Summer Update #1

Seeing as we're already halfway through June, I thought it important to give everyone a brief update on how the summer is shaping up. Other than a week of heat and humidity towards the end of May, the weather here has been beautiful. Although we get pretty erratic swings, with some days warm and sunny and others cool and breezy, the temperature seems to hover around the mid-70s on most days. It's really quite nice. Opportunely, Danie and I just discovered a wonderful little park on the East River that is only a five minute walk from our apartment and is a prime spot for late-afternoon lounging. Just writing that makes me feel guilty.

Of course, it's not all sunbathing and pleasure reading. I've just finished my second week as a research associate (glorified intern) at the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment, or, as I'll be calling it from now on so as to avoid carpel-tunnel, the Center. I spent most of last week getting caught up on a project the Center is working on with the government of East Timor regarding its plans to develop an offshore natural gas field. However, this week my research mandate shifted because that project is stalling (just do a google search for: Timor, Woodside, and Australia to find out why) and because the deadline for another project we're working on with the government of Mozambique is quickly approaching. A contingent of the Center's senior staff is headed to Mozambique the week after next, so until then I'm researching successful programmatic approaches to promoting small- and medium-sized enterprise development as a means of alleviating rural poverty through private sector growth and employment creation. I think the biggest challenge so far has been deciphering (and keeping track of) the multitude of acronyms, most of which are in Portuguese. Although my own research interests are not usually so private sector oriented, my work this week has been very interesting from an ethnographic standpoint. Plus I now know more about manual cashew processing methods and Mozambique's export-oriented nut industry than I did before. Hmm, maybe there's a blog topic in there somewhere...

In other news, I landed another job this week. Most importantly, this one is paid! -Aphorism alert- Third time's the charm! After catching wind that one of her restaurant's sister restaurants was hiring, Danie got me an interview with the manager. While I'd like to say that I nailed it, I think his totally sincere, yet noticeably skeptical remark that "[he'll] be happy if [I'm] half as good as Danielle" probably speaks for itself. I'm just thankful to have such nice coattails to ride.

Otherwise, Danie and I have been enjoying following the World Cup. Since we don't have a TV, we've really appreciated the thorough online coverage of this year's tournament. We've also taken to planning our workouts around important matches since our gym has what our apartment does not. Of course, for the truly important matches, we consult this map and then search out an appropriate venue.

Danie has her third closing shift in a row tonight but, thankfully, a day off tomorrow. Keep an eye out for a weekend post...who knows what kind of mischief we'll get into with a Friday afternoon off :)

points of interest

1. internal Pentagon memo: Afghanistan to become the "Saudi Arabia of Lithium." I suppose that about does it for an exit plan. All-to-revealing sentence of the day: "The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development."

2. how much less entertaining would the news be if it were covered by political scientists rather than the band of hysterical pundits currently tasked with the job? See the answer here.

3. priceless, yet poignant, irony courtesy Humble Oil (to become Exxon).

4. why are American college students taking longer to earn their degree? a new paper finds: "that declines in collegiate resources in the less-selective public sector increased time to degree...[and] increased hours of employment among students, which is consistent with students working more to meet rising college costs and likely increases time to degree by crowding out time spent on academic pursuits."

5. a possible solution to Arizona's racist legislation?

World Cup Update

For those of you who listened to Teju's and Tony's comments on the highly essentialized narratives about Africa that are being promulgated during the World Cup, the image to the left can serve as exhibit A. The image was released by ESPN before the tournament began as an example of what their World Cup studio would look like. You can see the Cup itself situated on what appears to be a pile of rocks? And then we see the desertic and bucolic landscape, punctuated with the quintessential African umbrella tree, under the unobstructed sunset. You don't have to strain yourself to find more examples, merely tune in to ESPN's coverage if ever during the next month you find a free moment.

A couple brief updates to my last post:

1. Raj Patel writes about slum-clearing and a slum-dweller resistance movement in South Africa, and is then interviewed about it.

2. Inequality, unemployment, and the evisceration of civil rights in the tournament's host country. It's definitely a bad sign when anybody starts a sentence: "At least under Apartheid..."

UPDATE: Danielle just brought my attention to this positively-Lion King like introduction to the US-England highlight reel.

World Cup 2010 Edition

Tomorrow the World Cup kicks off in Johannesburg. Always highly anticipated, this year's World Cup has received some additional fanfare because it marks the first time an African country will host the tournament. While there is plenty to read about when it comes to pure soccer analysis, I thought I'd point to a few sources of discourse for those who might be interested in exploring the sites at which politics, economics, colonial legacies, and sport intersect.

First, if you have time, I highly recommend watching this video of a round-table put on by the Media & Culture concentration in my graduate program last month, which discussed the historical and political importance of Africa's first World Cup. The discussants were Sean Jacobs, a professor in my graduate program, Time Magazine senior editor Tony Karon, Austin Merrill, who writes the Fair Play blog for Vanity Fair, and writers Binyavanga Wainaina and Teju Cole. Sean and Tony are both from South Africa and Binyavanga and Teju are from Kenya and Nigeria respectively. As such, this is a good opportunity to gain insight into a handful of thoughtful perspectives on the World Cup's locational importance, four of which belong to people whose identity is at least partly African. If you don't have time to watch the entire clip, you should not miss Teju's comments at the following time marks: 19:24; 38:30, 48:20, 50:56, and 1:19:50. Also, Tony's comments at the 27:00 and 51:30 minute marks are very interesting.

Second, Tony Karon has an excellent piece here on immigration, citizenship, and the fungibility of nationality in international soccer.

Also, here is a fun report that provides an economic, political, and sporting profile for each of this year's participating countries. It also has some more general discussions of the tournament, previous World Cups, etc. If you can ignore the enmity you may feel upon realizing who authored the report (or, if you're like me, the revulsion you feel when you come across the ideological exaltation of macroeconomic stability), the report is definitely worth a scan.

For a very interesting history of soccer in South Africa itself, including its role in the ANC's anti-Apartheid insurgency, don't miss this article.

Finally, for those interested in international development and the much-discussed potential development impact of hosting the tournament, I recommend looking for the documentary film Fahrenheit 2010 on your netflix or blockbuster account.

In this vein, I'll end with a quote from Planet of Slums, which really is a must-read. Davis reminds us that "in the urban Third World, poor people dread high-profile international events -- conferences, dignitary visits, sporting events, beauty contests and international festivals -- that prompt authorities to launch crusades to clean up the city: slum dwellers know that they are the 'dirt' or 'blight' that their governments prefer the world not to see."

Oil Spill Update

A couple of relevant updates to my last post:

1. Researcher at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a member of the government’s Flow Rate Technical Group, Ira Leifer, says of the broken well's daily flow rate: "there’s no reason to disbelieve BP’s worst case and that it could be very large, in the 100,000-plus range, for a freely flowing pipe, which it clearly appears to be."

2. ProPublica is reporting a series of internal BP investigations over the past decade warned senior BP managers that the oil company repeatedly disregarded safety and environmental rules and risked a serious accident. The reports described instances in which management flouted safety by neglecting aging equipment, pressured employees not to report problems, and cut short or delayed inspections to reduce production costs. A 2001 internal report noted that BP had neglected key equipment needed for an emergency shutdown, including safety shutoff valves and gas and fire detectors similar to those that could have helped prevent the fire and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf. See the article here.

deregulation: the policy agenda that brought you the recession unveils new oil spill edition

By now, I'm sure the epic BP oil spill has saturated your consciousness. As the broken well continues to spew somewhere around 60,000 to 70,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day, I thought I would share with you a couple of thoughts. I have no interest in reinventing the wheel, and the issue is obviously being covered very extensively. However, it seems to me that a disturbing truth has been overshadowed by the endless industry-government and partisan finger pointing which has characterized the majority of the discussions regarding questions of accountability. That truth is that during the last 30 years, both the Democratic and Republican parties have unquestioningly supported policy agendas of deregulation, which has effectively left extractive industries about as regulated as the financial sector.

In the last eight years, the federal government has conducted four training exercises to test the industry's capacity to deal with major spills. Amazingly, one conducted in 2002 actually simulated a deep-water leak in the Gulf of Mexico. It turns out all four exercises highlighted a serious lack of capacity to effectively deal with such an oil leak, moving the involved federal officials to report their concerns. Their primary concerns were regarding:

• coordination and communication between the Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security, especially involving the process for naming a National Incident Commander (NIC) to take charge of the crisis;

• a slow or inaccurate flow of information from the industry, particularly caused by companies’ desire to protect proprietary information and officials’ tendency to exclude industry representatives from the government’s command center; and

• a lack of expertise and modern technology for closing a spewing oil well leak and containing a slick through controlled burns and dispersants.

Sound familiar? Clearly, the exercises' findings have been substantiated. Yet the report also claimed that the needed safety measures and coping technologies would not be developed by the industry without the government requiring it do so. The report asserted: “Without requirements in place to require use of new response technologies they will not be developed and deployed adequately.” The logic is obvious. Developing new response technologies is expensive and may forever be unnecessary; thus, there is not a strong business case to make for their development. In economic theory, situations like this are referred to as "market failures," defined as circumstances in which a market incentive structure does not yield the most appropriate decisions or behaviors. Unfortunately for those to whom overly-simplistic ideology is appealing, it turns out the so-called 'free-market' does not always and everywhere function perfectly. If you weren't persuaded by the financial meltdown, perhaps the remarkable inability to stop the devastating oil leak provides a valuable site at which the virtues of deregulation may be reconsidered.

I'm reminded of a book written by economist and director of policy research at The Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Research, Jeff Madrick, which opens:

"It is conventional wisdom in America today that high levels of taxes and government spending diminish America's prosperity. The claim strikes a deep intuitive chord, not only among those on the Right, but also among many of today's Left. It has become so obvious to so many over the last thirty years, it hardly seems to require demonstration any longer. It is apparently so widely accepted by the public and rolls of the tongues of policymakers from both parties with such fluency that one would think the evidence needn't even be gathered."

Madrick continues: "Federal deregulation also reflects such attitudes about government. The lax federal oversight under George W. Bush has taken an increasingly obvious toll, most notably in the credit crisis of 2008 with hundreds of billions of dollars of losses accrued at major financial institutions, but also in areas such as food and drug safety, airline traffic and safety, and most tragically with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But few Democrats acknowledge how much they themselves contributed to a weakened regulatory attitute in the United States. Deregulation began to gain influence with the Nixon Administration in the early 1970s, but Jimmy Carter was a sincere believer and, aside from airline and trucking deregulation, which were arguably sensible, gave financial deregulation a decided push. Under Clinton, much of the New Deal regulatory apparatus designed to restrain financial market excesses was formally and proudly eliminated in 1999, though de facto erosions of the famed Glass-Steagall restriction were underway for a decade."

"Today, an ideological antagonism toward government in the United States has deeply undermined the nation's capacity to deal with rapidly changing times. These changes include rising competition around the globe, a marked worsening in wage growth and widening of income distribution since the 1970s, the rapidly rising costs of health care, an aging population, and the need for ever-more years of education."

Perhaps to this list we should add natural disasters, like the Gulf oil leak. These excerpts point to the fact that, today, politicians from both parties appeal to the inveterate free-market-small-government ideology held by so many Americans. As we continue to confront the effects of three decades of deregulation, we would be well served to replace ill-understood ideology with rigorously tested policy analysis.

As Madrick writes, "the lesson is that pragmatic government should prevail over any categorical or typically ideological dismissal of the uses of government."

The case for regulating certain private-sector activities to ensure the broader public good may never have been so robust.

On Commenting

Quite a few of you have expressed some frustration with the blog's commenting procedure, so I have adjusted the process a bit in hopes of making it easier to engage. By default, the blog's host (google) requires that anybody wishing to comment on a blog sign up for a google account. Setting up a google account is fairly simple, but experience thus far has shown that this requirement has discouraged many from sharing comments. Because I want to facilitate more dialogue and get more feedback from readers, I've adjusted the process through which you may comment on posts.

So, going forward, you will no longer need an account with google to post a comment. Now when you wish to comment on a post, click on that post's title (for example where it says 'On Commenting' above in orange); then scroll down to the bottom of the post and you will find a text-box titled 'post a comment'; write your comment in the box, and then go to the drop down menu directly below that says 'comment as:', select the 'name/url' option, and then type your name in the 'name' space (you don't need to type anything for url). Please note that while there is an 'anonymous' option, I will not accept comments from anonymous sources and your comment will be deleted. I feel this is important for dialogue and also for accountability. Please be sure to take credit for your comments then!

If you already have a google account, you can still use your account for commenting; simply choose your google account from the drop down 'comment as' box.

And remember, I've relaxed the commenting regime because I hope to hear from more of you :)

points of interest

In the spirit of filling in the gaps between substantive posts, I thought I'd introduce a new type of entry in which I merely advert to various points of interest I've come across during the past couple of days. The topics to which I will point in such posts will vary greatly; however, they will also likely reflect my own interests. Please feel free to comment on the articles themselves, or on any biases I reveal in the selection process. While I don't intend for these to be the most serious of posts, dialogue is always welcome. Thus, without further ado:

1. Remember Haiti? Issue-attention cycle on news coverage of disasters. (enlarged version of that truly fantastic graph)

2. Nixon's profound reasoning behind drug war policy.

3. A very cool new google-map color-coding the world according to its level of 'touristiness'

4. The impending diplomacy dilemma at the World Cup

5. While many have questioned Sarah Palin's English proficiency, the editors of Vanity Fair have provided a particularly visible illustration. I'm reminded of an article I came across during her vice-presidential bid.

6. Do calories count if I drink them? A wonderful feat of photography confirming it does.