Italy: Escaping the Traps

How much is a country's success or failure a result of their people's decisions?  Or, were countries fates determined from the start because of their location?  As emerging markets continue to grow, bringing prosperity to places it had been previously lacking, there is group of countries that can't seem to join this ascension from poverty.  Paul Collier refers to these as the "Bottom Billion".  In his book of the same name, he outlines four "traps" these countries fall into which hold them back from the pack.

Instead of picking the cliche failed states in Africa and talking about how screwed they are, I decided to focus on Italy, possessing the eighth largest economy in the world.  It isn't at the very top, nor is it without serious financial issues, but it certainly is not part of the bottom billion.  Why is this?  I'll go through the traps Collier outlines and explain Italy's success in their context.

The first trap is being landlocked.  Obviously, this one is directly tied to a country's location.  Access to the sea is one of Italy's least concerns.  Not only is it situated right in the middle of the Mediterranean, but it is a peninsula.  This means it has an unusually large amount of coastline for its size.  This allows it to thrive on sea trade, bringing economic prosperity.

The second trap is the natural resource curse, which is also directly related to location.  Italy does not have major deposits of natural resources so its economy never became dependent on any one commodity.  Its economy developed already diversified, allowing it to be isolated from price shocks.  This also helped it avoid the currency inflation associated with Dutch disease.

The third trap is conflict.  This refers to a cycle of civil war and instability in which each conflict provides fuel for the next.  After Italy's unification in the 19th century, the only war fought internally was World War II.  Italy escaped a recurrence of this violence mainly due to the Allies recognition of their failure in resolving the previous world war.  Policies like the Marshall Plan helped mitigate the economic effects of war.  Italy's location had very little to do with their ability to escape the conflict trap.  It was leader's ability to learn from past mistakes.

The final trap is bad governance.  In 2011, Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned due to a combination of pressure from the Eurozone crisis and personal legal issues.  Mario Monti was his replacement.  He was not elected.  Although these events seem to indicate that Italy's government is not particularly stable, compared to the bottom billion, this is nothing.  The amount of corruption, lack of legitimacy, and outside intervention that occurs in bottom billion countries is on a whole other level.  While Italians are not happy with their current economic and political situation, they still rank at the top in quality of life, GDP, and other measures of success.  Could their political stability be a result of this strong economic underpinning, and not a cause of it?  Obviously, the relationship between politics and economics works both ways, but to which side is the scale tipped in Italy?  It may be hard to tell until we see how they resolve their current economic hardships.  If there are strong links between economics and politics, then once again, geography plays into this trap.  As shown in the first two traps, location has a huge impact on economic growth, which in turn plays a role in politics.

Thus, using Italy as an example, it is apparent that geography sets up some initial conditions, but does not solely determine a country's future.  By learning from past mistakes, country's can escape traps that result from human error.  Unfortunately, Italy is not an example that provides much hope for countries not blessed with a great location.  Italy has not had to overcome any major obstacles that were out of their control.  This does not suggest that we can't overcome geographic barriers.  Italy is just one instance. Unfortunately, studying their history won't teach those in the bottom billion how to overcome the their respective traps. Instead, what is an example the bottom billion model?  Tell me below.

Candidates: Where They're From?

A lot of the focus during elections are on candidate's proposed policies and view points, but not on where these come from.  If you couldn't figure it out from my other post, I like to take things and examine their origins.  Thus, while what a candidate says today may be relevant to who you vote for, I find it just as intriguing to see what has inclined them to say those particular things.

It is no surprise that Obama and Romney have very different policies on certain issues.  It is also no secret that Obama and Romney come from very different places.  Remember, itt is hard to verify the effects one's environment has on one's personality and world view, however it is still interesting to make inferences.  These are not truths, but simply guesses. 

First, lets take a look at Obama.  The world he came from was one filled with uncertainty and change (notice the connection to the 2008 slogan?).  He was born in Hawaii, then relocated to Seattle, then Jakarta, back to Hawaii, then Los Angeles... etc.  His parents divorced.  He lived with his grandparents.  From these factors, a few connections can be made to his current policies.  Obama fosters a more liberal and open foreign policy, maybe resulting from his upbringing in more "foreign" locations.  His immersion in Indonesian society as a child could have implanted positive view of foreign nations that would cause him to be biased towards cooperation over competition.  Due to the lack of a stable family of his own while a child, he could have recognized that the idea of a "conventional" family is outdated and reductionist.  This may have influenced his policies on gay marriage, abortion, and other social issues. 

Romney is up next.  In terms of foreign policy, Romney's place of upbringing sticks out like a sore thumb.  Detroit is a city that isn't too fond of foreigners.  Being the hub of the auto industry, the risk foreign companies posed to his own prosperity could influence his foreign policy.  With his promises to label China as a currency manipulator and his offensive posture towards Russia, it is obvious he views them more as threats rather than friends.  Raised in the family of a CEO of an auto corporation, his experiences as a child could have painted a negative image of the government as his father grappled with taxes and regulations. 

These environmental factors outlined above are not the sole determinants of politicans' policies.  There are politicians that hold view similar to Romney who have upbringings similar to Obama, and vice-versa.  Is one correlation more frequent than the other?  How have these changed over the past century?  How have our own upbringings effected our political views?  All of these are intriguing questions. 

Preventative Care

                Recently, the group Invisible Children came to speak at our school.  Despite the controversy surrounding the group, there is still a real conflict that needs resolution.  My thoughts during Invisible Children’s presentation didn’t center on the group’s legitimacy (and the naked dude in San Diego…), but rather the nature of the problem in central Africa.  Even after an hour of being sold their cause, I still felt wholly uninformed about what was happening and why. I had to look into it further.

                The conflicts Invisible Children are focusing on are the atrocities committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).  I learned that this is a group of fundamentalist Christian’s who have abducted children, destroyed villages, and mutilated women in northern Uganda, southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Central African Republic.  Unfortunately, we’ve all heard this general story before. With the acceleration of media, we are constantly bombarded with images of suffering.  It’s reached a point of diminishing returns. We’ve been desensitized to suffering.  Kids will see a moving story about poverty, only to tab back over to Facebook and complain about how much homework they have.
 

                There are two ways to solve a problem.  Using the medical field as a metaphor, there is “diagnostic care” and “preventative care”.  One focuses on mitigating the effects of a disease already in the body, the other focuses on stopping a disease or catching it early before it requires the diagnostic care.  Both are critical parts of staying healthy.  The problem with my generation’s desensitization due to disaster porn is that we never understand the roots of any of these problems.  The most we’ll do is donate some time or money… as if that was a sustainable way to deal with every problem that comes up.  Don’t get me wrong, these are noble acts.  It is necessary, just not sufficient.  It's like eating junk food and exposing yourself to harmful radiation because you know you have a good doctor to deal with the consequences later.  

                 We need “preventative care” for atrocities like those created at the hands of the LRA.  This requires first understanding where these atrocities come from.  After reading through some articles on the LRA, the points relating to geography naturally stuck with me.  It turns out, the conflict is a result of the same “hunter gatherer vs. agriculturalist” struggle that has been recurring for thousands of years.  The LRA represents the ethnically Northern Ugandans (historically hunter-gatherers) and their opposition to the Southern Ugandans (descendants of Bantu farmers).  Was this conflict destined to happen just do to the fact that one region was more fertile than the other?  This is obviously a gross simplification of the issue: there’s colonialism, religion, poverty, and a whole lot more contributing to the crisis.  My point is that using this counterfactual analysis, we can find common themes.  For me, geography is the most compelling.  The “hunter gatherer vs. agriculturalist” conflict is present in lots of manifestations of violence, whether it is the oppression of natives in the United States or our current destruction of the environment.  Using these overarching phenomena, we can develop new ways for dealing with them in order to prevent future instances of suffering.  For example, promoting the use of cultural knowledge from indigenous populations can both help us be more environmentally friendly while breaking down social divisions. 

                What do you think? What sort of new ways of engaging with the world can we adapt to prevent future atrocities?

Wandering

Why was I born where I was? Why was it a hospital in suburban America and not a cottage in the rural Ukraine or a refugee camp in Chad? As I carry out the responsibilities of my everyday life, going through the motions, I can't help but imagining how alien everything would seem to an "alter-ego" me, born elsewhere.  This dilemma nags at my identity.  How much am I "me", and how much am I my surroundings?

Let's start from the beginning.  I do know that I am an only child.  I guess to make up for depriving me of siblings, my parents decided to give me a little taste of the world.  We would take vacations every summer, but not Disney Land vacations.  They'd show me our government in Washington DC, our colonial history in Boston, art in Paris, empire in London.  We'd visit uncommon destinations like Norway and Sweden.  Maybe it was those vacations, maybe it's something inherent in my personality, maybe everyone is like this, but all I know is that I can't stay in one place.

Even when I'm not traveling, my mind does.  I fantasize about what its like to live in obscure places.  I try to slither out of my shell and into one thousands of miles away.  Any geographic location I haven't heard of immediately gets Google mapped and wikipediaed (that's a verb now).  The CIA World Factbook is my bible.



A location carries immense significance.  It can be "home", "work", "escape", "ours", "theirs".  Settings simultaneously effect us, just as we effect them.  This isn't just restricted to the personal level. Agglomerations of beings are just as susceptible to environmental influences.  Thus, we've come full circle.  Its not just "why was I born here" , but "why was democracy born here and not there", "why is that culture more aggressive than its neighbors".

All events have a setting.  My purpose is to foster discussion on what the relationship between that event and its setting is.  I hope that via this investigation I can also learn about your settings, while at the same time sharing my own.

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