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Inspite of all its pitfalls, there remains to me no more enchanting a website in the world today than dear old Wikipedia. I know, its not the most reliable source for researching an article for say academic purposes, but that doesn’t stop it being the first destination I point my browser whenever I want to know about something of which I have no prior knowledge.
Few sites do greater justice to the ‘web’ part of the name in more gripping fashion. I’ve just finished reading an article on the Tokyo metro system, where I ended up having started my journey seeking the etymology of Mumbai, via the red buses plying the streets of the city where I happened upon a link to public transport in London and then a list of cities with rapid transit systems out of which Tokyo culled my interest simply because my flatmate had been mentioning a few days ago how it had done his head in trying to figure out the Tokyo ‘tube-map’ as it were, when he was there a couple of years ago(I said to him at the time that’s only because he’s an idiot, but now I feel I rather underestimated him). That is exactly why I love it so much. From nowhere, you can end up knowing quite a bit about something you have no idea you might even be interested in an hour back.
It works on the principle that knowledge should be free, and to me there can be no greater mantra to which I would lend my voice. Whoever came up with the whole thing would be my first pick(I quite like imagining I might one day be on the selection committee for one of these things) for a knighthood, or a Nobel peace prize (I’ve even got the ‘for’ part ready, its ‘for being the most revolutionary source of awareness in our age, without which peace shall forever remain an elusive concept’), maybe even a GQ Style award.
I know it can be a bit unreliable at times, but here you drift into the realm of how one defines knowledge. And for me, everything that is confirmed about a certain subject through rigorous testing or analysis is most definitely a necessary condition for knowledge, but not a sufficient one. For that, the random bits of trivia that the Wiki format often throws up, which may or may not be true(while acknowledging this possibility) makes for a more complete, accessible and interesting form of knowledge. That’s probably why since the first day I came across it, I was in love. It may have landed a few people in trouble in its time, but What I Know Is, its added a whole new dimension to the proliferation of knowledge in our society.
If you haven’t seen it already, Mohsin Hamid has an interesting op-ed in the NY Times, asking Musharraf to stop prolonging his rule. [Read it before it goes offline!]
Hamid says that the urban upper classes have been doing well under Musharraf:
My wife was an actress in “Jutt and Bond,” a popular Pakistani sitcom about a Punjabi folk hero and a debonair British agent. Her show was on one of the many private television channels that have been permitted to operate in the country, featuring everything from local rock music to a talk show whose host is a transvestite.
My sister, a journalism lecturer in Lahore, loves to tell me about the enormous growth in recent years in university financing, academic salaries and undergraduate enrollment. And my father, now retired but for much of his career a professor of economics, says he has never seen such a dynamic and exciting time in Pakistani higher education.
But there have been significant problems under General Musharraf, too. Pakistan has grown increasingly divided between the relatively urban and prosperous regions that border India and the relatively rural, conservative and violent regions that border Afghanistan. The two mainstream political parties have historically bridged that divide and vastly outperformed religious extremists in free elections, but under General Musharraf they have been marginalized in a system that looks to one man for leadership.
Hamid tells us that he had for a long time supported Musharraf, voting for him in the referendum a few years ago. But things have now turned sour:
What many of us hoped was that General Musharraf would build up the country’s neglected institutions before eventually handing over power to a democratically elected successor. Those hopes were dealt a serious blow two weeks ago, when he suspended the chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.
… He had blocked the showcase privatization of the national steel mill. He had, in other words, demonstrated that he would not do General Musharraf’s bidding. With elections due later this year, and challenges to irregularities like the rigging that took place in 2002 likely to end up in the Supreme Court, an independent chief justice could jeopardize General Musharraf’s continued rule.
Like many Pakistanis, I knew little about Justice Chaudhry except that he had a reputation for being honest, and that under his leadership, the Supreme Court had reduced its case backlog by 60 percent. His suspension seemed a throwback to the worst excesses of the government that General Musharraf’s coup had replaced, and it galvanized protests by the nation’s lawyers and opposition parties, including rallies of thousands in several of Pakistan’s major cities yesterday.
He ends his op-ed with a plea for democracy. The risk of militants coming to power, he says, is simply overstated.
Yes, there are militants in Pakistan. But they are a small minority in a country with a population of 165 million. Religious extremists have never done well in elections when the mainstream parties have been allowed to compete fairly. Nor does the Pakistan Army appear to be in any great danger of falling into radical hands: by all accounts the commanders below General Musharraf broadly agree with his policies.
An exaggerated fear of Pakistan’s people must not prevent America from realizing that Pakistanis are turning away from General Musharraf. By prolonging his rule, the general risks taking Pakistan backward and undermining much of the considerable good that he has been able to achieve. The time has come for him to begin thinking of a transition, and for Americans to realize that, scare stories notwithstanding, a more democratic Pakistan might be better not just for Pakistanis but for Americans as well.
As they say, read the whole thing!
A couple of quick thoughts on the op-ed (and I mean, quick. I love my readers, but it’s crunch time in law school land…)
1. What Hamid says about the economic opportunities and stability created by the Musharraf regime sounds a good bit like what they used to say about Ayub Khan back in the day. And the widening gulf between regions sounds familiar too from that period. We know how that turned out.
2. One of things I would question Hamid (or Pakistani readers who agree with him) about is why he thinks that a new run of democratic experimentization will turn out any differently than the last few. As Hamid notes, the institutions have not been strengthened. And have any new political figures emerged in this period of military rule that present a credible alternative to the old PPP/PML leadership? And if not, the danger is not that the militant groups will take over power whenever they hold elections – the danger is that when either the PPP/PML are mucking it up again, the vacuum of power and control that militant groups thrive in will only be deepened…
3. None of this is an argument against democratization. It’s important to spot what went wrong: the lack of institutional development. It wasn’t impossible in Pakistan. And it certainly isn’t impossible in Bangladesh. The rhetoric that we are seeing from the SOE government matches very closely the rhetoric of Pervez Musharraf. One hopes that they won’t try to follow him in the casual ad hoc way in which he’s approached the work of nurturing institutions.
4. So what is it going to be? A few years from now, are we going to have Tahmina Anam writing in the NYTimes (in anticipation of her second book) about being “betrayed” by the SOE government. Or will the SOE experiment have silently succeeded – perhaps the way that the Mauritania experiment is as we speak, with substance but little fanfare…
Back in school (I went to an Indian school in Kuwait till the beginning of 11th grade), the Indians would say that Bengalis were smarter because of the fish we ate. Based on this article [hat tip, marginalrevolution.com], one can now claim that it might actually have to do with how, culturally, it’s rude to look someone in the eye for too long when interacting with them. (This cultural trait probably generates some confusion (and some suspicion?) when Bengalis come to the West.)
On the other hand, shifty-eyed or not, we are a people with an extremely short historical memory. Right, Jajabor?
Shadhinota tumi
Baganer ghor, kokiler gan,
Boyeshi boter jhilimili pata,
Jemon icche lekhar amar kobitar khata.
- Shamsur Rahman
Professor Abhijit Bannerjee at MIT, who I had posted on previously, has a very accessible piece in the Boston Review about development economics, critiquing where we’ve been and drawing on some recent work (particularly in the area of education) that might show the way to the future. Choice lines:
The problem, in the end, is that we economists and development experts are still thinking in machine mode—we are looking for the right button to push. Education is one such button. Within education, there are more buttons: Economists talk of decentralization, incentives, vouchers, competition. Education experts talk about pedagogy. Government officials seem to swear by teacher training. If only we could do it right, whatever the favored “it” might be, we would be home free.
The reason we like these buttons so much, it seems to me, is that they save us the trouble of stepping into the machine. By assuming that the machine either runs on its own or does not run at all, we avoid having to go looking for where the wheels are getting caught and figuring out what small adjustments it would take to get the machine to run properly. To say that we need to move to a voucher system does not oblige us to figure out how to make it work—how to make sure that parents do not trade in the vouchers for cash (because they do not attach enough value to their children’s education) and that schools do not take parents for a ride (because parents may not know what a good education looks like). And how to get the private schools to be more effective—after all, at least in India, even children who go to private schools are nowhere near grade level. And many other messy details that every real program has to contend with.
The great virtue of the recent emphasis on randomized evaluations of social programs, it seems to me, is that they force us to venture inside the machine. To implement a proper evaluation, one has to know the exact details that define a program.
As they say, read the whole thing!
[Extra, extra! Read all about it! Here's an interesting and accessible paper on absentee doctors in the healthcare system in rural Bangladesh by Nazmul Chaudhury and Jeffrey Hammer of the World Bank. This type of work, of entering the system and trying to figure out what's working and where the gaps are, is in line with what Bannerjee talks about...]
Bangladesh has come a long way from being perceived as what Henry Kissinger infamously called a “basket case” in the 70s. The past decade has seen stunning economic growth rates of around 5 percent—this in spite of continuous political instability and economic disruptions because of it.
Accompanied by this growth has been an expansion of the urban middle class. The Bangladeshi middle class accounts for about 9 percent of the country’s population, still low compared to Pakistan’s 18 percent and India’s 30 percent, but growing.
Anyone who has recently been to Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, has come back raving about the new restaurants, coffee shops, malls representing new ways for the middle class to spend moolah.
A brand new shopping mall: Boshundhora City
About five years ago, a brand new theme park opened. ”Fantasy Kingdom” answered the prayers of urban kids with an urge to ride roller coasters and bumper cars superior to those found at “Shishu Park” where I have several baby pictures with my cousins. Some criticized the idea of a shiny new theme park when so many problems still plague a country where so many children still beg on the streets.
Yes, inequality in Bangladesh is still stark and most people still earn a bit less per day than the entry fee at Fantasy Kingdom. But the steady growth of the middle class can be a boon for Bangladesh if managed in the right way. This is if (with a capital “I” and capital “F”) governance improves, greater investment in the economy is allowed, taxes are actually collected, and the money is actually used to make smart investments to lift the poor.
But, regardless of this exhaustive list of things that the government could be doing with the golden economic egg, the chicken has already hatched. The question is which way the chicken will bolt.
Some trends have led us to hope. The growing middle class has already led to greater civil society participation. Impressively, the middle has shown itself to be increasingly vocal about political matters and brazen about challenging the government.
For the Club of the Optimistic (of which I am a member) these happenings could mean greater evolution and effectiveness of Bangladesh’s political institutions and in turn its economic institutions. A large enough middle class could also eventually mean more checks on the abuse of political power by the affluent, as well as more support for public investment in education, health and roads.
But I remind myself that in order for any of this to happen, the middle has to play fair too. First, it has to continue to stay socially and politically aware and active. Second it has put an end to inveterate practices that still continue and serve to shut out the many at the expense of a few: e.g. bribing everyone from politicians to school headmasters to healthcare institutions to company officials.
I sincerely hope that the growing middle will rise to the occassion.
I am sorry that this might come across as a little snarky, but this begged to be commented upon. Over at DP Blog, Rumi is ruminating during a visit back home. Discussing the encroachment of water bodies in the capital by developers and well-connected individuals, Rumi spends a little time reflecting the various names for water bodies in Dhaka. He writes:
…A water body, when it goes through a posh area, it is called a lake. The same thing when it enters middle class Dhaka, it renames itself as a Khal or jheel. A Gulshan resident can not tolerate a Begunbari or Meradia resident living beside a lake!!
I am sorry, Rumi. It is actually the other way round. It’s not that “the Gulshan resident cannot tolerate a Begunbari or Meradia resident living beside a lake!!” It’s that the Gulshan or Dhanmondi resident cannot tolerate living beside a khal or jheel like the middle class! (!!, if you will.) This of course speaks volumes about the mindset of the residents of the Gulshan/Banani/Baridhara (and Dhanmondi) crowd. And Rumi’s slip is revealing of the disconnect between this crowd (and many returning expats) and the rest of the population.
Moving beyond the initial class-condescension, the rest of Rumi’s post is great, and points out a bunch of interesting thing, with untempered enthusiasm and optimism. Keep writing, Rumi bhai!
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