this cow carcass.  Prior to my visit the rains did not come, and then they did not come again. As Teddy put it, "This Maasai was a millionaire, now look at what he has got."

Where is the next dollar coming from? Who is it owed to? These are critical questions for those living with no social safety net.

Photo of the week - Liwa

Every eight years the human body generates 100 trillion cells. That is, every single cell you had eight years ago is now no longer a part of you; you are completely new. Therefore you are not what you were, and you are not the stuff of which you are made.

Unless... we are like a sand dune; ever giving and ever receiving grains of sand from dunes around, yet somehow maintaining a consistent guise. We are never static, never solid... unless we are captured in a pretty picture.

Liwa Dunes, like the meringue of my dreams, rise hundreds of meters from the desert floor

Thoughts on Migration Innovation

Migration is a major issue. Yet is seems to always take a back seat to other issues, such as climate change, trade, aid, and so on. Ok, migration does recieve attention from the media and some political elites, but innovation of the concepts and practices of migration and migration law is scarcely heard of.

Lant Pritchett is one of my favourite authors on the subject of migration and a true innovator. Here and elsewhere argues that the world ought to adopt a system that is more like the UAE (without the widespread abuse).

 I agree with him, there ought to be more international migration in the world. I don't know exactly how this ought to happen, but Dr. Pritchett has some good answers. I understand that tensions can arise when immigrant populations threaten the livelihood of domestic citizens, but in most cases the benefits to migration far outweigh the costs.

Here in the UAE, foreigners (migrant workers) make up around 70% of the population. It is uniquely the highest per capita population of expatriates in any country on earth. The legal system that governs foreigners and their rights, is just as unique.

Basically, we have no rights. No right to a fair trial, no right to free speech, no right to freely associate, nothing. As such, human rights are frequently violated. But what are the benefits to this system? Over the next few days I will ponder this question and post when I come up with any insightful ideas.

*

The bottom line is that the restriction of international migration has a critical, depressive effect on the wages of the poorest people in the world. 

A story I heard once will help to illustrate my point. In California during the 1950's, many Mexican migrants worked the tomato fields. In the late 50's a new international migration law was passed which restricted the flow of workers across the border. As a result the owners of the fields could not afford to produce tomatoes any more and the Mexicans were out of work. 

For a short while the fields fell fallow. Quickly, though, a machine was invented that mechanized the process that once relied on the hands of labourers. Tomato production went through the roof, profits to California land owners soared and the wages of the poor in Mexico fell accordingly.

One could argue that this was in fact good for the world because the migration law forced innovation and led to higher returns. However, this labour saving technology, which is akin to restricting labour movements across boarders, depresses the wages of the poor. Which is more concerning, the returns to land in California or the wages of the worlds poorest people?

Until we can all move freely to wherever best suits our tastes and abilities, labour saving technology is bad for the world. Restrictions on migration not only keep poor people poor, but in light of modern innovation, also hurt the prospects of wages rising, ever.

Its also unfair! Just ask people:

Website of the Week - Structurally Maladjusted

Written by two audacious and delightful gentlemen out of Washington DC, Structurally Maladjusted is a blog that keeps pushing the right buttons. Mostly focusing on Latin America and US foreign policy towards LatAm, it digs and jabs - these guys know their stuff.

Any preconceived notions about anything Latin American you may have had will be throughly ripped apart and left for dead. This is not your average flaky commentary inculcated by the rhetoric of either populist leaders or American partisans - it is thorough. So get into it.

SuthEfrica

This video doesn't mention the 'tin can town' outside of Cape Town that I posted about earlier. South Africa has been building oppressive structures since the 1930s and somehow cant stop. They plan out places for poor people to live that will keep them poor. With no space for society, no space for creativity and no space for business, these oppressive designs have kept and will keep poor black people poor.

Song of the week - The Boss

Because the Godfather knows how to cool us down on this hot Thursday in the desert. Get down!

Rambling On About Value

Sitting in a business meeting yesterday I heard the word value in about ten different phrases, and not once was it clearly explicated.

Value is a concept that is vexes economists and political activists alike, especially when they attempt to confabulate across the aisle. Adam Smith and Karl Marx, two eminent thinkers that have been fallaciously placed in these two camps respectively, can help us understand what value has come to mean in our modern, advanced capitalist world.

Adam Smith, perhaps the most misinterpreted philosopher ever, wrote about two kinds of value, use value and exchange value: "Nothing is more useful than water but it will scarce purchase anything, scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use, but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it."

Delineating between use value and exchange value holds no water these days and this is principally due to the Marginal Revolution, which ushered in the notion of relative scarcity (which Smith was obviously familiar with). Diamonds are scarce, water is not (yet), therefore they hold vastly different values. Obviously there is more to value than this, but the marginal way of thinking about utility is powerful and resilient.

Where the neoclassical economists that followed the Marginal Revolution have an abstract notion of utility, Smith, aware of the effect of scarcity, retained a notion of value-in-use. He explained that the real price of something "to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it." He continued (in what can be considered today a Marxist fashion) by claiming, "Labour alone, therefore, never varying in its own value is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated." Smith believed wages would tend toward equality across all vocations in the long run. Tell that to the Reganites!

Where Smith grappled with the notion of labour, time and effort creating exchange value, Marx went one step further by establishing in his labour theory of value the notion of 'socially necessary' labour time as determinant of wages. The socially necessary (or normal) time it takes to do something in an industry is socially contrived and therefore dependent upon power and politics. 


Marx saw labour as a personal ability to make one's work available to capitalists, those in power. Any value that the labour created beyond what it took to replenish the labourers ability to work, that 'socially necessary' amount, he called surplus value. This, he thought, was the ultimate source of profit and ultimate form of exploitation.

The notion of tying together value and power is one that ought to be taken seriously, despite the efforts of economists at removing dirty politics from the realm of economics. This concept of a political/labour theory of value has been all but lost in today's economic discourse, as most modern economists argue that things are valued solely by what would be given up to obtain them.

Though I disagree with Marx and Smith about the existence of a cardinal measure of value, their labour value, Marx was right about the power relations inherent in value. Those in power (corporations...) will do as much as possible to extract value from people and parallel to Marx's theory, one great way they have found out how to do this is through advertising. 

Today we have advertising that helps is to value things more and more. Advertisers have cleverly created an entire new notion of value where people can enjoy not only a fictional story behind a product while consuming it, but also feel as if they are a part of a select group of people that can afford to enjoy such products. This may afford them some feeling of conspicuous leisure through what Thorstein Veblen would call 'pecuniary emulation'.  

Many stories could be told about the distorted value that advertising creates. Particularly tragic are those that involve children; they get 'em when they are young. Anne Becker observes the consequences of US advertising on Fijian youth. In the first three years of US ads eating disorders went from affecting no child to affecting fifteen percent of children. A more recent study in the United States found that banning advertising of junk food could cut the number of overweight children between the ages of 3 and 11 by 10% and the number of overweight adolescents by 12%. If the happiness of a child depends less on what appears to be given to other children, parents need not keep up with the Joneses and so will spend less on such unnecessary items.

I would like to think of value as the capability of a good to increase the well being of a person or a society. Of course this is quite open to interpretation, but even being phrased in this manner, I believe, ought to strip away or at least call into question many of the social constructions that inflate the value of goods in our modern advanced capitalist world. 


How does a diamond increase well being?

"Just MPESA his ear back on"

Nairobi, Kenya, 6am: Legishon, a night watchman, stumbles drunk to work, work he should have been doing since the evening before. He fumbles with the keys to the gate of this modest plot of land in the suburbs that he has been guarding for the past 4 months. Finally managing to remove the lock and chain, he swings open the gate to find the gardener, Anthony, a Luya man of about 36 years. The watchman slams the gate closed loudly and points his finger daringly in the face of the gardener. "You Luya are not to be trusted, why are you here watching the house?" he imposes. Angered by the late watchman, and tired from the sleepless night, the gardener shouts back, insulting the guard and his people, the Maasai. Legishon picks up a rock and throws it at Anthony's head, splitting his ear open wide. 

At the hospital Anthony is denied treatment because he has no money, no insurance and no prospects for paying. He calls his employer Theodore. Theodore picks up his phone, acknowledges the gravity of the situation, presses a few buttons on the phone and sits back, satisfied that he has helped out his injured gardener. He sips his beer and continues on with his evening.

It is that easy. In Kenya, if you want to send money to your family, if you want to pay for a bill, if you want to put down collateral on a purchase, you press a few buttons on your phone and presto, money is sent to anyone with a cellphone and an MPESA account. And like that indeed, the doctor received payment and stitched Anthony's ear back on.

Most urban people in Kenya have a MPESA account, some 10 milllion out of 30 in the entire country, and keep it well stocked with money incase a situation, like this one, arises. It has revolutionized bank transfers in Kenya.

One downside to MPESA is that it is a monopoly. Being a monopoly, MPESA kiosks can charge substantial fees for transferring and restocking accounts with money.

Can you think of any other reasons why MPESA might have any adverse repercussions? A potential one was recounted to me by Theodore himself: Men in Kenya often leave their home to find work elsewhere in the country and, when they can, bring money back home to provide for their family. Now, with MPESA, they don't have to travel back home, they can simply send it back, and the family never gets to see their father/husband.

Other than that, any ideas? All in all, I think it is a fantastic system and I wish it would spread around the world!

Prospects for the poor in South Africa

For a previous post about FIFA in South Africa, I hoped to find some better figures to share with you. I found some:

According to Citi, FIFA profited 1.8 million USD from the World Cup in Germany, equivalent to 0.8% of South Africa's GDP, and are expected to better that figure. Grant Thornton has predicted the boost to South Africa's economy will be around 0.4% of their GDP.

Though disconcerting, this is of course neoliberalspeak. What is most upsetting is the news of evictions and restrictions. Like in many major events in cities with high populations of poor people, there is a rug under which authorities hope to sweep any and all 'blemishes'. People are being sent to squatter camps.

Watch the video.

Disgraceful.

"Blikkiesdorp" - Afrikaans for "Tin Can Town".