Economic Development

Donkeys and Carrots

People are not essentially economic creatures.  They have to be created as such.  They then must be maintained as such.

People must be successfully convinced that economic development is in their best interest.  The world can be better than that which already exists.  That there can be a better world depends on the ethical assumption that there should be a better world.  And the rewards of economic development have to be tangible, visible, and just within reach.  These convictions are the single most important accomplishment of the economic development machine.  Perpetuation of those convictions, with or without their realization, is what keeps the purveyors of economic development in power.

Economic development is a keystone in the foreign aid industry.  It is not wholly important that the institutions of foreign aid realize claims that they are responsible for improvements in the quality of people's lives.  What is important is that each purveyor of economic development, more or less, actively engages people in the rituals of such development: meetings, trainings, visible project activities, reports, or the formalities of accepting various gifts (e.g. water wells, grain mill machines, storage buildings).  In the least, it is certain that each purveyor is obliged to ensure that the rituals transpire if they are to maintain and receive the benefits of their administrative position.

Economic development differs from economics in the following ways.  Economics is a word reflecting the fact that people engage in trading relationships.  Different cultures have different premises on which that trade is based.  Trade may be barter, redistribution, profit, tribute payment, political communication, and more.  Economics as a goal in itself, as a science, and as the operative manner in which people relate to each other is a reflection of a particular culture and, where such economics is actively promoted, a reflection of a particular interest group.  Nobody promotes something unless it is in their interest to do so.  Not your interest.  Their interest.

For the purveyors of economic development it is necessary that the majority of people believe that such development is good and natural.  Just true.  Like God was once true.  Development must also be naturally monetized.  Money is its measure.  True + natural + a way to measure + universal = monolithic.  Which is how we get to this thing called : the marketplace.  Not a bazaar.  Not Adam Smith’s market, which was a physical place.  Just a place that everyone has to believe in.  So they sell to it, borrow from it, invest in it rarely, but never actually own it.  The purveyors of economic development depend on the acceptance of those beliefs.  That is, the hopes of the ignorant and pauperized must rest in promises and doctrine.

An analogy:  Someone builds a house and calls it development.  An improvement has been made.  In order to call the building of a house an improvement, what preceded the house had to be perceived, or made to be perceived, as undesirable or inadequate.  Under the guise of economic development, the building of a house contributes to economic growth (the cumulative production of one more dwelling unit - a good) and satisfies a basic human need.  Alternatively, if putting a roof over one's head is simply a way of life, the state of being perpetuated, there was no vacuum, no need to be satisfied.  One is simply doing what one does.  This is not an improvement on being human.  There was no cumulative measurement of one more house, meaning more equals better.  Having a roof over one's head, or having ten roofs over ten people's heads, remains utterly human.  Perhaps this explains in part why in provincial towns, even cities like Bamako or in much older countries like Turkey, the urban infrastructure exudes a sense of a village bursting its seams.  Invariably, no matter how colossal a city like Istanbul, you can walk to what you need.

Housing only becomes ‘development’ through definition, a definition of what a human need is or what a better house is.  People must be taught that they have needs and taught to desire what they do not have.  Under the rubric of economic development, people have to learn that accumulation has greater value than moderation.  Whatever happened to building a house and calling it home?  Only recently did some people start calling bricks and mortar a need to be fulfilled through economic development.  We sink even deeper when we begin talking about housing markets.

The promise of a brighter future that is materially attainable is strikingly similar to appeals made by ideologies of persuasion other than that of economic development.  Access to a spiritual paradise, always just beyond the moment, often only after death, is mediated by third parties in other contexts.  Careful consideration should be given to this parallel.  It is the promise maker who experiences palpable benefit now, not the promised.

Money Talks

 Hypocracy and Contradiction in Good Intentions

Bangkok.  Of all places on the planet.  Once a swamp.  Then the Venice of the Orient.  Now macrocephalic conurbation.  Who would have thought?  A great big city ten times bigger than any other city in the same country.  Of course, Bangkok was not always like that.  Once upon a time, some eighty percent of folks lived quietly on the margins, growing food, doing the peasant thing.  The city of canals home to royalty, courtiers, and a meditating class.  Times have changed.  With machines, industry, and easy communication, humans have migrated en mass to the big city.  Bangkok is now steaming full with plenty more coming.  They quit their villages.  Even sneak in from over national boundaries.  Come in the back of a pickup truck.  Find a few baht to ride a bus.  Walk.  A steady influx of bipeds from every imaginable far flung corner possible. About one in every six people in Thailand lives here.  Or ten million people, if you like.  The figure grows with each season of regional poverty in the vast countryside and the magnetic pull of urban living.

What is the attraction?  Well, in the steamy bed of iniquity, air conditioners are popular.  The machines hum away in the remotest corners of the tiniest streets, fossil fuel consumption de rigueur.  Food is popular.  Purveyors of digestibles hawk from city sidewalks, serving everything from deep fried bananas to toast to barbecued chicken.  Fast food gastronomists discover heaven, maybe rice with vegetables and eggs whipped up quick, outpacing the American fast food record in a twinkling.  Small motorcycles are popular.  Adrenaline rushes for those who care to dare the paved arterial vortexes of hurtling steel boxes on wheels.  And visiting Bangkok is also popular, a kind of itinerant population.  Tourists, as everyone knows, flock to Bangkok.  They are good for certain kinds of businesses, not excluding a hopping sex trade, though the gross part of this nocturnal activity remains driven by domestic demand.

Yes, the popular things of Bangkok.  All contributing to an unwitting evolution, such that Thailand’s cultural heritage is in the throes of dramatic change.  Foreigners, especially white foreigners, carry with them the mythology of equivalencies between material wealth and happiness, inspiring transitions in socio-economic behaviour of exogenous rather than indigenous origin.  Air conditioners alter metabolisms, they define where, how, and in what human beings are willing to reside.  Motorcycles, all vehicles, affect communication, time, expenditures, oh so many relationships in complex ways.  New foods and fast foods change tastes, cooking styles, mobility, health, perceptions on time, and more.

However, for all the change in an urbanizing and industrializing culture, not much concern need be expressed by golden-days sentimentalists.  There is no need to decry lost traditions and the homogenization of world cultures.  After all, commerce has yet failed to melt colonial rich Europe into one pot.  New nations boil up persistently in the United Nations stew, peoples loudly proclaiming their nationhoods.  Some even say that democracies, the poster gals of conventional political wisdom, are our differences given free voice, a coming of age in an accelerating global economy.  Who is to judge their trajectories?

 Odd, though, it seems, this crass choice of industrial culture.  Machines and consumption and a life valued by wages are all the rage in Singapore, Brazil, Turkey, China of course.  Why the apparent sell out on a way of life as aesthetically simple (not simplistic) as Thailand’s may once have been?

Bangkok is quite ugly.  Extraordinary wealth does not improve that.  Advertising only tells us that we are beautiful.  To undo the damage to ourselves, we see a convoluted plethora of programs and projects to serve the poverty stricken slum dwellers, to assist the maimed, to study the beggars, to train the working but grossly underpaid, to educate the prostitutes, to encourage the up and coming who will always be coming but never be up.  But it is not these people who are ugly.

What is ugly is the noise and flashing lights, the fumes of diesel, the relentless onslaught of ever-never changing consumer goods, the gargantuan billboards and interminable signage.  The rank air stifled by the fumes of diesel.  The plastic, the stink of rotting sewage in the thick, grey, effectively dead canals.  They bubble.  They exude a fetid, stagnant, sour stench.  Not a grave’s depth below street level.  Something rotten in the Siam state?  The not so hidden side to the glories of industrialization.

There is also an ugliness not actually present in Bangkok, but which taints even the most generous of smiles.  Deforestation, officially banned for commerce, continues.  Most logging activity has been effectively transferred to and accelerated in Burma, Laos, and Cambodia.  More insidious than chainsaws and skidders and tractor trailers hauling monstrous logs is the romance of food.  Every evening a soft, rich smoke hangs over Thailand's countryside, resting in the valleys of the North and settling over the rice paddies of the Northeast.  In every village and in every home people are preparing meals by wood fire, with charcoal where this is affordable.  Farmers also light smoky fires for their cattle and buffalo to keep insects away for the night.  These activities have occurred since anyone can remember.  Nor are many people interested in change - the food is delicious and dusk is beautiful.  Even where there is interest to change (or necessity), the prohibitive cost of alternative fuels may make change impossible.  Persistent poverty contributes to the sad decline of forests in Thailand, albeit a romantic decline.  Likewise in any poor nation around the world.

And to keep those mouths in Bangkok smiling, people in the countryside must keep producing food.  A growing population and the effort to maintain low food prices means that agricultural production must continually increase.  Traditionally, this has been achieved by expanding land holdings.  The subsequent conversion of marginal land to agricultural production, land which is not suitable for perennial production of annual crops, has resulted in general environmental degradation.  The removal of forest cover has increased temperature extremes by three or four degrees in the Northeast.  Soil erosion is no less than extremely serious in the North, Northeast, and the South.  Nominal increases in production (per unit of land) and pest infestation are widespread agricultural problems.  Synthetic chemicals have gained importance and these are transferred in foodstuffs, animals, and waterways almost anywhere one can imagine.  Traditional subsistence food production has been altered to production for sale and this alteration is encouraged.  Dependence on cash income has increased but purchasing power for most people has not.

All this is Bangkok.

Yet, there is another side to Bangkok.  A sort of why are people doing what they do side.  Why are the young women dancing in bars and working as prostitutes or sweeping streets?  Why do young men work endlessly building new office towers or condominiums or sweep floors in hotels or drive tuk-tuks (little three wheeled taxis)?  Where does everyone's earnings go?  Nobody knows for sure.  Probably, most of it goes into hand and out of hand for survival.  A lot of it also goes back up-country.

Check out the post office in any up-country provincial town.  Older people, men and women, fathers and mothers sit around cashing in money orders.  Money orders sent from Bangkok.  Not everyone sends money and not everyone receives money.  But, to the extent that money is convertible into material resources, this transfer of money represents an unconventional flow of resources.  A flow which lands directly into the hands of rural people.

For all the international development organizations and all their wealth, none makes a direct transfer of money into poor, rural people’s hands.  They provide ideas and technology.  Certain ideas and certain technologies, which having originated from these institutions, belong to the cultural background from which they come.  Such ideas are neither a transfer of power, nor are they intended to solve the ugliness of what we find in Bangkok.

Take a classic economic view.  If people, likewise institutions, value the products or labour of rural people, or even the ecological imperative that agricultural cultures imply, high prices would willingly be paid to anything village and land sourced.  But high prices are not paid.  Not for rice.  Not for construction crews or prostitutes.  Not for any commodity.  High prices are paid in Bangkok for the value added products of industrial production and commerce.  And to the salaries of development experts who promote the flow of resources into urban economies.

For all our ideas of environmental awareness, over population, or the value of traditional cultures few know better than the poor that money talks.

A Note About Grandmother

A Blind Globe Trotter in Khoo Khad Village, Thailand

Grandmother has been weaving cloth for the past two months.  Everyday she slips into her loom, a tiny body and frail bones become the living motion of the poles, levers, and shuttles.  She and the loom are incomplete without the other and there is this living motion and this thing happens and we call it cloth.

Grandmother does not understand easily about making cloth for the foreigner.  The cloth she makes has such and such patterns and there are certain lengths into which the cloth is finally cut and that is that and that is the way it has always been done.  But the foreigner wants longer cloth and such bright colours!  Not that she feels that there is anything wrong with this in particular, but why not just have things the way things are, as they always were.  But the foreigners have bigger bodies and they wear different clothes, grandmother, explains her granddaughter.  Well, that may be so but this is how we make our cloth, says grandmother for the umpteenth time.  But the cloth is not for us, explains her granddaughter.  Yes, I know that, says grandmother, but why not just have it...  Finally she just shakes her head and says, smiling softly, well, yes, if it must be that way we can do things differently.  It is no matter really.  Her smile was with eyes sparkling silent thoughts.  The foreigner does not understand that he asked for our cloth but that all he really wants is his cloth.

Grandmother worries about her granddaughter who after three years of marriage still has yet to produce a child.  The granddaughter is infertile even though there is nothing wrong with her inside.  They even went and had her checked by a doctor at the hospital.  What is marriage without children?  The granddaughter is at home and is learning from grandmother about the weaving.  She already has a sewing machine of her own.  Such a good young woman.  No one has yet asked the son-in-law to have his fertility checked.

Grandmother shakes her head.  So many young people in the village that go to Bangkok.  When they come back no one knows what to expect.  The most trying of all the youngsters are the young women.  They find husbands that nobody knows!  These marriages are so difficult for the village.  They happen so quickly and how can you marry someone when no one, never mind the woman herself, knows the man or his family.  Everyone worries.  And there are so many widows in the village... men that go away and never come back...

Grandmother finishes cutting what cloth she has woven with the help of her granddaughter.  Because she is keeping only a portion of the cloth in payment for her work, her pieces and the foreigner's are folded into separate piles.  She goes beneath the house and returns with a little rice and fermented fish.  I am hungry after all that, she says laughing.

Soon she is back at the loom.  The foreigner's cloth has not yet all been made.  And there is little time.  Soon the rains will come and everyone must be in the paddy planting rice.

Equity and Equality – The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Euphemisms in Development

Equity is a right.  Equality is the platform on which it is achieved.  Neither occur in development.

In a democratic world, we want to say that we aim for equality of opportunity.  In an idealized world, equality of opportunity presupposes that a person or collective does not experience barriers to power for reasons of, say, sex, creed, colour, religion, or race.  Once in power, or at minimum having power over yourself (ves), you experience that thing called equity.

Well, dream on utopia.  A universal set of standards and institutions that represent and defend your personal interests or those of your chosen collective?  The development industry offers up only the hand-in-hand sisters of public education and capital economy and democracy.  You know, micro-credit schemes, primary schools, and international observers for elections.  You can either make money or not.  You can go to school or not.  You can vote for your government and majority wins or not.

Sorry, but it is an endgame.  No choice but uniformity.  No choice but a single integrated system.  Don’t like it?  The industry offers up the narcotic that as an individual you can be as different as you like.  Just be sure to go to school and get a job and vote.  The only place for action, however, is in the latter.  You do not decide what is taught, how your money works, or how you govern yourself (ves).  If you do try to decide for yourself, you and you collectively are asking for trouble.  Just ask Ghadaffi.  Or aboriginal peoples pretty much anywhere.  Has anybody lately seen an economy based on the principles of the common good?

My proposition is based on at least several premises.  One is that public education, in setting standards, teaches us first to conform to broader standards and then measures our success by our ability to mirror those standards which we do not personally own.  Through public education, we become specialists with narrow streams of knowledge.  First we buy into a broad social standard and give up our selves.  We then only claim to know what we have been taught in education institutions; our non-institutional knowledge, such as methods for good husbandry, have no value.  The public education process neutralizes our individuality, defeating the practice of who each of us are and what we might be capable of knowing and acting upon outside the realm of those standards.

A second premise is related to employment, for which any sense of equality must be subject to the rules of a given economic system; for all intents and purposes we now have only one recognized economy, call it capitalist, its tentacles having reached into the remotest corners of the planet.  There are those who are employed, who produce, earn and consume, and there are those who lose their homes and ways of life for hydro electric dams, expanded suburbs, corporate farms, mines, the trees in a forest… the list is endless.

You are either in this triad game of public education, jobs, and democracy, or you are not.  Winners.  Losers.  Plenty of lost souls in between.  But neither public education nor wage earning jobs nor democracy level the playing field.  On the contrary.  They are the playing field.  And you are either in the game, or out.  If you have gotten into the game, you necessarily behave according to established sets of rules.  Sorry, but when you paid the price of admission to the game, you left behind long ago your uniqueness and your principles of equality and equity.

Sameness and standards have nothing in common with the unbearable lightness of being.