At the start of time when humans first clambered to speech the voice was an expressive but undeveloped tool. Throughout the years speech has remained a poignant and persuasive medium, and thankfully, we learnt some new words along the way. Speech has been and always will be both for the truth and the fantastical. The trick is when the two are blended. Historically this has taken the form of oral history – the verbal recollection of real events – embellished over time. In the battle of Thermopylae, the Persians threatened they would rain down so many arrows they would blot out the sun. Dienekes, a Spartan soldier, responded with suitable gusto, “then we shall fight in the shade.” The bravado survived its translation to Frank Miller’s ‘300’ where the audience can literally see Persian arrows blot out the sun.

Realistically. It didn’t happen like that. It’s true the threats might have been true, but there simply weren’t that many arrows. The combination of truth with fiction – the real battle with the imagined shade of violence – is what gives the story it’s real power. Herodotus knew this when he heard it and before it was set down in writing.

With the advent of printing, there was some level of standardization (if we can forget propaganda &c.) to the history that was passed along. Whatever story that was codified was theoretically vetted by some authority, agreed upon, and then set into print.

These standards have changed for the you-tube generation. Anyone can publish whatever they like, more or less whenever they like thanks to the iblog phenomenon (hypocritical as this may be) and the over-saturation of youtube videos. When the entries are informed or loosely fact checked as per Wikipedia, there is at least the hope that information is largely based on truth. But most often this is not the case. At their best, blogs and their equivalents provide genuine insight, at their mediocre they embarrass a margin of the public (re: ‘the star wars kid’ video series), and at their worst, they blend fact with fiction. The difference is that where this was once the understood standard ‘back in the day,’ the modern philosophy is ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ and usually the more slanderous the better. Most blogs are taken to be true until someone can come along and pronounce them false. The inherent problem of the system is that there are simply too many blogs to fact check every falsity on the Internet.

Aside from the general cultural dilemma this raises is the fact that this property can be used as a political tool. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth? Enough people said the same thing at the same time and devalued – or at least cast doubt – on Kerry’s wartime service. Imagine if some organization called themselves POWs for Truth and questioned McCain’s service? An unfortunately more humourous example is Palin’s foreign policy experience. If enough people – including Palin – simply repeat that she does have experience because Alaska is close to Russia then it will cast the same form of doubt. In the funniest-case scenario, it will turn from fact to fiction, or people will simply stop caring to prove it wrong.

Before blogs, printed statements had the implication of editorship or at least an indication of any predispositions/bias. Now, the Internet has removed the editorial hand such that blogs have become a modern form of oral history. The Internet is the vocal cord of this generation and it is able to do as much good or as much harm to the truth as it so chooses.

Recently, the journal Health Affairs published a three-article online series looking at the health plans of the two presidential candidates. The discussion makes one thing clear: reform along the lines that our politicians currently envision it is going to be messy. If the Clinton plan was assailed for its complexity, don’t expect things to be any cleaner this time around. Since no one is proposing a single-payer system that would replace the chaotic set of competing actors that provide our health care today, the existing reform plans are inelegant by nature.

The big question in health reform is what to do about our existing, unsustainable and inefficient employer-based system. Unfortunately, while McCain wisely recognizes the need to get rid of this system, his replacement is unpalatable and offers little of the equitable redistribution that a health system should provide to protect the poor and the sick. Obama, like most Democrats, wants to maintain the employer-based system, but hem it in with a variety of small fixes that will support those who do not get insurance from an employer. The plan scores much better on solidarity, but maintains most of the inefficiencies of the current system. Neither plan would fundamentally reshape America’s health care system to deal with medical inflation.

As two of the three articles point out, the notion that employers should be involved in paying for health insurance is at odds with standard economic theory, which would suggest that the cost of paying for fringe benefits for workers is ultimately born by the workers, not the company. If this is true, there is no sensible equity reason for maintaining an employer-based system: whatever benefits workers get from the system, they pay for in lower wages. Since the system also excludes many workers and creates a high degree of insecurity and instability, it cannot be said to be particularly beneficial to any worker who does not have a guaranteed job for life. In today’s economy, such jobs have disappeared. At the same time, there is no way to argue that an employer-based system is efficient. The system locks people into jobs that are not best fits because health insurance is a valuable asset that people do not want to lose. It therefore reduces healthy job turnover and makes it hard for companies to compete effectively. In addition, employers either contract for their insurance, or they self-insure. The result is massive fragmentation of the employer-sponsored market, which generates enormous and inefficient administrative overhead.

Why would anyone want to hold onto a system like this? The basic answer is political. Democrats rightly understand that, while the system is neither equitable nor efficient, it does offer certain important benefits. First, because it is hard to maintain equity in an individual insurance market (where everyone just buys insurance on their own), employer plans essentially create an enforced risk pool which can reduce overhead and increase equity. A sicker person buying his own insurance in the market might get stuck with a very high premium, but in an employment setting, he would be de facto subsidized by other, healthier workers. The reason is that employers offer insurance to their employee base as a whole, and insurers are willing to cover these groups in group policies because of the risk dilution. In the individual market, insurers always want to pick off the best risks. If they have to accept a high risk, they want to charge the full expected value of that risk. This is the problem with creating a system in which everyone purchases insurance in the individual market, as McCain’s plan would tend toward. Purchasing insurance in this market is expensive and does not provide mechanisms for helping riskier and sicker patients find access to affordable coverage, subsidized by healthier and wealthier people. (For some high risks, the McCain plan does offer subsidized risk pools, though the Health Affairs authors suggest that they are inadequately financed.)

From an equity perspective, we should all be in one big pool, with those of us who are healthy or have more money subsidizing those who are ill and/or poor. This is the logic of single-payer national health insurance systems. In the absence of a single payer system, employer-based health insurance may seem like the only viable way of creating larger risk pools which dilute risk and keep premiums lower for sicker people. At the same time, as was learned during the Clinton debacle, the biggest enemies of health reform are people with existing policies that they are happy with. If high wage employees with good coverage begin to worry that a systemic transformation is under way that will ultimately deprive them of their existing care and replace it with an unknown quantity, they will immediately reject the reform initiative. Protecting employer-based coverage is also good politics, then.

The alternative would be to figure out a way to create larger risk pools that are unrelated to employment status. To a certain extent, but only for the currently uninsured population, this appears to be the mission of the Health Insurance Exchange in the Obama plan. But while the Exchange will offer uninsured individuals help finding insurance and regulate their insurance options, it is unclear how it will solve the underlying risk pooling problem described here. First, without an individual mandate (which Obama opposes), many people will still not buy insurance unless the benefit package covered by the Exchange, and the resulting premium, is put at a low level. Doing so, however, will not address the problem of those who are sicker and need more coverage. These risks could be siphoned off through high risk pools or reinsurance, but this does not necessarily allow for the kind of pooling that diffuses costs across society, and it involves inefficient mechanisms for determining access to the high risk pool. The plan promises that the Exchange will offer a number of affordable policies, heavily regulated by the government, but it is worth asking why such an Exchange is needed at all. Given a demand for health insurance, shouldn’t these plans already exist? If they don’t, it is probably because they are not financially sustainable. It seems ill-considered to force private companies to engage in behavior that is not financially sustainable.

Essentially, the Exchange does not offer an enforceable mechanism for creating large risk pools that would purchase insurance together. When risks are split up between pools, it is hard to convince people of the need to pay more in solidarity with the poor and the sick. Adverse selection into this system could lead to the creation of a pool paid for by the government which is biased toward bad risks and with no way to control costs. Neither Obama nor McCain wants to fundamentally tackle the problem of escalating costs in the American health care system. The McCain plan will tend to remove employers from the equation; the Obama plan preserves the fractured employer-based system. Neither introduces effective new structures for organizing delivery or organizing risk pools in ways that are both equitable and efficient.

What the Obama Plan does do is lay the groundwork for a possible shift to a single payer plan with a single risk pool at some point in the future. When the National Health Plan operated by the Exchange (the public option to be offered alongside private plans) has incorporated a certain number of people, and when employer-based coverage has declined further in quality while increasing further in price, the NHP will have developed institutional capacity to take over the insurance market and institute serious reforms to the delivery system. With an individual mandate and a robust public insurance model, the Obama plan could eventually lead us away from the fragmented, employer-based system we have today. In the meantime, things are going to get worse before they get better.

At the height of the excitement of America’s oncoming elections the economy is falling apart and chaos is in our midst while the international community is anxiously waiting with a breath that is bated for the next leader to shake up our globalized world.

A BBC poll conducted recently illustrated that an overwhelming majority of citizens polled from countries all over the world preferred Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Naturally, the polls in America are far more balanced with the slightest events shifting the favor from Obama to McCain and back again. So why does the world seem to prefer Obama? Is it because he is a candidate they can relate to? Not exactly. While political analysts observe that for Americans being able to relate to a candidate is a significant factor in choosing a presidential candidate the world is far more preoccupied with how the next president will affect their own state of affairs.

McCain’s hard-line politics and serious devotion to national security with a “no-nonsense” attitude towards any and all potential threats are a few of the main proponents of his candidacy to voters, but may be the most alarming to foreigners. Obama on the other hand has mentioned his approach will more likely be one of diplomacy and he even stated that he may be willing to talk to leaders such as Ahmedinejad and Castro among others. While still concerned about security, he is less interested in making threats and more serious about making active efforts towards peace and diplomacy, which may come off as weak to many critics.

So does the world support Obama because they believe he will restore change and hope for all? Or is it simply that they fear Mccain? I suppose the age-old question for Americans to consider now is, is it better to be feared than to be loved?

The excellent website Watching America, which collects and translates news and opinion stories from media around the world, has been fascinating to watch amidst the turmoil of the US market freefall. It’s an instructive read, if only because you recognize how high the stakes are for everyone, not just the United States.

For example, here’s a Chinese newspaper, the Oriental Morning Post, watching China’s main economic rival collapse, seemingly before its eyes:

Bad news keeps coming from Wall Street. Again, the decline of U.S. hegemony became a hot topic of debate. Complaining or even cursing a world of hegemony brings excitement to us. However, faced with a decline of U.S. hegemony, the power vacuum could also be painful. We do not like hegemony, but have we ever thought about this problem when we mocked its decline? If the United States is no longer hegemonic, or its strength is declining, then who will be willing to pick up the load that the United States is not able or willing to carry?

It is from this sense that U.S. decline is dangerous. This is why many Western historians share a view that the end of U.S. hegemony is unlikely to nurture a multi-polar world system in an orderly fashion, but will lead to a world torn apart, because no other country is able to play a role of global leader. Ferguson, a British historian, even pessimistically addresses it as a “dark age.”

Meanwhile, in the Manila Times, an editorialist reflects on the repercussions of job losses upon his friends and family in the United States:

I have relatives and friends in every state of the USA, whose savings and small businesses are threatened with extinction—if the $700-billion bailout law is not passed at once.

Millions of Americans will lose their jobs, their children will not be able to go to college, etc.

The decline of the value of good stock in Wall Street by up to 60 percent must also be promptly stopped by restoring investor confidence in the market.

And in Dar al-Hayat, Mostafa Zein connects the market issues to broader discontent with American foreign policy:

The events in Pakistan have coincided with another consequence of the fall of the “Bush revolution,” one that threatens the global economy, with the US economy leading the way, with collapse. The White House has promoted free markets and confronted any state intervention; it forced many countries to privatize public institutions and lift subsidies on basic goods. The president went even further, when he planned to privatize the army, as we see from the example of the mercenaries used in the Iraq war. This administration was obliged to intervene to halt the economic downslide, violating all of the principles of its president, who has proposed pumping $700 billion of taxpayer money into the system. In other words, Bush has resorted to nationalization, even if not on the socialist model, to save what can be saved, abandoning all of his earlier proposals.

Many states have formed and then fallen apart on the rubble of the Soviet Union. Communist and leftist parties have become “orphans,” and some of their leaders have even embraced the Bush revolution. He has raised the neo-liberal banner and justified his wars and the crimes of his administration, from Pakistan to Iraq.

This extra-special scrutiny of America by rest of the world needn’t have policy implications for US legislators and critics: after all, we’ve got our own economy to worry about. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind that, at least as the economy is concerned, we truly are a global village.

Other than the fact that it wasn’t a deliberate policy, recent developments in the financial markets would seem to epitomize the phrase “shock and awe”: millions of ordinary people, and hundreds of pundits, mouths gaping, eyes wide, paralyzed by fear and doubt, unable to say much of anything coherent. One thing is clear: while old paradigms are under attack, old language, and by implication, old ideas, have remained surprisingly durable. We have heard the usual terms paraded out to describe events: socialization, regulation/deregulation, free-markets, big government, and of course, that old standby, “crisis.” These terms have become increasingly dated, yet they are still trotted out by pundits and politicians and, yes, ordinary citizens to describe a series of fictions that we have conjured up to cloud reality.

Apropos of this impoverished language, the repartee between Obama and McCain over what the latter meant when he said our economic “fundamentals” were sound would be amusing if it wasn’t so pathetic. No one besides Sarah Palin honestly believed McCain when he tried to explain that what he meant by “fundamentals” was the “American worker.” But on the other hand, did anyone actually know what he meant? Does anyone know what an economic “fundamental” really is? Few of us do, but like the other terms mentioned, it has been used brazenly by politicians and common folk alike, contributing to a general decline in our analytic capacity.

Whatever else this evolving situation may be, it is an opportunity for our leaders to trash the old idiom we use to talk about “free markets” and “big government,” and work a little harder to describe the real world. What do I mean? Let’s start with the concept of a free market.

Has anyone ever actually seen a free market? The answer is almost certainly no. Complex societies do not have free markets. All markets are regulated by agencies that protect traders and consumers, setting reasonable rules for exchange. Moreover, many economists today believe that these governing institutions (things like a legal system to protect property rights when people try to cheat one another) are at least as important as the market itself for maintaining economic growth. The degree to which government agencies function well actually explains the bulk of the difference between countries that grow quickly and countries that do not. It may be that the degree to which these institutions function also affects the likelihood of the developments we have been witnessing in the past few weeks as well.

It could be argued that the term “free market” is just relative, and that freer markets are better than less free markets, and so the language is approximate but appropriate. That would be fine, except that if it is true that government bodies are essential to market functioning, than the language is not appropriate, because truly “free” markets are likely to fail. It follows that freer markets are not always better than less free markets.

The term “free market” should be replaced with the use of the term “incentives” to describe public policies. Underlying the use of the term “free market” is the idea that the market embodies a particular set of incentives. Incentives may be set by the market, through price signals, but they may also be set by regulatory agencies. All existing markets use a combination of types of incentives, some of which are set by prices and others by regulators. The key question is how to set incentives properly. Government regulators may use price signals to set incentives, and the price signals that are allegedly “free market” are always affected by the actions of regulators at least indirectly through, for example, their control of the money supply.

By asking whether incentives are aligned to produce desirable results, we can focus on the outcomes we wish to produce, rather than the false dichotomy of means between markets and governments. To take one example: even in a market system, different rules can reward executives for long term as opposed to short term maximization of shareholder value. If we focus on incentives, we can debate which of these is more sensible. If we stick to the dichotomy between free markets and big government, we will never have this debate.

Once the concept of a free market is discarded, other terms automatically become meaningless. Deregulation and regulation have the same silly pedigree, positing a world in which it is possible for markets to exist without regulation. Since no such world exists, the terms do not help us understand anything. What we do want to know, again, is how incentives are likely to affect economic (and political) actors. Socialization is a flimsy concept, too: is socialization the opposite of a “free market”? It is unclear why the events of the last few weeks should be thought of as socialization. Indeed, the use of this term significantly muddies the waters, since all government intervention is being referred to as “socialization.”

Socialization used to mean government taking control of the means of production. But as Paul Krugman pointed out in his column yesterday (”Cash for Trash”), the new Treasury plan has the government taking over only bad debts, not actual control of companies (that has happened only with Freddie and Fannie, which were already state-owned). Indeed, Krugman’s column indirectly underlines the very real necessity for a change in language: if we use terms like socialization to describe the taking over of bad debt, we allow a particular ideology of limited government intervention to define the terms of debate. The Bush administration may or may not have good reasons for failing to truly take over these companies, but by falsely tagging a bad debt buyout as “socialization,” we don’t even get to debate this point.

The most unfortunate aspect of how we talk about the economy is that the dichotomies we use between free market and big government falsely assume that there is only one kind of capitalism, one kind of market, and one kind of government. But this is absurd. We already know that governments can be bad or good; ours is relatively good, Zimbabwe’s has been awful. History has shown that “markets” can be bad as well: when Mexico and Russia privatized state assets without creating appropriate regulations, new private monopolies and oligopolies quickly formed. The problem prior to privatization was not the absence of private or free markets, but the absence of incentives for competition. When the market was “freed,” the incentives were still all wrong. If Mexico’s liberalization is described as a transition from “socialization” to “free markets,” nothing much is properly understood about what happened there.

Finally: the use of the word crisis. Alas, the word crisis is being used now, as so often, to posit something general, when in fact there are specific people that will be hurt. Of course, it is hard to say exactly what the incidence of the financial chaos or the government intervention will be. We don’t know, and we will never know, the counter-factual: what would happen if the government let institutions fail? I do not doubt the claim that a crisis in the financial sector could have spillover effects that would be costly for all of us. On the other hand, by this measure, we have a lot of crises: we have an environmental crisis, and a health insurance crisis, and a poverty crisis. What makes the financial crisis special? We won’t be told, because the use of the word “crisis” obviates the question. If it is a crisis, it needs to be solved immediately. The health care crisis isn’t a crisis, because, according to the people who control the money, it can be allowed to fester without getting any worse, however bad it may be.

Americans have a right to ask why this crisis is different. They also have a right to demand estimates of costs, and to ask, when it is over, if the costs of paying for it can be born primarily by the people who caused it. The fact that it is termed a “crisis” should not be a fig leaf to cover up the extensive granting of not only power, but impunity, to a small group of financial actors.

Once we have gotten over some of our shock, we should take seriously the need to recalibrate our language so it describes the world a little more accurately. That truly would make us all better off.

On September 22nd, former Foreign Minister Taro Aso was elected president of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), filling a void left by Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s hasty resignation earlier this month. As the LDP, together with its coalition partner New Komeito, maintains a majority in the more powerful Lower House of the Japanese parliament, the vote is widely assumed to have crowned Aso as Japan’s next PM. In fact, it is expected.

Save for a brief bump from 1993 to 1994, LDP internal elections have chosen the Japanese head-of-state for the better part of five decades. As such, a politician’s pedigree and LDP connections are often most determinant of his (so far no “her” PMs) potential to become prime minister.

Aso, of course, is no exception. His grandfather was Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, famous for the “Yoshida Doctrine” of promoting Japanese economic might first and geopolitical influence second. His father was a close associate of Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, and his father-in-law Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki. His younger sister is married into the Japanese royal family.

Because they are not directly elected, Japan’s premiers rarely last more than two years. The Japanese citizen often feels little attachment to their prime minister, and is quick to blame him for wider government scandals and inefficiency. As such, PMs are convenient scapegoats for the Liberal Democrats; when one fades in popularity they are quickly swapped out for another.

Of course, the LDP’s ability to cherry-pick prime ministers is directly dependent on its hold on the Lower House. The Liberal Democrats are only as good as their brand.

That brand has suffered serious damage in recent years. Following the pop of the Japanese “bubble” economy in 1990, the LDP’s previously pristine economic record burst spectacularly into flames. Ever since, the party has been hanging on by a thread, wrangling coalitions with lesser parties to maintain control.

Things improved somewhat during from 2001 to 2006, during which the energetic and dogmatic Junichiro Koizumi held office. Jun-chan, as he was often affectionately referred, was known for his lion-esque mane, love of Elvis, and dogged passion for cutting the government budget.

While Koizumi’s aggressive governance delighted some Japanese, his heavy-handedness caused equal controversy. He took power with an approval rating of 85%, finishing, after a number of LDP scandals and economic downturns, just above 50%.

After Koizumi the LDP lost its moxie. It’s charisma-counter reset to zero, leaving the party with scandal but no schmooze. His successor, Shinzo Abe, was best known for his vague promise of a “Beautiful Japan” and using too many foreign words in his speeches. He resigned in a year after the suicide of one of his cabinet members and losing 50,000 pension records. Fukuda, little more charming than the average salaryman, was done in by covering up pesticide-laden dumpling imports from China, a contaminated rice scandal, continued economic troubles, and failing to make peace with the opposition.

Aso’s appointment as Party President is very telling of the LDP’s want for a new Koizumi. Known for a fiery speech in Tokyo’s nerdy Akihabara district, in which he proudly praised manga’s contribution to Japan’s image abroad, Aso possesses some of the Koizumi spark. A self-proclaimed “hawk” who is wont to speak his mind regardless of consequences, he just may be the man the LDP is looking for.

Yet, I wonder how long the Liberal Democrats can survive Koizumi-to-Koizumi. In recent years the opposition Democratic Party of Japan has effectively used LDP blunders as stepping-stones, and is rapidly gaining in the polls. Unless the Liberal Democrats can effectively fix the Japanese economy and clean-up party corruption, they may reach a point in which cosmetic solutions just won’t be enough.

Don’t count on a new era of Japanese politics just yet, though. If there’s one thing the LDP is good at, it’s holding on.

It seems too good to be true.

Free credit—free in the sense that it requires no guarantee, no material collateral, no oppressive mountain of documentation to sign. Free credit, geared toward the poorest of the poor.

In Argentina, the first replica of the Nobel Prize-winning Grameen Bank was launched in 2000. Since then, Grameen Argentina has expanded to more than thirty locations throughout the country. Those who participate in the program—nearly all female—seem to share an overwhelmingly positive experience, with abundant anecdotes of economic improvement and personal accomplishment. Grameen has, without question, given many thousands of women across Argentina the opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty.

But if there is so much to gain—and seemingly nothing to lose—then why aren’t more poor Argentines participating in Grameen?

After interviewing dozens of Grameen borrowers and their non-Grameen neighbors, I encountered one predominant obstacle to the proliferation of microcredit in Argentina: distrust. In a country where inflation rates are as absurdly high as they are unpredictable, where citizens would rather store cash under their mattresses than in a bank, where the word gobierno is met with indignation, scorn, and disgust, it was unsurprising to see that people placed little faith in lending institutions.

Women who inquire into the possibility of borrowing from Grameen face tremendous opposition—even ridicule—from their friends and neighbors. Well-meaning community members strongly caution against the waste of time and and money in yet another money-lending “scheme.” Those who venture into microcapital eventually contend not only with the stringent requirements imposed by Grameen but with an unyielding pressure to justify their choice to their community. Only successful stories of Grameen-funded small businesses occasionally convert naysayers—but even prosperity through microcredit is often dismissed as an unrelated stroke of good fortune.

Besides raising awareness, building trust appears to be the single most important task for microcredit institutions in Argentina. And trust is difficult to secure in a country disillusioned by false promises and bombastic but fruitless speeches from pompous bureaucrats. The motivation to avoid risk-taking behavior is tremendous, even among those who have very little to lose. Even when offered the opportunity to escape from poverty, the poor Argentine is so intensely averse to risk that she will often act against her own self-interest and forgo a meaningful economic benefit.

The Grameen methodology, which relies intensely on group solidarity, has been able to counter some of the apprehension by appealing to a basic, natural trust in one’s neighbor rather than demanding faith in government institutions. Any connection to the federal government has the potential to be damning, and microcredit organizations are wise to avoid political ties. While disheartening, the need for such a separation is blatant, and the success of microcredit programs in Argentina seems to depend on it.

Mexican daily El Universal reports several indicators of the endless spread of violence in Mexico today. First, private companies are now spending more than ever on private security. The number of business people using bodyguards has increased by 30 percent this year over last, and the year is not over. The old bodyguards are not good enough either: firms are hiring foreign consultants with special military training to create more sophisticated cadres. There is even a public-private initiative to help train an elite state force in the wealthy northern state of Monterrey that will be managed by the government, but with Israeli training paid for by local businesses.

This is the high-profile violence in Mexico that we are now becoming accustomed to. But the paper reports another worrying statistic that is indicative of more general, low-profile violence. According to the Mexican Secretary of Health, 59 percent of adolescents (10-19 years old) have been violently attacked in the past year, 7 percent of those by someone with a gun. No breakdown of the causes of this violence was reported, but the statistic is alarming.

Violence in Mexico is reaching epidemic proportions: the private violence of domestic abuse, the ordinary violence of adolescent fistfights, and the blockbuster violence of narco-traffickers and organized kidnapping gangs. Increasingly, one can speak of a culture of violence, too. More and more people talk of and experience base fear. Wealthy people are learning to live simpler lives, hiding their consumption. Some are even being “trained” to do so. And while it is too early to say, there are reasons to worry that as people become habituated to violence around them, they begin to resort to violence themselves. There is some social science evidence to support the view that growing up in violence leads people to become more aggressive themselves.

Mexicans have experienced enough violence in the last century to warrant a reprieve. Democracy was supposed to bring that. It has not been very successful. It will be a shame if the spiraling violence of contemporary Mexico breeds a new generation of Mexicans quick to resort to violence.

A new report from the Mexican Congress estimates that 1.3 million Mexicans left for the United States in the last two years. That is more than 1 percent of the Mexican population. Mexico is not the only place that sends migrants to the United States, however. While we hear a lot about the border between Mexico and the U.S., we hear less about Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. This border is the site of a constant flow of immigration from Central America to Mexico, much of which continues north to the United States. And the flow of these immigrants is increasing, because the drug lords control several of the access points now.

While we have been busy building walls and increasing local enforcement of our immigration statutes by raiding meatpacking plants, we have not done anything about the push factors which drive people to migrate in the first place. And because these push factors are pushing harder, we can expect that increasing enforcement, even if it works (of which there is little evidence), is just plugging one of a thousand holes in our immigration policy.

What are these push factors? There are many. The drug wars have increased violence in Mexico in recent years, which is driving everyone from the poor to the better off to start looking for exit options. The cartels are also becoming even more involved in human trafficking, and, as a recent article in Mexican daily El Universal reports, they have taken over the networks connecting Tabasco and Guatemala. This has led to both more violence, and less enforcement on Mexico’s southern border. Agricultural crisis and a shortage of usable land in the Mexican south have, for more than a decade now, been pushing young people north. Immigrants from Mexico largely used to come from the middle of the country. Today, they increasingly come from further south. In states like Oaxaca and Chiapas, it is rare to meet someone without family in the States.

As in so many areas, the Bush administration has preferred sticks to any other kind of public policy. Bush himself was personally sympathetic to a more humane immigration reform, but he was unable to face down anti-immigrant forces.  Even liberals, however, have tended to focus on rationalizing our current policies on the pull side.  Few have spoken about a more comprehensive approach, one that would address push factors through development assistance.  Or push the Mexicans to rethink their approach to the drug wars.

Turning the United States into a massive gated community is not a strategy for the future.  But even immigration reform that makes it easier to come and work in the United States legally may not be enough. If Mexico, down through Central America, does not become a better place to live, we will never have control over our own immigration policies. A more ambitious agenda for the Americas, one that recognizes that helping our southern neighbors is in our own “enlightened self-interest,” is a job for the next president, whoever that may be.

All over the developing world problems of poverty rage on and the greatest developments seem to not be in a solution, but rather in the strategy of begging. In cities all over places like India and Egypt there exist the “cripple-makers” a modern day beggar’s pimp who literally cripples or handicaps a beggar in some way in order to make him more pitiful towards passersby and thus more likely to receive donations. In sub-Saharan Africa beggars dress in their dirtiest of rags to line up outside churches on Sunday afternoons and outside mosques on Fridays in hopes to catch people when they are feeling their most generous. More and more children are being sent in to beg for money and are often able to cry on command and can be significantly more relentless and persistent than adults when it comes to begging for money. Children and adults even try and sell little things like tissues, prayer pamphlets, and especially gum for some extra change and sympathy.

The greatest moral dilemma an individual most often faces when coming across a beggar is how to help. Westerners are more likely to take on a pretentious approach refusing to donate money thinking that handouts only make the problems worse and remove the incitement for beggars to find their own jobs. While this approach certainly has merit, refusing to spare any extra change, but then forgetting to help out in any other way does nothing but promote the status quo and deny a beggar the opportunity for a lunch or even a mere piece of bread in a day.

With the worldwide food shortage and rampant inflation daily life is becoming more difficult for most people, but the poor are suffering the hardest. When obtaining food has become so difficult that one feels as though the best solution is amputating an arm or a leg it may be time for the international community to revaluate their goals and refocus their attention.