The Power and the Money

Why learn a foreign language?

 Geocurrents is a fun blog. I recommend it.

But they can, like all blogs, post some ill-thought-out stuff. They have recently posted a putative takedown of Larry Summers’ argument that universities should cut the resources that they use to teach foreign languages. 

The argument: English is widely-spoken and pretty much all you need for business. Add that to the ever-increasing efficiency of machine translation, and the case for expending mass resources to teach foreign languages disappears. Thus, we should cut back. 

I was looking forward to a solid criticism of this argument. Instead, Geocurrents avoids Summers’ substantive points and then at the end undercuts itself. Since I think that Summers is probably wrong, I find this frustrating.

Let’s proceed, in a lesson about How Not To Build an Argument:

(1) The author points out that most of the world does not, in fact, speak English. Since Summers never argued that they did, it is hard to see the relevance of this point.

(2) The author then points out that a lot of immigrants to the United States speak a language other than English. Of course, their children lose those languages super-fast. Moreover, Summers never claimed that there were no non-English-speakers in the United States, and I have never anybody justify the resources spent on foreign-language teaching by saying that we need to communicate better with immigrants. If that is the author’s argument, then she needs to make it explicitly.

(3) Finally, after two non sequiturs, the author states that machine translation is imperfect. This is perfectly true. Some students of mine recently presented me with a Pemex integrated service contract machine-translated from Spanish: it was so incomprehensible that we went back to the Spanish and translated it ourselves. But ...

First, machine translation is getting better all the time. Summers’ argument is about the future. I want to know why the author of the Geocurrents post believes that translation will be as bad in 2050 as it is now! And I am superlatively annoyed that she does not tell me.

Second, the author then presents a frighteningly good and clear machine translation of a Russian poem. No, it isn’t as poetic as the human translations. But it is completely comprehensible. And since Summers is talking about “doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East,” she needs to explain why the level of machine competence shown by her own example is not sufficient to those tasks.

At which point she also needs to explain why machine translation won’t become good enough by 2050. (Or, heck, by 2015!) But I repeat.

In short, the riposte does absolutely zero to grapple with Summers’ contention. It is an example of how not to construct an argument, because it doesn’t actually construct an argument.

Comments are more than welcome. How would you argue against Summers?

Play it again, Cristina!

 What will happen? Well, Setty pointed out that we have seen this movie before. In general, I think he is correct ... with a wrinkle. 

1. Nationalization;
2. Giant compensation claims from Repsol ... say, I dunno, $10.5 billion;
3. Long loud wait;
4. Long drawn-out arbitration;
5. Payment from Argentina ... well after Cristina’s term ends in 2016!

There is, however, a wrinkle. That wrinkle is that Argentina is the first country to try to stick it to ICSID. They have just said no. That has, shall we say, annoyed other countries. Consider that the Obama Administration has imposed sanctions on Argentina ... the first time that an American president has used the 1974 authority. The diplomatic reaction from Spain ... and Britain, and the European Union, and Mexico and Chile and (OMG!) Bolivia ... has been ferocious. This is looking much more like 1968 or 1938 than it is like more recent expropriation events.

It might play out quicker than we expect. The big if is the European Union. If it uses its muscle, regardless of legality, then Argentina is going to hurt. If it does not, then the Setty calendar will play itself out.

Either way, it will be a show.

Miscellaneous Saturday links

 Comin’ atcha from the Westside ... Medical Center in the very-creepily-named Plantation, Florida:

Department of Denominators: Really, the graph needs one, like, say, real tax revenue. I expect better.

Department of Thanks: “I want to express my sincere gratitude for your thoughtful discussion of the issues,” wrote Colonel Qaddafi in a letter to Congress. “We are confident that history will see the wisdom of your country in debating these issues. We are counting on the United States Congress to its continued investigation of military activities of NATO and its allies to confirm what we believe is a clear violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973.”

Department of Trouble: Doug Muir made the good point that there must be reasons for the Anglo-French defense posture, since both countries spend significant amounts on their militaries. I would like to see this discussed seriously, for the simple reason that I do not discount the possibility that there is no plan, and NATO defense budgets are set simply out of a combination of momentum and interest group politics. Moreover, what’s the counterfactual? What would an alternate European defense posture look like?

Department of Panaceas: We’ll see if ending gerrymandering has an effect on California’s political woes. I doubt that it will, but I would also like to be wrong.

Department of Crime: There is less of it, and nobody really knows why.

Department of Bahrain: Things are very bad.

Informed blogging about Bahrain

 Justin Gengler is a graduate student at the University of Michigan. In 2009, he conducted a political survey of Bahrain, which gives him great insights (backed by actual data!) about the current state of play in that country. His blog about Bahrain is packed full of useful information, analyzed in a systematic manner and presented with no small element of style. Highly recommended!

Above is a brave Bahraini mother navigating Manama traffic with a stroller while her other child runs on ahead. Read “Religion and Politics in Bahrain.”

On-ground-blogging from Libya

 Ryan Calder, a Berkeley Ph.D. student in sociology, is in Benghazi right now. He is keeping a blog, called Revolutionology, about his experiences in rebel territory. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the situation in eastern Libya, or the civil war.

Scariest quote, so far: “This is what a twenty-first-century ragtag volunteer army looks like. These guys are all heart, not much coordination, and no training whatsoever.”

Chile, Haiti, and disorder

 I think that Tyler Cowen makes a surprising mistake here when he compares the lawlessness in Chile and Haiti. Cowen:  “Haiti, on the other hand, remains fairly orderly and there have been reports that police corruption has gone down significantly ... Haiti is so orderly because a) looters would be killed on the spot, and b) the entire fate of the nation is at stake and thus every small event is taken very seriously.” He links to a CNN story and a tweet from somebody in Santiago reporting secondhand about Concepción. (God, I hate Twitter.)

I dispute the stylized fact. I am peripherally involved with (well, hearing about) a U.N. survey design in Port-au-Prince: the lawlessness is out of control. Kidnappings, assaults, and rapes are endemic. Concepción, on the other hand, has a looted shopping center. These are not the same thing!

Haiti seems orderly because expectations were much worse. Chile seems chaotic because expectations ... well, actually, Chile doesn’t seem that chaotic, given the scale of the disaster. More chaotic than it needed to be, but the state functions and there has been no organized violence. Minute-to-minute reports here.

The post perturbs me a bit, since I know many people who rely on Marginal Revolution for information, and I am afraid that the false comparison is going to mislead some of them. It is also a bit ironic, since the main point of the post was “context-dependence, context-dependence, context-dependence.” 

Yes. Context-dependence. By any absolute standard, Haitians reacted far more violently than Chileans to the earthquake, because the destruction was far greater and the state basically collapsed, even if it is now getting back on its feet. Apples and oranges, context-dependence.

How to speak Mexican in 197 easy lessons

 I swear a lot in Spanish. My wife doesn't like cursing — public swearing is illegal in Trinidad, and her extensive time in Queens did nothing to change her (most excellent!) preferences — but I can't abandon the practice.  But what I can do is change languages.

Now, the groserías that I picked up as a kid came mostly from Spain (at home) or Puerto Rico (hundreds of different people and places). But my Spanish swearing really didn't come into its own until I lived in Mexico City. That town has developed it to a high art.

Now, courtesy of my old friend Tania Martínez, comes an excellent guide to swearing in Mexican, or, more properly, Chilangese.

I have had to insist that my wife not call me “güey” when she's talking to me, even though that's how she refers to her Mexican friends. When you understand why that sounds wrong, then you will be ready to advance to the next level. When you can explain the proper use of “cagado,” then you will be an expert. Until then, enjoy, learn, and feel free to exercise the Nicoll Doctrine of English language expansion.  You will be doing your country a mitzvah.

And it will come very much in handy while watching sporting events in certain parts of North America and most of Europe north of the Pyrenees. If not a Yankees bar in Boston. Trust me, and I speak from highly embarrassed experience, somebody will understand you.

Customs receiverships and Crown Agents

  So Doug is in Tanzania, working on something mysterious designed to make the world a better place. On a previous excursion to Congo, Doug discussed the general malfeasance of the Congolese government. He also thought hard about the administrative competence of the Belgian bureaucrats who ran the colonial government. They ran that government to little purpose, but they ran it efficiently. 

One way to stylize Congo’s dilemma is that the government can’t control its own agents. To which there may be a solution: get foreigners to do it.

Kris Mitchener and I have just written a brief piece for Paul Romer’s Charter Cities blog that summarizes our work on customs receiverships and Crown Agents. The piece draws from the early 20th-century experience of circum-Caribbean countries with customs receiverships, where countries relinquished management of their customs services to a small group of American managers, and the early 21st-century southern African experience of doing the same thing with a small group of British managers. There was a failure — the fellow who was able to run customs in Haiti found the more sophisticated Panamanians running rings around him when he became the fiscal agent there — but in general corruption went down and collections went up. Crown Agents, the organization that took over in the 21st century, had an earlier cameo on this blog.

Politically feasible? Well, Angola and Mozambique did it. So did several eastern European countries (in a slightly disguised form) when customs corruption looked set to hold up their ability to join the E.U. Long-term benefits or spillovers to other parts of the government? Well, at best the jury is out. But sometimes peoples need their governments to do certain things well right now.

Read the piece and tell us what you think.

Internet censorship in the UAE

 I just arrived in Abu Dhabi from the Caribbean. It seems as though the UAE government has decided to censor all Typepad blogs. Posting will be sparse around here, until I get to Bahrain on January 12th or the government changes its policy.

Unless this attempt at a workaround succeeds.  I can't read the blog ... did it?

Consider this an open thread.

The Democratic Republic of Congo

  These are honestly the best series of posts from Doug yet, and that is setting a rather high bar.  All they lack are representative photographs.

Here Doug visits Katanga.  The post details the province's problems, covers some colonial history, and shows why visits to Africa often produce wistfulness and confusion regarding the European empires even among people who hold no emotional attachment to them.  In Doug's case, quite the reverse.

This post explores a practical question:  how do central banks manage to get currency into the hands of people who need it?  Money as a unit of exchange is worthless if people with wealth can't convert their stores of wealth into units of exchange.  But that turns out to be much more complicated than it might seem.  Latin American countries have at times encountered problems of small change --- Argentina recently went through one such episode, and I lived through another in Mexico in the early and mid 1990s --- but I know of nothing on the scale of the problems Doug describes.  He also describes a minor miracle in which millions of dollars in cash sits undisturbed and barely protected in a place where one would not expect it to last.

Doug also investigates past and present plans to dam or make navigable (these are different) the lower reaches of the Congo River.  Mobutu, it turns out, built a massive long-distance power line to move electricity from one of the dams on the Congo (the last of which was built in 1958) to Katanga, in order to make the province dependent on the central government.  It didn't work out too well.  The whole mess makes me wonder.  Did decolonization in Congo have to be such a mess?  Was a better outcome at all possible?  I know not.  But Mozambique suggests that it might have been better.

And in the latest, he asks the question:  how bad is Congo's government?  You won't like the answer, nor the paradoxically Pollyannish (but almost certainly correct) explanation.

Also, in recognition of my co-blogger, we now have a Finland tag!  Enjoy. 

Was conquering the Philippines worth it?

  When you're a recreational blogger (procrastinational is more accurate) every so often an issue that you know a lot about is raised among the Big Dogs of the blogosphere, and for a moment you're annoyed that they didn't bother to check you out.

That's universal, I'm sure.  In my case, though, it's immediately followed by relief.  I don't want this place to be well known.  I mostly use it to establish a public record of my ideas, most of which will go into the book(s) I'm working on.  I've had a few bad experiences with tossing out such ideas sans public record.  Truth is, most of them are between silly and wrong, but every so often there's something good buried in there.

This applies to links to other people's ideas.  The linking makes me think about them, and how they apply to the stuff I work on.  It's why I don't see the point in link dumps, as opposed to specific links.

Which is why I'll link here to Matt Yglesias's question:  “Was conquering the Philippines worth it?”  In it, he suggests the following:

I mean, suppose the Philippines had obtained independence from the United States in the 1890s rather than the 1940s. How would my life be worse? How would any American’s life be worse? What “long-term benefits” actually accrued to us as a result of the counterinsurgency effort?  It seems to me that unless you look at victory and conquest as being their own reward, it’s hard to see any. Anti-American rebels lost, but we didn’t really win anything of note. We spent a lot of money, suffered some casualties, killed a lot of people and in exchange got some military bases that were overrun by the Japanese as soon as it looked like they might be strategically useful.

I have my own opinion, of course.  I might even give it later, although some of my thinking can be found here and here.  And I do think that one should take into account a counterfactual view of the Philippines before issuing judgment.  “Fifty years of Hollywood” might have improved the lot of the Filipinos, and it seems reasonable for a retrospective to seriously examine that possibility rather than reject it out of hand.   

So, before I give my own opinion (which is, as so often, changeable), what are your thoughts?

National health care, updated

  Megan McArdle, whom I respect, linked to a piece by Glenn Reynolds that basically says that his wife and father would be dead while his daughter and mother would have a much-impaired quality of life under socialized medicine.

But I have a question.  Two, actually.

(1)  The treatments for Reynolds' mother (hip replacement) and father (radioactive prostate cancer implants) were developed for a patient pool that is mostly subject to Medicare.  Which is socialized medicine by most definitions.  Why doesn't that fact show that the argument is fallacious?

(2)  If other countries generally force healthy young women to die or live impaired lives, why doesn't that show up in any of the comparative quality-of-life studies?

A third, fourth, and fifth might be:  Does Ms. McArdle really believe this argument?  If so, why?  And what does it have to do with any of the actual health care reforms that are on the table?

Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias points out why I have trouble staying friends with doctrinnaire libertarians.  This one's for you, Guy.

UPDATE:  Matt Miller has an interesting column in today's Financial Times.  He points out that save for the public option, the current reform plan essentially extends coverage using a basic template designed by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.  In addition, one of the financing plans on the table (not my preferred one, I must admit, nor the President's) was basically proposed by John McCain.  Finally, the eye-popping cost is propaganda, caused by people's emotional reaction to the t-word; the right way to think about the cost is that it is 0.5% of GDP or 3% of total healthcare spending.  In short, the way to a compromise that should attract lots of Republican votes is obvious.

But I will add that since we aren't going to get any Republican votes, I will be very annoyed at my party and President should we get a bill that does not include a public option and that is not financed by a surtax on high earners like, uh ... really? ... my wife and me.

Demography matters, and a music video

  There is an interesting (if rarely updated) blog called “Demography Matters.” It's hit a few interesting topics lately.  Randy McDonald is the driving force behind it.  For those of you who don't know him, he wrote the defining takedown of the whole “Eurabia” nonsense, aka the idea that immigration and differential birthrates will eventually give Europe a Muslim majority.  But the blog is a lot more than that.

Here is a discussion of Greenland.  Short version:  considering the country's dependence on Danish expats for skilled labor, even a non-independence independence of the sort negotiated by other microstates could lead to disaster.  The population is shrinking despite high birthrates.  Maybe they'll get lucky and find oil.  More likely they will remain a dependency of Denmark forever, most likely de jure but definitely de facto.

The blog also recently discussed Iran.  Short version:  looks like Europe!  Crashing birthrates could fuel an economic boom if only the place could get the policies right.  In comments there is an interesting discussion of the fact that American birthrates have stayed above replacement ... and that much of that difference is because urban birthrates in the U.S. aren't appreciably different from their suburban or rural equivalents.  The really weird fact?  Canadian birthrates are crazy lower than U.S. ones, even in such similar places as Washington and British Columbia. 

Finally, it presents a scary version of Cuba's future, in which the country enters a demographic death spiral.  All it lacks is a projection of the worst case scenario: what would Cuba's population and age pyramid look like in 2050 if it goes the way of Ukraine and stays there?

Below the fold is a music video.  It is for Randy, for reasons he understands.  Essentially, while not my cup of tea, it shows what can be accomplished in his preferred genre in both aural and visual terms when attempted by two rather accomplished artists.  Enjoy.

More Doug in Senegal, and why you shouldn’t worry about the deficit

  It seems as though I start a lot of posts with the words “it seems.”  I will try to rectify this in the future. 

Ditto, “so,” a verbal tic I blame on my unbridled admiration for Doug Muir, who has, by the way, written a little more about Senegal.  He tells us about the Mourides, a powerful Muslim sect of which I am embarrassed to say I knew nothing.  He bemoans the crappy state of Dakar’s airport, and receives in turn a useful warning from Bernard.  Finally, he wraps his trip with a discussion of W, railroads, France, birds, the CFA franc (e.g., France yet again, although he doesn’t say so), the weather, the expats, and the clothes.  I am pretending not to be annoyed at not getting a shout-out on the France tip, which means that pique is not the reason why I am not explaining the story of the Senegalese railroads under French colonial rule. 

Which brings us to the U.S. federal deficit.  You hear a lot of worring about how interest rates are going to rise from all this wild borrowing.  Where will the money come from?  We are doomed, doomed!!  No links, because I actually like and respect many of the people doing the worrying.  But they need not.

I just had a colleague in my office with the latest BEA numbers, worrying about just that.   Where will the money come from?  So I pulled out a spreadsheet and showed him.  In the first quarter of 2009, annualized personal savings came to $620 billion, or 5.7% of personal income.  Total savings (again, annualized) came to $1,273 billion, or 9.1% of GDP. 

Personal savings is only going up.  If we assume that nominal GDP growth is flat in 2010 (meaning, most likely, that real GDP keeps falling), a rise in the personal savings rate to 10% will produce $468 billion of additional savings.  Retained earning are also likely to rise, say from 4.6% to 5.0% of GDP.  That’s another $47 billion.  Total of $515 billion in new savings ... just as the federal deficit is projected to fall by $393 billion.  Plenty of wiggle room should private investment rise (one can hope) or the current account deficit fall (which seems likely).  A rise in real interest rates does not seem like something we need to worry about.

Rather, what we need to worry about is a continuing shortfall in demand.  What if Americans don’t substitute domestic consumption for imports?  Final demand will fall.  What if domestic investment doesn’t quickly rebound?  (It was $2 trillion in 2008, a full 25% higher than in the beginning of 2009.)  Final demand will fall.  In that situation, we might be wishing for another round of stimulus, rather than worrying about the deficit. 

UPDATE:  The May numbers just came out from the BEA.  Looks like the personal savings rate hit 6.9% that month.  We are on track to exceed 10 percent in 2009, and in my opinion the country will permanently return to 1970s savings levels.  That said, past performance does not always predict future results.  Any counterarguments?

Doug in Senegal part 5

  Doug is now in Goree, a small island off the Senegalese coast.  I don't have much to add at the moment, unfortunately.  (Or not.)

Doug in Senegal parts 3 and 4

  My friend Doug Muir is in Senegal.  He is visiting a city that I am deeply ashamed to admit that I had never heard of.  His reports from Kaolack are here and here.

Read the posts.  They pose an interesting question, about infrastructure, trade, and prosperity.  How much would an improvement to Kaolack's port reduce transport costs?  How much would a reduction in transport costs increase peanut production?  (In other terms, are there increasing returns in peanut production?)  These are unanswered questions; it isn't a sure thing that fixing Kaolack will promote growth.  After all, a declining peanut economy could provoked the city's decline, rather than the other way around. 

Which isn't to say that Doug is wrong; he probably isn't.  Just that any and all development quick-fixes deserve careful stress-testing before they are implemented. 

Hopefully we'll hear more from him soon.

Domingo flojo, and Doug in Senegal parts 1 and 2

  ¡Domingo flojo!  Despierta tarde en el mediodía, llama al tren, pa’ver q pasaría ... Narnia?  No no no no no. 

So I line up a trip to the deep-pit copper mine.  Chido!  At which it point it starts to hail around here, and the company cancels.  (Liability issues.  Chile is not Mexico, it seems.)  So I figure, hey, Chile has restarted passenger train service, why not chill in Chillán?  Metro to the train station, thin attractive woman a little older than me and wearing this cute little neo-hippy snoopy hat sells me a ticket with just the right amount small talk to remind me why I like this country so much.  Only ... she realizes that the return trips are all sold out.  I debate taking the bus back, decide no, and now regret it.  WTF am I going to do in Santiago on a rainy lazy Sunday?  Work in my hotel room?  Too depressing! 

I'll figure something out.  Meanwhile, Doug Muir is in Senegal, with details here and here.  I, of course, am fascinated by the French influence.  As always, don't expect pictures from Mr. Muir, but do expect lots of information, historical detail, and very good analysis about what it all means. 

You can also go here and here on this blog, where we discuss another part of the French not-empire in West Africa, or here, where you find out how Burundi got a handle on infectious disease.

I'll be back with more about regional inequality, copper, and the effect of the Panama Canal on Chile, but right now I'm going to go brave the rain and wander aimlessly around Santiago for a while.  I will, however, take requests for any Chile-related topics you might want to know more about.  (Randy has one pending on regional inequality.)  Hasta pronto, mis cuates desconocidos. 

A different perspective

  I haven't been to Mérida, Venezuela, in decades.  (I haven't been to the one in Yucatán for about as long, either.)  I used to have an aunt who lived nearby.  She's long gone, and last I heard both her grown children (and their families) lived in Houston and Miami.  

Anyway, Gringa Diary is by an Australian socialist fervently working to further the triumph of the Bolivarian Revolution and turn back to the forces of imperialism.  I believe her name is Tamara Pearson.  It's a fascinating look into the Revolution, up-close-and-personal. 

Of course, her perspectives on the value of Mr. Chávez or the long-term impact of his policies on the poor of Venezuela are quite different from my own.  But she's so earnest about it.  Which is sort of touching, in a way.  More importantly, the true-believer tone infuses the blog with this sense of reading something for a parallel universe.  You read her stories, and more often than not find yourself scratching your head at her emotional reaction or logical analysis, so different from your own. 

But you can't get angry; she's so enthusiastic about it all.  Recommended. 

Ross Douthat

  Who reads my blog?  Nobody reads my blog.  Do I avoid certain topics anyway?  Of course I do; I don't have tenure.  But I do believe that my liberal progressive credentials are fairly secure.  So I would like to ask Brad Delong, on the off chance that he is reading this, to go here.  These arguments exactly reflect my thinking when I first read Brad's posts on the Douthat appointment.  I think that Douthat will be a fine columnist, albeit one that I will usually disagree with and often be infuriated by.

Let me add that as someone who between 1988 and 2000 managed to go from a bizarre Reagan Democrat phase into dumb-ass radical libertarianism before becoming a sort of Democratic-voting Rockefeller Republican in the 1990s ... only after 2001 did I drift further left under the weight of, well, facts ... I am seriously glad that there was no internet to preserve my more adolescent opinions.  You gotta forgive people their past opinions.  Even George Wallace reformed.  So I can't hold Ross Douthat's sillier college columns against him. 

People usually change their opinions when the fact available to them change.  Albeit not always. 

P.S.  If I haven't said so already, Ganchoblog is worth putting on your regular blogroll, for all news Mexican and quite a bit else besides.

My return, I hope, plus some apparent nonsense

  I've been busy, what with the election and then finishing Work-in-Progress number 1.  It isn't quite done, but Carlos and I went through a frenzy of productivity (and three steak lunches, with wine) in New York last week, and the end is very near.

So I will try to get back to posting, although I can't promise anything.  Anyway, I began today with a brief discussion of the Typealyzer.  It purports to be able to analyze the personality type of a blog-writer using some sort of unspecified text analysis algorithm.  I heard about it on Kevin Drum, and then again on Language Log. 

Now, I usually like this sort of thing.  What British political party should I belong to?  The Liberal Democrats!  Of course!  What kind of movie is my life most like?  An action flick!  Obviously!  What South American country would I be?  Venezuela!  Uh ... well, yes, that does make more sense than any of the others, when I think about it.

But the result from the Typealyzer, well, it was just odd:

Doug in Burundi, part 8

Here Doug discusses what cheap labor really means on the ground.  And he means cheap labor.  According to the U.S. State Department, workers in Burundi received on average 1,500 francs per day, or $1.40.  Since a 12-hour day wouldn't surprise me, Doug's estimate of 20 cents per hour might even be high.

You don't need to go to Western Europe to see just how poor that is.  To give an example with which Americans are familiar, production workers in Mexican maquiladoras cost US$2.64 per hour in 2006.  Production workers in all Mexican manufacturing cost US$2.75.  Total hourly direct pay for all employees (including benefits but not taxes and other social charges) averaged US$3.32 per hour.  (That'd be 5,752 pesos per month.)  Even farmworkers in the country's northern states make about US$1.50 an hour.  In short, Burundi is impoverished compared to Mexico.

Anyone who spends time in Latin America can see some of the effects of cheap labor, but nothing on the scale of what Doug describes.

Doug in Burundi, part 5

More about Burundi, starting with the presence of the African Union, moving on to the rebels, and ending with a discussion of the country's really really bad transport problems.  It appears to still be raining in Bujumbura.

One point that I'll repeat on Doug's comment page:  narrow gauge isn't a problem.  Narrow gauge railroads can be upgraded to carry similar loads and operate at close-to similar speeds as standard gauge.  They simply lose most of their initial cost advantage.

Doug in Burundi, parts 3 and 4

Looks like it's rainy in Bujumbura.  It's been weirdly tropical in Massachusetts this summer:  black downpours so heavy that you can't see across the street followed by bright actinic sunshine.  Thankfully, that seems to have ended here; let's hope it ends soon in Burundi.

Over here, Doug explains why there's a Greek deli in the middle of Bujunbura.  It seems as though there was a small community that came down the Nile from Alexandria with the British; some kept going and wound up in Burundi, where they helped administer the place and played a role in commerce.  The messiness of independence, though, drove most of them back to Europe (I assume), leaving a big consulate and what seems to be a very nice deli.

Doug in Burundi, part 2

Catch it here.  Although I dunno why it's on AFOE instead of HDTD.

Doug in Burundi, part 1

Available here.

Doug across Africa, but first Brussels

This post goes out to my friend Doug Muir, over at HDTD.  Doug is going to Burundi.  Burundi, unlike neighboring Rwanda, is still at risk of relapsing into violence, although I wouldn't want to exaggerate it.  Doug writes, “I don't know if Burundi is the sort of place that stimulates blogging,” which I don't understand, and “nor whether the work will allow much time for it,” which I most certainly do.  Anyway, here's a vote for some reportage on what the situation looks like on the ground. 

Before that, he is going to Brussels.  Brussels is interesting.  The two main train stations are strangely chaotic, a throwback to the 1980s in New York.  The smaller one smells of vomit and has a population of rather hostile-looking teenage runaways.  But the architecture is pleasant. 

The larger one, Midi, closely resembles Penn Station in New York, save that it's rare to have to break up a screaming match between a dude in a leather jacket and a tall slender woman in Penn Station these days.  The strange thing, to an American, was the lack of reaction.  I ran towards the guy yelling, "Llame seguridad!" but an Algerian and a British dude (both of whom seemed to work in the bar) got there first and grabbed him, telling him ... something.  Meanwhile, all these other people stood around and watched.  Ignore it completely, that I understand, jump in, that I understand, but gawk?  A little odd.

I don't suppose that this will be obvious to people who don't know me, but I like the above kind of thing.  At least now that my city of birth no longer has it.  Brussels is a real city, and I very much like the place.  Quite a bit. 

Outside Midi is an immigrant neighborhood well worth visiting.  More below the fold.

What's in a name?

Once we figure out the easiest way to port over my existing posts, I'll be leaving HDTD for another space on the internet, turning this place back over to its rightful owners.  I'm sure my new spot will soon become the hot go-to spot for Caribbean politics, early-nineties hip-hop, and random photographs.  Plus, pirates! 

Of course, it needs a name.  "Pure Product of America" is taken by an excellent blog that y'all should go over and start reading regularly.  (Go!  Now!)  Which leaves me at a loss, because while I'm sure that my posts have a pattern, I'm too close to see it, let alone come up with a pithily descriptive phrase.  "Orgulloso de ser argentino" would work, except I'm not.  (Argentino.)  "Shwingalokate" is one of the best tracks ever, but seems a bit too random.   I'd love to do "Radio Free Brooklyn," only I'm, like, not in Brooklyn any more, and "Radio Free Boston" just sounds wrong.   Which leaves me with "Notes from the Gabacho," or perhaps "Notes from teh Gabacho."  The problems with that one are obvious.

"The Power and the Money"?  Too serious.  "A Wee Bit Down the Charles"?  Derivative.  "Econ Dub Style"?  "Mexican Pie"?  "Yeah, We Did Start the F@#&in' Fire"?  "Rico Suave"? 

Quality Control ... Debout là d'dans ! ... Con Todo Respeto ... Lo Que Sea?

Anyway, suggestions are very appreciated.