Month: November 2003

I had dinner here in Mexico City with a reporter who was about to return to Iraq, where he has already been twice in 2003.  The impression that I’d gotten from following the news in the U.S. is that the situation in Iraq is improving very gradually.  The progress is hard to see like the rising of an exponential function near 0 but eventually it might take off sort of like the diode equation around 0.6 volts even though actually the curve is the same.

The reporter, who’d spent a couple of months on the ground in Baghdad already, was much more pessimistic:  “Iraq isn’t a country; it is three countries:  a Kurdish north, a Sunni center, and a Shiite south.  These people all hate each other and would like nothing more than a civil war so that they can all kill each other.  The only thing that is stopping them right now is the fact that 95% hate Americans, maybe 10% enough to try to kill Americans personally.”

He was not looking forward to returning.  “I’m afraid, to tell you the truth.  I’ve worked in Kabul and been in the middle of skirmishing warlords in Afghanistan but Iraq is a lot scarier.”

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This item comes to you from an Internet cafe in the capital of a country that is

• oil-rich
  
• still smarting from the pain of a U.S. invasion
  
• throughout its history has seldom enjoyed a government elected by the people
  
• lacking in basic physical security, except in a handful of areas patrolled by guys wearing body armor and toting machine guns
  
• not somewhere you can turn on the kitchen faucet and expect drinkable water to come out

Does this sound like a crisis?  Actually it is normal everyday life in Mexico City and somehow nobody seems to mind.

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MIT is having a holiday on Monday and Tuesday and the Boston weather forecast is unappealing…. good excuses for hopping a plane to Mexico City.  I’ve never been there before and would appreciate comments on where to stay and what to see.  My main interests are Pre-Columbian history and artifacts, soaking up the lifestyle, and modern architecture.  I’ll be alone.

[In case you’re curious, I’m not taking my own airplane down to Mexico.  At 150 mph it would take roughly 16 hours to cover the 2000 nautical mile distance.  I have taken the plane into Baja, Mexico and wrote up the experience in http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/baja]

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The October 10, 2003 issue of MIT’s student newspaper, the Tech, carried some articles about a group of unfortunate students who decided to hold a ghetto/rap-themed party in their dorm.  The invitation email started “Callin all you playas, pimps, hos, gangstas, and bitches…”.  Various campus functionaries indicated their displeasure at what they viewed as an assault on the sacred principle of diversity. The students immediately issued a craven apology to the community but nonetheless Chuck Vest, the president of MIT, responded by noting that his administration would “deal swiftly and fairly with those responsible for the event.”

Today’s issue of the Tech carries some more invective from the administration directed as these allegedly racist students.

There was no actual evidence of racism by the students holding the party and in fact the only people involved in this dispute who are known to judge others by the color of their skin are the MIT administrators themselves.

A very similar situation occurred in the 1990s at University of California Riverside.  A fraternity held a “South of the Border” party advertised with a poster featuring a sleeping Mexican, complete with sombrero and tequila bottle.  The frat boys were harshly disciplined until a lawyer sued the school, pointing out that (a) half of the fraternity brothers were Mexican-American, and (b) the First Amendment prohibited a state institution from editing the fraternity’s party posters.  A federal judge sided with the students.

So many university administrations have tried to muzzle their students that an entire non-profit organization, http://www.thefire.org, exists to fight back.

Perhaps, however, the university bureaucrats are doing the right thing after all.  The U.S. Constitution guarantees that the government won’t interfere with your right to free speech.  Private employers, however, are free to say “You will continue to receive a paycheck so long as you stay in your cubicle with your head down and your mouth shut.”  Only a tiny fraction of Americans have a practical right to free speech and these are primarily the very rich and the very poor.  A primary mission of a college is to prepare young people for the real world.  Does it really make sense to delude kids into thinking that they can say whatever they want and still have a paycheck and health insurance?  Perhaps it would be better for a university president to address the incoming freshmen thusly… “This is my plantation and if you want to stay here for four years you’ll learn to say ‘Yes, Massah'”.

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Today’s Boston Globe carries two contrasting front-page stories.  “As economy gains, outsourcing surges” talks about how American workers at for-profit companies must compete with 84 million Filipinos, many of whom are well-educated, speak good English, and are delighted to work for $300/month.  Things are looking more cheerful for U.S. workers in the not-for-profit sector.  A front-page story on Boston University’s search for a new president revealed that the school decided to pay Dan Goldin $1.8 million in exchange for… not working at all.  Considering that Mr. Goldin had yet to start his job, that’s a pretty good hourly rate.  You could hire a staff of 45 Filipino engineers for ten years with that $1.8 mil!

[Update:  the Globe runs a three-article series on “the white collar job migration”.  Article 2 is “US workers see hard times” and includes a quote from a venture capitalist:   “Right when you think about Employee 11, you should think about India.  My view is you should not start a company from scratch in the United States ever again.”  Article 3 is “US business students find opportunity is global” and talks about how MBAs are adapting.  A more interesting article appears in the same issue, November 4, “As work shifts, internship in India the new rite of passage” and starts with “An increasing number of US students are going to India to intern at top information technology services firms or to participate in tours that allow them to network with the country’s corporate elite.”  The American interns, most of whom are MBAs or MBA students, get paid about $350/month (compared to their old internships of $7000/month in the U.S.).]

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One of our friends has a young Cuban lover and she goes to visit him there periodically.  This situation spurred some reflection:  “Why are there so many artists and musicians in Cuba?”  The next thought “Well, why not?”  In the U.S. when Johnny decides to ignore his family’s advice and take up oil painting or guitar playing instead of investment banking it is a big crisis.  Johnny is very likely giving up the opportunity to own real estate, send his kids to private school, and otherwise enjoy the great festival of materialism that is the United States.  In an economy with hardly any opportunity, however, why wouldn’t a person choose to do art or music?

Art doesn’t require a lot of capital investment.  You really just need a crayon and some paper (or scissors and paper if you were Matisse).  If human ability is equally distributed across the globe you’d therefore expect the best art to come from the poorest countries where people have no competing bourgeois job offers.  Yet paradoxically the art for which people are willing to pay the most money seems to come from advanced economies such as Germany, England, Japan, and the U.S.

For the comment section:  Why?

[I’ll start by throwing out a personal opinion:  art can only touch you if the artist shares a similar social and economic environment, which is why Westerners mostly like the art that is produced in Western countries; art produced in poor countries is actually much better but we can’t appreciate it because, despite heavy doses of ecotourism, we can’t understand the milieu in which it was produced.]

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