A Good Afternoon

You know when you have those days when you just are really thankful that
everything's going the way it is?

After class today (during which we had almost no grammar instruction but
spent the whole morning talking about the social structure of the
quechua-speaking world), I headed down to the supermarket near the
house, to get some groceries and break a S./100 note. It was just a
beautiful afternoon. Blue sky, fluffy white clouds.

I walked through the Plaza Tupac Amaru--commemorating a failed
revolution in 1780--walked past indigenous women in their hats and
braids eating lunch on the grass, walked past the Kaiser jeep pickup at
the Policia Nacional building, walked past little kids with their
parents running around the glowering Tupac Amaru, walked past two middle
class women praying at a Catholic altar in the parking lot of a gas
station (Christ being whipped by a guy with a mean moustache,
incidentally--handlebar moustaches are, along with Stetson hats with
capes, the universal symbol of villainy)

I don't know. Nothing too special, but it just really struck me at that
moment how fortunate I am. I really like it here. Like Peru, like the
people, like the locally manufactured soft drinks.

I also saw, for the first time today, a shelf full of Coca beer. I have
no idea how that works, but it was there in living color.

I have nothing but respect for cocaleros' attempts to build a better,
legal life by marketing their product as a healthy alternative to...
well... pretty much everything. And I get a kick out of Hugo Chavez's
going on about Coca when he clearly has no idea what he's talking
about. (Wouldn't you like to say to unc'l Hugo's face, "Dude. You
don't chew coca paste. That's for cocaine")

But I have to say, most of the coca products I've have the pleasure to
trying have basically been like... like what you would expect a product
made out of ground up leaves to be like. Grainy, dry, and with
basically no taste. Like eating green dirt.

For those of you who haven't been down here, you can buy coca toffee,
coca flour, coca tea, and a lot of other coca crap.

Coca tea is fantastic. I drink it every day.

The rest of the stuff is crap. For a bag of 15 or 20 pieces of coca
toffee, I could support 30 candy-selling street children for a year, and
be much happier off. Knock-off Peruvian jolly ranchers are far superior
to their narcotic-containing brethren.

Jelly beans aren't as good here as in Guate., though.

And in case you don't know, there is no mind-altering aspect to these
coca products. Coca, when chewed by the indigenous folks, does have a
mild stimulative effect. To be honest, I'd like to try it. Sounds like
a strong cup of coffee, only without the jitters. Might help me get
through Avner Greif faster.

All the locals claim that coca tea is great for altitude sickness, but
they're full of it. Unless you typically take your tea with a teaspoon
of sugar and another teaspoon of ash.

Though I do wish they still made Coca Cola with real coca. Probably
better for you, too.

To get the narcotic effect, you have to consume (usually chew) coca with
a catalyst, which is usually the burnt ash of the Quinoa plant. You can
buy that stuff in the market, in theory, but I've never gone looking for
it. I should check it out some day. If only to know what it looks
like. Though I suspect Mike T. can tell me.

For the record, by the way, I'm also not a big fan of Quinoa. Except
for the puffed Quinoa cereal I eat every day. That stuff is awesome.
I'm bringing 150 lbs. back with me when I come home for Xmas.

Sometimes they're got the culinary thing down...

First of, I don't understand why you can't yogurt for drinking in the
states. The stuff is excellent. (Bill S. Preston, Esq.)

And popped Quinoa cereal. By god, if they've got anything due for
export to the United States, it's that stuff! Just like rice crispies,
but bigger puffs and more nutritious.

On an only tangentially related note, I wanted to mention that I saw a
whole truck (not a pickup, but a truck with a 15 or 20 foot bed and 6'
stake sides) entirely filled with cattle heads and hooves. It was
awesome. I've seen cow heads in the streets and in the markets before,
but never in such quantity! Just like seeing a truck full of green
bananas, except better, at least for the adolescent boys among us that
look like 31 year-olds.

There was also blood dripping out of the truck onto the ground in
pools. It ruled.

Then I came home and had this really good sausage and noodle dish.
Mmm. Salty.

Markets for Education

For fairly obvious reasons, I'm interested in education. Working as a
middle school teacher tends to do that to you. And I'm interested in
the ways that education in the United States can work better. In
general (partly, at least, because of my own personal experiences), my
preferences run towards market incentives and away from government
regulation. In general, I would have to say that (central) government
regulation in education (read: No Child Left Behind) doesn't work very
well.

There needs to be accountability in education. Unfortunately,
standardized testing promotes the wrong kind of accountability. And
frankly, it's kind of bizarre that the party of small government has
implemented an old-fashioned approach to regulating education of a kind
that I would expect from New Deal Democrats.

On the other hand, calling the administration of G.W. Bush a "small
government" administration is clearly stretching the truth beyond any
plausibly recognizable form. Mmm.

But that's a tangent.

According to UNESCO (I should cite this, but I'm being lazy), the
Peruvian educational system is almost singularly inefficient in terms of
the kinds of student achievement it gets out of its kids, relative to
the amount of money it puts into the system. Lots of money in, almost
nothing out.

Not surprising on the ground. Peruvian teachers don't show up to work,
and when they do they're faced with terrible working conditions.

But you might expect that the private education system would (1) be
better, and (2) force the public institutions to compete, leading public
schools to perform better.

At least this is what the radical proponents of privatized education expect.

I'm not opposed to the introduction of some market incentives into the
school systems. I'm a big fan of merit pay and charter schools. But I
also think that the Peruvian case demonstrates that market forces
themselves cannot lead to the kinds of outcomes we want.

Why not? I'm not sure, but I've got a couple of ideas.
1. Geographic barriers to educational markets. In some places (like
rural Peru and islands in Maine) there simply isn't a big enough market
for private education.
2. Poverty. In some places (like Peru and Mississippi) people can't
afford a high-quality private education. This may be "efficient" in the
economic sense, but we probably aren't generally in favor of this kind
of efficiency. In general, we would probably feel a lot better about
ourselves if we provided rural Peruvians with (for example) a
sixth-grade education, and if we provided rural Mississippians with (for
example) a high quality high school education and subsidized student
loans, so they have an opportunity to be upwardly-mobile.
3. Collusion. Here, I'm talking about unions that are politically
powerful enough to resist market forces (and democratic pressures, among
other things). This might be a story about clientelist history, or it
might not.

I would like to test these ideas, but I'm not sure how I would get
around the endogeneity issue. There is a strong argument to be made for
the opposite relationship and the opposite direction of causality.
Countries with crappy public education systems will have lots of private
education (because who wants to send their kids to the terrible public
schools).

Cool Internet Stuff!

So, my Quechua instructor lives in Calca, a (somewhat) rural town about
an hour from Cusco, a little bit out of town, where he can't get
internet (or mail, for that matter). So we've made some arrangements
together to do this cellular internet thing, which appears to be
working. Fabulous. The deal is that you get this nifty little USB
modem, plug it into your computer, and connect to the internet through
the cellular network.

The setup is a pain in the ass, because the software that comes with the
modem is terrible, but a little bit of internet searching (thank
goodness I also have wireless internet in the house at the moment) and
it works just fine.

Makes my day.

Now, to get some work done...

Peruvian Haircuts....

Are even cheaper than their Guatemalan counterparts (that's a strange
way of saying that, ey?

I paid about US $1.60 for a pretty good haircut today. Rock, rock on?

Quechua Animism

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog posting on the subjectivity of
economic rationality--the fact that these Quechua-speaking peasants do
things that are rational, but only when taken from the perspective of
their own philosophy and belief system (which has strong pre-Colombian
roots, and is fundamentally animist).

Aubrey commented that I might be not be casting my net wide enough, in a
way--that these kinds of belief system issues have been the root of many
conflicts in the past.

I agree with that--I didn't mean to downplay the relevance of these
kinds of belief systems to the things we see today. Fundamentally, we
all have our own belief systems which might or might not be correct--we
all probably do a lot of things that we think are rational, but in some
objective way, make no sense at all (or wouldn't make sense if we had
access to some sort of objective truth).

But maybe I'm getting a little esoteric.

In my Quechua lessons, we spend a lot of time talking about the
spirituality and philosophy of the Quechua-speaking peasants. Valerio
(my teacher) thinks it has a strong bearing on the kinds of things I'll
be looking for when I go out to the municipalities to do more
fieldwork. He might be right--I do think that sometimes these kinds of
"cultural" factors are often less important than we assume they will
be. But I did seem to find some evidence of the importance of some of
these things in my data analysis on the Guatemalan municipality data I
used this summer. Unfortunately, Krister doesn't have any questions in
the survey that touch upon issues like values, philosophy, and cultural
traditions, but ethnic background (Maya or Ladino/Mestizo) often was
statistically significant, as was level of education.

In any event, we've been talking about the way that the peasants will
often take part in a form of economic exchange with (who else) a Shaman
and an Apu (spirit/deity/ancestor).

As something of a questioning believer myself, I find all of this really
interesting on a personal level. I find the idea that my ancestors are
around looking out for me kind of comforting. Especially when I picture
my grandfather, handlebar moustache and all, keeping an eye out for me.

I also think it's pretty interesting the way that the shaman (is that
plural? Shamans? Paqokuna?) make contact with these deities. Sometimes
they talk to them--the more powerful or learned shaman can talk directly
with the Apu, but most of the time, they need to use some intermediate
tool--like reading the future in coca leaves tossed on a blanket, or (in
some places), the use of these terribly unglamorous hallucinogenic
plants that they have down in the jungle.

I wonder if there is some truth to all of this, but not in the way we
might think--it might not be that the well-trained Paqo can use those
coca leaves as something of an inkblot test to bring out his (her?) own
thoughts and instincts about the customer/client/lost soul/seeker of
truth.

Anyways, I probably won't be making offerings to Pachamama any time soon
(or offerings to Maximon, the Guatemalan evil saint, either), but it
does get me thinking. Is there a god? Are there parallel universes
close to our own? And is a 6'2" bald guy with a fantastic moustache up
there looking out for me?

I would make a terrible Catholic, and an even worse Evangelical
Protestant. And I would probably be worst of all as an Animist. I'd
probably be a pretty good Unitarian, though. And I might be able to
swing it as a Catholic of the Franciscan variety, too. Although I guess
the never getting married thing would do me in.

Might I just add...

...that it's bizarre how many hits for "prison labor," "prison," and
"prison torture" I get when I'm searching my hard drive for a .pdf file
with the phrase "prisoners' dilemma."

Chillin' like a statistician...

For the last couple days, I've been running some elementary statistical
tests (ANOVA analysis, two-sample t-tests) for this Paper that Krister
wants to write about a "race to the bottom" in decentralized forestry
regimes.

The race to the bottom argument says that, essentially, when capital
becomes more mobile (it's easier to move capital in whatever form
around) or when political authority is decentralized to sub-national
governments, local governments compete for investment and income by
lowering their regulations and taxation. The end result is that nobody
attracts any more investment, because everybody's taxes and regulations
go down, and everybody ends up worse off because regulations (like labor
and environmental regulations) decline, as do government services
(things like road maintainence law enforcement, and education) because
tax revenue declines along with declining tax assessment rates.

Aside from insane Laffer-curve nonsense, this makes a certain amount of
sense.

So, basically, what I'm doing is comparing forestry regulations, changes
in regulations, and local officials' knowledge of neighbors' forestry
regs through the use of several subjective survey questions.

In the end, I think the evidence pretty strongly supports the argument
that we want to make--there is no race to the bottom. The paper may
also present some weak evidence for a race-to-the-top dynamic (instead
of cutting regulations and taxes, municipalities compete for investment
by operating more efficiently and providing better services), but that's
a stretch for the data we're using.

Essentially, what we're doing is comparing the means of these questions
across the three countries--if a Race to the Bottom is taking place, you
would expect that regulations would be stricter in the least
decentralized country and less strict in the less decentralized
countries, municipal officials would have more knowledge of their
neighbors' forestry regulations in the most decentralized regimes, and
the stringency of regulations would have declined the most in the most
decentralized regimes. None of these things is the case, in several
different iterations of these tests.

In general, I think the paper is pretty strong. My concern is that the
relatively unsophisticated statistical techniques we're using won't be
taken seriously. What I wanted to do was use GIS software to generate a
spatial lag with which to test the idea. But Krister wants to get it
out quickly, and it's true that that sort of stuff will take a billion
years.

Maybe for the dissertation. It's a good excuse to spend months looking
at satellite pictures on Google Earth.

Congrats to Zane on his prospectus defense!

Aaron McGruder discovers...

...what I have always known:

http://www.gocomics.com/features/24/feature_items/393042