The Law of Unintended Consequences

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MANILA, April 11 — More than anywhere else in Asia, the soaring price of rice has become a good-vs.-evil drama in the Philippines, one of the world’s largest importers of rice.

Traders who fiddle with the price of the nation’s all-important staple now face life in prison. Police are raiding warehouses in search of hoarders. Soldiers and police have been mobilized to help sell government-subsidized rice to the poor.

Philippines Caught in Rice Squeeze, By Blaine Harden, Washington Post Foreign Service,Saturday, April 12, 2008

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Peace Corps in the late 1980s; in fact, this story was brought to my attention by the discussion list started last year by the organizers of our 20th anniversary reunion.

I keep thinking about how they used to dry the rice on the roads. I’d go for bike rides and have to go around these patches of grain laid out to dry. The farmers had an incredible sense of balance, too, walking over these slippery, mud-covered ridges that separates one rice field from another.

I hate to invoke the old adage of the right-wing economists, but it is ironic that these farmers are now suffering exactly because their crops are suddenly so valuable. Even more ironic, the scarcity of rice seems linked to the demand for ethanol in the west. Maybe the appropriate saying is some variation on ‘feed the fever, starve the cold.’

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Writing

Inside Oxford: Questions for Niko Pfund

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2. Do you hate Wikipedia?”

Not at all, I’m actually very fond of Wikipedia, which is not only useful to me on a daily basis but one of the most interesting exercises in information-gathering we’ve yet seen. While there are obvious and stark differences between the goals and utility of Wikipedia and traditional reference works—say, the Oxford English Dictionary—we are rapidly moving toward an online environment defined by “multiple levels of authority” (in the words of our online/reference publisher, Casper Grathwohl), in which people know to go to different sites for different kinds of information. As the population becomes increasingly technology-literate and information-literate, as search becomes increasingly sophisticated, and as Wikipedia’s growing influence brings additional challenges (with prominence come expectations…), the one-stop shopping model will likely fragment, as people will know where to go for the best and most appropriate information, or will be led there automatically.

Inside Oxford: Questions for Niko Pfund

Whenever we talk about citation formats (APA,MLA) I always tell my students that the conventions of print are relatively new and the the emerging conventions of the web, including collective authorship, undated material and the like, are much older. Pfund makes a similar point, contending that Wikipedia is simply returning to a type of authorship that created, among many other things, the Oxford English Dictionary. Imagine, the rabble wrote the OED!

Posted in: Language, Professional, Writing

Abolition

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Yes, we mean real slavery. People held against their will, forced to work and paid nothing. Sometimes the slave holder ‘pays’ a few grains of rice to keep the slaves alive, or uses a bogus payment that the slave holder reclaims at the end of the month. But the end result is what slavery is today and has always been—one person controlling another and then forcing them to work.

Through Free the Slaves’ research, first published in Kevin Bales’ Disposable People, our conservative estimate is that there are 27 million people in slavery today. This means that there are more people in slavery today than at any other time in human history. Slavery has existed for thousands of years, but changes in the world’s economy and societies over the past 50 years have enabled a resurgence of slavery.

FreeTheSlaves.net

I keep thinking and hearing about the world out there, hidden for the last eight years or so by this fog of rhetoric about terrorism, a tactic disguised as a movement. Here’s an awful problem that could be solved in just a few years, as easy as going to the moon, if only we paid attention.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Language, War