Tried to do a couple of interviews this morning, but I didn't have any
phone numbers, so I hadn't called anyone ahead of time, and no one was home.
People are pretty friendly out there, though. Folks were very helpful
in pointing me out to the correct house, etc...
Maybe I'll have better luck tomorrow.
Basically, I've been looking for ways in which exogenous shocks and
political structures have changed institutions in particular ways that
might impact outcomes in forestry.
In particular, I was hoping to find ways in which the Guatemalan civil
war--a shock pretty much exogenous to anything related to
decentralization (or forestry)--had impacted institutions at the local
level--perhaps by destroying civil society or social capital, or maybe
by displacing people in such a way that institutions that come out of
older, Mayan traditions have disappeared.
However, I haven't found anything.
Maybe this isn't such a surprising thing, though. I asked the locals
what the effects of the civil war were on Sta. Catarina, and they said
there were very few direct effects--they didn't believe any locals had
been killed in the conflict. This contrasts pretty strongly with some
parts of the highlands, which were cleared of their residents, and whole
villages were razed.
So maybe this municipality represents the baseline case, and unfortunate
cases of scorched earth military offenses in the highlands will
represent the critical cases for the elaboration of these ideas.
...we shall see...
Mark Mazower's take on Social Science, and Communist attempts to explain
away youth resistance to the regime through materialism.
Finally finished the book, and now I'm on to reading Jeff Frieden's
_Global Capitalism_, which is a little bit more engaging as far as I'm
concerned. Mazower started out well, but after a while, it got to be a
little tiring. I have to say, as well, that his stabs at social science
(like the one above) rubbed me the wrong way a bit. Don't imagine
Frieden will make too many stabs at Political Scientists or economists.
One of the important theories which my dissertation will wind up
addressing will be a theory of decentralization based on
"inter-jurisdictional competition." In normal English, that's "race to
the bottom" dynamics (where municipalities compete for investment by
cutting tax rates and services, leaving their residents worse off.
Sometimes, in American politics, this is called the "Delaware Effect,"
because Delaware supposedly has all those credit card companies and
banks in state because of their permissive tax structure and
regulations. A contrary story is told by some advocates of
decentralization which posit that, rather than a "race to the bottom,"
there is a "race to the top," in which municipalities compete for
investment by working to improve efficiency, and to make life more
comfortable for businesses and residents by providing services. This is
also sometimes called (by Americanists) "The California Effect," because
California has supposedly attempted to attract business by providing
better services.
I might note that I say "supposedly" here, because although I've read
some academic work that brings these characterizations into question
(does Delaware really attract investment because it actually provides
better services--like legal services--to credit companies?), I've never
seen these characterizations made in an especially rigorous or
systematic way. And I'm no Americanist, so I don't know anything about
Delaware or California (except that their capitals are Dover and
Sacramento--thanks to Mrs. Steinnagle, my 3d grade teacher)
One of the ideas that I've had while starting out this dissertation
research is that the idea of comparative advantage--that countries are
better off when they trade freely with others because they can
specialize in the things that they produce most efficiently (so the
Japanese make cars, and US firms make... mmm... movies? genetically
modified beef? spoiled children?)--might apply as effectively to local
communities as to countries.
I've been thinking a lot about this the last couple of days...
Actually, that's a lie. I've been thinking about comparative advantage
and its effects on government spending for at least a year as a result
of a paper I've been writing with the brilliant and well-dressed David
Brown.
But in any event, I've been thinking about comparative advantage at the
local level since getting down here to Guatemala. It seems like pretty
much common sense that towns will possess comparative advantages in
particular types of industries (Santa Catarina Barahona, the
municipality I'm doing now, will have a comparative advantage in
industries that use a lot of land--like agriculture, which uses up about
90% of their municipal area). In places like this, these
comparatively-advantaged industries will have a lot of political clout.
For example, since most of the families in Sta. Catarina are engaged in
agriculture (because agriculture there is relatively more efficient
than, say, the production of polyester leisure suits), farmers will have
a lot of political clout than leisure-suit tailors or weavers (they have
more money than other industries in town, and more votes).
As a result of this, government will have two compatible incentives to
spend more money on agriculture.
First, if the government wants to build up its tax base, they could work
to make agriculture more productive than it already is.
Second, if the government wants to please its citizens, they can provide
services that the dominant industry can use.
So, in brief, the theory goes like this...
1. Municipalities will have comparative advantages in industries that
use a lot of the factors of production which are most abundant (relative
to one another) in town.
2. Those comparatively-advanaged industries will be wealthier and more
powerful than other industries.
3. Those comparatively-advantaged industries will also be the
municipalities' best chances to improve their tax bases, by making those
industries more productively (and helping them generate more income that
the government can tax).
4. Therefore, governments will spend more money on services which will
help out the industries in their boundaries which enjoy a comparative
advantage.
5. Finally, Glenn's moustache is awesome.
In other news, I've had some thoughts on theories of decentralization
related to ninjas and democratic accountability.
One of the measures that Krister has used to measure citizen demands for
forestry services (and other kinds of services) is a question asking how
frequently citizens and community organizations make demands/express
their opinions regarding that particular type of service (forestry,
education, sewage, etc...)
There may, however, be a problem related to strategic interaction
between citizens and mayors, and also related to
reverse-causality/endogeneity.
1. The idea behind the question is that, where people ask for
particular services more frequently, government may be more likely to
provide them. When people ask for greater security, mayors will put
more police on the streets. There might be a problem, however--the
relationship might go in the other direction. Where conditions are
worse, because government isn't providing necessary services, people
will make more demands. Where mayors have put fewer police on the
streets, crime will be worse, and therefore, people will make more
frequent requests for greater security. I seemed to see results like
this in my initial analysis using 2001 data and DB's favorite analytical
program, DataDesk.
2. There might also be problems related to strategic interaction here.
Mayors might not need to hear a lot of demands from citizens to know
that there are (or there are going to be) certain kinds of problems in
the community. They may act to solve these problems before complaints
become widespread.
I'm not sure how deep these problems might be, or how to deal with
them--it's hard for me to come up with, off the top of my head, an
instrumental variable to instrument for "citizen demands for forestry
services," but maybe there are a few things I can try. Maybe % forest
cover will be a good instrument?
That is all. As you were.
http://audacityofhops.blogspot.com/2008/06/alaskan-settlement.html
Really, ship owners can't be held responsible for the actions of their
captains, right?
I agree with Señor Kelly's assessment--can the courts really expect that
corporations involved in shipping have no greater control over their
vessels than in the early 19th century? With satellite phones, LORAN,
GPS, shortwave radio, etc., it seems to be a truly bizarre argument.
However, for all of the rhetoric about Joe Hazelwood and his
whiskey-slinging bravado, the real travesty here is the kind of
incentive this produces (or fails to produce) for the owners of Exxon.
I have no historical institutionalism here, but maybe a little rational
choice institutionalism:
If the court system structures a set of incentives around the hazards of
shipping oil that externalizes the costs of accidents and disasters, oil
companies and others involved in the industry will face no incentive to
prevent such disasters. If, on the other hand, the courts force the oil
industry to pay for its accidents, they will create incentives for the
industry to prevent these accidents in the future.
An example--If I understand correctly, the oil industry has, since the
time of the Valdez disaster, instituted a policy of replacing its
single-hull tankers with newer, double-hulled designs. Basically, the
rocks (or reef, or sunken pirate ship or whatever) need to bust through
two hulls before the oil starts to leak, instead of just one (as was the
case in the bad old days).
But if the oil industry doesn't need to pay for these disasters, and
Alaskan fishermen, and Alaskan and US taxpayers bear the costs of oil
spills, why bother to build these types of ships (which are more
expensive)?
And let's face it--$500 mil. is peanuts at any time, let alone in these
times of high profits for oil.
A potentially interesting aside: I understand that the Alaskan
heli-skiing industry was a direct result of the oil spill. Bored oil
spill cleanup workers needed something to do on weekends, and Exxon had
the helicopters...
But I should postscript this with a disclaimer--I am no expert on (a)
the oil industry, (b) the legal field, or (c) backcountry skiing in any
form (though I do have four pairs of skis hanging in my storage shed).
1. Since arriving in Guate., I've often been enjoying a rapturous
moment amongst the interesting culture and colonial (or concrete block)
architecture, when my mind has been brought back to reality by the
various and sundry security systems arrayed about the walls of the
Spanish-style courtyarded homes here. There are four basic styles of
"security." First, concertina wire or barbed wire run about the
perimeter of the structure, especially along the street. Second, broken
glass bottles set into cement at the top of the walls surrounding the
home. Third, electric fencing (probably the most effective, but far
less intimidating-appearing than the alternatives). Finally, a huge,
angry, mangey dog standing on the roof, barking at passers-by. The
broken bottles are my favorite (the dogs my least favorite--I've been
scared out of my wits on a number of occasions by dogs who were smarter
than I am, who hid in wait for me until I was directly below, then they
suddenly barked, causing me to jump, fall, or shout in Spanish, "¡Ai!
¡Por Dios!"
2. Blond girls in huge sunglasses look even sillier here than in the
states.
3. I've recently been re-reading Mark Mazower's _Dark Continent_, a
history of Europe that Jennifer Fitzgerald assigned in her class on
Western European Politics. Mazower's take on history is to remind us
that Democratic Liberalism, for much of the 20th century, was not the
pre-eminent ideology in what we now assume is a democratic and
capitalist Europe. Mazower notes, briefly, an interesting theme that
touches upon Zane's dissertation topic. Basically, he suggests that
peace needed to be financed--literally, financing needed to be found to
rebuild Europe after both the First and Second World Wars to ensure
long-term, sustainable peace. The absence of such financing, Mazower
claims, was one of the reasons why the First World War led to the
Second. An interesting twist, I think, on Zane's focus on financing
war. Does access to finance make both war and peace more likely?
It is a beautiful place, though unfortunately, about as far from typical
as you can get without actually leaving the country. Although there are
probably ritzy neighborhoods in Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango which
are worse, though probably not by much.
When I was in Quetzaltenango last summer, I was really struck by how
many tourists there were in town, even though people told me that Xela
(as a the locals call it) was a fairly non-touristy place to study. I
saw what they meant, however, when I got to Antigua. While there were a
lot of pasty faces in Xela, those people were younger, and pretty
comfortable traveling--people that were interested more in the local
culture than the fine food and drink they might consume while abroad.
In Antigua, however, the tourist class was very different. People
walked around town as if they were outfitted for an expedition--wearing
their Gore-Tex floppy hats, wearing camera vests (looking like a bunch
of lost fly-fishermen), zip-off travel pants, and more supplex nylon
than I knew had ever been woven.
The age demographic was also older--people in their 40s (at least) with
relatively few young people (though, of course, young people come
through here as well.)
Last time, I spent too many days in Antigua. Hopefully, I'll have a
more positive experience here this time. I should say, however, that
aside from a little shack beside the road where a Guatemalan gentleman
sold coffee and espresso as he roasted his own coffee beans in a tiny,
wood-fired roaster (with coffee bushes growing out back and all around),
the best cup of coffee I've gotten in Guatemala was here in Antigua.
They know how to make it for us Gringoes.
Although the best coffee I've had is still from Bolivia. I don't know
how they make it so strong, and still can have it so smooth.
I'm still getting used to the humidity here. It's hard for my skin to
adjust to a place with so much drizzle when I've been living in the rain
shadow of the rockies for so long. But if that's the worst that happens
to me all day, I'll be doing all right.
Once in Antigua, after finding a place to sleep and a place to eat, I've
spent some time dealing with my case studies. I have to wait to be
certain about exactly where I'm going to go--I'm going to talk to some
academic connections in Guatemala City on Wed., after which I'll
probably have a pretty good idea of what's next. But for the time
being, I think I'll head up to San Miguel Dueñas, a village above
Antigua, to get started. It looks like a pretty typical case, based on
some scatterplots and partial regression plots, and it's close. I may
go tomorrow or Sunday, though I expect I'll have better luck on Monday
when people are working.
And there is a mariachi band playing in the courtyard for La Dueña's
birthday. Good horn players, too.
Incidentally, I've been staying at this guesthouse called "Dos Lunas,"
which has been very comfortable. It's run by a friendly Dutch guy and
his Guatemalan wife, and runs about $30/night for a room with a shared
bathroom (less for a single). Not the cheapest place down here, but not
camping accommodations, either. And much more pleasant than either of
the worn-feeling places I stayed at in downtown Guatemala City last year.
Dos Lunas is about five minutes from the airport. Unfortunately, the
Airport is a long way off from anything else, and there's nothing
interesting in the immediate environs, although a National Police
barracks is right next door (I awoke this morning to the sound of some
gentleman shouting numbers through a megaphone), and you can see the
volcano Pacaya as you walk by the Police camp's fútbol field.
The good news for today:
1. I had no trouble getting a refill for my Guatemalan cell phone (from
Telefonica, the Spanish company--I get a kick out of the fact that my
sister has the same service in Europe).
2. I also was able to get the video chat working on my computer to talk
to Emily (my wife). Really nice. And free. Hopefully, I didn't gum up
the internet here too badly in the process.
The bad news:
1. I'm really struggling with a great deal of missing data in my
Guatemalan forestry survey dataset. I'll be meeting with some academic
colleagues of Krister (my advisor) on Wed., so hopefully, I'll be able
to get some of those problems squared away. It's difficult to get
statistically significant results when missing data brings you down to
30 or 35 observations.
2. I think the place which makes the most sense for me to go next is
Antigua--the Disneyland of Guatemala. It's a comfortable place to stay,
but authentic, it's not. It is, however, a very short distance from at
least three of the cases in the Guatemalan survey data which would be
good case studies, and given that I have to be back in Guatemala city
for the beginning of next week, it might be the most logical.
3. I busted a pair of headphones somehow yesterday on the plane. I'll
have to be on the lookout for a new pair.
A few thoughts and observations:
1. Latin Americans really love the shiny buildings. If there's one
thing that says classy down here, it's polished tile.
2. The D.F. airport is the most confusing airport I have ever been in.
Compared to D.F., O'Hare is like the Maine Interstate System--simple and
well marked.
3. My dry Colorado skin wasn't ready for this rainy tropical weather
business.
Captain Joshua Slocum, in /Sailing Alone Around the World/, notes a
problem that we also address in the social sciences--dealing with
uncertainty. False precision and false accuracy may not sink any ships
in the Social Sciences, but one has only to look to the "shock
treatment" approach of Sachs and others (now renounced by Sachs) to see
that, when Economists and other Social Scientists are too sure of their
models, bad things can happen--bad things that can lead to a great deal
of suffering. That is, of course, when governments decide to listen to us!
In quantitative research, there are some fairly well developed protocols
for addressing issues of uncertainty (one example is the practice of
reporting confidence intervals and p-values). There are some
potentially very dangerous problems, however, in statistics when
analysts can produce a large number of regression results at very low
cost. We can simply choose the results we like, when probability favors
a particular model. It is easy, in many cases, to run 100 regression
models and report the one for which the results fit our theory. We
conveniently ignore, however the other 99 models, which would make our
95% confidence intervals look a bit questionable!
Of course, as many quantitative researchers have pointed out, these
issues are also a problem in qualitative research, where protocols for
reporting uncertainty have not developed in the same way as in
quantitative analysis. While respected scholars such as King, Keohane,
and Verba suggest estimating uncertainty in qualitative research, it is
unclear to me how I can accurately depict uncertainty without providing
a great deal of information about the process of doing research and how
I drew a particular set of conclusions.
This problem may explain the reason that I seem to observe a correlation
between the variable "historical institutionalism" (a dummy variable
coded 1 for Steinmo, Thelen, etc...) and the variable "length of
published manuscript."
The New York Times is reporting that the Senate has killed a legislative
attempt to institute a greenhouse gas cap and trade system, after the
bill was lauded as the best thing since sliced bread.
Interestingly, the Congressional Budget Office, among other sources,
agree with conservative economist Greg Mankiw that a carbon tax is
probably a better way to reduce U.S. (and global) greenhouse output--you
just tax the coal and oil producers at a set rate per ton of CO2
emitted, doing away with costly annual swings in the cost of emissions,
and doing away with the need to create an expensive bureaucracy to
monitor emissions.
I think the real problem is the term "tax."
Nobody wants to be associated with a new "tax." Instead, we'll
implement a "cap and trade" system, which includes the word "trade," so
it must be less costly, while a carbon tax--well, that smacks of pinko
communism! New taxes are un-American!
And so it goes...
But more immediately, both Repubs. and Dems. are probably concerned
about doing anything that might be seen as likely to increase the cost
of gas. That could be bad for their election year chances. Most
legislators believe that we'd be better of if we just cooperated, but if
you vote for it, your opponent in November will be able to accuse you of
increasing the cost of gas at the pump, hurting widows, orphans,
students, and hard-working blue-collar Americans.
So they vote against the "cap and trade" system, too.
By way of trying to be optimistic, maybe it'll be better in the
end--maybe we'll get a carbon tax (my first preference) in the spring,
instead of a cap and trade system (my second preference). But for now,
it looks like we're stuck with the status quo (last preference).
To begin, I will be heading to Guatemala on the 18th of June (less than
two weeks now--wow!) for about two months. What will I be doing
there? My dissertation will deal with the effects of forestry
decentralization, the dynamics driving forestry-related outcomes, and
factors (especially institutional factors) which produce desirable vs.
undesirable outcomes in forest governance.
In English: For years, policy makers in aid organizations have been
pushing governments in the third world to decentralize--to grant more
political power to local governments. The outcomes of these reforms
have sometimes been great, sometimes terrible, and often, pretty
mediocre. I'm setting out to better understand why decentralization
sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
And as a part of the process of studying decentralization, and trying to
figure out how the policy community can make it work better, I'll be
going to several municipalities in Guatemala, Peru, and Bolivia to
figure out what's going on there, and I'll be talking to a lot of people
in those places, in the hopes of adding to the statistical analysis I'll
be conducting with survey data that's already been collected.
I will also be drinking lots of coffee (little known fact: coffee from
the Yungas region of Bolivia is the best coffee in human history),
eating lots of eggs (Guatemalan folks buy them by the case) and trying
to avoid other gringos--especially the ones wearing travel pants and
photography vests.
