Some fluff, some info

topics covered:

Here is an article from the NY Times about the recent WTO ruling about cotton subsidies. Since linking to the NYT is always spotty, here's a big fair-use chunk of it. Or here is an article from the Economist. Or, for the especially lazy among you, here's a summary:

The WTO's goal is `free trade', meaning the removal of restrictions on the market that prevent the free flow of goods. This usually means tariffs or blockades at the borders. This also includes anti-dumping rules, which make it illegal for a government to pay one of its exporters to send goods overseas, because this would also prevent the market from arriving at the natural price for the goods, at the cost of the industries of the importing country which don't have their own subsidies propping them up.

So what about when a country subsidizes an industry not for the sake of exports, but just hands them lots of money all the time? This too will have a distortionary effect on the world market, and although it is not a trade barrier blocking a free market, it makes it impossible for producers in other countries to compete, preventing a fair market.

Hard question; there was a decade-long agreement in the WTO to just not talk about it. That agreement expired on 1 January of this year, and Brazil immediately litigated the issue, suing the U.S.A. for cotton subsidies and the EU for sugar subsidies (see this Economist article on sugar). Brazil won with the U.S.A. (EU is pending), and the official ruling of the WTO is that the cotton subsidies must stop: they hurt farmers in poor countries all around the world. Our government, for its part, will fight this as far as possible. At the extreme, the U.S.A. may even drop out of the WTO entirely---and when it does so, it will point to the liberal agitators who wanted a better deal for the world's poor and say that it is doing the agitators a favor.

Doing something We'll divide Americans into two classes: people who have no idea about cotton subsidies and their effects on world poverty, and cotton farmers. The cotton farmers are out in full force, hoping to ensure that the U.S.A. defies the WTO and keeps the subsidies coming. The rest of us, who don't grow cotton and think poverty sucks, need to do our part to counter them.

That's right, it's time to write your congressperson. Forget switching to the hippie phone company or picketing the World Bank: this is the easiest, and potentially most effective thing you can do to help alleviate world poverty today.

Here are links to help you look up your Senator and Representative.

A few tips: handwritten letters get much more consideration than printed letters, which get much more consideration than emails, and emails that show distinctness get much more consideration than those with signs of cut-and-pasting. But in the mean time, here are some sample letters, which I hope you will, at the least, cut and paste to your congressman.

If your congressperson is a liberal
I am writing you with regards to the recent WTO ruling that the U.S. must curb its cotton subsidies. I believe that we should make every effort to comply with this ruling.

Personally, I am worried that we do not do enough to help the poor nations of the world. By cutting cotton subsidies, we do just that---and save billions of dollars in the process. The World Bank found that if the wealthier nations cut their agricultural subsidies, then 144 million people could be lifted out of poverty. Cutting the budget and helping the poor at the same time is a win-win situation if ever there was one.

The U.S.A. has lost face in the world since the invasion of Iraq, and needs to improve its image. This is a wonderful (and cheap) way to do so, showing that we have an interest in the world that goes beyond its oil, and that we have respect for international organizations even when they don't entirely agree with us.

The alternative, maintaining subsidies in the face of a WTO ruling that we should not, would leave parts of the world poorer and make them hate the U.S.A. still more. I would not feel more secure in a world like that.

So please, curb the cotton subsidies, as the WTO has mandated that you do. Doing so would help the U.S.A. and the impoverished of the world in equal measure.

If your congressperson is a conservative
I am writing you with regards to the recent WTO ruling that the U.S. must curb its cotton subsidies. I believe that we should make every effort to comply with this ruling.

Our budget deficit is larger than ever, and I know you are looking for more waste to trim. Now you have a international ruling that you must cut billions of dollars in handouts from our budget---what more could you ask?

I know that special interests are coming to you telling you that every cotton farmer in America will go out of business if these subsidies are eliminated, but I don't believe them, and I don't think you should either. Our farmers are still the best-educated, best-equipped farmers in the world, working on some of the best soil in the world. They will compete and prosper in a free market.

I am not asking you to hurt cotton farmers. I am asking you to return them to the same position that the rest of us are in: earning our money by good work instead of good lobbying. In the long run, this will benefit us all, as fiscal sanity and bravery in the face of special interests always will.

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The social security tax First, I have to mention that the social security tax is the most regressive tax in the U.S.A. today. `But', you say, `people are contributing to their own pensions that they'll eventually take out later.' This is, of course, a myth, supported by annual mailings from the Social Security administration. Every dollar the government takes in goes into one big pot, and every dollar taken out for this year's budget, whether for pensions or bombs, is taken out of the same big pot.

The populace has been duped into thinking that social security is a more moral and just tax, because it is somehow a separate fiscal entity which supports itself and nothing else. In your accountant's dreams it does. It's a tax just like the income tax, only it starts taxing at the first dollar you earn, taxes only labor, gives you no deductions, and the wealthy are 100% exempt.

[Here is a cute paper by Ed McCaffery about cognitive errors applied to tax policy. You can question his lab methods, but I have no doubt that this would generalize with no problem to the population at large.]

Eliminating the Social Security tax and raising the income (or any other) tax accordingly would undoubtedly make the U.S.A. a less polarized place and provide a much easier life for the struggling among us. Too bad it'll never happen.

Immigration and pensions Now that I've talked about how horrific pension taxes are, let me tell you about the latest buzz: portable pensions.

There are two simultaneous issues which wealthy nations (the U.S.A., the EU) face relative to the poorer nations (Mexico, the Ukraine): the wealthier nations aren't having kids at a replacement rate, and they attract lots of immigrants.

So we want some sort of incentive to get people to flow back to the poorer nations, which is where portable pensions come in. The idea is that if you choose to move to Mexico, your imaginary social security account goes with you. This is a good thing for circular migrants, and for the large number of illegal immigrants to the U.S.A. who pay social security taxes and never get anything back. Conversely, if people choose not to use the portability, they can stay in the country they've migrated to and not think about it.

At the same time, this is a strong incentive for old people to get out of the country. A dollar in Mexico buys about eight times what it does in the U.S.A.---and it's sunny. A regular retirement paradise.

There are people who support this idea because they think the alternative is that the dark skinned people will take over the country and never leave. Dubya's platform supports them. But just because *uckheads agree with an idea doesn't make it automatically wrong.

I take a more multicultural approach to assessing the value of the proposal: circular migration is a good thing. As more people commute across a border, the border eventually becomes irrelevant. If somebody comes to the U.S.A., gets a great education, and then chooses to go home to disseminate knowledge, then that's frigging optimal. Of course, if the person is forced out coercively, then this is significantly less than optimal, and is even sort of evil. Portable pensions, conversely, are actually a lessening of government restrictions---nothing but creating more options for people to decide among.

So the portable pension idea is a nice way to induce more circular migration, which would bring more capital (=the pensions) to the net-out-migration countries, and either augment their human capital or at least alleviate any brain drain. Plus our old folks will have more options for living on a limited income.

Finally, getting back to the fuc*heads, this is a way to convince them that their country is not being invaded. That means that with portable pensions come more porous borders, which is also a good thing.

Anyway, so that's my thinking. I haven't spent enough time pontificating to see the evil dark side of portable pensions. On the analytic side, I've retrofitted my immigration model for (name of international development group) to test whether portable pensions will do what we want them to. (Name of international development group) has me so supremely outclassed, by the way: I provide the model and they provide the data to run it with, and they came up with the most beautiful data set you have ever seen, ever. My model isn't worthy. So I'll be working, trance-like, for the next several dozen hours to make my model classier. Will try to remember to eat, sleep, and inhale at regular intervals.

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Mr. JE of New Orleans, Louisiana, asked me about this article, which is a libertarian commentary on a boycott of Taco Bell. The story is one we've heard a hundred times before: workers are mistreated, in this case the Immokalee Indians of South Florida who harvest the tomatoes, then liberal college students hear about it and a boycott is organized, causing a couple of college campuses to close their Taco Bells and many a chalupa to not get sold.

The libertarian response is predictable: the boycott is interfering with the market, which only hurts the people whom it is intended to help. "It is an attack on capitalism and an attempt to impose moral connotations to simple purchasing actions of consumption goods. [...] Prices are not set by arbitrary moral standards, but rather by available levels of supply and demand in the market."

But the people who are boycotting Taco Bell are the market. The first piece of confusion in the libertarian view is the belief that there are millions of perfectly atomic consumers within the market, who don't interact, and then there are these Jesuits and labor unions who come to them, from outside the market, and stick a screwdriver in the works. But the students who boycott are as much on the demand side of the market as the guys who still buy their tacos from TB, and it is an error to suddenly exclude somebody from a model of the market because they care about ethics. The above article acknowledges this: "Boycotting Taco Bell lowers the demand for tacos" and in the same paragraph denies it: "Staging a boycott against Taco Bell does not change the guided self interest of taco eating teenagers."

Why would a libertarian make such selective inclusions and exclusions? The root problem is in the narrow-path presumption that a person's utility function may only include a limited set of elements. Taste, convenience, price: OK. Ethics, affect, peer influences: forbidden. Academic economic models facilitate this, since price is much easier to model than ethics, and it's generally true that ethics really don't enter into most people's utility functions as strongly as price.

But ethics do matter, for everyone. I believe that every one of us could think of one product out there that they would never buy, whose production is somehow repulsive: maybe Metallica CDs, snuff videos, copies of the Communist Manifesto, or Krupps coffee makers. I'm a fanatic vegetarian, so I've got my list. It would be silly to put these considerations outside of the market mechanism: my utility from a Taco Bell taco stems directly from the fact that many franchises use animal fat in their rice (according to this source. Last time I saw an official ingredients list, it listed chicken stock in the rice, but that's apparently changed). To the extent that I'm a part of the market, the demand curve is directly affected by my ethical beliefs.

An interesting feature of ethics is that the vast majority of people don't care, but for those that do it's a deal-breaker. This is hard to model for the economists, and hard to deal with for the companies: do you alienate a thousand people for the sake of saving a penny on a million units? Part of the equation is the contagion problem, that if a person is sufficiently alienated then they will not only stop consuming, but they'll complain about you to all of their friends, which could hurt sales still further. The cost/benefit analysis would be different for every case: it's surely true that a company would have to shut down if it tried to satisfy all the ethical qualms of all of its consumers, but it's also surely true that a company which ignores the ethics of all of its consumers shoots itself in the foot.

Affect also matters. The clearest proof of this is that companies like Taco Bell spend billions of dollars a year on it. The narrow-path economists insist that advertising exists only to inform the consumer of new products or perhaps demonstrate the company's stability, but people who actually work in advertising would laugh at this: most advertising is about making the product emotionally appealing, by implying that attractive and desirable people use the product, or otherwise making you feel warm and fuzzy when you see their logo. If you can get people to have an emotional attachment to your product, then you can charge more for the same product---that is, emotional attachment is the best investment a perfectly rational producer can make.

The academic economists downplay affect for the same reasons they downplay ethics: hard to model, and price generally matters more. Many will argue that it's reasonable to ignore it in the design of an academic model, since many of the features of emotional attachment can be explained using other things like a desire for consistency or shared preferences between producer and consumer. But regardless of whether it should be included in a good model, it is certainly a real-world issue on which real-world companies spend billions of dollars.

Ethics and affect are tied. My affect toward Taco Bell is based upon all my information, including both the advertisements and my knowledge of how their proverbial sausage is made. The aforementioned libertarian article is happy to acknowledge half of this, by the way, pointing out that much of Taco Bell's demand comes from that frigging dog that says `Yo quiero Taco Bell'. [Better would have been `Quiero el taco bello', meaning `I want the beautiful taco'. But, alas, Taco Bell is named for its founder, Mr. Bell.] I can not explain why our libertarian friends say that demand can be shifted by something as squishy as a talking dog but not from the squishy issues of ethics.

Consumers are irrational. We can make up general rules about how they'll behave (like how demand falls with price, though we can't even prove that), but in the end they'll buy what they darn well please to. The role of the companies on the supply side of the market is to work out what those irrational desires are, regardless of where they came from, and cater to them. And the role of the think tank, by the way, is not to wish away those irrationalities or define those people it considers to be irrational as somehow outside of the market, but to discuss how society can best facilitate suppliers meeting those arbitrary demands. This is a hard question when the strong desires of a few (for fair-pay tomatoes) directly clash with the weak desires of the many (for cheap tomatoes), but the article I'm critiquing ignores it, and I must acknowledge that I really can't offer a generalized solution.

For Taco Bell's owners, paying its workers more should be part of the advertising budget. If behaving within the bounds of the consumer's ethical beliefs helps to improve consumers' visceral affect, then it makes as much sense as spending millions on affect-improving advertising, no matter how irrational or arbitrary those ethical rules may be.

In this context, the boycott absolutely makes sense for the laborers, although it is potentially risky. Consumers with certain ethical beliefs will want to maximize the cost to Taco Bell for ignoring those beliefs, which means not buying tacos and convincing as many people as possible to not buy. This works entirely within the market mechanism, by moving demand. To repeat the quote from above: "Prices are not set by arbitrary moral standards, but rather by available levels of supply and demand in the market." This is true, but levels of demand are influenced by arbitrary moral standards, which then influence price. The more vehement the arbitrary moral standards, the more influence they will have on price.

What T.B.'s managers will do about the increasing effect its labor policy has on demand is hard to guess. It may acknowledge that a penny a taco, shifting everybody's demand down a touch, is worth the benefit from restoring lost demand among boycotters and their expanding network. It may also find other means; such as buying tomatoes from some other group of laborers who aren't as organized; or maybe just ignoring the whole thing and reducing tomato purchases, losing money for the workers (which is the libertarian prediction; see below). The boycott has both costs and benefits to the workers, and I certainly don't have the numbers in both columns calculated---but then neither does our libertarian friend. Meanwhile, I have no reason to think the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is run by idiots, and I expect they are aware that sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease and sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the shaft. They are aware that Taco Bell's decision will be based entirely on costs and benefits, not the board of director's heart strings---and so they are doing exactly the right thing to convert their ethical complaints into the largest possible shift in demand, which Taco Bell's managers (being rational market actors) will respond to.

A final note: I feel that I should specifically respond to a few points in the article, though they don't generalize very far and won't be of interest except as a rebuttal.

A more effective method of raising the wages of Immokalee migrant workers would be to stage the exact opposite activist campaign. If college students were to buy more tacos and ask for extra tomatoes on those tacos the demand curve would be moved in the appropriate direction, raising migrant workers wages. But this realization seems farsighted from the anti-capitalists.

The Jesuit Volunteer Corps seems to be burning the migrant workers match at both ends. We've seen how the boycott would have a lessening effect on the migrant workers' wage rates, what we have yet to mention is that the JVC regularly encourages college students to gain the cultural experience of being a migrant worker. While lowering the demand for their goods and services, JVC kids travel to south Florida and work along side the migrant workers, in effect challenging them for the very jobs they are trying to spread a message of value for. This action raises the supply of labor and reaffirms the low pay scale.

In this case, I think that it is the author who is being short-sighted [or in economist-speak, is looking at a partial equilibrium model where he should be looking for the general equilibrium]. The goal is to maximize the benefit that Taco Bell gets from paying tomato-pickers more. The obvious way to do this is to provide less labor and demand more tomatoes, as suggested. However, one person's request for extra tomatoes has a small effect, but one person's refusal to buy---and encouragement to lots of friends not to buy---creates a much larger effect. The board of directors is asking, `what is the benefit to paying more for tomatoes?' and it seems obvious that the benefit the board sees is larger in the case of a public boycott that affects the demand decisions of a larger group than the private actions of a smaller set of people.

The Jesuit labor thing is similarly a long-term issue. If we have a person who marginally expands the supply of labor for a summer, and then spends the next decade encouraging others to care more about labor and shifts demand by self and others accordingly, then the long-term marginal shift may dwarf the short-term. Clearly the JVC thinks so.

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If you know me personally, you know that I had a number of contracts at the Bank. Some went well, but most were for a rather shifty individual who was somewhat dishonest, both academically and more generally. The contract stipulated pay for eight days, and I cut bait and left after maybe four months of mostly full-time work trying to fit models to his hypotheses--and he still withheld payment.

There you have it, right in front, and you can read the rest of this article knowing my bias. Though, I'd worked out most of the below over a year ago, and you can tell by this header that I'm self-conscious enough not to base any of the below on one personal data point.

The World Bank is huge, and that is not necessarily wrong. If we somehow broke it into ten separate organizations, those organizations would have constant turf squabbles and fights over funding, constantly need each others' assistance and/or replicate each others' work, and would probably wind up setting up some sort of interorganization council that doesn't differ too much from the Bank's top management. There are umpteen thousands of people working in development, and that's an organizational problem no matter what.

Now, there are two eminently sensible ways to divide expertise: you can go by geographic region, because Central Asia is a very different place from Sub-Saharan Africa, or you can go by topic, because poverty reduction is a very different issue from gender issues. The Bank does both: the management chart is a grid, with departments like Central Asia-poverty and Africa-gender (except everything is an acronym, so it'd be ECA PREM). That is, everybody has two bosses, thus giving everybody something to complain about at the water cooler.

The next problem is that new projects come and go at a pretty rapid pace, and always involve subject that are a bit far afield from the expertise of the managers. The solution: hire contractors. Lots and lots of contractors. The Bank doesn't have a dam-building division--they contract. Nor do they have a dam-evaluating division; that's contracted too. Nor do they have sufficient expertise in virtually any of the subjects that your typical Bank report is about.

So when you sit at the coffee shop in the Bank's spacious atrium--and a whole lot of Washington is like this--you find a small core of individuals who are there for life and a constant flux of two-year RAs and contractors. Also, you'll see that only two of the five coffees they serve will be Fair Trade certified.

Now, if you work in a technical field, you know that finding people who are both technically apt and good managers is supremely difficult. Further, even if they were the best of the best twenty years ago, maybe their COBOL skillz aren't so impressive now. I would contend that in the pool that the Bank has to draw from, there are simply not enough people who are experts in country plus subject plus general management to fill all the posts. They have to compromise.

And the compromise the Bank chooses, time and time again, is to go for the people who can best manage the stream of contractors. Subject knowledge can be hired; familiarity with the Bank and its protocols can't. To add to this, managers are rotated every few years, so if somebody really buckles down and learns everything there is to know about labor in Europe, it's down the drain when they're moved to managing technology dissemination in China.

Now, management skill generally goes with political skill, and much of the work of a Bank manager consists of not pissing off politicians. So this is one more reason to bias toward managerial knowledge over subject knowledge. It is also why most Bank reports don't actually say anything of substance.

I suppose the arrangement of hiring subject knowledge could work, but the Bank culture kills it. The Bank's employees are trained to think like business managers. Impoverished countries are referred to as "clients", and I have heard at least one manager give a speech explaining in no uncertain detail about how the Bank must be run like a business. There are clear management goals; growing GDP by 7% per year in an given country is always a popular one--and even if it is achieved via inequality-expanding means, all boats will eventually rise with the tide.

However, the Bank's questions are only partly business on the ground. A huge percentage of the Bank's product is reports, about the business climate, about how [trend of the month] can reduce poverty, about the environmental effects of dams. So the contractors the Bank will hire are a mix of the usual survey-takers and other such laborers, and academic types.

As demonstrated by me and my shifty boss (really, I had some nice ones too!), academics and hard-nosed managers don't mix. Academics want to write something that is correct to the last detail; managers want something that gets the point across. Academics want to hold off judgment until the data is in; managers want to write the introduction to the report before hiring the academics. Academics need time; managers need output by Friday. Further, experienced academics are not cheap. They have day jobs, and if you need original research, that distracts from the navel-gazing they'd rather be doing.

I asked one well-known academic, “what do you think of the World Bank?” and he snapped back, “Did they pay you?” Then there's the graduate student who confided to me that she didn't tell her adviser that she's working at the Bank; due to so many bad past experiences, her department has a policy of not allowing students to work there. After I gave up on the project at the head of this column, shifty manager attempted to contract two experienced individuals working in my field, and both refused. I'll stop with the anecdotes there.

The end result from all of this: the Bank generally runs on the young and inexperienced. If you just got your Master's, they've got work for you to do. If you can't necessarily do original research, but you know how to run Microsoft Excel, then you have what it takes to write the flagship publication, the World Development Report. If you skim through the thing, you'll notice that (1) it is primarily a very long lit review, and (2) none of the original data work goes further than a bivariate graph. Most of those bivariate graphs (e.g., pp 2.14 and 2.20) are Excel charts based on a manually-enterable number of data points. That is, it's the sort of report that you expect from a team of Master's students.

Of course, that report has its value, and if you want a survey of global poverty in 2005, you should definitely click the link above. But does the following statement inspire confidence in you?: "Resources to eradicate world poverty are allocated based upon the best research by the most eager graduates of the last few years."

In short, the Bank's structure consists of a core of managers, many of whom learned their economics in the '70s, and a constant stream of generally inexperienced subject-knowledge labor. The result is well-managed and well put-together graduate-level work, upon which life-changing policies are decided.

Policy recommendations

The Bank is clearly over-managed, in the sense that there are just too darn many layers of management and the corresponding politics and unproductive inoffensiveness is stifling. It is also overmanaged in the sense that it is run like a business with a series of financial goals for its clients, rather than an organization whose goal is to understand poverty and eradicate it.

Coauthoring is efficient. The latest Journal of Political Economy has seven articles, five of which were coauthored. To produce a good report about environmental issues in India, you can hire a full-time India-environment specialist, or you can hire a full time India specialist and a full time environment specialist. The team stands a good chance of producing a better paper and finishing in fewer person-hours than the lone author. Thus, the grid is redundant: a team of the best and the brightest for each country and for each topic, plus a nice coffee stand where then can all interact, may be sufficient, and can run with a fraction of the managerial overhead.

What do the best minds in academia want? [And let me make very clear that I am decidedly not referring to myself.] First, they want to feel that their work will actually go somewhere. Everybody understands that things go slowly and nobody's recommendations are magically implemented a week later. But it is disheartening to know that your careful and interesting work will be reduced to the politically least offensive denominator. For a report to be interesting to one's academic peers, it has to say something.

For Bank contractors, much of the pay is in the form of carrot-dangling about how maybe one day you'll have a real job at the Bank and at the least you'll have a recognized name on the resume, both of which are premia that only a recent graduate could love. The incentives to advance for the full-time employees are primarily about being able to control more money. The World Bank has no advancement path of any sort for a person who has experience and knowledge regarding poverty and economics.

Since there is no means of retaining those who are interested and capable regarding the intellectual challenge of fighting poverty, such people are guaranteed that the Bank will be an unpleasant place for them, and if they want a community of people thinking about poverty, they are better off elsewhere. The Bank could be the focal point where the smartest people in the world meet to tackle the world's hardest problem, but instead it is a house of bureaucracy, hiring lowest-bidder contractors to provide management solutions to the government officials who are its clients.

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When I was nine or ten, I thought wars were a historical artifact. Intelligence and literacy have grown throughout the world over the centuries, and we'd finally reached such a level of global unification that we'd all be able to put blunt ugliness behind us. The USA would be at the forefront of this, they told me in fifth grade, since we're nice people who don't have centuries of baggage weighing us down.

Though, when you're nine years old, everything is history.

Desert Storm was the first war that involved the USA that I could remember, and it was hailed as what all wars would be like in the future. It was clean and quick. Since only U.S. casualties count, about two people died. The President's approval rating soared, and it was to be the model for the future, where wars are just three-day affairs in those bad weeks when negotiation breaks down.

So here we are, well past the millenium mark, and we've all collectively realized that it's business as usual. In September of 2001, all the commentators pointed out that the former battle between the USA and Russia has been replaced by a battle between the West and the Islamic states, and switched from asking “Is history over?” to “Are we at war with Islam?” and “Is Islam at war with us?”

But the story there isn't quite right. It's not that George `Dubya' Bush suddenly declared a crusade on 16 September, 2001. Europe has been at war with the Middle East for seven hundred years. For a while there, it was called the clash between the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire, but then the Byzantine Empire fell apart; and Rome gained dominance, leading to the (original) crusades; then the Habsburg Empire, AKA the Holy Roman Empire, started to bump up against the Ottomans; and next thing you know you're at World War I, where the Ottoman Empire fell apart, and we went into a period of many, many minor skirmishes.

The story is that the Christian/Muslim War was dormant during the Cold War, and the Soviet Union certainly did a good job at the border of the former Ottoman Empire of starving everybody of the resources they needed to fight each other. But the War between Islam and Christianity went about its business, in Algeria, in Afghanistan, and even in British-run India. After the Soviet Union broke up, look where all the skirmishes were from the 1990s to present: Chechnya, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan (again), the Persian Gulf--these are the edges of the Ottoman Empire.

Remember the Battle of Kosovo, between Serbian Christians and Muslims to the East? That could refer equally well to 2001 and 1389.

Of course, everything is much more fragmented than it was back in the old days. The Christians have their infighting (e.g., WWII) and the Muslims have theirs (see my earlier notes on the Shiite/Sunni conflict). But where there is a border between Muslim and Christian, there is tension and occasional outbreaks, and that is as true today as it was in 1400.

Although both Christianity and Islam are names of religions, this has little or nothing to do with religion. After all, they're both People of the Book, who place themselves at the feet of the same God of Abraham. Allah (contraction of Al Ilah) translates literally to `The God', which is exactly the term a Christian would use--unless the Christian uses Jehovah, which is just an attempt at pronouncing the yud-yud used by Jews. [For the computer geeks, the symbol for the Name of God is Unicode code point 05F2.]

So what is the confict about? I could only guess. Whose fault is it? I don't f.ing care. What can we do about it? Nothing.

My ideal, in such a world, is migration. Muslims move to Paris and New York, Christians move to Jerusalem and Cairo, and the black and white lines on the map just fade into a muddled grey. But the same forces that have kept the war going for seven hundred years are the forces that bar the door in the name of security and that make it uncomfortable for those minorities who do get through. So the greying of the map may one day happen, but there'll be a whole lot of wars before then.

When I was nine, I felt as though we were on the edge of something great, on the edge of lasting peace. When you're a kid, people talk to you a lot about peace. But thinking that we're the special generation that will finally bring peace is all just hubris. Two hundred years from now, kids will be reading about the Iraqi war in exactly the same way that we read about the Ottomans attempting to take Vienna. “In the early 2000s, Baghdad, an Islamic capital, was taken by U.S. forces in a series of bloody battles,” the textbook would read, and the kids would be grateful that it's all just distant history.