Sunday, April 19, 2009
hit the grue with the Elvish sword
It's 4am in the dungeon known as Changi airport in Shanghai. I have yet to see the sky in shanghai - at all, anywhere - but it's always sunny down in subbasement 3L or wherever the hell I am. Everything is very well signed, but it's still a laberynth. A vacant, carpeted laberynth with Starbucks and free, high speed internet. Echoing, cavernous, unmappable. Sooo very dungeons and dragons. Photo essay! In an hour, we depart for Kuala Lampur (BADGERS BADGERS BADGERS BADGERS) and then on too Jakarta, whereupon we will plan our workshop, sleep, present, sleep, fly back here. Jakarta workshop, defying expectations, will be well attended by government and NGO flacks. hooray!
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Omnibus Celebratory Brunch
Hey. We're cooking you breakfast. Housewarming, book launch party, excuse to drink before noon... we've got our reasons. You just show up, ok?
Copious breakfasty delights (veggie friendly), bubbly and OJ provided. Feel free to just show up. Please RSVP in the comments section below - significant and insignificant others welcome. Please let me know if you have food allergies, etc (jonathanwerve @ gmail).
Cheers,
Jonathan and Kate
WHEN:
Sunday, September 7, 11am-2pm
Cool kids come early.
WHERE:
2947 N Broadway #3, Chicago 60657
Near Broadway & Wellington
More or less in the vicinity of Clark and Diversey.
Call Jonathan at (415) 515-7662 if you have questions. Hope you can make it!
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008
PNG: Going below zero.
A few thoughts on the developing world, from a nation that isn't: Papua New Guinea (PNG).
Subsistence agriculture is tricky for classical economists. Working from a neo-classical point of view that has shaped the largest international development insitutions since the Bretton Woods agreement, subsistence living -- growing or collecting what you need on your own land, and taking a pass on the cash economy -- is a sort of baseline. It is the tabla rasa upon which development begins.
To techocrats sweating out the details of currency exchange and monitary supply from cubicles in Berlin or Washington or Tokyo, subsitence economy is like dark matter: We know it exists, but none of our instruments can detect it.
To villages that may go years without contact with outsiders or a national government, I imagine that the whirlwind of data in a Bloomberg ticker would seem quite a bit less real than the day-to-day work of pulling yams from the ground. But the subsistence economy in Papau New Guinea is not at all a blank slate. In a country of fantastic cultural and political diversity, these economies show quite a bit of complexity.
In this confusion, tragedy lurks: Despite village life's seeming naivete, subsitence is not a floor from which an economy can only grow, but a system in political and economic equilibrium, refined over millenia and by its own terms, highly efficient. In the South Pacific, village gardens provides a decent living to people, without the need for 60 hour workweeks. At least, it used to.
Change is here, brought on by haphazard national-level governing colliding with a world economy thirsty for PNG's lush natual resources. With is have come disruptive shocks to the economic and social life of PNG. While the economic tigers in Singapore, Thailand and coastal China rip along toward long term GDP growth, the rewards of development haven't materialized in PNG. But stunningly violent crime, AIDS and an unraveling of family life have certainly arrived. Things are bad here, and appear to be getting worse.
As it turns out, PNG's traditional subsitence economy was a long way from the bottom. So where do we go from here?... THat's another post.
Subsistence agriculture is tricky for classical economists. Working from a neo-classical point of view that has shaped the largest international development insitutions since the Bretton Woods agreement, subsistence living -- growing or collecting what you need on your own land, and taking a pass on the cash economy -- is a sort of baseline. It is the tabla rasa upon which development begins.
To techocrats sweating out the details of currency exchange and monitary supply from cubicles in Berlin or Washington or Tokyo, subsitence economy is like dark matter: We know it exists, but none of our instruments can detect it.
To villages that may go years without contact with outsiders or a national government, I imagine that the whirlwind of data in a Bloomberg ticker would seem quite a bit less real than the day-to-day work of pulling yams from the ground. But the subsistence economy in Papau New Guinea is not at all a blank slate. In a country of fantastic cultural and political diversity, these economies show quite a bit of complexity.
In this confusion, tragedy lurks: Despite village life's seeming naivete, subsitence is not a floor from which an economy can only grow, but a system in political and economic equilibrium, refined over millenia and by its own terms, highly efficient. In the South Pacific, village gardens provides a decent living to people, without the need for 60 hour workweeks. At least, it used to.
Change is here, brought on by haphazard national-level governing colliding with a world economy thirsty for PNG's lush natual resources. With is have come disruptive shocks to the economic and social life of PNG. While the economic tigers in Singapore, Thailand and coastal China rip along toward long term GDP growth, the rewards of development haven't materialized in PNG. But stunningly violent crime, AIDS and an unraveling of family life have certainly arrived. Things are bad here, and appear to be getting worse.
As it turns out, PNG's traditional subsitence economy was a long way from the bottom. So where do we go from here?... THat's another post.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Papau New Guinea
Actual conversation at anti-corruption conference:
Her: Yeah, I wasn't even going to come to this conference, because my husband just got shot in the head.
Me: Whaaaaah?
Her: Yeah, it was the funniest thing...
Me: Funny.... like how?
Her: Well, not funny ha ha, more like funny that it didn't penetrate his skull. Just went in and slid around a little. So he's fine now. Hard on the kids though -- they're 7 and 9 -- kind of freaked them out. But now they're fine too. It was at their school, so everyone heard about it. They were the news kids at school, and now everyone knows their names, you know? So they're fine.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Our Apartment
For those keeping score: this is what our apartment would look like if we had furniture, which we don't - all the pink stuff is fictional. Map is to scale, 1 pixel = 1 inch on full size image.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
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