From the thread below, LB wrote:
And I do believe that resources should be redistributed from the global rich to the global poor, until the range of inequality in the world is much, much smaller than it is now.
Which reminded me of this 7 things post, specifically:
Development isn't a legal issue, it's an enforcement issue
Which makes it seem even more unsolvable, though.
This: Poor people aren't any more noble than anyone else. Should be extended to include people of historically put-upon groups. Some of the most viciously bigoted things I've ever heard have come out of the mouths of people from groups that have suffered horrifically at the hands of bigots. Some of the nastiest acts driven by prejudice that I've witnessed have been committed by people who are themselves victims of prejudice. People are just people, and we're all horribly flawed.
What's so counterproductive about sharing a bottle of vodka?
Yes, and I think it's important to get past the idea that human beings only deserve to be assisted in achieving a stable life if they're perfect. For certain relatives of mine, even in speaking of certain other relatives of ours, assistance should only be offered as an ever-retreating carrot to entice someone out of vice or mental illness. (And need I add that those two are basically considered the same thing?)
The solution to the problem in 1 is in some cases to ease off on the actual laws. If the law is so strict that it is seen as impossible to comply with then people will work around it and the enforcement agencies will have considerable incentives to overlook violations*. Sometimes model legislation is passed in order to win foreign aid, knowing full well that the laws will never be complied with. Rolling back legislation that is overly strict risks international backlash as nonprofits in the donor countries apply pressure to their governments without realizing that less strict laws allow for more strict enforcement and a net improvement in conditions.
*And since violations are going to be overlooked as a matter of economic necessity, picking and choosing which ones to overlook is at the discretion of the enforcers, who might as well squeeze out a few bribes along the way, helping to create or further embed a culture of corruption.
4: Doing that would require us to admit that we (who are clearly deserving of aid in our time of need) are potentially imperfect.
This is why I don't think the possibility that a fiver I give to a beggar will be spent on booze is any reason not to give it. He's screwed up, I'm screwed up, we're all screwed up together. Might as well have a drink.
Some of the most viciously bigoted things I've ever heard have come out of the mouths of people from groups that have suffered horrifically at the hands of bigots. Some of the nastiest acts driven by prejudice that I've witnessed have been committed by people who are themselves victims of prejudice.
Being able to think about ethical issues rather than simply inheriting the prejudices of your parents and peer group requires a degree of leisure and access to resources that implies quite a lot of money in the greater scheme of things. Sorry about that, world, it's a bitch isn't it?
Is there a well-understood path to ending corruption in a society? Is it possible for a country to emerge from poverty and still have widespread corruption?
3: You lose half of a bottle of vodka.
8 -- Ask Mitch. I heard he spent some time in such a country.
Or any resident of Chicago.
Is it possible for a country to emerge from poverty and still have widespread corruption?
Italy?
Was China known for being corrupt? I guess there are many types of corruption, but I'm picturing corruption-in-the-details, rather than ethical transgressions by a government.
Friends who taught English in China tried to use play acting about a hospital to teach names for body parts, basic illnesses, etc. The students mostly acted out bribing various officials at the hospital.
I am not a China expert, but I know enough to know that you bribe people in China for essentially everything.
Do you count Russia as having emerged from poverty? I think most people would. If so, the answer to 8.2 seems pretty clearly to be "yes."
Also, this may be informative. Note that China currently scores a 3.5, and Russia a 2.1.
I like the list but "Development isn't a legal issue, it's an enforcement issue" seems like a meaningless distinction to me. It's not like people are clamoring for unenforceable laws.
This list reminds me, a friend who's a therapist went to a training of some sort or other, and a session began with everyone in attendance encouraged to state one thing they knew, from their years of practice, to be true beyond a doubt. People came up with bizarre things once they thought about how many of things they might say were conditional. One person said "I know that it is never a good idea to have sex with your children."
Maybe that needed pause/play.
Yes, China was known for being corrupt.
Transparency and peaceful changes of government have done a lot to reduce corruption in the richest countries. Consider why something like the Teapot Dome scandal, less than a century old, couldn't happen today.
The source blog is pretty consistently interesting.
Is China no longer known for being corrupt?
What's so counterproductive about sharing a bottle of vodka?
Well for starters you get less of it when you share.
p.s. on a moment's consideration, I retract 15.1. People do love to feel that they've done something without actually doing something.
Is China no longer known for being corrupt?
You don't want to know how they get those little slips of paper into fortune cookies.
7: I think you are correct. Deviating appreciably from the patterns of the past requires either high levels of confidence or some sort of safety net. People living close to the edge are conservative because they have to be.
On a positive note, Botswana is getting to the point where changes are much less scary. There is significant pressure to overturn the anti-homosexuality laws and the major civil rights groups have all adopted anti-homophobia stances. The laws won't be gone right away, but within the decade I think it will happen.
This is why I don't think the possibility that a fiver I give to a beggar will be spent on booze is any reason not to give it.
Lately I think about this a lot, because I notice this ugly reflexive skepticism in myself when people walk through a subway car doing the standard spiel about anything would help, food would help. I find myself thinking "this is the fourth car from the back and you came in from the back. Someone just gave you a sandwich. It seems very likely people have already given you food and that's not what you're after." I don't think this is a valid way of assessing need, but it would be dishonest to deny it goes through my head. I think people don't like the possibility they're being lied to, whether or not that's a good motivator for charity or withholding charity. Once in a while you'll see someone with a sign that says "need money for booze" or the like, that I think passively acknowledges this under the guise of a joke.
22: You could make them a sign that says "For reasons that cannot be easily remedied by my own efforts, my contribution to the modern political economy is highly likely to be valued by employers at a level well below what is required to support myself in a manner consistent with human dignity so I've kind of stopped trying and need beer to pass the time."
Once in a while you'll see someone with a sign that says "need money for booze" or the like
And I will cross the street to give these guys money. I don't really know what that says about me.
Also, why are we having two foreign aid threads?
25: Typical American. Exaggerating the extent of US foreign aid.
I used to live in a neighborhood with a) a lot of panhandlers, and b) a lot of homeless people. At some point it became clear to me that the overlap between these two groups was zero. Panhandling has got to be like anything else -- the rewards don't go to the deserving, but to the people who are good at it.
27: I think it depends a lot on the neighborhood. Also on some of your definitions. I mean, most of the oogles are homeless by any reasonable standard, but they don't necessarily HAVE to be homeless. Of the non-oogles, there do seem to be a lot of folx panhandling who have some kind of place (other than a shelter) to sleep at night, but I suspect many of them are "housing-insecure". But certainly also in the neighborhoods that I frequent, there are a lot of folx who are either truly 100% homeless or doing a hell of a good imitation of it, who do panhandle.
As I've said before here, when I get my check, the boss doesn't snatch it out of my hand and say "Now, I'm only going to give this back to you if you promise not to spend any of it on liquor". Panhandling is homeless' people's job, and in a sense I'm their employer, so why should I treat them differently than I would want to be treated?
27: They took his change under false pretenses. Now, Someguy is "Out for Change." In theaters this July.
I work in a touristy area in NYC. Every time I go for a walk in the park during lunch I see a particular woman working her very direct in-your-face "I'm hungry! Help me!" routine. Whenever she pulls it on me I feel especially pissed off; do I look like a tourist?
30: Is it not plausible that she's hungry every single day? I certainly am.
I once had a guy ask me for $5 so he could pay his rent for the night. He said that he stayed in some lady's house and she'd let him stay only if he paid her $X each night. I gave him $3 and told him to tell the next person he needed $2 for the bus because that sounded more plausible to me. On reflection, the hypothetical lady's business plan started to make more sense as houses are very cheap within walking distance of where I was. She could have lived next door and let in a bunch of strangers to a different house.
That was a damn good post, and I wish I had more intelligent things to say about it. I haven't done the same extent of research, but it certainly accords with my travel experience and that of my folks (who did quite a lot of development work in healthcare across Africa and southeast Asia). No one's a saint and institutions are hard to build, which makes the whole development issue a damn hard nut to crack.
I think that's why I'm so excited about the Poverty Action Lab and similar groups. At least someone's trying to take a scientific approach to cataloging attempted interventions, recording outcomes with as much objectivity as possible, and testing new strategies that seem promising. Of course, this runs smack into the problems of how complex each nation is, and whether results are really replicable. But that just means out-of-sample tests are necessary, doesn't it?
Is there a well-understood path to ending corruption in a society?
One way is when a very powerful outside interest decides it no longer wants to pay bribes. I read somewhere that Mexican customs officials used to be very corrupt, but cleaned up their act when NAFTA took effect, because of pressure from businesses.
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On a personal bleg:
I'm about to move to NYC, and am looking for sublets in June and July. This is pretty much the first time I've ever had to look for rentals, etc. Are there any great sources of leads that people can recommend? I've mostly been looking at PadMapper, which pulls in info from Craigslist and Apartments.com. Thanks!
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Sadly, I'm discovering that apartments with easy access to the 4/5/6 cost rather more than $5 a night. Boo.
This guy was paying more than $5 a night. He just needed $5 more. Or he was going to use the $5 to buy Boone's Farm wine.
"Oogles" sounds like a small, magical pest in Harry Potter.
31: There's no way she has the exact same urgent need to express her hunger every day.
22: Have you tried giving to a reputable charity instead? It seems to me that would clearly dominate either (a) giving the same amount to the subway spieler, or (b) doing nothing but feeling guilty and rationalizing defensively.
Once we run out of obvious slam-dunk charities to give to, I'll sympathize with feeling ambivalent about panhandlers. But as long as I can spend $1 on vaccinations for African children or something to obviously greater effect, there's no reason to think about whether a panhandler is deserving or not.
41: A reputable charity seems an imperfect substitute. He should give to a disreputable charity.
Po-Mo -- I am on a listserv at my school that is 9/10 people asking for someone to sublet their apartment for June and July. Email me!
41: If it were a perfect substitute then it wouldn't be an improvement.
45: Thought for a second that link might go to this.
Yeah, yeah, nobody is a saint, but that link in 45 reminds me too much of the standard rightwing spiel that people are people and hence inherently nasty and awful and you may as well give up trying to fix injustices, as the victims won't thank you for it and will be just as nasty once they are top dog.
I wouldn't. Or rather, I count it has having regressed pretty seriously into poverty during the 90s and is selectively emergent now. Russian GDP fell 60% in the 90s and the country basically operated on a barter economy for a while. Even now, the vast majority of the (middle class) wealth creation is concentrated in Moscow and St Petersburg. The countryside and provincial cities are desperately poor and even more desperately corrupt.
I've always figured, "Well, if I were them, I might be drinking too", but I realised recently when suffering from persistent back pain that alcohol is a *really effective* as a temporary pain killer and muscle relaxant. I bet a lot of these people are in some level of physical pain most of the time.
Russian GDP fell 60% in the 90s and the country basically operated on a barter economy for a while.
It is possibly the most striking indictment of the CIA that they spent forty years trying to undermine the USSR by any means necessary and achieved sod-all, and then the US sent over a handful of economists from Harvard, and in three years they had basically destroyed industries and left people standing all the way from Brest-Litovsk to Kamchatka. Truly Reagan was right when he said that the most terrifying sentence you can hear is "I'm from the US government and I'm here to help".
To be fair, GDP would have fallen pretty heavily anyway when the whole communist bloc apparatus collapsed - it's not an identical situation, but look what happened in North Korea at the same time when it lost its cheap imports from Russia. But yeah, the neoliberals didn't exactly help, and are a large part of the reason many Russians are perfectly happy with the country's increasingly authoritarian bent.
There's a woman round here who has developed the bold strategy of knocking on doors and asking for £5 or £10 for a taxi, because she has to get to her epileptic daughter who is elsewhere. She gets very upset if you don't believe her, and will offer to show you the taxi at the corner. I gave her a fiver because I couldn't help thinking that someone who goes round begging at doors at 9pm has to be desperate. Desperate for what, I don't know, but still. She also hangs about at the local train station asking for the last pound towards her fare.
Desperate for what, I don't know, but still.
In the case of the people who hang about the train station here, asking for the last pound for their fare, desperate for heroin.
I had one of those in Buchanan Street, in Glasgow, once ask me for 60p for his tube fair home.
Me: "Sorry, I've only got a fiver, no change."
Him: "That's alright, I can give you change."
55 is the funniest thing I've seen in weeks.
and then the US sent over a handful of economists from Harvard, and in three years they had basically destroyed industries and left people standing all the way from Brest-Litovsk to Kamchatka. Truly Reagan was right when he said that the most terrifying sentence you can hear is "I'm from the US government and I'm here to help".
I think the Russians themselves deserve the lions share of the blame there. They got the exact same advisers, the exact same advice as Poland, and were in not quite as bad an economic mess at the start of things, yet things turned out much, much worse in Russia. Yes, Poland had the advantage of moving towards the EU starting in the mid nineties, however the Russians had oogles of natural resources to provide an income stream to help deal with the transition. The cause was far worse corruption and terrible governance.
Talking about which, anyone else have somewhat mixed feelings about people holding up Khodorovsky as a symbol of Putin's authoritarianism? The guy made his money by stealing it from the Russian state, courtesy of plenty of officials who were happy to give him the goods in return for a cut and political support. Then the government, or rather the new set of thieves at the top, stole it back. Sure, their motives were all about politics, and if he'd been a good loyal Putin supporter he would still be one of the richest men in the world, but it's at least as much a case of mobsters falling out amongst themselves as it is crushing political dissent.
But yeah, the neoliberals didn't exactly help, and are a large part of the reason many Russians are perfectly happy with the country's increasingly authoritarian bent.
Personally I tend more towards the suspicion that most Russians have always been perfectly happy with the country's authoritarian bent, as long as it gives them a chance to clobber some foreigners, Muslims or Jews, and have a sneaking suspicion that the Harvard team at least bought us a bit of grace by reducing the extent to which Russia could fund such clobbering-related program activities. I just can't see an alternate history in which Russia doesn't get screwed over by neoliberals in 1994 and is as a result a peaceful, democratic member of the community of nations in 2011.
desperate for heroin
It might be addictive.
re: 59
Yeah, although I think you are only vulnerable to it if you have a whiny nasal voice.*
* that may be just Glasgow.
Apparently, we now have perky addicts.
Yes, Poland had the advantage of moving towards the EU starting in the mid nineties, however the Russians had oogles of natural resources to provide an income stream to help deal with the transition. The cause was far worse corruption and terrible governance.
Oogles of natural resources leads almost inevitably to corruption and terrible governance, it seems, in the absence of extremely robust democratic (or autoritarian) institutions. Which post-Soviet Russia did not have. And certainly I'm not absolving the Russian leadership of blame at all. It seems a bit harsh to blame the Russian people at large though.
58: There's an element of that to be sure. Russians are very attached to their national greatness mythos, and Putin played/plays to that expertly in his domestic and foreign policy. And the average Russian can be spectacularly xenophobic and/or racist. But as everywhere, that sort of populism plays much more successfully in an economically depressed society, especially one where living standards for many were much better in very recent memory.
Russia in the 1990s also had to contend with its main export - oil - stuck at a price below $20 per barrel for much of the decade. The relative success of the Vladimir Putin era is largely reflective of the huge rise in oil prices that started around 2000.
And he never even thanked me.
63: And natural gas, of which Russia has the largest reserves in the world.
On corruption in China: _Will the Boat Sink the Water _ is succinct and was written for internal readers. Very short form: corruption different at different levels of government, parts of populace not resigned, seeking leverage. Recent rehabilitation of Confucius might help.
The analogy I usually use for ending corruption is bullying:
Schools that make a systematic, unanimous effort (i.e. from the principal on down) to communicate that bullying won't be tolerated and punish it every time it happens will find themselves in a reasonably short time without a bullying problem. The crucial threshold is when the students start policing each other, without the need for official intervention in each incident. Once the cheerleaders start saying 'Hey, leave that gay, ethnic nerd in the wheelchair alone!', the battle's been won.
Provinces (and companies) that have pursued similar monolithic programs against corruption have reduced it significantly. The success threshold is the same: When civil servants or employees start sincerely monitoring each other, it's not a program anymore, it's a culture.
The problem in most places is just political will. Why would a medium-level Chinese civil servant want to work really hard at reducing corruption? He's stackin' cheese!
Corruption is a crime of calculation, not a crime of passion. Compared to a lot of other societal problems (domestic violence, for example), it's actually quite responsive to systemic interventions, incentive structures, basic monitoring practices, etc. You just have to want that stuff.
And thanks for the link, Heebie!
67: this is a really interesting question and I wish I knew more about history etc in order to be able to answer it. I have a vague impression that Britain (for example) in 1800 was amazingly corrupt, but by 1900 it wasn't; so what happened? I'm not aware of any 19th century government making corruption a target.
68. Start here. Or here if you're pressed for time.
By 1850, relatively few political observers accused the government of such systematic 'corruption', or its élite stewards of such insatiable greed. This change in perception marks a ruling-class success story. For largely the same rather narrow élite of wealthy, mostly landed gentlemen, whose ostensibly 'corrupt' authority was widely condemned and sometimes vigorously challenged in the years after 1780, still held the dominant position within the central government in 1850. Most of the members of the élite who possessed the greatest influence over the structures of the state during the intervening period--namely, the usually Pittite or Conservative ministers who sat in cabinet offices--sought to portray the state not as a tool for the advancement of their own private interests, but as the impartial guardian of private property: the protector of what they, along with the rest of the propertied classes, already possessed. The challenge they faced as governors was to convince both themselves and an ever more politically conscious public that this image of the state conformed with reality.By 1850, relatively few political observers accused the government of such systematic 'corruption', or its élite stewards of such insatiable greed. This change in perception marks a ruling-class success story. For largely the same rather narrow élite of wealthy, mostly landed gentlemen, whose stensibly 'corrupt' authority was widely condemned and sometimes vigorously challenged in the years after 1780, still held the dominant position within the central overnment in 1850. Most of the members of the élite who possessed the greatest influence over the structures of the state during the intervening period--namely, the usually Pittite or Conservative ministers who sat in cabinet offices--sought to portray the state not as a tool for the advancement of their own private interests, but as the impartial guardian of private property: the protector of what they, along with the rest of the propertied classes, already possessed. The challenge they faced as governors was to convince both themselves and an ever more politically conscious public that this image of the state conformed with reality.
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Off topic, it's about the link:
Really, interesting? Every snowflake is different and oppressed people aren't noble. That's not interesting, that's reasonable starting point. From there we can begin looking for something interesting, some pattern, some leverage point. But every country sucks in its own unique way is far, far from interesting. It's banal.
return to conversation.
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