Notes on Afghanistan

Back in February, Tim Hetherington came to Colgate and talked about his career photographing war and about how things aren't working out in Afghanistan. Then last week he was killed in Libya, and I'm left looking at this signed copy of Infidel. He was a good guy. Today Candace Rondeaux came to Colgate and talked about her career as journalist/analyst, and about how things aren't working out in Afghanistan. It's a drug-cartel war, it's a civil war, it's a religious war, and it's a war in which we're supporting the thoroughly corrupt side which many citizens decide they just can't deal with. (Of course we're also supporting the other side via drug money and oil money.) She did offer a specific, concrete suggestion: she suggested that many of the Afghan officials most responsible for corruption hold dual passports which could be pulled by their other countries. Hmm....

Bob Kraynak asked her to comment on possible silver linings, both in the short-term "decimation" of Al-Qaeda and in the long-term change in regional culture so that in several countries now we're seeing possible democratization and in a generation or so we might see a lot of it. Rondeaux does not believe A-Q has been decimated (Bob's term, here) because Taliban forces seem frequently to be guided by A-Q advisors; she admits the possibility that in a generation, or two generations, we may think the whole thing was worthwhile, but it's only a possibility if we "face reality" and stay in, but not in the way we're doing now; it's only a possibility if we take nation-building seriously.

Well, if decimated still means killing one in ten, I think it's likely that Al-Qaeda's leadership has been decimated, for what that's worth -- and I think our situation would be a lot worse if that decimation hadn't happened. I suspect that the TSA has done little or nothing to prevent terrorist attacks since 9/11, but it's not that the bad guys thought they'd done enough. They're far from gone, but they've been hurt; just as important, their friends in the Taliban got hurt. In the short run, I do think that's a silver lining on some very stormy clouds.

Democratization is more problematic; the long run is more problematic. As I've said many times, I think we're likely to be in really bad trouble somewhere in the ten-to-thirty-year time frame because a variety of technological destructive possibilities "improve" in Moore's Law style but human destructive tendencies change slowly if at all. We can withdraw from Afghanistan, and fewer Americans will be killed for a year or five thereafter, but some of the nuts we'd be leaving as we bolt are already nuclear. Things will get worse; three thousand dying at once is not guaranteed to stay maximal, or even to seem like a bad day. 9/11 may yet be recognized as the wake-up call for which we groped around, banging around the alarm clock, before finally hitting the snooze button -- for just a little too long. There are times when I agree that the reason we don't hear radio communications from the stars is simply that no intelligent species survive their inevitable development of really bad technology. "Intelligent?" Well, you (probably) know what I mean.

So what can we do? As usual, I'm left looking over what I said before, thinking that it still looks reasonable -- but maybe it's too late. I would certainly

• cut bad-guy funding
  • in the short term, by calling a halt to the drug war -- opium should be moderately taxed and treated like nicotine, not pushing immense profit into the hands of those who hate us;
  • in the longer term, by initiatives like intrinsically blow-up proof nuclear reactors to reduce world-wide oil usage. (I'm not even thinking about carbon.)
• improve good-guy funding
  • directly, via free trade, and
  • indirectly, by pushing transparent interactions...my basic message, repeated millions of times at immense expense even in the midst of our own economic troubles, would still be close to what I said before:

    here is your RFID/bar code/photo/fingerprint/biometric ID, linked to a bank account which already has a couple of bucks in it, and here is your personal cell phone....

    (and everything has a URL)
  And there would still be a somewhat-internationalized Barnett-style SysAdmin force behind that, as before...

But of course it's not going to happen, and I don't see why any more practical plan is likely to happen either. Some nights are less cheerful than others.

clarification: A random reader might well think it's insane to think of free trade as direct support for good guys--direct support is arms and material for them what's shooting at bad guys. No, those who shoot at bad guys may be our allies, probably some good guys and some -- well, Stalin was an ally in WWII. Aid for them is necessary, but it's not the same as aid for good guys. The good guys mostly just want to live their lives with family, friends, neighbors and perhaps letting others live their lives too, sometimes even helping. Support for them is mainly lowered transaction cost for doing business, which I loosely call "free trade".

Rodrik on Development

I've been reading Dani Rodrik's blog and now his current book, One Economics, Many Recipes. He is lots more enthusiastic about government than I am, and mostly I feel battered in that he is mostly making a good case for stuff that I'd rather not believe: sometimes interventionist government works better than minimalist government. This makes my worldview more complicated than -- as a laygeek interested in economics and specifically in development economics -- I want it to be. I see in Arnold Kling's review that he (albeit not a laygeek) feels more or less the same way, which is not a big surprise -- my views often overlap with his.

However, I'm still feeling bothered by the book's start, right on page 1 of the Introduction:

ON A VISIT to a small Latin American country a few years back, my colleagues and I paid a courtesy visit to the minister of finance...a detailed PowerPoint presentation on his economy's recent progress...listed all the reforms...Trade barriers had been removed, price controls had been lifted, and all public enterprises had been privatized. Fiscal policy was tight, public debt levels low, and inflation nonexistent. Labor markets were as flexible as they come. There were no exchange or capital controls, and the economy was open to foreign investments of all kind. [sic] "We have done all the first-generation reforms, all the second-generation reforms, and are now embarking on...

...Alas...The economy was scarcely growing, private investment remained depressed...poverty and inequality were on the rise. What had gone wrong?

This opening created, for me, a tension for which I have not yet seen a resolution in the book; I'm not nearly done, but I don't see it indicated in Kling's review either, or when I follow up the obvious terms -- "corruption", "transparency", "bureaucracy" -- in the index. It sounds to me as if Rodrik is reporting that the minister of finance told him they'd done all the reforms...except for reform.

[[personal background: I grew up largely in Latin America, with a dad who was trying to assist businesses large and small, from the early 60s when he ran the Veracruz shipyard for Baltimore Shipbuilding and Drydock, the mid-60s lumber mill in Nicaragua, the late 60s and 70s as a "project engineer" for dams and road and shipyards for the Interamerican Development Bank in Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, and so on to his death in the late 80s; he was always trying on the side to help little businesses get going. (This was his peculiar version of Quakerism.) He kept saying he was going to write a book about Latin America's failures, but I think in the end it would have been a less abstract, more dramatized version of parts of De Soto's Mystery of Capital but without de Soto's central real-estate insight; it was all about corruption, lack of transparency, and bureaucracy.]]

I look at Transparency International's corruption perceptions map and wonder which Latin American country Rodrik could be talking about: Chile is pretty good and Uruguay is not bad, but Chile's been growing pretty fast (and is pretty big, anyway) and Uruguay isn't privatized, so I guess by my standards (especially in the light of Uruguay's poor commercial (small-biz) characteristics) their respective growth patterns, and those of their neighbors, are not terribly surprising.

I remember Dad talking in 1970 about helping somebody set up a small export (leatherwork) business in Montevideo; the basic forms took more than a year, stopping at several dozen desks, even with him pushing them along as if the IDB (or BID, if you speak Spanish) thought they were important. Without that help they would have simply failed -- not necessarily from corruption, but from bureaucracy.

That's been my model of Latin American government all my life: any given government will have a lot of honest people in it, but the net effect will usually range from actively predatory down to parasitic, with the exception of Chile. (Mexico is not an exception, but has benefited and suffered in various ways from proximity to the US -- I'm thinking of legal immigration, illegal immigration, and the drug trade as well as legal trade and a few invasions.)

I'm not saying that government has to be a baleful influence. In the US, my plumber is a business, the carpenter is a business... -- I'm a business and a half (half of a partnership) duly registered for small fees with the county clerk. The Small Business Administration and Federation of Small Businesses are not perfect, but my feeling is that they are actually pretty good. The US overall has a pro-growth government, in many ways, and I'm fairly comfortable with that kind of interventionism -- but mostly that's a kind of interventionism that has to do with constantly adjusting the regulatory barriers that keep businesses from getting too predatory, rather than assisting them (and bureaucrats) in being predatory. I do get muchly less comfortable when it tries to intervene in favor of specific industries, areas, companies, people -- there you get massively harmful rent-seeking as with our agricultural subsidies. Still, there are some government interventions which may make sense, and Rodrik argues effectively. Mostly.

However, I'm not comfortable with Rodrik's starting point; it struck me as pretty strange.

(Well, maybe not.)

Development-in-a-Box; SysAdmin generally

Tom Barnett's Explaining Development-in-a-Box™ says

Since the centerpiece of the approach is adapting internationally recognized standards and best practices to local conditions to jump start development, we couldn’t find another name that emphasized both development and standardization as well as the term Development-in-a-Box.

The post is a bit of a disappointment in that I've been hoping that he'd actually give me a good way to think about what DiB actually is, whereas he doesn't really detail what he just said -- he explains why that's a good thing. Yeah, I believe it's a good thing, and I know he has a detailed model, but I guess I'll have to wait for the next book. My own sysadmin notion is that

• every person, place or thing has a RESTful URL,
• each contractual relationship (loan form, invoice, business license) has a document template and instances which are also RESTful, people are linked in a FOAF-style web...everybody gets a cell phone for financial transactions.
• The "Box" for development is actually a collection of interlinked templates describing an economically functional village... valley... harbor... country... and so on. Oh, well.