Nigeria's long-run growth performance has been extremely poor. Between 1960 and 2000, real income per capita grew at only 0.43 percent per year. The situation improved between 2001 and 2006 when real per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at an average annual rate of 4.2 percent. This paper demonstrates that the superior growth performance during 2001-06 is largely attributable to the impact of better leadership and economic policy making. The improved performance of the economy after 2003 arose from implementing a comprehensive economic reform program focusing on four main areas: macroeconomic reform; structural reform; governance and institutional reform; and public sector reform. The reforms, backstopped by improved oil revenue management, monetary policy implementation, and debt management, improved overall macroeconomic policy making. This resulted in real GDP growth averaging 7.1 percent per year between 2003 and 2006, an inflation rate of 10 percent in 2006, foreign exchange reserves of US$45 billion in 2006, and total external debt of only US$5 billion in 2006. Clearly, between 1960 and 2000, Nigeria's policy choices were poor, and the reforms that sought to correct them were plagued by inconsistencies, policy reversals, and lack of coherence. In contrast, due to good leadership, the reforms adopted in 2003 were consistent and have been implemented in a coherent manner.
In the early 1990s the World Bank launched the Regional Program on Enterprise Development (RPED) in several African countries, a key component of which was to collect data on manufacturing firms. The data sets built by these and subsequent enterprise surveys in Africa generated considerable research. This article surveys the research on the African business environment, focusing on risk, access to credit, labor, and infrastructure, and on how firms organize themselves and do business. It reviews the research on enterprise performance, including enterprise growth, investment, and exports. The article concludes with a discussion of policy lessons.
The Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s not only highlighted the welfare consequences of transparency in the financial sector but also linked this relatively narrow problem to the broader context of transparency in governance. It has been observed that objections to transparency, often on flimsy pretexts, are common even in industrialized countries. This article argues that transparency is indispensable to the financial sector and describes its desirable characteristics: access, timeliness, relevance, and quality. The authors emphasize the need to weigh the costs and benefits of a more transparent regulatory policy, and they explore the connection between information imperfections, macroeconomic policy, and questions of risk. The article argues for developing institutional infrastructure, standards, and accounting practices that promote transparency, implementing incentives for disclosure and establishing regulations to minimize the perverse incentives generated by safety net arrangements, such as deposit insurance. Because institutional development is gradual, the authors contend that relatively simple regulations, such as limits on credit expansion, may be the most reasonable option for developing countries. They show that transparency has absolute limits because of the lack of adequate enforcement and argue that adequate enforcement may be predicated on broader reforms in the public sector.
Unless developing countries embrace a corporate governance perspective, privatization is unlikely to provide the benefits of improved performance with accountability. This article introduces the concept of governance chains that can constrain the grabbing hands of public and private actors by providing information and accountability mechanisms to help investors monitor managers. Empirical data on established firms from 49 countries provide estimates of the relative importance and strength of private and formal chains of governance. The framework and empirical benchmarks help explain the outcomes of past privatizations and suggest certain steps that governments can pursue to be sure to get the most out of future privatization activity.
Part one of an interview with Maria Mendoza of Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Topics include: Maria Mendoza's parents were born in Portugal, but she was born in Bedford, MA. How she and her husband moved to Fitchburg, MA because of his work in the cotton industry. Her first impressions of Fitchburg and what the city was like when she first moved there. Her work as a stitcher. Her education. Her feelings about politics and government in the U.S. Her feelings about Fitchburg today. How she spends her leisure time. ; 1 WAYNE LUCIER: December 1st, 1973, interview conducted by Wayne Lucier. Place of interview, Mrs. Mendoza's home. Your name, please. MARY MENDOZA: Mary Mendoza. WAYNE LUCIER: And your nationality. MARY MENDOZA: Portuguese descent. WAYNE LUCIER: And your age. MARY MENDOZA: 62. WAYNE LUCIER: Date of birth. MARY MENDOZA: June 15, 1911. WAYNE LUCIER: And what generation are you? Were you born in the United States? MARY MENDOZA: Yes, that would be the second generation now. WAYNE LUCIER: And your present address. MARY MENDOZA: 9 Exeter Street, Fitchburg, Mass. WAYNE LUCIER: And your phone number. MARY MENDOZA: 2-2286. WAYNE LUCIER: And what city were you born? MARY MENDOZA: New Bedford, Mass. WAYNE LUCIER: Okay. And when did you come to Fitchburg? MARY MENDOZA: Hmm, 1941. WAYNE LUCIER: And like from, from New Bedford, when-when you were born, where else did you go? MARY MENDOZA: Springfield. Oh, what, I didn't [go to] Springfield now, don't I, because I lived in Springfield anyway. WAYNE LUCIER: You went from New Bedford directly to Springfield? MARY MENDOZA: Well, we went, uh, Chicopee before, but then I didn't like the place where we lived in and we moved to Springfield. WAYNE LUCIER: And why did you, why did you move to these places? MARY MENDOZA: Because his work, yeah. He has to go and work in there, in Springfield, so there's too much driving. WAYNE LUCIER: Why did you come into Fitchburg? MARY MENDOZA: Mm, the cotton industry. We went in after my husband had to come for the [mildew] and shot at [your health] there. In that, he was attorney to handle some, manage some people in the night shift. 2 WAYNE LUCIER: Before you came here, what kind of jobs did you hold? MARY MENDOZA: Myself was stitching. WAYNE LUCIER: Throughout the whole time? MARY MENDOZA: No. I was a supervisor, because I went up. I went in, I cut the work… well, stitched part of that time, too. WAYNE LUCIER: Before you came here, what did you know about Fitchburg? MARY MENDOZA: Nothing, just my husband, the boss, the superintendent of the cotton industry brought him here. WAYNE LUCIER: What did you think about it after you got here? MARY MENDOZA: Well, I thought it was a nice, old city, small, but peaceful. My thoughts and my mind was always in New Bedford, but after a while, my son was born here and I kind of, you know, learned to like Fitchburg. The only thing that bothers me is what the politicians are doing to it. WAYNE LUCIER: Even then? The politicians were… MARY MENDOZA: No, they were peaceful. We had enough. We had everything we needed if we wanted to work for it. Now, they give us this, give us that, then they turn around and take all we, all the dollars we have, together, put together all those years. And they call it "to help the people." Let the people help themselves, and they're fine. Unless they're sick, they shouldn't be so much helpless. They call it "help." WAYNE LUCIER: Where did you live in Fitchburg when you came? MARY MENDOZA: When we came over here, we went to Marine- WAYNE LUCIER: Maryland. MARY MENDOZA: Maryland, yeah, Maryland. WAYNE LUCIER: And then from there you came… MARY MENDOZA: And then we went to Edwards Street. They sold the house where I was, so I went to Edwards Street. And then we bought this house. WAYNE LUCIER: And all these homes, did you own these homes or…? MARY MENDOZA: No, just this one. WAYNE LUCIER: Were they… MARY MENDOZA: They were rented.3 WAYNE LUCIER: And were there a lot of people living there? You know what I mean, where… MARY MENDOZA: No, one was a cottage, and the other one was a two-family apartment. WAYNE LUCIER: And in this district, were the people… MARY MENDOZA: Oh, those days, they had about 10 children, I guess, [from us]. WAYNE LUCIER: Were they Portuguese people or they were just… MARY MENDOZA: They were French people. But to me, they were people and they were nice people, poor people. But that's why I compare now – things now and then. Then they were so poor, they used to put beans, green beans in a bowl with milk and they call it a feast. Now we have so much. I used to say, you know, once in a while, I used to give things to them because – and they were so pleased with life. They were a paper girl and a paper boy, and they help the father. The name, the middle name was LeBlanc, but the dad name's [nothing]. And yet, they seem to have certain happiness. Now that they have so much in name, yet it isn't enough. My gosh! I never had no trouble, because my heart was here, the day my mother put me in school, you know, to know your language and all that, but she had a summer house there, so that made it… she left me there, and of course, I didn't want it. We come back after my father died and we struggled. She had no social securities, no nothing. Ten children and we get together, and we get along all right. But those times, there was no help of any kind. I remember when they used to – Mr. Simmons, you give him $3 a week, warfare, and he was so grateful. They paid his rent, which in those days was about $2.50 for a three-room apartment. And he was so grateful. Now, they're getting $20 a head and more, but still they holler because they don't go to work, you know. That's why when I get to politicians, you get my blood way up in the air. But the country that I loved to be, it's just like before, not the way in the depression time. That was a bad time. Still, we could depend, we could trust people. Now, we have more than what we need—not everybody, but the biggest part of it—and we can enjoy nothing 4 because we have no faith, no leader, no… That's what's bothering me about the country and about my son and his children. For us, you know, we're almost there. WAYNE LUCIER: Almost there where? MARY MENDOZA: In heaven, I hope. WAYNE LUCIER: [Laughs] MARY MENDOZA: Close to it. WAYNE LUCIER: One foot in the door, huh. MARY MENDOZA: Yeah. Well, before, I never even bothered with politicians, and now with peace, now that I decided for… but going on two years now, I decided to think if there was anything that I could do or help, you know, on my [own], because if everybody does a little something, then the little in every home or in every family would help the country finally. But I told you, I'm sorry, I did, because it gets my blood boiling. I can see it, but all I have is grammar and people that go to colleges and have they call it an education and yet they can't, they do nothing about it. I don't know. So you see, when there's not much that I can say, even the prices are so high that you can't touch this, you can't touch that. Even that, I wouldn't mind it if we had a good leader and if we had some kind of a love in our country, but they bring so many people from all over the world, they each get their different ideas, and mixing them together, of course something's going to blow up. But I shouldn't tell you this, because you know more than I do anyway. But you asked me how I feel. It's a terrible feeling that you can't explain it. And even prayer kind of gets mixed up. Your mind is wondering what's going to be the next minute. WAYNE LUCIER: When you were younger, what type of jobs did you hold? MARY MENDOZA: Well, I've been a stitcher all the way; most of it is stitch. WAYNE LUCIER: How did you learn this? Is this something your mother taught you or you just learned to pick it up? MARY MENDOZA: No. I went to the shop and I guess I asked Mr. Silverman for a job. And he asked me what did I know about the job. I told him nothing. We had a sewing machine, you know, not a [farm]5 machine, a sewing machine. I used to make an apron or… it wasn't me already to cut this, cut that. He says, "Would you bring, come tomorrow and bring some of the things that you did?" And I went home and I couldn't think of anything that I thought was good to show them. So I took myself a dress and an apron that I had bought all a bunch of cloth for $1.00 and took it to him. "Did you did that?" I had made a dress for a doll, but when I was small, I never had a doll. Then somebody, you know, I get a price, a dollar, and I was made a dress. So he says, "Why don't you go in that machine and you play with these pieces of cloth? Do anything you want." And so I made a dress for my doll. And from thereon, you know, I was – he says, "I'm going to give you a job. There was the floor walking. I want you to help me. When some work is wrong, you tell them that; show them what they did wrong. We take it out of the block." I said, "I don't have enough education for that." She says, "Well, just mark one dress out." And from thereon, you know, when I get away, [unintelligible - 00:09:33] I could hand in my papers and mark with kind of cloth, how many yards, what I did and all that. So that's how I learned it, at work. WAYNE LUCIER: Where was this first place? It was in -- MARY MENDOZA: Silverman and Sons, New Bedford, Mass. I worked there nine years. It's a dress shop. And from then on, I get out of there was, well, I don't like to get myself fancy [battle], but it doesn't work with me. But I used to be an assistant to the floor walk. She put me like, you know, there's [above] a hundred bills' work and there 400 bills is a lot of work and we checked the work. And anything that we think that wasn't going to pass, we put it in a box and I sit in a machine next to the office and fix it in some way, surely it can be done. She said, "Use your imagination. Whatever you do, it's done." Those days we're making, I think it was $14 a week. And boy, that was a big pay for me. It was big, because the other girls were making five or six dollars. And I thought, see, the language didn't do… I pay attention to what she said, because I could scribble like any human being that comes from Europe and he 6 takes that paper with their parents with somebody there that they know from [unintelligible - 00:10:49], they can do it. In three months' time, I could write a letter. Not like you do, or you know, the people who go to school, but I could write it. If I could do it those days, then everything goes so slow. The kids today are so smart. They want me to tell me that they need all this spending money and that they do it or not. Oh, I wish I had the chance to talk to that [girl]. He's trying now, but I think it's a bit late. Well, never too late, I guess, they say. So that's the way it is. And, you know, the two of us together, we bought our home. We always had our car. I don't call my house luxury because everything is going to be 40 years that I'm married next April. So everything is old but that. The rest is all furnished. They rented things that is in there. It's not all new, but it's not the one, the furnishing I had. And still, you know, we're happy, until this crooked stuff come up. That's the only complaint I got about it. Not the country, but the politicians. I love the country. WAYNE LUCIER: Do you belong in any clubs? MARY MENDOZA: No. I belong to the guild in the church but I quit, because in some of them, we go to the cottage so I never – I mean no meats or nothing, so I told the priest, I can't belong to anything which we enjoy very much when we go down there. It's just a little weekend near the water. WAYNE LUCIER: Where's this? MARY MENDOZA: In the Buzzards Bay. Fairhaven is the town. We pay the tax. And now you can't even go there. That's not funny when you work so hard and we had so much. The country have plenty and look what… Oh, gosh, going… I don't know. No matter what I say, it ends up on the… And I was so happy that I was going to retire this year. And, you know, going here, not going too much in it anyway. Just going a bit, that's enough good time for me. And I don't do any more than I would do at home, but just go and wipe my feet, go in the water, that I enjoy very much and the air. That's the way things are now. You stay home and get old to the point 7 that there's no faith of any kind all because of the… oh, gosh, no, it's really terrible. And the young people, they have so much power. There's so much – not understanding, they don't have any, but so much knowledge, and yet they don't put it to good use. They put it to steal. That people can't keep their doors, they can't go out in peace and say, "When I want to go home, would I have the junks that I left home?" It's not a – I don't know, you can't put into words. WAYNE LUCIER: Things have to get better anyway. MARY MENDOZA: Oh, they have to because if this is it, the good Lord will punish all of us, because, you know, it's really too much. They go stealing. Murderers walk free. That's really… Only they think they're doing some good to themselves, and how wrong they are. There going to be a time where they don't have no body and no soul to go with it. WAYNE LUCIER: What type of education did you have? MARY MENDOZA: Fifth grade? WAYNE LUCIER: What city was it? MARY MENDOZA: Oh, it was in New Bedford, A. Lincoln School, Abraham Lincoln Elementary School that I went to. And there was sitting among us, there's love for the Abraham Lincoln story that I could learn most anything. And I was 17 years old already. WAYNE LUCIER: Do they mix boys and girls in classes? MARY MENDOZA: Yeah. Then it's always the funny ones that don't want to learn. They're cracking jokes, and there's a couple of serious ones. I don't know, she says, "Well, you don't belong with these. Where did you go to school?" I said, "I didn't." I went to school, you know, in Europe, in school which [unintelligible - 00:14:48] high school I finished there. But that was it. Over there, they call it high school the way I -- it's different, the grades from here. WAYNE LUCIER: You went to school in Europe? MARY MENDOZA: Yes, I finished the school. WAYNE LUCIER: What type of school?8 MARY MENDOZA: Regular school, but I finished almost the secondary of high school in Portuguese. WAYNE LUCIER: Was it harder over there? Is the school harder? MARY MENDOZA: Well, we don't have no fun. We go to all the school at 8:00 and we get out at 4:00. And now, we have after that, it's one hour for dinner. WAYNE LUCIER: So you learn the same things, too? MARY MENDOZA: You learn, you read, you write, you learn about the histories, about… well, most of it is reading and writing, see what other countries are doing. You get into a history which I was beginning to get into it other than… well, let's put it that way. I only have what would you call junior high, huh. WAYNE LUCIER: Yeah. MARY MENDOZA: Yeah. And we don't learn no stitching, no cooking, no nothing. That's up to our mothers to teach us that. That's the difference of our country, make the people work and learn and love it at the same time. And when you get home, you do what your mother tells you. You do wash clothes, you iron clothes, you wash dishes, and you help, you know, when they bake bread. It's really an interesting life, though. We do a lot more. Here, everything is bought. When they get the rough going, they can't take it. I remember these things; we get our potatoes, our beans and all that. I was fortunate that I never had to do anything like that. Because it – that St. Michael resources, the woman don't work. The men work like the devil, but they don't do any wives' work either. It's men's work and men's work, and the woman does its washing, cleaning, and that's it, and cooking, of course, and trying to mend the clothes and make their own clothes. Now I guess, I understand everything is different. It's 40 years. I haven't been there now. I was too young to… but what I remember, I remember vividly, though. And that's the way I learned to… you learn to read, you learn some manners. The girls stay in the middle of school and the boys stays on one row in the sides, you know, facing the windows and the girls facing the teachers. And you then, when it's the 9 border, boys will sit like that and watch them. They were writing, they want us to figure that. That at school, that's what we had. That's why a kid there for with the second grade knows more than one over here at fifth grade. Because we have nothing, we have no basketball, no pitches, no nothing – just work, books, and they make you writing and they make you try to explain what you read, you know, how that means. That's the way they learn there which is the same thing over here. They give you a book and you read it and you have to explain that in your own words. But see, there's a difference. It's funny, though, only one hour a day that we had. So when you get to 12 years old, you have to pay for the school because that… WAYNE LUCIER: Who pays for the school? MARY MENDOZA: The parents, and if you don't have it, you stay out. WAYNE LUCIER: Really? MARY MENDOZA: My mother paid for my brothers, and they don't care. They were satisfied. Jimmy was the only one, but he's smart, though. But he likes his tea, strong tea. But he is a pretty, smart kid, and he writes like a professor, actually. And you know, that's the way we were. My brother's used to go, you know, in the farm, like a farm over here. It was about 100 acres of land and when she had it, it was enough to take care of all the children. And when nobody… then she could not – she signed her name, my grandma, but that's all she was interested into it, because she went to school a couple of years, and she says that don't give me no share at all of bread to eat. She quit it. And now, you know, but she worked hard. She didn't have to have no help, no. It's a farm. Of course, she worked there. She got up from 6:00 to 6:00 in those days. I don't remember my mother when I was little. She leave, I was asleep. She would come home, I was asleep. So finally, my grandmother says, "Leave her here." WAYNE LUCIER: She was working where? She wasn't working over there, right? MARY MENDOZA: In New Bedford. WAYNE LUCIER: New Bedford.10 MARY MENDOZA: She was 25 years in New Bedford thing, too hard, only he except two. Not three year, she used to go there every two or three years. She used to go spend the summer there. My father was there. They're rich here. A couple of rich people, my father, very rich, too. But his mother don't want him to marry my mother. And that was it, he was out. And they used to work there every three years, because he was a steam engineer, my father. And he used to – then, he used to make better than average, but he spent it, too. Every three years, he goes to Europe for six months; that's a pretty good life. But he was used to that. You couldn't take him out of it. All my father's people didn't got a home. They claim I have some relations here and I have seen that. I don't know them when I was little. Now, it doesn't feel that. That was an awful thing to do to your children. I've thought about it, they go look far, but on my father side, the lowest one, she's the head of a hospital in Sacramento, California. WAYNE LUCIER: What, your father's what? MARY MENDOZA: Sister. And the other one's, well, they come into paper not too long ago. They'll send it to me. There's your uncle's boy, got injured in [Madeira]. I just go, "Good for him." You know, it doesn't do me anything because we never saw – I only saw one cousin. He was a lawyer. And he was so bad. My mother didn't know what to do with himself. And she said – WAYNE LUCIER: Are you a citizen? MARY MENDOZA: I was born in this country so I consider myself as a citizen. WAYNE LUCIER: Okay. Are you a Republican or a Democrat? MARY MENDOZA: A Democrat. WAYNE LUCIER: A faithful Democrat? MARY MENDOZA: Well, when it comes to good men, I never [unintelligible - 00:21:06], see I belong to this team, and I'm going to fight for it with all my heart if a good man is a good man, and an American is an American. That's all it means to me. But when Roosevelt came in, that was the first time that I voted. So that's when it went, not because I had any special feelings for any… And now, I still say, a 11 good man is a good man. If a Democrat is rotten, we don't root for him. WAYNE LUCIER: Have you ever become involved in a political party, working for a candidate? MARY MENDOZA: No, I never did. WAYNE LUCIER: And what are your feelings about the state government? Is it a useful tool? How was it? MARY MENDOZA: About what the state does? WAYNE LUCIER: The state, yeah. MARY MENDOZA: I don't know. I don't think I'm going to get to those answers because that gets me mad. Oh, no, the state did to me, I think more the city, what the city does than the state. WAYNE LUCIER: What does the city do, then? Is it better than the state? MARY MENDOZA: No, they're copying the state; that's why they call Fitchburg "the Little Watergate." Yeah, and that's… I don't know much about it. So just now, I have no special feeling for the government and even scared of anybody that works for them, because they all – not all, thank God for that. There's a dozen of good ones there somewhere. I don't think they're doing their job. That's – is that a good enough answer? WAYNE LUCIER: That's good. Have you ever experienced any language barriers or problems, you know, when you first, you know, say in your education or today or…? MARY MENDOZA: No, seeing that I'm not much of a social… I really don't… Never bothered me not knowing, I never go any places that I have to be put on. I fall asleep pretty soon. WAYNE LUCIER: How about, have you ever experienced any discrimination in your job due to your language or to your background? MARY MENDOZA: No, that's another left wing. They call this… they're "Oh, we don't like this guy and their people." I never even thought about it. Where I worked, there was a Jewish girl next to me. On the Friday, we eat meat and she eat… we eat fish and she'd eat meat. I ask her, "Why do you do that?" She said, "Well, our religion doesn't call… we don't eat this, we don't eat that." I thought, 12 "Well, it's her own way. Let her do the way she wants." To me, you know, she was – then there's a colored girl then, in [unintelligible - 00:23:34], I didn't understand half of the things she says, the way she talked. But still to me, "She was one of the workers," I said. I don't think there's no discrimination. That's the politicians just make that. And the Black people, they holler that they're getting hurt. They don't think of the White ones, they're getting the same thing. It's the workers that… I can't explain it. The states got the power to come in our pay envelopes and take in the government, to take out [unintelligible - 00:24:05] and we can't say nothing about it. They would have the power to say, "You do wrong, you pay." And we take just so much. And we can't do that, you know. We're not going to do it. You know, I have a son, they need schools. They close the schools. And in Route 12, they got a nice-looking school. It's a small school, but it's all boarded up. And yet we have no own, and then they keep sending for the kids, when they let their kids to come from all over the place. Immigration should be, come down to nothing now, until we get these things straight. Then when they open the immigration ports, they should be slow. Not the way they are, because they – among those immigrants, there's a lot of troublemakers. And that's why our country is rotten and the president is… I don't want to get to talk about him because of his… This is a weekend. WAYNE LUCIER: How about when you went looking for a house? Did you ever have any trouble finding a house, you know? MARY MENDOZA: No, never trouble of that. I always was lucky to find a nice home. Even when I come to Fitchburg, you know, I thought that was really, oh, it's a French town, and I had no trouble of any kind. I moved over here. They say, "You don't only stay here a couple of years." I saw the French. I said, "Well, what's the difference? They're people." WAYNE LUCIER: Who said that?13 MARY MENDOZA: Some of my neighbors. This one is German. She's says, "Oh, you won't like it." I never liked her. I said, "Look, that's their house. This is my house. We all belong to the same…" I never had no trouble. Honestly, I never did. WAYNE LUCIER: Okay. Do you think Fitchburg has decent job opportunities? Let's say, when you came here. Did they have enough jobs when you first came to Fitchburg? MARY MENDOZA: It's better than the average city, though. They get… well, like not every city has [AEG] and they're the ones that complain that they not making enough. But they have the paper mills which you always pay better than the shops. I think Fitchburg has more opportunities than some big cities. WAYNE LUCIER: Even today? MARY MENDOZA: Even today, if people want to work. And the government was fair, and they say, "Look, somebody is sick." Does this sound good? If somebody is… well, like my grandma, she was really an invalid that could do no more. She could not take care of herself. I could pick her up. You know, you need help, that's fine. I'll be glad that they give them people, whatever they need. But when these people, they got to go to the hairdresser every month. I haven't been to hairdresser for two years. I get by, passing, I'm no beauty, but I never try to please the outside world, just my own family. And I don't understand it when they… if they do that, they give so much. And yeah, they get people to have the feeling of doing something for themselves. Like now, you're a young boy, but you're taking care of your home. You used to come here, "See, I did this myself." You learn to love that house. But there's a lot of people, my daughter in law told me the other day, she says, "I'm going to change this living room." I said, "Why?" She says, "It's because it's my work. And I love this house." I could see what she – she was wanting to work. Some of these people, they just don't want to work; that's why the city of Fitchburg has a lot of jobs and still pretty good. The only thing that was wrong with that 14 baby [feast], that's why, you know, we hire… young men's going to have a hard time to get in. WAYNE LUCIER: Who? MARY MENDOZA: Some men. WAYNE LUCIER: Oh, yeah. MARY MENDOZA: When the rough, when things get rough, you walk out. And he's good, he's good nothing. This, you know, maybe this don't mean anything to the reevaluation. This is an awful thing they did to Fitchburg that destroyed their faith, the city, and made people swearing and got… well, they got to go to office. Because the reevaluation, I'm paying the rent in this house. That's what's wrong, very wrong. And yet, they mean to tell me they can't do anything about it, the mayor. WAYNE LUCIER: There's a new one coming, anyway. MARY MENDOZA: Well, I'm going to tell you something. He's not much when it comes to speeches and to looks and all that. He's an old man. But I'm sure he's not going to make it worse. If the councils work with him, he's going to be better than the lawyer. Lawyers always have riches and all that. I think that's why Black Walden stay in, not because he was a bad man, because he's a lawyer. People get so scared, that Watergate, that… You know, it's true. That's why I hope and I hope the council works with him. But he was against the reevaluation. But no, they'll be faced with evaluation. It's bad if some don't pay, some don't own… Do you think it's fair in your own mind that I pay about $18 a week for taxes in this house, between $17 and $18 just for taxes? WAYNE LUCIER: Well, you wouldn't mind paying them if you saw it – I don't mind paying as long as I see something for it, I mean, the money helping somebody, you know, that deserves it. You know what I mean? MARY MENDOZA: Oh, there's a lot of people that deserve, you know, I like to put it, deserve help, that they have no way of going to work. But there's also these people… You know, in Europe, a girl has a baby, she's not married, she's got to struggle. And the second time she has one, they put her away. That's why they have people over there, 15 they think they're straight. They're not. The government is straight. They don't go and help all kinds, you know, induce them to have it, so the others can support it. That's the wrong thing, too. But a girl falls into a misfortune the first time, sure, I give her the help that she needs. But you hear them telling you, "Oh, I'm not going to work. If I go to work, I get less than what I get from the welfare." I don't know. Then they pay babysitters, they have to have a day where… I don't know. I don't understand it anymore. I know that's not the way I do things, the way they do it. The taxes are too high, and there's still people that didn't get no reevaluation at all. They say every five houses, they skip one. Well, I wasn't the lucky one. But one of their men came over here and see the house, if you only know what I felt like doing. So the government is turning the people into killers and to… Oh, boy, if I had a gun, I think I'd shoot him. Yeah, I wouldn't shoot him to kill him, but I'd say, "I want you to get out." But who is making the fuss? Just me, not because I take it to see how we don't know… we're not stupid. Now, one of these days, they're going to get it. People are going to revolt. Boy, and it's not going to be fun and God have mercy on all of us. So it's good that we go out and try to bring peace with them. It takes a lot of it. So that's the way I think of our government and I hope somebody feels better than I do. WAYNE LUCIER: How is your leisure time spent now away from work? MARY MENDOZA: That's it. We go to the summer cottage in summer. In winter, we save, save so we can go in the summer. And we go and every other week, we stay there a week, three days. Now that, I figured, maybe I could stay there and all, biggest part of the week then come back. I'd never liked to stay there, let's say all summer, no. My son and my grandchildren are here. So my heart stays in Fitchburg, too. I'm divided. But that was enough fun for me. Got my family and my husband's family, they're all from there. They come and stay with us. I call that a lot of fun. They don't live there. They live around there. They come and spend the day with us and we go in the water. We talk to our neighbors. That kind of, you know, it 16 was just some things that I never had a chance to do when I'm working. That's my pastime. I don't like big crowds. I like little gatherings, but I don't like big crowds. I don't like going for dances and –/AT/jf/cp/ee
The New Political Economy1 is based on the postulate of homo politicus that Downs (1957) presents as the clone of homo oeconomicus, a rational agent mo- tivated by the maximisation of his material self-interest. Goodin and Roberts (1975) were the first to propose an alternative to the homo politicus postulate by introducing the notion of 'ethical voter' 2. The 'ethical voter' describes a rational agent who is not only motivated by the maximisation of his short term material self-interest but also by the promotion of what he considers as fair for the society as a whole. There have been so far only few attempts to model 'ethical voting'. Most of them liken 'ethical voting' to caring about the well-being of the worst-off when voting (see Snyder and Kramer (1988), Kranich (2001) and Galasso (2003)). Alesina and Angeletos (2005) constitute an exception. Following responsibility-based theories of justice, they assume that individuals share the conviction that one deserves the income on the basis of his skill and effort and that only luck creates unfair differences they are consequently willing to compensate. However, the 'responsibility cut' (Dworkin (1981)) used by Alesina and Angeletos (2005) lacks justification, should one consider the theoretical literature on fair redistribution or the empirical literature on individual opinions on distributive justice. I propose to analyze 'ethical voting' in a more comprehensive way. The thread of this work is a 'fair utility function'. More precisely, I specify in paper 1 a 'fair utility function' to model citizens' trade-off between their self-interest and some of their major concerns for fairness. Paper 2 and paper 3 rely on the 'fair utility function' to study voting behavior over the (re)distribution of economic surpluses in different contexts of democracy4. In paper 2, my coauthor and I compute the politico-economic equilibrium that emerges when citizens are endowed with the 'fair utility function'. We model the institutional setting of a typical Western democracy where political cleavages are mainly income-based. In paper 3, I estimate the 'fair utility function'. I base my estimation on survey data that I collected in an ethnically polarized democracy where political cleavages are mainly ethnic-based. Paper 1 investigates whether concerns for fairness influence the aggregate out- come in real life interactions so that economic analysis should complete the postulate of homo economicus with the postulate of homo ethicus. I conduct a three-step analysis addressing the following research questions: • Which are the main concerns for fairness that individuals are able to show? • Do these concerns for fairness influence the aggregate outcome in the eco- nomic field? • Do these concerns for fairness influence the aggregate outcome in the po- litical field? Based on experimental evidence, I identify three main concerns for fairness likely to influence individual behaviors besides self-interest: utilitarian altru- ism, 'Rawlsian' altruism and desert-sensitivity. Utilitarian altruism consists in maximizing the sum of all utilities. 'Rawlsian' altruism consists in maximizing the utility of the worst-off. Desert-sensitivity consists in weighting one's con- cerns for fairness towards others, should they be utilitarian altruistic concerns or 'Rawlsian' altruistic concerns, depending on these others' deservingness with respect to their responsibility characteristics. I find out that concerns for fairness have no impact on market aggregate out- comes, should I focus on markets involving complete contracts or on markets involving incomplete contracts. I provide evidence that concerns for fairness have a significant impact on po- litical aggregate outcomes. More particularly, concerns for fairness (utilitarian altruism, 'Rawlsian' altruism, and desert-sensitivity) seem to express through citizens' position on a liberalism/conservatism scale which ultimately impacts their voting behavior. However, evidence also shows that ethnic prejudice, an unambiguously unfair motivation, constitutes a serious challenger to individual concerns for fairness, even in the Western democratic context where political parties are officially divided along income-based, not ethnic-based, lines. My findings suggest that economic theory in general (and the New Political Economy in particular) should pay more attention to the modelling of ethical voting behaviors to improve its explanatory and predictive power. I propose a provisional 'fair utility function' to model citizens' trade-off between their self-interest and the three various concerns for fairness which are utilitarian altruism, 'Rawlsian' altruism and desert-sensitivity. • Which is the politico-economic equilibrium emerging in a society where individuals are endowed with the 'fair utility function'? We study a simple voting model where a unidimensional redistributive parame- ter is chosen by majority voting in a direct democracy where political cleavages are income-based. We allow for heterogeneities in productivities and preferences for consumption and leisure and incorporate the incentive effects of taxation. We show that in a society where altruistic preferences are desert-sensitive, (i) strictly lower levels of redistribution emerge in political equilibrium comparedto a society where altruistic preferences are not desert-sensitive and (ii) lower or equal levels of redistribution emerge in political equilibrium compared to a society where preferences for redistribution are purely egoistic. We then investigate the following research question: • Can our theoretical result help explain the differences between the Ameri- can and the European social contract? Using data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 1992 dataset, we provide empirical evidence that: (i) preferences for redistribution are not purely egoistic, (ii) desert-sensitivity induces lower support for redistribution and (iii) differences in desert-sensitivity hold between both continents, inducing lower support for redistribution among Americans compared to Europeans. We see two apparent explanations helping to understand why preferences for re- distribution are more desert-sensitive among individuals in the US than among individuals in Europe (see Alesina et al. (2001) and Alesina and Glaeser (2004) for an extensive discussion). First, the myth of the US being the 'land of op- portunity' greatly entrenched its customs. Meanwhile, European perceptions are influenced by the historical (from medieval times till the nineteenth cen- tury) division of society into classes, where birth and nobility were the main determinants of wealth and success. Second, the American belief of undeserv- ingness of the poor may reflect racial prejudice against the black minority. Poor white voters might reduce their support for redistribution when they believe that poor black citizens also benefit from redistribution (see Luttmer (2001) for strong empirical evidence). Roemer et al. (2007) find out that marginal income taxes would have been much higher when racial prejudice would have been absent. They believe that racial prejudice is the major underlying factor explaining why in the US, while the past twenty years were characterized by a sharp rise in inequality, the effective marginal income taxes have fallen. • In an ethnically polarized country, does aversion towards inter-ethnic in- equity induce citizens to vote for a party promoting an equitable allocation of national resources among ethnic groups?5 or, in other words, Could ethical voting help reduce risks of conflict in ethnically polarized countries? Relying on data collected among students from Addis Ababa University, my answer is threefold. First, I show that aversion towards inter-ethnic inequity significantly lowers university students' temptation to vote for their ethnic party. This finding is encouraging. Under my initial assumption that the degree of ethical concerns of university students constitute an upper bound of the degree of ethical concerns of the average citizen, this finding indeed suggests that ethical concerns could also influence his voting behavior. In other words, nationwide civic education programmes could be a promising conflict-reducing strategy in ethnically po- larized countries. Finkel (2002, 2003) provides evidence that civic education programs have a significant impact on participants' 'political tolerance', while his concept of 'political tolerance' is close to our notion of 'aversion towards inter-ethnic inequity'. Second, I find out that, though significant, the relative impact of ethical concerns is very small in comparison to the impact of ethnic group loyalty, an important determinant of ethnic voting. This finding is discouraging since it suggests that the relative impact of ethical concerns will be even lower across a more representative sample of the Ethiopian population. In other words, the 'return' on nationwide civic education programmes in terms of switch from ethnic voting to ethical voting is expected to be low. Third, I analyse the sociodemographic determinants of university students' aver- sion towards inter-ethnic inequity and ethnic group loyalty. I provide confirma- tion that some specific sociodemographic characteristics significantly (i) increase the degree of aversion towards inter-ethnic inequity and (ii) lower ethnic group loyalty. Those characteristics have in common that they reduce the 'psycholog- ical' distance between ethnic groups, like living in a cosmopolitan city and hav- ing parents belonging to different ethnic groups (see Atchade and Wantchekon (2006) for a first evidence). Besides, I find that ethnic group loyalty is par- ticularly strong among ethnic groups experiencing a severe level of grievance. Finally, evidence shows that aversion towards inter-ethnic inequity depends pos- itively on the income of the household in which the respondent grew up in. ; La politique de la Nouvelle Economy1 est basée sur le postulat de l'homo politicus qui Downs (1957) présente comme le clone de l'homo oeconomicus, un agent rationnel mo- tivé par la maximisation de son intérêt matériel. Goodin et Roberts (1975) ont été les premiers à proposer une alternative à l'homo politicus postulat en introduisant la notion de «électeur éthique» 2. Le «éthiques des électeurs »désigne un agent rationnel qui n'est pas seulement motivé par la maximisation de son matériel à court terme l'intérêt mais aussi par la promotion de ce qu'il considère comme équitable pour la société dans son ensemble. Il ya eu jusqu'ici que peu de tentatives pour le modèle «vote éthique». La plupart d'entre eux vote éthiques assimiler »pour veiller au bien-être des plus démunis au moment de voter (Voir Snyder et Kramer (1988), Kranich (2001) et Galasso (2003)). Alesina et Angeletos (2005) constituent une exception. À la suite de la responsabilité fondée sur théories de la justice, ils supposent que les individus partagent la conviction que l'on mérite le revenu, sur la base de ses compétences et de l'effort et que la chance ne crée différences injustes, ils sont donc prêts à compenser. Toutefois, le «Couper la responsabilité» (Dworkin (1981)) utilisé par Alesina et Angeletos (2005) n'a pas justification, doit-on considérer la littérature théorique sur la redistribution équitable ou la littérature empirique sur les opinions individuelles sur la justice distributive. Je me propose d'analyser «vote éthique» d'une manière plus globale. Le fil de ce travail est une «fonction d'utilité équitable». Plus précisément, je précise en papier 1 une «fonction d'utilité équitable» au modèle des citoyens compromis entre leur intérêt personnel et certaines de leurs préoccupations majeures pour l'équité. Livre 2 et document 3 compter sur la «fonction d'utilité équitable» pour étudier le comportement des électeurs au cours de la (re) distribution des excédents économiques dans différents contextes de democracy4. Dans le document 2, mon coauteur et je calculer l'équilibre politico-économique qui émerge quand les citoyens sont dotés de la «fonction d'utilité équitable». Nous modélisons les institutionnels création d'une démocratie occidentale typique où les clivages politiques sont principalement fondée sur le revenu. Dans le document 3, je estimer la «fonction d'utilité équitable». Je me base estimation des données d'enquête que j'ai pu recueillir dans une démocratie ethniquement polarisés où les clivages politiques sont principalement fondées sur l'ethnie. Document 1 cherche à savoir si les préoccupations d'équité pour l'influence sur l'ensemble- viennent dans les interactions réelles de sorte que l'analyse économique devrait compléter le postulat de l'homo economicus avec le postulat de l'homo ETHICUS. -Je effectuer une analyse en trois étapes l'étude des questions suivantes: • Quelles sont les principales préoccupations d'équité que les individus sont en mesure de spectacle? • Ne ces préoccupations pour l'équité influence le résultat global de l'éco- domaine économique? • Ne ces préoccupations pour l'équité influence le résultat global de la po- litical domaine? Sur la base de données expérimentales, je identifier trois principales préoccupations pour l'équité susceptibles d'influencer les comportements individuels en plus de l'intérêt: utilitaire ALTRU- ISM, «l'altruisme rawlsienne et désert sensibilité. l'altruisme utilitariste consiste à maximiser la somme de tous les services publics. «Altruisme rawlsienne» consiste à maximiser l'utilité des plus démunis. Desert sensibilité consiste en un coefficient de con- préoccupations d'équité envers les autres, devraient-ils être utilitaires préoccupations altruistes ou «préoccupations altruistes rawlsienne», selon le caractère méritoire de ces autres avec fonction de leurs caractéristiques responsabilité. Je trouve que les préoccupations d'équité n'ont pas d'impact sur le marché global hors vient, dois-je mettre l'accent sur les marchés portant sur des contrats complets ou sur les marchés impliquant des contrats incomplets. Je fournis des éléments de preuve que les préoccupations d'équité ont un impact significatif sur le Po- litical résultats globaux. Plus particulièrement, les préoccupations d'équité (utilitaires l'altruisme, «l'altruisme rawlsienne», et le désert de sensibilité) semblent exprimer à travers citoyens position sur une échelle de libéralisme conservatisme qui a un impact à terme leur comportement de vote. Toutefois, la preuve montre également que les préjugés ethniques, une ambiguïté déloyale motivation, constitue un concurrent sérieux aux préoccupations individuelles pour l'équité, même dans le contexte occidental de démocratie où les partis politiques sont officiellement répartis le long de revenus, pas à base ethnique, des lignes. Mes résultats suggèrent que la théorie économique en général (et les nouveaux enjeux politiques Économie en particulier) devrait accorder plus d'attention à la modélisation de l'éthique les comportements de vote pour améliorer sa capacité explicative et prédictive. Je propose à titre provisoire «fonction d'utilité équitable» au modèle des citoyens compromis entre leurs l'intérêt et les trois différentes préoccupations d'équité qui sont utilitaires l'altruisme, «l'altruisme rawlsienne et désert sensibilité. • Quel est l'équilibre politico-économique émergent dans une société où les individus sont dotés de la «fonction d'utilité équitable»? Nous étudions un modèle simple de vote où une redistribution unidimensionnelle para- ter est choisi par vote à la majorité dans une démocratie directe où les clivages politiques sont fondées sur le revenu. Nous tenons compte de l'hétérogénéité dans les préférences et les productivités à la consommation et de loisirs et d'intégrer les effets incitatifs de la fiscalité. Nous montrons que dans une société où les préférences altruistes sont désertiques sensibles, (i) strictement niveaux inférieurs de la redistribution émerger dans comparedto équilibre politique d'une société où les préférences ne sont pas altruistes désert sensibles et (ii) inférieur à ou des niveaux équivalents de redistribution émerger dans l'équilibre politique par rapport à un société où les préférences pour la redistribution sont purement égoïstes. Nous avons ensuite étudier la question de recherche suivante: • Peut notre résultat théorique aider à expliquer les différences entre les Améri- peut et du contrat social européen? En utilisant les données de l'International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 1992 dataset, nous fournir des preuves empiriques que: (i) les préférences pour la redistribution ne sont pas purement égoïste, (ii) du désert sensibilité induit support inférieur pour la redistribution et (iii) les différences dans le désert sensibilité tenir entre les deux continents, induisant support inférieur pour la redistribution entre les Américains contre les Européens. Nous voir deux explications apparentes aide à comprendre pourquoi les préférences pour les re- de distribution sont plus sensibles du désert entre les individus aux États-Unis que chez personnes en Europe (voir Alesina et al. (2001) et Alesina et Glaeser (2004) pour une discussion approfondie). Tout d'abord, le mythe des Etats-Unis étant le "pays de l'op- portunity «fortement enracinées ses coutumes. Pendant ce temps, les perceptions européennes sont influencés par les historiques (de l'époque médiévale jusqu'à la dix-neuvième de la CEN- siècle), une division de la société en classes, où la naissance et la noblesse ont été les principaux déterminants de la richesse et de succès. Deuxièmement, la croyance américaine de undeserv- disponibilité manifestée des pauvres peuvent refléter les préjugés raciaux contre la minorité noire. Pauvres électeurs blancs pourraient réduire leur soutien à la redistribution quand ils croient que les pauvres citoyens noirs aussi profiter de la redistribution (voir Luttmer (2001) pour de solides preuves empiriques). Roemer et al. (2007) constatent que marginal impôt sur le revenu aurait été beaucoup plus élevé lorsque les préjugés raciaux aurait été absent. Ils croient que les préjugés raciaux est le principal facteur qui sous-tendent expliquant pourquoi les États-Unis, tandis que les vingt dernières années ont été caractérisées par une forte hausse des inégalités, les impôts en vigueur du revenu marginal ont chuté. • Dans un pays ethniquement polarisés, ne aversion envers inter-ethniques en l'équité amener les citoyens à voter pour un parti de promouvoir une répartition équitable des ressources nationales entre les groupes ethniques? 5 ou, en d'autres termes, Pourriez vote éthiques aider à réduire les risques de conflit dans des environnements ethniquement polarisés pays? S'appuyant sur des données recueillies auprès des étudiants de l'Université d'Addis-Abeba, mon réponse est triple. Tout d'abord, je montre que l'aversion envers l'inégalité inter-ethniques réduit considérablement la tentation des étudiants universitaires à voter pour leur parti ethnique. Cette constatation est encourageant. Sous mon hypothèse de départ que le degré de préoccupations éthiques des étudiants constituent une limite supérieure du degré de préoccupations d'ordre éthique du citoyen moyen, cette constatation suggère en effet que les préoccupations éthiques pourraient également influer sur son comportement de vote. En d'autres termes, l'éducation civique à l'échelle nationale programmes pourraient être une stratégie prometteuse de réduction des conflits dans des environnements ethniquement po- tif pays. Finkel (2002, 2003) fournit la preuve que l'éducation civique programmes ont un impact significatif sur la tolérance des participants «politique», tandis que son concept de «tolérance politique» est proche de notre notion de «aversion envers l'inégalité inter-ethnique ». Deuxièmement, je trouve que, bien que significative, l'impact relatif des préoccupations d'ordre éthique est très faible par rapport à l'impact de la loyauté envers le groupe ethnique, un important facteur déterminant du vote ethnique. Ce résultat est décourageant, car elle suggère que l'impact relatif des préoccupations d'ordre éthique sera encore plus faible sur une plus échantillon représentatif de la population éthiopienne. En d'autres termes, le «retour» sur les programmes d'éducation civique à l'échelle nationale en termes de passage du vote ethnique au vote à l'éthique devrait être faible. Troisièmement, je analyser les déterminants socio-démographiques des étudiants de l'Université moyenne- sion vers l'inégalité inter-ethnique et loyauté envers le groupe ethnique. Je fournis des confir- tion que certaines caractéristiques socio-démographiques spécifiques de façon significative (i) augmenter le degré d'aversion pour l'inégalité inter-ethnique et (ii) inférieur à un groupe ethnique fidélité. Ces caractéristiques ont en commun qu'elles réduisent la «psycholo- iCal «distance entre les groupes ethniques, comme vivre dans une ville cosmopolite et HAV- ING parents appartenant à différents groupes ethniques (voir Atchade et Wantchekon (2006) pour une première preuve). D'ailleurs, je trouve que la fidélité groupe ethnique est par- particulièrement forte parmi les groupes ethniques connaît un niveau sévère de grief. Enfin, il est prouvé que l'aversion envers l'inégalité inter-ethnique dépend pos- itively sur le revenu du ménage dans lequel le répondant a grandi po
Timothy Mitchell on Infra-Theory, the State Effect, and the Technopolitics of Oil
This is the first in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
The unrest in the Arab world put the region firmly in the spotlights of IR. Where many scholars focus on the conflicts in relation to democratization as a local or regional dynamic, political events there do not stand in isolation from broader international relations or other—for instance economic—concerns. Among the scholars who has insisted on such broader linkages and associations that co-constitute political dynamics in the region, Timothy Mitchell stands out. The work of Mitchell has largely focused on highly specific aspects of politics and development in Egypt and the broader Middle East, such as the relations between the building of the Aswan Dam and redistribution of expertise, and the way in which the differences between coal and oil condition democratic politics. His consistently nuanced and enticing analyses have gained him a wide readership, and Mitchell's analyses powerfully resonate across qualitative politically oriented social sciences. In this Talk, Timothy Mitchell discusses, amongst others, the birth of 'the economy' as a powerful modern political phenomenon, how we can understand the state as an effect rather than an actor, and the importance of taking technicalities seriously to understand the politics of oil.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current globally oriented studies? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
I'm not myself interested in, or good at, big debates, the kinds of debates that define and drive forward an academic field. The reason for that is partly that once a topic has become a debate, it has tended to have sort of hardened into a field, in which there are two or three positions, and as a scholar you have to take one of those positions. In the days when I was first trained in Political Science and studied International Relations, that was so much my sense of the field and indeed of the whole discipline of political science. This is part of one's initially training in any field: it is laid out as a serious debate. I found this something I just could not deal with; I did not find it intellectually interesting which I think sort of stayed with me all the way through to where I am now. So although big debates are important for a certain defining and sustaining of academic fields and training new generations of students, it is not the kind of way in which I myself have tended to work. I have tended to work by moving away from what the big debates have been in a particular moment. My academic interests always started when I found something curious that interests me and that I try to begin to see in a different way.
However, I suppose with my most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011), in a sense there was a big debate going on, which was the debate about the resource curse and oil democracy. That was an old debate going back to the 70's, but had been reinvigorated by the Iraq war in 2003. But that to me is an example of the problem with big debates, because the terms in which that debate was argued back and forth—and is still argued—did not seem to make sense as a way to understand the role of energy in 20th century democratic politics. Was oil good for democracy or bad for democracy? The existing debate began with those as two different things—as a dependent or independent variable—so you would already determine things in advance that I would have wanted to open up. In general I'm not a good person for figuring out what the big debates are.
But I think, moving from International Relations as a field to 'globally oriented studies', to use your phrase, one of the biggest challenges—just on an academic level, leaving aside challenges that we face as a global community—is to learn to develop ways of seeing even what seem like the most global and most international issues, as things that are very local. Part of the problem with fields such as 'global studies', the term 'globalization', and other terms of that sort, is that they tend to define their objects of study in opposition to the local, in opposition to even national-level modes of analysis. By consequence, they assume that the actors or the forces that they're going to study must themselves be in some sense global, because that is the premise of the field. So whether it is nation states acting as world powers; whether it is capitalism understood as a global system—they have to exist on this plane of the global, on some sort of universal level, to be topics of IR and global studies. And yet, on close inspection, most of the concerns or actors central to those modes of inquiry tend to operate on quite local levels; they tend to be made up of very small agents, very particular arrangements that somehow have managed to put themselves together in ways that allow them take on this appearance and sometimes this effectiveness of things that are global. I'm very interested in taking things apart that are local, on a particular level, to understand what it is that enables such small things, such local and particular agents, to act in a way that creates the appearance of the global or the international world.
Now this relates back to the second part of your question, about substantive concerns that we face as a global community. When I was writing Carbon Democracy there was all this attention on the problem of 'creating a more democratic Middle East', as it was understood at the time of the Iraq war. It struck me that when debating this problem—of oil and democracy, of energy and democracy—we saw it as somehow specific to these countries and to the part of the world where many countries were very large-scale energy producers. We were not thinking about the fact that we are all in a sense caught up in this problem that I call carbon democracy, and that there are issues—whether it is in terms of the increasing difficulty of extracting energy from the earth, or the consequences of having extracted the carbon and put it up in the atmosphere—that we, as democracies, are very, very challenged by. Those issues—and I think in particular the concerns around climate change—when you look at them from the perspective of U.S. politics, and the inability of the U.S. even to take the relatively minor steps that other industrialized democracies have taken: this inaction suggests a larger problem of oil and democracy that needs explaining and understanding and working on and organizing about. I also think there is a whole range of contemporary issues related to energy production and consumption that revolve around the building of more egalitarian and more socially just worlds. And, again, those issues present themselves very powerfully as concerns in American politics, but are experienced in other ways in other parts of the world. I would not single out any one of them as more urgent or important than another, and I do think we still have a long struggle ahead of us here.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your approach to issues?
Well, I had a strange training as a scholar because I kept shifting fields. I actually began as a student of law and then moved into history while I was still an undergraduate, but then became interested in political theory; decided that I liked it better than political science. But by the time I arrived in political science to study for a PhD, I had become interested in politics of the Middle East. This was partly from just travelling there when I was a student growing up in England, but I also suppose in some ways the events of the seventies had really drawn attention to the region. So the first important thing that shaped me was this constant shifting of fields and disciplines, which was not to me a problem—it was rather that there was a kind of intellectual curiosity that drove me from academic field to field. And so if there was one thing that helped me arrive at where I am, it was this constant moving outside of the boundaries of one discipline and trespassing on the next one—trying to do it for long enough that they started to accept me as someone who they could debate with. And I think all along that has been important to the kind of scholarship I do; yet therefore I would say where I currently am in my thinking about my field is difficult in itself to define. But I think it is probably defined by the sense that there are many, many fields—and it is moving across them and trying to do justice to the scholarship in them, but at the same time trying to connect insights from one field with what one can do in another field. I have always tried to draw things together in that sense, a sense that one can call an interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary sensitivity.
I think the other part of what has shaped me intellectually was that, in ways I explained before, I was always drawn into the local and the particular and the specific and I was never very good at thinking at that certain level of large-scale grand theory. So having found myself in the field of Middle Eastern politics in a PhD-program, and being told that it involves studying Arabic which I was very glad to do, I then went off to spend summers in the Arab world, and later over more extended periods of time for field research. But to me, Egypt and other places I've worked—but principally Egypt—became not just a field site, but a place where I have now been going for more than 30 years and where I have developed very close ties and intellectual relationships, friendships, that I think have constantly shaped and reshaped my thinking. And even when I am reading about things that are not specifically related to Egypt—the work I do on the history of economics, or the work I have done on oil politics that are not directly connected with my research on Egypt—I am often thinking in relation to places and people and communities there that have profoundly shaped me as a scholar.
So traveling across different contexts I'd say I have not developed a kind of set of theoretical lenses I take with me. Rather, I would say I have developed a way of seeing—I would not necessarily call it 'meta', I see it as much more as sort of 'infra': much more mundane and everyday. While I have this sort of intellectual history of moving across disciplines and social sciences in an academic way, there is another sort of moving across fields, another sensibility, and that sensibility provides me with a sense of rootedness or grounding. And that is a more traditional way of moving across fields, because whether when one is writing about contemporary politics or more historically about politics, one is dealing constantly with areas of technical concern of one sort or another, with specialist knowledge. Engaging with that expert knowledge has always provided both a political grounding in specific concerns and with a kind of concern with local, real-world, struggles on the ground. So that might have been things like the transformation of irrigation in nineteenth-century Egypt, or the remaking of the system of law; or it might be the history of malaria epidemics in the twentieth century, or the relationship between those epidemics and transformations taking place in the crops that were grown; or, more recently—and more obviously—of oil and the history of energy, and the way different forms of energy are brought out of the ground. And I should mention beside those areas of technical expertise already listed, economics as well: a discipline I was never trained in, but that I realized I had to understand if I was to make sense of contemporary Egyptian politics—just as much as I had to understand agricultural hydraulics or something of the petroleum geology as a form of technical expertise that is shaping the common world.
In sum, what keeps me grounded is the idea that to really make sense of the politics of any of those fields, one has got to do one's best to sort of enter and explore the more technical level—with the closest attention that one can muster to the technical and the material dimensions of what is involved—whether it is in agricultural irrigation, building dams or combating disease. And entering this level of issues does not only mean interviewing experts but arriving at the level of understanding the disease, the parasite, the modes of its movement, the hydraulics of the river, the properties of different kinds of oil... So as you can see it is not really 'meta', it really is 'infra' in the anthropological way of staying close to the ground, staying close to processes and things and materials.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
A couple of things. I think one is precisely the thing I just mentioned in answer to your last question: that is, the kind of interest in going inside technical processes, learning about material objects, not being afraid of taking up an investigation of something that is a body of knowledge totally outside one's area of training and expertise. So, if I was advising someone or looking for a student, I would not say there is a particular skill or expertise, but rather a willingness to really get one's hands dirty with the messy technical details of an area—and that can be an area of specialist knowledge such as economics, but also technical and physical processes of, for instance, mineral extraction. I think to me this is—for the kind of work I am interested in doing—enormously important.
The other thing that I would stress in the area of globally-oriented studies, is that one could think of two ways of approaching a field of study. One is to move around the world and gather together information, often with a notion of improving things, such as development work, human rights work, international security work. This entails gathering from one's own research and from other experts in the field, with a certain notion of best practices and the state of field, and of what works, and therefore what can then be moved from one place to another as a form of expert knowledge. Some people really want that mobile knowledge, which I suppose is often associated with the ability to generalize from a particular case and to establish more universal principles about whatever the topic is. And in this case one's own expertise becomes the carrying or transmission of that expert knowledge. One saw a lot of that around the whole issue of democratization that I mentioned before in the Middle East, around the Iraq war when experts were brought in. They had done democracy elsewhere in the world and then they turned up to do it in Iraq, and again following the Arab Spring.
Against that, to me, there is another mode of learning, which is not to learn about what is happening but to learn from. So to give the example, if there is an uprising and a struggle for democracy going on in the streets of Cairo, one could try and learn about that and then make it fit one's models and classify it within a broader range of series of democratizations across the world, or one could try and learn from it, and say 'how do we rethink what the possibilities of democracy might be on the basis of what is happening?' To me those are two distinct modes of work. They are not completely mutually exclusive, but I think people are more disposed towards one or the other. I have never been disposed, or good at, the first kind and do like the second, so I would mention that as the second skill or attitude that is useful for doing this sort of work.
In which discipline or field would you situate yourself, or would we have to invent a discipline to match your work?
I like disciplines, but I do not always feel that I entirely belong to any of them. That said, I read with enormous profit the works of historians, political theorist, anthropologists, of people in the field of science and technology studies, geographers, political economists and scholars in environmental studies. There are so many different disciplines that are well organized and have their practitioners from which there is a lot to learn! But conversely, I also think, in ways I have described already, there is something to be learnt for some people from working in a much more deliberately post-disciplinary fashion. The Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department to which I have been attached here in Columbia for about five years, represents a deliberate attempt by myself and my colleagues to produce some kind of post-disciplinary space. Not in order to do away with the disciplines, but to have another place for doing theoretical work, one that is able to take advantage of not being bound by disciplinary fields, as even broad disciplines—say history—tend to restrict you with a kind of positive liberty of creating a place where you can do anything you want—as long as you do it in an archive. I quite deliberately situate myself outside of any one discipline, while continuing to learn from and trespass into the fields of many individual disciplines. They range from all of those and others, because I am here among a community of people who are also philologists; people interested in Arabic literature and the history of Islamic science; and all kinds of fields, which I also find fascinating. The first article I ever published was in the field of Arabic grammar! So I have interests that fit in a very sort of trans-disciplinary, post-disciplinary environment and I thrive on that.
Yet doing this kind of post-disciplinary work is in a practical sense actually absolutely impossible. If only for the simple fact that if it is already hardly possible to keep up with 'the literature' if one is firmly situated within one field, then one can never keep up with important developments in all the disciplines one is interested in. There are some people that manage to do this and do it justice. My information about contemporary debates in every imaginable field is so limited; I do not manage to do justice to any field. In the particular piece of research I might be engaged in, I try to get quickly up to pace on what's going on, and I often come back again and again to similar areas of research. I am currently interested in questions around the early history of international development in the 1940's and 1950's, and that is something I have worked on before, but I have come back to it and I found that the World Bank archives are now open and there is a whole new set of literatures. I had not been keeping up with all of that work. It is hard and that is why I am very bad at answering emails and doing many of the other everyday things that one is ought to do; because it always seems to me, in the evening at the computer when one ought to be catching up with emails, there is something you have come across in an article or footnotes and before you know it you are miles away and it has got nothing to do with what you were working on at the moment, but it really connects with a set of issues you have been interested in and has taken you off into contemporary work going on in law or the history of architecture… The internet has made that possible in a completely new way and some of these post-disciplinary research interests are actually a reflection of where we are with the internet and with the accessibility of scholarship in any field only just a few clicks away. Which on the one hand is fascinating, but mostly it is just a complete curse. It is the enemy of writing dissertations and finishing books and articles and everything else!
What role does expertise, which is kind of a central term in underpinning much of the diverse work or topics you do, play in the historical unfolding of modern government?
That is a big question, so let me suggest only a couple of thoughts here. One is that modern government has unfolded—especially if one thinks of government itself as a wider process than just a state—through the development of new forms of expertise, which among other things define problems and issues upon which government can operate. This can concern many things, whether it is problems of public health in the 19th or 20th century; or problems of economic development in the 20th century; or problems of energy, climate change and the environment today. Again and again government itself operates—as Foucault has taught us—simultaneously as fields of knowledge and fields of power. And the objects brought into being in this way—defined in important ways through the development of expert knowledge—become in themselves modes through which political power operates. Thanks to Foucault and many others, that is a way of thinking or field of research that has been widely developed, even though there are vast amounts of work still to do.
But I think there is another relationship between modes of government and expertise, and this goes back to things I have been thinking about ever since I wrote an article about the theory of the state (The Limits of the State, pdf here) that was published in American Political Science Review a long time ago (1991). The point I made then, is that it is interesting to observe how one of the central aspects of modern modes of power is the way that the distinction between what is the state and what is not the state; between what is public and what is private, is constantly elaborated and redefined. So politics itself is happening not so much by some agency called 'state' or 'government' imposing its will on some other preformed object—the social, the population, the people—but rather that it concerns a series of techniques that create what I have called the effect of a state: the very distinction between what appears as a sort of structure or apparatus of power, and the objects on which that power works.
More recently one of the ways I have thought about this, is in terms of the history of the idea of the economy. Most people think of 'the economy' either as something that has always existed (and people may or may not have realized its existence) or as something that came into being with the rise of political economy and commercial society in the European 18th and 19th century. One of the things I discovered when I was doing research on the history of development, is that no economist talked routinely about an object called 'the economy' before the 1940's! I think that is a good example of the history of a mode of expertise that exists not within the operations of an apparatus of government but precisely outside of government.
If you look in detail at how the term 'the economy' was first regularly used, you find that it was in the context of governing the U.S. in the 1940's immediately after the Second World War. In the aftermath of the war there was enormous political pressure for quite a radical restructuring of American society: there were waves of strikes, demands for worker control of industries, or at least a share of management. And of course in Europe, similar demands led to new forms of economy altogether, in the building of postwar Germany and in the forms of democratic socialism that were experimented with in various parts of Western Europe. As we know, the U.S. did not follow that path. And I think part of the way in which it was steered away from that path, was by constructing the economy as the central object of government, coupled with precisely this American cultural fear of things where government did not belong. So this was radically opposed to how the Europeans related government to economy: European governments had become involved in all kinds of ways, deciding how the relation between management and labor should operate in thinking about prices and wages; instituting forms of national health insurance and health care; and the whole state management of health care itself... Now this was threatening to emerge in the U.S., and was emerging in many ways in the wartime with state control of prices and production. In order to prevent the U.S. from following the European path after the war, this object outside of government with its own experts was created: the economy. And the economists were precisely people who are not in government, but who knew the laws and regularities of economic life and could explain them to people. It is interesting to think about expertise both as something that develops within the state, but also as something that happens as a creation of objects that precisely represent what is not the state, or the sphere of government.
Your most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011) focuses on the political structures afforded, or engendered, by modes of extraction of minerals and investigates how oil was constitutes a dominant source of energy on which we depend. Can you give an example of how that works?
Let me take an example from the book even though I might have to give it in very a simplified form in order to make it work. I was interested in what appeared to be the way in which the rise of coal—the dominant source of energy in the 19th century and in the emergence of modern industrialized states—seemed to be very strongly associated with the emergence of mass democracy, whereas the rise of oil in the 20th century seemed to have if anything the opposite set of consequences for states that were highly dependent on the production of oil. I wanted to examine these relations between forms of energy and democratic politics in a way that was not simply some kind of technical- or energy determinism, because it is very easy to point to many cases that simply do not fit that pattern—and, besides, it simply would not be very interesting to begin with. But it did seem to me, that at a particular moment in the history of the emergence of industrialized countries—particularly in the late 19th century—it became possible for the first time in history and really only for a brief period, to take advantage of certain kinds of vulnerabilities and possibilities offered by the dependence on coal to organize a new kind of political agency and forms of mass politics, which successfully struggled for much more representative and egalitarian forms of democracy, roughly between the 1880's and the mid 20th century. In general terms, that story is known; but it had been told without thinking in particular about the energy itself. The energy was just present in these stories as that which made possible industrialization; industrialization made possible urbanization; therefore you had lots of workers and their consciousness must somehow have changed and made them democratic or something.
That story did not make sense to me, and that prompted me to research in detail, and drawing on the work of others who had looked even more in detail at, the history of struggles for a whole set of democratic rights. The accounts of people at the time were clear: what was distinctive was this peculiar ability to shut down an economy because of a specific vulnerability to the supply of energy. Very briefly, when I switched to telling the story in the middle of the 20th with oil, it is different: partly just because oil was a supplementary source of energy—countries and people now had a choice between different energy sources—but also because oil did not create the same points of vulnerability. There are fewer workers involved, it is a liquid, so it can be routed along different channels more easily; there is a whole set of technical properties of oil and its production that are different. That does not mean to say that the energy is determining the outcome of history or of political struggles, and I am careful to introduce examples that do not work easily one way or the other in the history of oil industry in Baku, which is much more similar to the history of coal or the oil industry in California for that matter. But you can pay attention to the technical dimensions in a certain way, and the to the sheer possibilities that arise with this enormous concentration of sources of energy—which reflects both an exponential increase in the amount of energy but also an unprecedented concentration of the sites at which energy is available and through which it flows—that you can tell a new story about democratic politics and about that moment in the history of industrialized countries, but also the subsequent history in oil-producing countries in a different way. That would be an example of how attention for technical expertise translates into a different understanding of the politics of oil.
This leads to my next question, which is how do you speak about materials or technologies without falling into the trap of either radical social reductionism or a kind of Marxist technological determinism? Do you get these accusations sometimes?
Yes, I think so, but more so from people who have not read my work and who just hear some talks about it or some secondary accounts. To me, so much of the literature that already existed on these questions around oil and democracy, or even earlier research on coal, industrialization and democracy, suffered from a kind of technical determinism because they actually did not go into the technical. They said: 'look, you've got all this oil' or 'look, you had all that coal and steam power' and out of that, in a very determinist fashion, emerged social movements or emerged political repression. This was determinist because such accounts had actually jumped over the technical side much too fast: talking about oil in the case of the resource curse literature, it was only interested in the oil once it had already become money. And once it was money, then it of course corrupts, or you buy people off, or you do not have to seek their votes. The whole question of how oil becomes money and how you put together that technical system that turns oil into forms of political power or turns coal into forms of political power, does not get opened up. And that to me makes those arguments—even though there is not much of the technical in them—technically very determinist. Because as soon as you start opening up the technical side of it, you realize there are so many ways things can go and so many different ways things can get built. Energy networks can be built in different ways and there can be different mixes of energy. Of course most of the differences are technical differences, but they are also human differences. It is precisely by being very attentive to the technical aspects of politics—like energy or anything else, it could be in agriculture, it could be in disease, it could be in any area of collective socio-technical life—that one finds the only way to get away from a certain kind of technical determinism that otherwise sort of rules us. In the economics of growth, for instance, there is this great externality of technological change that drives every sort of grand historical explanation. Technology is just something that is kept external to the explanatory model and accounts for everything else that the model cannot explain. That ends up being a terrible kind of technical determinism.
The other half of the question is how this might differ from Marxist approaches to some of these problems. I like to think that if Marx was studying oil, his approach would be very little different. Because if you read Marx himself, there is an extraordinary level of interest in the technical; that is, whether in the technical aspects of political economy as a field of knowledge in the 19th century, or in the factory as a technical space. So, conventional political economy to him was not just an ideological mask that had to be torn away so that you could reveal the true workings of capitalism. Political economy has produced a set of concepts—notions of value, notions of exchange, notions of labor—that actually formed part of the technical workings of capitalism. The factory was organized at a technical level that had very specific consequences. The trouble with a significant part of Marx's theories is that he stopped doing that kind of technical work and Marxism froze itself with a set of categories that may or may not have been relevant to a moment of 19th century capitalism. There is still a lot of interesting Marxist theory going on, and some of the contemporary Italian Marxist theory I find really interesting and profitable to read, for example. Some of the work in Marxist geography continues to be very productive. But at the same time there are aspects of my work that are different from that—such as my drawing on Foucault in understanding expertise and modes of power.
How come so many of the social sciences seem to stick so rigidly to the human or social side of the Cartesian divide? It seems to be constitutive of social science disciplines but on the other hand also radically reduces the scope of what it can actually 'see' and talk about.
I think you are right and it has never made much sense to me. I suppose I have approached it in two kinds of ways in my work. First, this kind of dualism was much more clearly an object of concern in some of the early work I published on the colonial era, including my first book, Colonising Egypt (1988), where I was trying to understand the process by which Europeans had, as it were, come to be Cartesians; had come to see the world as very neatly defined it into mind on the one hand and matter or on the other—or, as they tended to think of it, representations on the one hand and reality on the other. And I actually looked in some detail, at the technical level, at this—beginning with world exhibitions, but moving on to department stores and school systems and modern legal orders—to understand the processes by which our incredibly complicated world was engineered so as to produce the effect of this world divided into the two—of mind or representation or culture on the one hand, and reality, nature, material on the other.
Second, what were the effects, what were the repetitive practices, that made that kind of simple dualism seem so self-evident and taken for granted? All that early work still informs my current work, although I do not necessarily explore this as directly as I did. One of the things I try to do is avoid all the vocabulary that draws you into that kind of dualism. So, nowhere when I write, do I use a term like 'culture', because you are just heading straight down that Cartesian road as soon as you assume that there is some hermetic world of shared meanings—as opposed to what? As opposed to machines that do not involve instructions and all kinds of other things that we would think of as meaningful? So I just work more by avoiding some of the dualistic language; the other kind would be the entire set of debates—in almost every discipline of the social sciences—around the question of 'structure versus agency' which just doesn't seems to me particularly productive. And I have been very lucky, recently, in coming across work in the fields of science and technology studies, because it is a field of people studying machines, studying laboratories and studying people, a field that took nature itself as something to be opened-up and investigated. In taking apart these things, they realized that those kinds of dualisms made absolutely no sense. And they have done away with them in their modes of explanation quite a long time ago. So there was already a lot in my own work before I encountered Science and Technology Studies (STS) that was working in that direction; but the STS people have been at it for a long time and figured out a lot of things that I had only just discovered.
Can you explain why it seems that perhaps implicitly decolonization, or the postcolonial moment—which is understood within political science and in development literature as a radical moment of rupture in which a complete transfer of responsibility has taken place, instituted in sovereignty—is an important theme in your work?
I have actually been coming back to this in recent work, because I am currently looking again at that moment of decolonization in Egypt. The period after World War II, around the 1952 revolution and the debacle around the building and the financing of the Aswan Dam, constitutes a wonderful way to explore questions on how much change decolonization really engendered and to see how remarkably short-lived that sort of optimism about decolonization, meaning a transfer of responsibility and sovereignty, actually was. Of course decolonization did transfer responsibility and sovereignty in all kinds of ways, but then that was exactly the problem for the former colonial regimes: because, from their perspective, then, how were all the people who had profited before from things like colonialism to continue to make profits? The plan to build the High Dam at Aswan—although there has always been Egyptians interested in it—initially got going because of some German engineering firms… For them, there was no opportunity in doing any kind of this large-scale work in Europe at the time because of the dire economic situation there. But they knew that Egypt had rapidly growing revenues from the Suez Canal and so they got together with the British and the French, and said: let's put forward this scheme for a dam so that we can recycle those revenues—particularly the income from the Suez Canal, which was about to revert to Egyptian ownership—back into the pockets of the engineering firms, or of the banks that will make the loans and charge the fees. And that is where the scheme came from. Then the World Bank got involved, because it too had found it had got nothing to do in Europe in the way of development and reconstruction, so it invented this new field of development. And it became a conduit to get the Wall Street banks involved as well. And the whole thing became politicized and led to a rupture, which provided then the excuse for another group, the militarists, the MI6 people, to invade and try to overthrow Nasser. So just in the space of barely four years from that moment of decolonization, Egypt had been reinvaded by the French, the British, working with the Israelis, and had to deal with the consequences and the costs of destroyed cities and military spending. That is an example of how quickly things went wrong; but also of how part of their going wrong was in this desperate attempt by a series of European banks and engineering firms trying to recover the opportunities for a certain profit-making and business that they had enjoyed in the colonial period and now they suddenly were being deprived of.
Last question. Has your work helped you make sense of what is currently going on in Egypt and would you shine your enlightened light on that a bit? Not on the whole general situation but perhaps on parts which are overlooked or which you find particularly relevant.
May be in a couple of aspects. One of them is this kind of very uneasy and disjunctive assemblage relationship between the West and forms of political Islam. It sometimes seemed shocking and disturbing and destabilizing that the political process in Egypt led to the rise and consolidation of power of the Muslim Brotherhood. But of course the U.S. and other Western powers have had a very long relationship going back at least to the 1950's—if not before—with exactly these kinds of political forces or people who were locally in alliance with them, in places like Saudi Arabia. I have a chapter in Carbon Democracy that explores that relationship and its disjunctions. And I think it is important to get away from the notion that is just a sort of electoral politics and uneasy alliances, but it is actually the outcome of a longer problem. Both domestically within the politics in the Arab states, of how to found a form of legitimacy that does not seem to be based on close ideological ties with the West, but at the same time operates in such in a way, that in practical terms, that kind of alliance can work. So that would be one aspect of it, to have a slightly longer-term perspective on those kinds of relationships and how disjunctively they function.
The other thing, drawing it a little more directly on some of the work on democracy in Carbon Democracy, is that so much of the scholarship on democracy is about equipping people with the right mental tools to be democrats; the right levels of trust or interpersonal relations or whatever. There is a very different view in my book, that the opportunities for effective democratic politics require very different sets of skills and kinds of actions—actions that are much more as it were obstructionist, and forms of sabotage, quite literally, in the usage of the term as it comes into being in the early 20th century to describe the role of strikes and stoppages. These are, I attempt to show, the effective tools to leverage demands for representation in more egalitarian democratic politics. I have been very interested in the case of Egypt, in the particular places and points of vulnerability, that gave rise to the possibility of sabotage. For instance, one of the less noted aspects of the Egyptian revolution in general, was the very important role played by the labor movement; this was not just a Twitter or Facebook revolution, but that was important as well. Although the labor movement was very heavily concentrated in industries—in the textile industry—the first group of workers who actually successfully formed an independent union were the property tax collectors. And there is a reason for that: there was a certain kind of fiscal crisis of the state—which had to do with declining oil revenues and other things—and there was the attempt to completely revise the tax system and to revise it not around income tax—because there were too few people making a significant income to raise tax revenues—but around property taxes. And that was a point of vulnerability and contestation that produced not just some of the first large-scale strikes but strikes that were effective enough that the government was forced to recognize a newly independent labor movement. This case is an instance of how the kind of work I did in the book might be useful for thinking about how the revolutionary situation emerged in Egypt.
Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian. His areas of research include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Much of his current work is concerned with ways of thinking about politics that allow material and technical things more weight than they are given in conventional political theory. Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. At Columbia he teaches courses on the history and politics of the Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things.
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Faculty Profile at Colombia University Read Mitchell's Rethinking Economy (Geoforum 2008) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics (The American Political Science Review 1991) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's McJihad: Islam and the U.S. Global Order (Social Text 2002) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The Stage of Modernity (Chapter from book 'Questions of Modernity', 2000) here (pdf) Read Mitchell's The World as Exhibition (Chapter from book 'Colonising Egypt' 1991) here (pdf)
A sweeping history of libertarian thought, from radical anarchists to conservative defenders of the status quoLibertarianism emerged in the mid-nineteenth century with an unwavering commitment to progressive causes, from women's rights and the fight against slavery to anti-colonialism and Irish emancipation. Today, this movement founded on the principle of individual liberty finds itself divided by both progressive and reactionary elements vying to claim it as their own. The Individualists is the untold story of a political doctrine continually reshaped by fierce internal tensions, bold and eccentric personalities, and shifting political circumstances.Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi trace the history of libertarianism from its origins as a radical progressive ideology in the 1850s to its crisis of identity today. They examine the doctrine's evolution through six defining themes: private property, skepticism of authority, free markets, individualism, spontaneous order, and individual liberty. They show how the movement took a turn toward conservativism during the Cold War, when the dangers of communism at home and abroad came to dominate libertarian thinking. Zwolinski and Tomasi reveal a history that is wider, more diverse, and more contentious than many of us realize.A groundbreaking work of scholarship, The Individualists uncovers the neglected roots of a movement that has championed the poor and marginalized since its founding, but whose talk of equal liberty has often been bent to serve the interests of the rich and powerful
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"Sacred Foundations argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation. Existing accounts focus on early modern warfare or contracts between the rulers and the ruled. In contrast, this major study shows that the Catholic Church both competed with medieval monarchs and provided critical templates for governing institutions, the rule of law, and parliaments. The Catholic Church was the most powerful, wealthiest, and best-organized political actor in the Middle Ages. Starting in the eleventh century, the papacy fought for the autonomy of the church, challenging European rulers and then claiming authority over people, territory, and monarchs alike. Anna Grzymała-Busse demonstrates how the church shaped distinct aspects of the European state. Conflicts with the papacy fragmented territorial authority in Europe for centuries to come, propagating urban autonomy and ideas of sovereignty. Thanks to its organizational advantages and human capital, the church also developed the institutional precedents adopted by rulers across Europe-from chanceries and taxation to courts and councils. Church innovations made possible both the rule of law and parliamentary representation. Bringing to light a wealth of historical evidence about papal conflict, excommunications, and ecclesiastical institutions, Sacred Foundations reveals how the challenge and example of powerful religious authorities gave rise to secular state institutions and galvanized state capacity"--
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This study quantifies the effects introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic on air connectivity and passenger travel behaviour. Our analysis suggests that the pandemic has led to significant connectivity loss at all airports, especially at large hubs and tourism destinations. Low-cost carriers' operations at these airports, whose main targets are price-sensitive, non-business travellers, have been significantly reduced, too. There is preliminary evidence that network carriers at hub airports played more important roles amid the pandemic, likely due to the benefits associated with their hub-and-spoke networks. Connectivity losses at the smallest airports tended to be temporary and limited. These airports had limited aviation services to start with and, thus, it was not too costly to maintain the minimum connectivity. Empirical results obtained from a passenger preference study indicate that traveller subgroups are impacted in different ways. When there is no online meeting option, nearly 80% of the respondents prefer, and are willing to pay for, pandemic control measures. These 'pro-control' passengers perceive such measures and the associated high costs/fares as valuable and necessary to lower the health-related risks during air travel. When there is an online meeting option, the share of such passengers decreases to 44.5%, with the remaining 55.5% exhibiting disutility for the increased price and time associated with pandemic control measures. The average willingness-to-pay for pandemic control measures decreases significantly, whereas the value of time saved at health checkpoints increases significantly. The aviation industry thus faces a 'double-hit' problem: operation costs will increase due to pandemic control measures, and the resultant inconvenience and extra time and costs further reduce travel demand. Unlike previous short pandemics, business travel is likely to suffer with an extended decline until the pandemic is fully controlled. These results call for financial and operational support for aviation services, especially at major airports and tourism destinations. Because these large airports are expected to be profitable post the pandemic, they may resort to low-cost finance from the capital market in the short term. Because the value of time saved at checkpoints is very high, it is more important for government agencies to make the pandemic control and health measures efficient and smooth. For operations such as vaccination records, stakeholders in different countries should cooperate to facilitate seamless control and pleasant air travel experiences.
Latest reports suggest that an ambitious high-speed electrified railway track running through Laos and connecting Kunming in China's southwestern province of Yunnan with northeastern Thailand is now 78 per cent complete. All the bridges, tunnels and other structures have been completed; what remains to be done is to lay the track, and to install the signalling and the other 'mechanics' necessary for operations. The first trains are expected to use the line approximately two years from now. Formally announced in 2015, the railway is part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and is widely seen as a major step in the Laotian government's long-held desire to turn the country from being land-locked to land-linked. For China, completion of the railway will not only link Yunnan directly to Thailand but also connect it to the Malaysian peninsula further south and ultimately to Singapore. The 420-kilometer north-south line cuts through a large part of northern and central Laos, starting at Boten on the Laos-China border, passing through Luang Namtha province, then wending its way roughly south through Oudomxay, Luang Prabang and Vientiane provinces, before terminating at a station most likely to be built close to the country's capital, Vientiane. Its construction has been a colossal undertaking, requiring more than 70 tunnels and 150 bridges. Indeed, the line will run through tunnels for almost 200 kilometres.) It will have ten stations in Laos, including one at the former royal capital of Luang Prabang, It will thus allow domestic passenger and freight use. The line will also have some 20 'crossing loops' to allow trains to pass each other on what will be largely a single-line railway.
In Asia, which began to develop nuclear power generation in the 1960s, several countries are considering the introduction of nuclear power. East Asia Summit (EAS) countries that have been using nuclear power are China, India, Japan, and the Republic of Korea. When neighbouring countries use nuclear power or begin generating nuclear power, no country can avoid involvement in potential problems such as information sharing in the event of a nuclear accident, or the transportation of radioactive waste. Hence, delivering information about nuclear power to people in a timely fashion, eliminating information asymmetry, and improving public acceptance of nuclear power generation by both hosting and neighbouring communities are important issues. This research offers policy recommendations for improving the public acceptance of nuclear power in Asia based on a direct exchange of views between opinion leaders in Euro-American countries, since 2018. For many years, there have been entities that successfully communicated with and served as a bridge between residents and business operators in areas where nuclear power facilities are located.
The power sector of Armenia achieved remarkable results through first generation policy, legal, regulatory, and institutional reforms implemented from 1991-2003, the first decade of independence. The sector achieved financial sustainability with tariffs that assured recovery of reasonable expenses and collections that reached virtually 100 percent of sales. The implicit and explicit subsidies to the power sector were eliminated and the largest sector companies were among the top taxpayers in the country. More than 70 percent of power sector assets were denationalized (privatized or transferred to Russian ownership in debt-to-asset swaps). However, in 2010 these achievements started to reverse and gradually worsened during the past several years. Today, the large state-owned sector power companies, as well as the privately-owned Electric Networks of Armenia (ENA) have accumulated large amount of expensive commercial debts and are on the verge of bankruptcy.
In many countries safety nets consist predominantly of universal subsidies on food and fuel. A key question for policy makers willing to shift to targeted safety nets is under what conditions middle-class citizens would be supportive of redistributive programs. Results from a behavioral experiment based on a nationally representative sample in Jordan reveal that increasing transparency in benefit delivery makes middle-class citizens (particularly among the youth and low-trust individuals) more willing to forgo their own welfare to benefit the poor. Moreover, increasing transparency enhances the relative support for cash-based safety nets, which have greater impact on poverty compared with in-kind transfers, but may be perceived as more prone to elite capture.
