As farmers sought to establish the cotton industry in Texas and tried to deal with the big challenge of needing labor at unpredictable times of year:
Planters imported monkeys from Brazil and tried to teach them to pick cotton, but the animals in the end were uncooperative. And geese, it turned out, will weed a cotton field when fenced in…[but] geese could not be trained not to trample cotton plants.
Some of my research has related to the impact of losing a parent on a child’s education in various African contexts. In this work, I have been impressed by the disparity between the dire stories reported in the media and the more hopeful patterns revealed in my statistical analysis.My training is in statistical analysis, but I have been thinking about the value of stories recently. In a recent (excellent) edition of This American Life, I heard the tragic story of a young woman whose mother illegally brought her to the United States as an infant. Now this daughter is finishing college but cannot get a job because of a choice completely out of her hands. The story is sad and yet, without some relevant statistics (How many people are affected by this? to start).
That’s not to say that statistics are always convincing: often they are misleading, either by design or through ignorant misuse. Still, when handled right, they can elucidate the broad patterns in a population. Alternatively, statistics rarely reveal intimate dynamics. (This is not because they couldn’t in principle but because the right data is rarely gathered.) There, a story can illuminate.
Dani Rodrik enunciates a nice (if not earth-shattering) balance in his new book One Economics, Many Recipes:
I believe in the need for both cross-country regressions and detailed country studies. Any cross-country regression giving results that are not validated by case studies needs to be regarded with suspicion. But any policy conclusion that derives from a case study and flies in the face of cross-national evidence needs to be similarly scrutinized. Ultimately, we need both kinds of evidence to guide our views of how the world works. (p4)
A good friend of mine (who is not an economist but who has worked with her share) shared the following:
Scene: Our kitchen this afternoon. Ten-year-old fourth grader is eating his after-school snack.
Son: Here is my explanation of the economy: when people have money,
they buy things.
Mom: That’s how economists explain it too.
Son: But they do it in a more complicated and boring way, right?
Mom: Right.
!!!
I just finished listening to this audiobook by a Honduran writer (my first). It was fun if not exceptional. My thoughts:
cuento agradable y divertido de una familia hondureña y un supuesto autor
Este libro contiene dos narrativas paralelas. La primera cuenta los esfuerzos (mayormente sin éxito) de un hombre neoyorquino que quiere ser autor pero no logra escribir. La segunda cuenta la vida de Fernandez y Alejandra, habitantes de un pueblo chiquito en Honduras quienes se conocen, se casan, y crían una familia a través de tres décadas.
La historia de Fernandez y Alejandra es refrescante; su amor siente auténtico. Mantienen una vida normal hasta que Fernandez cree recibir una visita celestial una noche, después de que se encuentra encargado con una misión excepcional. Experimentamos la reacción de su esposa y de sus varios hijos a través de todo y si no es irresistible, es complacido agradable y divertido.
Mientras tanto, las frustraciones del autor no dejan de entretener, y me imagino que todos que han empeñado escribir pueden relacionarse con los esfuerzos, las excusas, y el consejo no solicitado que recibe sin cesar de sus vecinos.
No es un libro para cambiar la vida, pero lo disfruté y lo recomendaría.
Escuché el audiolibro narrado por Walter Krochmal, publicado por Recorded Books Audiolibros (4 CDs).
David Leonhardt of the NY Times makes an effort to explain the credit crisis to laypeople. It helps. My favorite line:
I spent a good part of the last few days calling people on Wall Street and in the government to ask one question, “Can you try to explain this to me?” When they finished, I often had a highly sophisticated follow-up question: “Can you try again?”
Update: I just read another version, how Steve Waldman would explain the credit crisis to a kindergartener. [HT: BW]
You read Tropical Gangsters. You watched American Gangster. You read about the Economic Hit Man. But nobody’s safe when the Economic Gangsters come to town.
My friend and colleague Ted Miguel is coming out with a book this fall, bound to be a good time with insight to boot. From the website:
Meet the economic gangster. He’s the United Nations diplomat who double-parks his Mercedes on New York streets at rush hour because the cops can’t touch him—he has diplomatic immunity. He’s the Chinese smuggler who dodges tariffs by magically transforming frozen chickens into frozen turkeys. The dictator, the warlord, the crooked bureaucrat who bilks the developing world of billions in aid. The calculating crook who views stealing and murder as just another part of his business strategy. And, in the wrong set of circumstances, he just might be you.
In Economic Gangsters, Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel take readers into the secretive, chaotic, and brutal worlds inhabited by these lawless and violent thugs.
I’m not sure if the double-parking diplomat was the most intimidating way to introduce the gangster, but still… Recommended reading this October.
* My take on the prequels: Tropical Gangsters was great, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man was underwhelming, and I didn’t see American Gangster.
My wife gave me this interesting volume of history for our anniversary in 2006, and I’ve read it bit by bit over the last several months. My thoughts:
worthwhile peek into the lives of ordinary saints
The best known characters of Mormon history are the presidents of the Church* (from Joseph Smith to Thomas Monson), Joseph Smith’s immediate relatives (such as Emma or Joseph Smith, Sr.), and a handful of other people included in the canonized works (such as the three witnesses of The Book of Mormon). Of course, the Church’s current membership of 13 million has been built by a much broader group of people. Arrington and Bitton draw on diaries, oral histories, and other sources to construct character sketches (most of them under ten pages) of 17 people who for the most part don’t fit into those categories; I’d only heard of a few of them. The subjects range from the founding of the Church in the mid-19th century to the people who grew up in the early 20th century (the book was published in 1981, after all).
Arrington and Bitton haven’t managed to write a page-turner (Don’t expect The Da Vinci Code or even Prince and Wright’s David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism), but the accounts contain enough choice experiences and insights into the evolving Church to make this volume well worth the reading.
I wish the book had included more women (only five of the 17), but to the authors’ credit, the subjects are diverse in other ways: one isn’t a member of the Church (Kane), one left the Church (Wight), one held firmly heterodox doctrinal beliefs (Ericksen), one grew up among Hopi traditionalists (Sekaquaptewa). The authors try not to pass judgment but rather to present the stories as the individuals or their families recorded them. The examples of these hardworking rank-and-file members inspired me in their imperfections as much as their diligence and faithfulness.
[I even encountered an ancestor of mine by surprise: Oscar Kirkham makes an appearance in the life of Edna Ericksen (p132).]
Here is a list of the book’s chapters, with the (sometimes approximate) vital dates as available in the book, to give a sense of the time spanned:
1. Joseph Knight: Friend to the Prophet (1773-1847)
2. Jonathan Hale: Preaching the Restored Gospel (1800-1846)
3. Lyman Wight: Wild Ram of the Mountains (?-1858)
4. Colonel Thomas L. Kane: A Friend in Need (?-1883)
5. Jean Baker: Gathering to Zion (?-1880)
6. Edwin Woolley: Bishop of the Thirteenth Ward (1807-1881)
7. Charles L. Walker: Sage of Saint George (?-1904)
8. Lucy White Flake: Pioneering Utah and Arizona (1842-?)
9. Edward Bunker: Living the United Order (1822-1901)
10. Lemuel H. Redd: Down the Chute to San Juan (1836-?)
11. Chauncey West: Nineteenth Century Teenager (1877-?)
12. George F. Richards: A Link in the Chain (1861-1950)
13. Helen Sekaquaptewa: Traditions of the Fathers (1898-?)
14. Ephraim and Edna Ericksen: The Philosopher and the Trail Builder (1882-1967, ?-?)
15. Margrit Feh Lohner: Swiss Immigrant (1914-?)
16. T. Edgar Lyon: Missionary, Educator, Historian (1903-1978)
* The Church refers to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I listened to another Spanish audibook, leaving me just one short of completing the Expanding Horizons Challenge. La nada cotidiana, by Zoe Valdes [published in English as Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada, deals with the challenges of life in modern Havana (Cuba). It yielded a few insights but I didn't like the protagonist, nor did I find her experiences particularly interesting. Go read Chaviano's El hombre, la hembra, y el hambre [Man, Woman, Hunger] instead. My thoughts:
un libro cotidiano, con el tema mejor escrito en otro lado
Este libro nos cuenta de los tres amantes de Yocandra, una joven de la habana, juntos con vistas de la vida cotidiana en aquella ciudad. Varios temas se parecen entre este libro y el de otro libro que también se trata de la vida dura en la habana (El hombre, la hembra y el hambre, por Daína Chaviano). Uno de los temas que los libros tienen en común es lo difícil de conseguir comida que a nosotros en los EEUU nos parece cotidiana, como los huevos y el queso. Los dos libros se tratan del conflicto interno que sienten los cubanos: que si deben emigrar o no, sintiendo el amor a su país de un lado y la desesperación al otro. Valdés ofrece ciertas vistas que no encontré en el libro de Chaviano: por ejemplo, oímos de las experiencias de varios cubanos que ya han emigrado (uno a los EEUU y otra a España) y lo difícil que es asimilarse a una sociedad ajena. Después de todo, el libro de Chaviano me impresionó mucho más, tanto en la prosa como en la trama de la novela.
He visto varios comentarios (aquí en Amazon) por cubanos que dicen que esta novela (La nada cotidiana) capta la vida cotidiana del cuba de una forma excelente. No soy cubano así que no puedo negarlo, pero ni el personaje ni las experiencias de Yocandra parecieron muy interesantes.
Escuché el audiolibro narrado por Olga Merediz [4 discos], publicado por Recorded Books. La narración fue buena pero no excepcional. Este libro también se puede comprar en inglés con el título no muy conciso de Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada.
[Si le importa, este libro tiene dos escenas sexuales bastante gráficas y una de aquellas es muy larga. El libro de Chaviano también tiene algo de eso, pero menos largo y con menos detalles.]
I’m reading Wizard of the Crow, the longest book ever written in an African language. It was written in Kikuyu, one of Kenya’s main languages, and then translated into English. The author is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. As you can see by his name, Kikuyu has some extra vowels. This afternoon I sat down with a Kikuyu colleague to figure out how to pronounce vowels in Kikuyu:
a as in car*
e as in egg
i as in me
o as in toe
u as in blue
ĩ as in day
ũ as in toe
You’ll note that I’ve given the same pronunciation for o and for ũ. She repeated the difference for me several times and I could finally hear it but the best I can characterize it is that the ũ sounds higher in tone whereas the o sounds lower. Very scientific, I know.
So Ngũgĩ is actually Go-gay: the n is at best very faint. One on-line writer suggests “place your tongue against the back of your front teeth and start to say ‘no.’ But instead of adding the ‘o,’ replace it instead with” go-gay. But when my friend said it, I essentially couldn’t hear it.
*I’m (obviously) not a linguist; this is my best effort based on chatting with my friend.
My good friend Andrew Evans, a DC-based writer, has posted an article on Eritrea’s sweet cultural spots in DC. If you don’t know what Eritrea is, Evans explains
Red Sea coast turned unsuccessful Italian colony turned UN protectorate then ceded to Ethiopia followed by a 30 year civil war, nominal independence, undemarcated borders… It’s your typical horn of Africa fairy tale.
