Where are the women?

While following the Egypt protests, one thing I have been struck by is the apparent absence of women among the protesting masses. In the approximately 50-100 photos/videos of Egyptian crowds I have seen, there has not been even a single woman in sight. By contrast, the Tunisian and Iranian protests had a woman for approximately every 5-10 images.

In fact, one of the enduring symbols of the Iranian protests (at least in Western circles) was the killing of a woman, Neda Agha-Soltan (even though, interestingly, she was not a protester, just a bystander).

Granted, my location is remote, sample size small, and statistical approach shady. But surely, the relative difference surely says something, no?

* * * *

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton, while commenting on the Egypt situation took a jab at Iran:

"I want the Egyptian people to have a chance to....democracy. Not faux democracy, like the elections we saw in Iran..."

This was just plain nasty and unwarranted. For all its flaws (including that of having a whimsical religious leader playing the part of the constitution), Iran has a democracy of sorts which has elected the likes of the progressive Mohammed Khatami in the past.To equate Iran's rigged election with Egypt's lack of democracy is in no way reasonable.

Perhaps it would have been more fitting for Ms Clinton to have compared one of the United States' client state, Egypt, with another, Saudi Arabia, which also has no democracy to speak of.

* * * *

One wonders, how long will this moral-high-road charade of supporting "democracy" by so-called liberal Western democracies continue? The Palestinians' democratically elected government of Hamas was never recognized by them; instead they have clubbed with the Palestinian Authority to thoroughly void the Hamas government's authority through economic and military sanctions. The democratically elected but Hezbollah-dominated Lebanese government is barely off the starting block but is being roundly pooh-poohed by these paragons of democracy.

All democracies are equal, but some democracies are more equal than others, right?

* * * *

By toppling the more-or-less secular Saddam regime, the US unwittingly paved the path for a government that is decidedly Islamic in nature and supported by an openly militant Islamic cleric. As far as US interests (read Israel) are concerned, it only goes downhill from here. Is the same happening in Egypt, albeit without any material US support? What if the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power?

Parents in law

The Chinese legislature is considering a draft bill which calls for more emotional care of the elderly. The bill, if enacted, will amend the existing Law on the Protection of Rights and Interests of the Aged and will require that elderly parents be visited regularly by their children. It is expected to prevent physical and emotional isolation of the elderly.

I can come up with many arguments as to why this law is not fair, on the basis of some truisms about individual liberties. Yet, all societies obligate parents to support their offspring until they are children and I am more inclined than not to think that taking care of the elderly is the logical flip side of the coin.

Further, societies with social welfare programs spend significant sums of money after the elderly. Perhaps there is a economic argument too, for these kinds of laws.

* * *

On the subject, India enacted the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act in 2007. The law obligates children and legal heirs who have attained majority to provide for their elderly relatives.

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While still on the subject, check out this traditional Chinese song 常回家看看 (Go see your parents frequently). This rendition is by Gong Yue.

Perhaps the inspiration for the proposed law. A translation is here.

So, what caused America's economic woes?

Like the blind men and the allegorical elephant, every person who cares to think about this question has a different theory, there being half a dozen to dozen dominant aggregate theories. This week's issue of Economist speculates on a couple of relatively less-paraded ones (here and here). Not that these are new ideas, but I promptly took note because they seem to resonate with my own notions of the elephant:

1. Price of oil

My friend D and I often commiserate with each other and jointly wonder/seethe at the energy profligacy of our fellow men. When oil touched $120 a barrel back in 2008, I remember spending a summer afternoon exchanging our ignorance on what damage such prices would do in an economy so dependent on cheap energy.

In this paper, James Hamilton of the University of California proposes through a study of historical energy prices and economic downturns that indeed, high oil prices may have been one of the culprits:

"The correlation between oil shocks and economic recessions appears to be too strong to be just a coincidence. If consumers try to maintain their real purchases of energy in the face of rising prices, their saving or spending on other goods must fall commensurately."

Crude has been inching up steady for a past few months and flirting with the 90s now. One wonders...

2. The US' promotion of easy homeownership

In his book Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, Raghuram Rajan at the University of Chicago suggests that in America, the political response to rising inequality was to make credit easily available to prop up the living standards of those at the bottom.

"Easy credit has been used as a palliative throughout history by governments that are unable to address the deeper anxieties of the middle class. Politicians, however, want to couch the objective in more uplifting and persuasive terms.....in the United States, the expansion of homeownership was the defensible linchpin for expanding credit and consumption."

Interestingly, Peter Wallison, one of the members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, has released a dissent opinion which places the blame for the financial crisis squarely at the feet of the US government's housing policies.

* * * * *

On the subjection of self-deceiving public policy, saw the documentary I.O.U.S.A the other day. It is a well-made, roundly depressing piece of work. The film has a clip of Gerald Ford's 1975 State of the Union speech when he announced "...I must say to you that the state of the Union is not good...". I was fantasizing that Obama would give an equally blunt message in his speech yesterday. Of course he didn't. Hope obstructed realism.

Messing with a sacred cow

This interesting article from McClatchy compares the Canadian housing market and lending policies with those in America. Not a single bank in Canada failed during the financial crisis, and less than one percent of all mortgages are under threat of default. Things are very, very different in the U.S.

The articles looks at a number of things the Canadians did to not screw up. The most significant thing that caught my eye was the fact that Canada offers no tax write-offs for interest paid on house mortgage payments unlike America where homeowners enjoy the deductions provided by the federal government ostensibly to promote home ownership. However:

..even without a mortgage-interest deduction, Canada's percentage of home ownership at 68.4 percent is comparable to U.S. home ownership rates.

I have always found the interest write-off to be unfair and ass-backwards. Unfortunately, it is too popular with the voter bases of both parties, which makes is somewhat of a untouchable subject and unlikely to go away easily.

But then, there is much noise from House Republicans now in a majority about sweeping changes to make the government smaller and simplifying the tax code. Well, the interest write-off is a perfect example of social engineering, something Republicans would not like to be seeing doing. Very good reason to tackle it. Deficit hawks should also take note.

Conscience of convenience

Barack Obama entertained Chinese president Hu Jintao today. Among other things, Obama politely admonished China for its "human rights" record:

"History shows that societies are more harmonious, nations are more successful and the world is more just when the rights and responsibilities of all nations and all people are upheld, including the universal rights of every human being..."

One can't help exclaim: What cheek!

The United States of America is presently waging at least one clearly illegal war. President Obama's men routinely shoot and bomb Afghanis, Iraqis, and North Africans on their own soil for doing nothing more than what Americans themselves do - choose violence to advance their own philosophical or economic goals (however disagreeable they may be). The number of civilian deaths from the aimless Iraq war is almost 100,000 if not more. The American armament industry thrives on wars waged abroad.

While the civility with which America treats its own citizens is indeed remarkable, it shows no regard whatsoever for rights of human beings elsewhere, except in self-serving circumstances. Really, what moral audacity to call someone else's human rights record in doubt!

Warmonger-in-chief meets lesser evil (photo credit: IBT)

A fresh whiff of onion breath

There are tons of proponents of the free market (including this blogger) who will advocate that most regulations are unnecessary. Incidentally, it so happens that more often than not, market deregulation seems to benefit the rich.

Avinash offers the same argument, but turns the results upside down. Why ban onion exports, he argues, when the apparent beneficiaries are going to be farmers, the ones who always bear the brunt when prices go down?

Short but interesting read here.

Two exceptions

Of the difference between travel writers and travelling writers: the former write of the experience, of the joys and sorrows, of travelling as an end in itself. The place they travel to is of no more importance than the phenomenon of their presence there. Travelling writers, on the other hand, will write about the place they are in.

Travel writers are generally harmless. Like an aimless gust of wind sweeping over a pile of turd or an open-air barbecue, they only carry ephemeral impressions. They have short memories and are, in turn, forgettable.

Not so with travelling writers; be skeptical of their opinions. These will stay in a place long enough to pick up the 'authoritative' badge, then offer a pedestrian report burnished with that very badge. Travelling commentators supposedly have an edge over native ones because they write about things with an external perspective that the latter do not have. The problem is, perspective is of no use without good sight, and unfortunately most travelling writers fail to properly see things before rushing to put them in perspective.

Dissing travelling writers is not what this post is about; I have recently been taken by surprise by a couple of delightfully insightful accounts of India coming from drive-by observers. These are what this post is about:

1. A Village in a Million is an excellent account of Shahabpur in Uttar Pradesh by Economist correspondent James Astill.

"Demeaning, divisive, dismissable", my friends in the There-Are-No-Two-Indias camp will sneer. Perhaps so. But notable just for the richness of vision and detail of observation. Little, unimportant details like why it makes sense to walk along the middle of the street in Shahabpur to why Jokho Lal may be the last of his calling.

2. India Calling: The New 'Land Of Opportunity'? by American writer Anand Giridharadas is interesting for the author's sharp vision, and equally so for the intelligent placement of observations within an American perspective.

Both worth a read.

They don't do it no more

Came across this rather interesting video of how a leather football is manufactured:

I enjoyed watching the details, but thought something was strange about it. Took me a while to put my finger on it: the people engaged in the repetitive, humdrum tasks were not Vietnamese, not Bangladeshis, but Americans.

Think of the stereotype of an American worker: she fights wars, invents, sues, buys, sells, teaches, nurses, packages loans, and struts around like Jerry in the first 15 minutes of Jerry Maguire. What you don't see her doing is making stuff with her own hands.

OK, that was a little facetious, but not entirely make-believe. American manufacturing has been declining steeply in the past 50 years. It has gone from accounting for 53 percent of the economy in 1965 to 9 percent in 2004. In the same period, agricultural work was increasingly being performed by foreign migrant workers. Borrowing and spending has replaced production as the chief economic activity of this nation.

Much is said about the collapse in house prices and the financial meltdown, as if these caused the economic malaise. But these are mere symptoms. Indeed, the biggest untold story of the current economic narrative is the demise of American production.

I am taking bets on whether Wilson will still be manufacturing footballs using American labor 5 years hence...