Bargaining in the Souk
Bshhal? (How much?), I say, pointing to an objet d’art.
He gives a figure.
La?! (No?!), in mock shock at the price he has quoted. Bezzaf! (Expensive!)
How much you pay?
I get out a small pad of paper and pen (invaluable in the souk) and write a much lower figure.
Now it is his turn to be "shocked," handmade, silver, he says launching into a spiel.
We bargain some more back and forth. The call to prayers starts in the background, he says, "listen, good sign."
I say, yes but for which one of us? He laughs. I am not budging much on the price so he tries to distract me with a less valuable piece.
C’est la ou rien, I reply. For some reason the use of English, Arabic and French is not confusing.
Then he says "you give me maximum price, top, price serioux."
La, I reply, you give me minimum price, price serioux.
He laughs. You professor?
Now, I am shocked. Yes, how did you know?
I smelt it, he says touching his nose. "Everywhere professors have good eye but no money."
I seize an unexpected advantage, na’am (yes) no money.
We bargain some more and come to a deal. I ask for my pen back. He says no, small gift, small gift, mon amis.
Twenty dirhams!, I reply.
Professor, you must be Berber.
I laugh. He keeps the pen.
Addendum: If you go, ask for mon amis Rashid at Zemouri Ahmed Belhaj in the Souk. Tell him that the Professor, day after Christmas, sent you. He says he will remember.
Random thoughts from Marrakesh
I see about as many women in Marrakesh in full scale (eye slit only) chadora as on a typical day on the campus of George Mason University. Tyler is correct; globalization makes every place increasingly different and all places increasingly similar. Of course, I have yet to see snake charmers in GMUs central square.
The dates and apricots from the street sellers are the best I have ever tasted. I could subsist on the dates, apricots, pistachios and the incredible orange juice alone.
I visited a harem today; alas the women were long gone or at least moved to the new palace.
The monkeys look sad.
As I am blogging I can hear the call to prayers in the background. Ancient and modern in one experience; how cool is that (insert exclamation point here).
In Marrakech
The streets of Marrakech run with blood today. It is Eid Al Adha, the feast of the sacrifice, to comemorate Ibraham’s (Abraham) willingness to obey God by sacrificing his son Ishmael (Ishmael/Isaac, who can say?). (If a booming voice told me to sacrifice my son, I’d tell him to go to hell. My failure to see the virtue in Abraham’s more faithful actions lets me reject three religions in one go. Convenient.) In anycase, God relented at the last minute and said sacrifice a ram instead. So today rams are being sacrificed all over town, the heads are then cooked in the streets over barbecues made from old bedsprings. It’s not to my taste but if I wanted things to my taste I would have gone to Starbucks.
Many thanks to all who gave tips earlier. I will write more later the kybrd here is hard to use.
Must have been a Monday
[Sir] Bob Geldof is angry about European farm subidies:
The CAP is a protection racket Al Capone would look at in
admiration and be proud of. Why do Europe’s farmers need protection?
Farmers are being paid to look after fields – they are just gardeners.
Some are growing stuff through subsidy that we don’t even need – then
we are paying more taxes to store the stuff we don’t need and more
taxes to destroy the stuff we don’t need. The CAP was responsible for
the butter mountains and the wine lakes. These surpluses are also being
shipped out to Africa and destroying local markets and economies. It is
not giving people a chance to get back on their feet. The CAP should be
scrapped and farmers should be open to competition. We’re not a free
market. There is no free trade. The CAP is anti-free trade….CAP is killing people. Africa is only eight miles down
the road from Europe and it is in conceivable that there is starvation
and poverty there while huge amounts are wasted across Europe on
farming subsidies. Europe gives 65 cents -just over half a euro -to the
average poverty-stricken African in aid in a year, whereas a surplus
cow in Europe gets 848 euros a year.
Hat tip to the Adam Smith Institute Blog.
With friends like these
There is a sort of an unwritten code in Washington, among the
underworld and the hustlers and these other guys, that I am their
friend.
Former Washington mayor and current council member Marion Barry after being robbed at gunpoint in his home.
Marrakech
Next week I am off to Marrakech. Why? Can any economist claim to understand markets who has not been? I will also spend a few days in Casablanca. Comments are open if you know a good gin joint.
Private Education in India
Sebastian Mallaby has a good column on the explosion in private schooling in India and the implications for theories of development:
More than four out of five Indian engineering students attend
private colleges, whose potential growth seems limitless. …Something similar is happening to the Indian
school system…Since the early 1990s the percentage of 6-to-14-year-olds
attending private school has jumped from less than a tenth to roughly a
quarter of the total in that cohort, according to India’s National
Council of Applied Economic Research. And this number may be on the low
side. James Tooley of the University of Newcastle in Britain has found
that in some Indian slums about two-thirds of the children attend
private schools, many of which are not officially recognized and so may
escape the attention of nationwide surveys.The causes of this
private-school explosion shed interesting light on debates about
development, not just in India but throughout the poor world. The
standard assumption among anti-poverty campaigners is that education
leads to development…the recent private-education boom in India shows how causality can also
flow the other way…Since India embraced the
market in the early 1990s, parents have acquired a reason to invest in
education; they have seen the salaries in the go-go private sector, and
they want their children to have a shot at earning them… Once parents understand that education buys their kids into the new
India, they demand it so avidly that public money for schoolrooms
becomes almost superfluous.… Apparently unconnected development policies —
cuts in tariffs and oppressive business regulation, or projects to
build roads and power grids — can sometimes stimulate new educational
enrollment at least as much as direct investments in colleges or
schools.
See my earlier post for some more references.
I know that we have a number of readers in and from India so comments are open if you have further information.
Lester Brown vs. Broken Watch
It’s no contest. A broken watch is correct twice a day.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese have been lifted out of abject poverty in the last several decades but trust Lester Brown to see the downside (Brown, of course, is sadly joined by Paul Krugman and neo-cons itching for another cold-war). In his latest book, Brown argues that the Chinese will soon be eating little children. Well, not exactly, but he does think that Chinese eating will cause little children to die. Writing in the Washington Post, Bill McKibben summarizes the Brown argument (which he endorses):
The Chinese, in particular, are constantly converting farmland to
factory sites (even as they learn to eat more meat), and they have
plenty of American cash stored up to pay for any shortfall. But if they
do so, the first casualties will be the world’s really poor nations,
already reeling from increases in the price of fuel.
Of course this is an old story for Lester Brown who in 1973 said:
The soaring demand for food, spurred by continued population
growth and rising affluence, has begun to outrun the productive
capacity of the world’s farmers and fishermen. The result has been
declining food reserves, skyrocketing food prices, food rationing in
three of the world’s most populous countries, intense international
competition for exportable food supplies, and export controls on major
foodstuffs by the world’s principal food supplier.
Isn’t it amazing how rising affluence leads directly to mass starvation? Some people just can’t be happy.
To be clear, I do think that issues of food production and demography are important (although what is most important is regional poverty – I have few worries about global food production per se), it’s just Lester Brown who should not be taken seriously.
Daily Ablution has some good links on these issues. Comments are open.
Constitutional Torture
Liberals are claiming that President Bush has violated constitutional restrictions on torture and spying on Americans. Don’t they understand that the constitution is a living document that must be reinterpreted in light of new events and understandings? An originalist reading of the constitution would throw us back into the
primitive past when the minimum wage was unconstitutional. Fortunately, conservatives know that constitutional interpretation must change with the times and never more so than now. We live in a different world. The Founding Fathers may have been great in their time but they did not face the problems that we face today and we should not be bound by their 18th century ideas of liberty and executive tyranny.
Social snowflakes
Inspired by yesterday’s snowflake photograph, Steve Horowitz pens an excellent post on spontaneous orders in the natural and social worlds. At our best social scientists inspire an "aesthetic appreciation of, and deep desire to understand, the
awesome beauty and complexity of the undesigned order of ‘social
snowflakes.’" Do read the whole thing.
Merry Christmas
A real picture from The Snowflake.
David Friedman’s Blog
David Friedman has started a blog. As you might expect, it’s interesting. Here is an idea from one recent post.
Libertarians still tend to identify with the Republican party. Save for
historical reasons, it is hard to see why. The current administration,
despite its free market rhetoric, has been no better–arguably
worse–than its predecessor on economic issues. Its policy on public
schooling, the largest governent run industry in the U.S., has been a
push towards more central control, not less. Its support for free trade
has been at best intermittant. Reductions in taxes have been matched by
increases in government spending, increasing, not shrinking, the real
size and cost of government. It has been strikingly bad on civil
liberties. Its Supreme Court nominees have not been notably sympathetic
to libertarian views of the law. Libertarians disagree among themselves
on foreign policy, but many support a generally non-interventionist
approach and so find themselves unhappy with the Iraq war.The
Democrats have problems too. While things have been looking up for them
recently, their ideological coalition has been losing strength for
decades, leaving them in danger of long term minority status.The
obvious solution to both sets of problems is for the Democrats to try
to pull the libertarian faction out of the Republican party. How large
that faction is is hard to judge, but it is clearly a lot larger than
the vote of the Libertarian Party would suggest. ….How
can the Democrats appeal to libertarian Republicans without alienating
their own base?…I think I have an answer. In 2004, Montana went for Bush
by a sizable margin. It also voted in medical marijuana, by an even
larger margin. Legalizing medical marijuana is a policy popular with
libertarians, acceptable to Democrats, and opposed by the current
administration.At the very least, prominent Democrats should
come out in favor of the federal government respecting state medical
marijuana laws, as it has so far refused to do. Better yet, let them
propose a federal medical marijuana law. That will send a signal to a
considerable number of voters that, at least on this issue, one of the
parties is finally on their side. It would be a beginning.
The Cuban Cigar Mystery
Why are Cuban cigars good? It’s not as if communist economies are known for producing quality goods so why the exception for Cuban cigars? I have a few hypotheses:
- Cuban cigars are not good. The contrary impression is due to rememberances of things past and the sex appeal of the forbidden fruit. (Testable hypothesis: Are Cuban cigars as highly prized in countries where they are not banned?)
- The Cuban "terroir," the soil, climate and environment are unique. (Maybe but Communists destroy good terroir – see Zimbabwe, the Ukraine etc. – all the time.)
- Castro puts a huge amount of resources and incentives into producing cigars because a) he likes to smoke and b) exporting cigars and doctors is good for the brand image. Cuban cigars are like Soviet chess.
- Castro has basically privatized the cigar industry allowing for significant market incentives.
Comments are open for those who know more about cigars and the Cuban cigar industry.
The Beauty Myth
The Soviets pioneered the technique but capitalists have perfected the art of the photoshop (takes a moment to load). Perhaps this explains this.
Solving Das XBox Problem
The usual explanation, a shortage generates hype, doesn’t make much sense. First, as Tim Harford also points out hype can be generated by high prices as well as by shortages. Very high end luxury items, for example, like Lamborghini’s are difficult to obtain but also very expensive. Second, it’s implausible that a shortage
now could generate such greater sales later as to be worthwhile this is especially true given that Christmas is the peak selling season. You want
hype before not during Christmas.