(A)live from Bogotá

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Prevent Homelessness

This is my problem: Next monday, I move to New York City. As per now, I have no where to live. No one wants to sublet to someone they can't meet who is living in Bogotá, Colombia.

If you want to sublet an apartment in New York City for a few months or a few weeks, please contact me!

I don't expect this to work, but I am surprised by some of the people who read this. I was invited to speak on a pannel on immigration reform in Ohio... or 'Prof. Lamberson' was invited.

That's what I've got,
Walter

Friday, May 19, 2006

America, What ARE You Doing?

In Colombia, people expect me to provide insight into American current events and offer an explaination for our doings. They ask me how Americans like a game as boring as baseball Baseball. I explain that we agree that it's boring but it is a good excuse to drink beer. They get it. I am able to give them some cohesive understanding for the world.

But sometimes I am at a loss. For example, the immigration bill. Apparently, since I left you have decided that English was the 'National' language as well as the 'Common and unifying language' and then decided to build a big wall along the Mexican border and in fact deployed troops to the border. People here ask me if Americans are really that scared or angry and if there are really that many immigrants. I don't know what to say. I don't remember anyone giving a damn when I left. I am truly unable to imagine what things are like at home. It seems like you're all crazed, making much ado about nothing. (Link thanks to Dan Miller)
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05/19/senate.english.ap/index.html

I was pleased to see that Senator Domenici of my home state, New Mexico, was the only Republican to vote against having a national language on the grounds that, as the article says, "his state's constitution prohibits discrimination based on inability to speak, read or write English or Spanish." It does not mention that the state's constitution was written in Spanish (As was California's).

Part of me thinks there is a legitimate point to be made on the behalf of the 'common and unifying' crowd in congress, which is that nations have a right to an identity and boarders. I said in a previous post I would think about argument about cultural differences we determining who should be a citizen of a certain nation. I have thought about it, and I believe that is fair.

Cultural differences are good, and should be protected, but I don't know how you protect a culture with a law. The absence of laws does quite well. I have been looking out the window for fifteen minutes trying to think of an example of a cultural practice codified into law that I wouldn't like to see repealed. I don't believe women anywhere should be legally required to wear headscarves, nor that they should be banned from it (as they are in French schools) and I think the US would be a better place if the drinking age was lower. The only example I can think of is polygamy, which should be illegal as it is in almost all nations. I don't think of this so much as a cultural practice that our laws need to protect us from as much as a crime that hurts people. (There is a very good book that really convinced me that polygamy is not just 'different' but really abusive and terrible. it's called 'under the banner of heaven' and is about the Fundamentalist Chruch of Christ of Latter Day Saints. It's not about normal mormans, they don't practice polygamy either). But I concede that Immigration law protects culture in a very different way.

One one hand, this is a problem that a law can solve. There are a lot of Americans in Costa Rica. When Americans move to Costa Rica they internalize the cost of buying land and building a house in Costa Rica etc, but whether or not Costaricans want them there does not affect their decision to go. There are a lot of Costaricans who want fewer Americans in the country--or fewer english speakers or fewer retired people etc. For one reason or another, they would be happier if Americans left. If you believe Costaricans have a right to want Costarica more Costarican fewer Americans, or English speakers. perhaps it should be harder to move to Costa Rica to account for upsetting all those Costa Ricans. Is that a good argument?

Here is a similar arguemnt that was popular fifty years ago: there are too many black people in northern cities like Chicago, it displeases white people when they come to their neighborhoods because it makes them feel unsafe and uncomfortable, thus white people should have the right to make it more difficult for blacks to enter their community. Regardless of whether or not blacks were actually more dangerous than whites, they certainly made white people more uncomfortable. To be sure, few people agree with the legitimacy with this line of reasoning, and I have trouble diferentiating the two.

Sometimes something upsets people and they don't have a right to be upset. In a case like that, no one has an obligation to placate them. Congress, however, is well on its way.

In practice, there is no good way to apply laws to protect culture. I live in New Mexico. There are a lot of Texans in New Mexico and there are plenty of people who don't want them there: (at the risk of offending my Texas family, I'll continue) They speak bad spanish, they drive big, dangerous cars, they don't eat the same food, they take jobs away from the native population, and I won't even mention the way they ski. The cultural differences between Texas and New Mexico (or Kansas and New Mexico) are far greater than those between Mexicans and New Mexicans. But there will never be a law preventing Texans from entering New Mexico and changing our culture. Such a law would be unconstituitonal.

There is a more important point, about what constitutes a culture and why 'our' culture is our culture, how it became our culture, and the difficulty of arguing that it can be 'ruined' and not changed. I had an frustrating conversation with an American about his fear that immigrants would come and try to destroy American culture. He said that these immigrants were not willing to adopt american customs. I am confused as to how a culture can be 'ruined'.

I have never heard any story of any group of immigrants being particularly willing or able to adopt 'American culture'. Early Irish immigrants in America were persecuted for being Catholic in a Protestant nation but they didn't convert, the nation became one without denomination. I want to say that the nation is the better for it. I don't invest in normative judgements of cultures, but that I think open cultures are better than closed cultures. When I read that the US is building a big wall with another country, I get scared.

I am not scared because I think the wall will make American a white, english-speaking, protestant, fully-employed country. It won't. I am scared because of what it means. Things like this wall, political things, are not about the consequences: it can't possibly be worth anyone's time or effort to build a wall, no one will materially benefit from it and there are no doubt better uses for the troops along the border. Likewise, no one will be very negatively effected: I have full faith that a wall that spans 4,000 miles will not matter when there is the amount of traffic between the two countries that there is.

Maybe illegal immigration will reduce slightly, is it worth the cost of building a big wall? That isn't the real question; the point is that no one has ASKED that question. The material consequences of the wall don't matter to anyone for the reason all the things that politicians argue about don't matter and for the reason people's political opinion's don't matter: it's not woth anyone's time to care what the actual results are. The wall is a symbol that will provide angry people with comfort, not security.

Yesterday, there was a big concert close to where I live on la Plazuela de Los Periodistas. A presidential Candidate spoke and rallied a large group of students in front of a big sign that said NO TLC (a free trade agreement with Latin America and the US that this candidate opposes). He didn't give reasons for his opposition but to say that Colombia is for everyone, that the youth were with him, and that hunger is a problem--not trade. Then the band played and the students cheared, waved flags, and danced.

I don't know what this candidate will do if elected, and I am confident that they do not either. But they don't care. There is no reason for them to take their vote seriously: the probability of a single vote changing the outcome of an election is approximately zero. So if you weigh the unlikely probability of your vote inacting good economic policies against the certainty of enjoying a concernt with a lot of other students, it's an obvious choice: go shout with everyone else about voting for the NO TLC guy becuase he's more fun, who cares what would happen if he were elected: you can't affect that.

And it IS a lot more fun to say 'hunger is bad' and dance. For this reason political identity is a lot less like thinking and a lot more like chearing for the Yankees. It's more about an image than an opinion, becuase your opinions don't matter.

And that's why I don't like the wall. It's not becuase of the consequences, but the causes. It doesn't matter if you build it, immigrants will come. But it is a symbol that you are upset about them coming. You're at the rally dancing and screaming NO MEXICANS, but you don't care what the outcome is. And it might be fun to say it 'enhances national security' or 'will create jobs' or will 'make everyone speak english', but this isn't the reason you shout. You don't have to believe it to shout it, and it certainly doesn't matter whether it is true. No one cares about the material consequences of the wall. They care about immigrants and they care about dancing, and that wall is one great big dance and immigrants are not invited.

So I'm against the wall.





But I can't wait to be home. The best part of coming home on an international flight after a long stay abroad is when the customs officer says 'welcome home'. It happens Saturday night.

Also, I like Texas

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Happy Mothers' Day

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Bush Unpopular, Chavez Super Popular, Gas Prices Hit $0.14 in Caracas

The top story on the New York Times today says that President Bush is extremely unpopular, especially among adults aged 18-72 (who else is there?). I guess I'm not surprised to see the news, in light of the war with a country that didn't have weapons of mass destruction, the prospect of another country with which we are not yet at war obtaining such weapons for real, high gas prices and a weak dollar. I hear he's also bad at other things like maintaing a staff. While the news that less than one in three Americans approve of the job that he is doing is shocking, I don't buy the conclusion that he is doing any worse than usual. As a president, I would think he has done a lot better than about nine months ago when he ignored a great big hurricane that wiped out a major American city. But I don't think approval ratings by the public are a good indication of how good a president he is.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't vote for him, don't like him, and wouldn't eat barbacue with him even if it were free. I think he's dumb. But approcal ratings are not a good indicator of anything. If you click the link below you can see the approval ratings of previous American presidents, including the most recent polls concerning Pres. Bush. They don't correspond with much other than the purchasing power of the dollar (A guess based on the data). 41% of Americans in the poll approve of his handling of the war on terror and only 13% approve of his 'handling' of the issue of gas prices.

Americans take the issue of gas seriously, but blaming the president for a high gas price doesn't make sense. He's messed up a lot of things, and deserves a lot of blame, but the price of gas is not one of them. Gas is not more expensive becuase he is the president and would not be cheaper if he were not the president. Arab and Latin American nations are not restricting oil output becuase of him, they are pumping oil as fast as they can to take advantage of the price. Gas is expensive becuase places like China and India finally have money to buy some. The way to know that a change in demand and not supply explains the high price of gas is to observe that since four years ago, when gas was much cheaper, the quantity produced glboally is almost 15% greater.

President Bush was the second president in American history to finsh his first term with a higher price of oil than the price at the beginning of the term and still win reelection. Americans are in a place to be hit hard when oil prices rise because it's the most variable cost that takes up any sizeable portion of the average family's spending (coffee and produce are also variable, but account for a much smaller portion of our spending). Not only do we spend a lot of money on Gas, but it is not easily substituted away from so we pay for it when the price rises, especially in the short run. Right now oil prices are somewhere around $75 a barell, and adusted for inflation that makes them higher than any time since 1981, the end of the oil crisis. That sounds bad, because in 1981 people were very seriously affected, the government rationed gas with lines and tickets, Presidents (Carter) were removed from office, and federal laws changed the speed limmit to conserve fuel. Today, Americans are much better off even if the price is comprable. That's because the figure doesn't take into account how much wealthier most people are today. In 1981 the average American family spent almost 10% of their income on fuel. That isn't even almost the case for most americans today. As a share of their income, an American family of four spends an average of 3% of their income on fuel--and there is a huge standard deviation because the number varies grately depending on whether you live in a city or a suburb. Some people-commuters and suburban families with big SUVs that they bought when gas was cheap-are more hard hit, but on average Americans are in a much better place to deal with a high gas price. At the end of the day, especially in the short run, people will pay A LOT of money for a liquid with which they may drive several miles on only a few ounces. Europeans have been doing it for a long time.

Nonetheless, people are upset and blame the president. But I don't think the President can or should do anything in response to the price because I believe fuel should be rationed by the market. Let me explain: if the President would do something, most people would probably hope he would subsidize gas prices, open the reserves (which is the same), reduce the tax on gassoline, or allow drilling in the ANWAR. These are all terrible ideas.

Subsidies and gas prices are the most popular ideas, and in my mind almost as dangerous as drilling in Anwar. The market for gassoline works well becuase price allows people to allocate gas between time periods. By making gas expensive when gas is scarce sends people the correct signal that gas is valuable and should be used responsibly. It should not be wasted driving a military vehicle through the suburbs unless you REALLY like to be seen driving said vehicle. And if you really like it, and it really makes you happy, it should cost you a lot. Making the price articificually low allows people to continue to waste gas, not change their lifestyles, and continue to driver irresponsibly large trucks.

Part of me likes it when gas costs a lot becuase it makes me optimistic that it will someday be worth someone's time to invent something that can move a person from one place to another with much less gassoline. Because the investment in the research for such a product would have to be so great for the project to have a reasonable probability of producing a new vehicle, it will only be made if the production of such a vehicle is profitable after the investment. Even now that gas prices have risen almost 35% in the last three years, an individual who used to spend $100 each month putting gas in his car spends a total of 1200 each year, and with the new gas prices, he is spending $420 more each year (assuming he does not drive any less). at an interest rate of ten percent, he would be willing to pay $4200 (420/ 0.1)dollars to secure the old gas prices forever, assuming he would use his car the same amout for the rest of time.

Imagine a techonology that allowed a driver to drive twice as many miles with each gallon of gas--something like a new car or a magical potion you put in your gassoline. Assume that the model driver does not drive more or less with the pill (or that his demand is perfectly inelastic, a completely unrealistic assumption in the long run). How much would the driver be willing to pay for the pill? if he spends 1650 dollars on gas now, he can driver the same amount for $825 each year, saving the other $825 a year. At an interest rate of ten percent, this technology is worth about $8250 dollars to someone who plans to live forever. Say there are 100 million such drivers in the U.S., then the techonology is worth aroud 800 billion dollars. It looks like a lot, but it's less than the U.S. military's budget for two years. Morever, that is the reward IF you can invent the technology and I'm guessing that it is extremely difficult and extremely risky to to produce this technology. Say it cost 400 billion to have a fifty-fifty chance of producing the magical pill that doubles gas mileage. You would be crazy to take what seems like a fair bet with that sum of money. No one would ever do it.

But this technology would probably be worth more if we assume everyone buys the magical potion, and everyone drives the exact same distance, because in that situation the US uses half as much gassoline. It seems fair to assume that it costs less than half as much money to produce half as much gassoline, or that the cost of producing a gallon of gas increases the more gas you produce. The millionth gallon of gas is probably more expensive than the first and, thus, if you reduce by half the amout of gas the U.S. consumes, you would probably also lower the price of a gallon of gassoline (this is the same as saying that the supply curve is upward sloping). So aside from making people need less gas, the cost of gas would be lower, so they would be willing to pay more for it (and more for the technology the more widely used it was, since the more widely used it is the cheaper gas gets).

But this all assumes that people don't drive any more when it costs half as much to drive a mile. Since people don't seem to drive much less when it costs more to drive a mile, this is maybe a reasonable assumption in the short run, but in the long run it is certainly not.

Many environmentalists believe that inventing something that that can double gas mileage is the solution to our problems with air polution. This is incorrect. If we consider that in the long run, people will adjust their driving habits to the reality that they can drive twice as far for the same cost it could well be the case that people use MORE gas in the future than they do at present, making the price of gas increase and not decrease. That would be a net increase in pollution if we assume that burning a gallong of gas always creates the same amout of pollution.

This seems impossible to imagine in the short term, but in the long run I don't have trouble imagining the ways people would change their behavior if driving a mile cost half as much. We would fly in airplaines much less, we shipt things by car more, ship more things, we would have less of a reason to take the subway, and would take a lot more road trips and vacations. This is not to mention the new investments that would be made in making cars faster: if people drive more, then a technology that makes a car drive the same distance with the same amout of gas at a faster speed is a more valuable techonology. This way cars could really compete with air travel and trains even over long distances. I do not have trouble believing that the long-run demand for driving is elastic, which is to say that reducing the cost of driving one mile by one-half would cause people to drive, in the long run, to drive more than twice as much. It would be necessary to test the conclusion, but I would not be surprised if that has happened in the past.

So I believe that oil should be expensive to reflect the fact that a lot of people want it. Hugo Chavez and I disagree on this point and Venezuela heavily subsidizes oil within its own country and also to some extent to the rest of the world. A gallon of gassoline costs U.S. $0.14. (I'm not kidding, less than fifteen cents for a gallon of gassoline. see here; http://money.cnn.com/pf/features/lists/global_gasprices/price.html). This is a problem, and I think it is representative of the sort of problems that arise when politicians abuse power over the market. In Caracas, the streets smell of gassoline (I am told), because oil is so cheap it is wasted. The vehicles get terrible gas mileage and pollute at levels you can't imagine. The rivers are unsafe because of the amount of petroleum drained into them. At the colombian boarder there is a military station and a mountain of gas canisters used to illegally traffic fuel from Venezuela, where it is artifically cheap, to Colombia and the rest of the world where politicians do not interfere with the market so grotesquely. When gas is artificially cheap people use it badly becuase they live in an artificial reality where gassoline is cheaper than bottled water (true! they actually do.). On the margin they use gas very badly: it is not worth the cost to make even very cheap repairs to their cars and busses that would double their gas-mileage. The value of gas, on the margin, at thirty cents a gallon. There are plenty of people in venezuela who would like to trade a gallong of gassoline for thirtry-one cents of food or medicine and plenty of people in the rest of the world would be willing to pay them far more than that. This is a mutually beneficial transaction that is illegal becuase of Venezuelan law, and the world is a worse place because of it. (The law that sets the price at $.14 a gallon must be accompanied by a law that bans its export at that price or people would expore gas until it cost the market price in Venezuela).

This is a good example of people in Latin America exploiting their country's wealth to win elections. Hugo Chavez does this better than anyone else. He is wasting that country's wealth and selling those peoples' oil to gain immediate popularity. He's a meglomaniac and that will cost his country grately in the long run. I believe the extremely high price of oil is what has allowed Chavez to come to such prominence in the international community. His nation's windfall profits have made government spending incredibly important in Venezuela and allowed him to buy votes in his own nation by subsidizing things like gasoline and funding other public programs for the poor. He has also bought respect abroad by buying two billion dollars in argentine treasury notes, which gives him ENORMOUS sway over the Argentine economy, for if he decided to sell all of them at once the Argentine interest rate would have to rise so quickly almost all foreign investment would flee and even that would probably not prevent governmental default. He also did a one billion dollar contract with Iran for defense technologies, built a one billion dollar oil refinary in Brazil, and finances campaigns in Bolivia, Peru, Panama, and Colombia.

Evo Morales in Bolivia, of whom Chavez is an outspoken ally, has recently followed in Chavez's footstepts and nationalized the oil industry there. This is the same sort of policy that is dangrous for the reason that they are scaring foriegn investors away by the bunches, as well as creating abusively powerful governments. They scare investors away becuase of the fear that your capital will be nationalized; there is clearly a much greater risk that your company will be nationalized and prifits seized now that Morales is in power, as such the country and people should expect much less foreign investment and much higher interest rates. This is bad if you are middle class and would like to build a store, shuch as a restaurant, which requires borrowing money. And if it is harder for one person to build a business it is twenty-million times harder for twenty-million people to build an economy.

There is also a long-evidenced trend for countries with great mineral and peroleum deposits to have hugely corrupt governments and as a result, terrible economies. There are a few reasons for this, but the most important is that, since these reserves tend to be owned by the state, the government is in a position to spend a huge amoung of money relative to average incomes and thus the role of president is endowed with an enormous amount of power not different from a dictator. Goverments have a tendency to distort incentives in favor of not working since this is what gets them elected (if they have elections, and interestingly this isn't the case in places like Saudi Arabia, where there are no elections). Moreover, when there is one source of revenue that has one owner and can be auctioned to a private company leaders become particularly corruptible. Becuase exonnmobile is willing to pay so much to access the oil reserves, the value of changing a politicians mind is high, and thus there are plenty of mutually agreeable transactions that constitute corruption (twenty million dollars in campaign contributions for a vote for the right to Nigerian oil reserves, say). Some people call this the curse of oil.

So I don't think oil is too expensive, and I don't think President Bush should do any more, but that doesn't mean that I think he is doing everything right with respect to oil. IF anything, oil is too cheap. Since the American opinion responds to readily to oil prices, the President has every reason to lower them today and no reason to care how much oil costs in the future. He would be happy to get Saudi Arabia to pump all the oil they will pump for the next twenty years during the duration of his presidency, and make the price as low as it is in Venezuela. Americans would be happy, for the next two years. But it's a bad idea, becuase after that the price of oil would get EXTREMELY expensive, far more than it is now (even with less extreme examples). Saudi Arabia doesn't have a reason to do it becuase they would do better to save that oil and sell it later than sell a lot of oil now at a low price. If the market were effeciet we would assume this is what they do, save oil in periods of plenty for the time that it is scarce. But there are good reasons to believe that this does not happen and that Saudi Arabia does not make profit-maxamizing decisions (like Venezuela), but makes political decisions. The US has enormous clout in Saudi politics and no doubt pressures Saudi Arabia and other oil producing nations to producing more, even more than is profit-maximizing, becuase George Bush has no interest in long term oil solvency.

There is an organization that claims to have good evidence that this happens, and is wide spread and oil is too cheap now (despite monopoly powers exercised by OPEC). I cannot find their website at present, but I ment the founder of the PAC at (of all places) a career fair (she used to be an investment banker). She was extremely interesting and has dedicated her time to solving this important problem, trying to get markets and not politics to ration oil over time. Apparently the movie Syriana concerns this (I bought a pirated version, but have not yet watched it).

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/politics/20060509_POLL_RESULTS.pdf

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

My Favorite Laws in Colombia

I have two. The first is the law that bans the use of motorcycle helmets. It is not becuase there is a volitile group of hell's angles here but because helmets give the driver anonymity, and in a place where the motorcycle is widely associated with assasins anonymity is dangerous. More dangerous than the motorcycle. So they banned helmets.

The second law is the law that says that if you put bullets in someone else, even a lot of other people, you are not a fellon UNLESS one of the people in whom you put bullets spends more than two weeks in the hospital. If they spend less than two weeks in the hospital, no matter how many people you shoot, you have not attempted to commit murder and do not face real prison time.

I learned this when a friend of mine told me that he was in a club in March when the guy standing next to him pulled out a gun and shot seven people in the legs. The good news was that no one died and in fact, everyone was out of the hospital by the end of the week. The bad news: the police let the shooter out of jail the same day.

Interview with John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith dided last week, and I feel like most people know his name and little else about him. He was, at least nominally, an economist but more accurately remembered as a politican who worked for five US Presidents, serving as the Head of Wartime Price Controls during World War II and JFK's ambassador to India. He was the social planner that other economists only write about. The first quasi-economics book I ever read was The Affluent Society, which is not great economics but it is good social commentary critical of the role of material goods in American society. He believed that new levels of wealth among Americans would not make us happier (this was in the 50s). He worried that the role of the public sector was underrated, and that the obsession with building products like the biggest, fastest automobile corroded at American life by creating ''private opulence and public squalor.'' His willingness to criticize peoples' ability to make decisions for themselves won him more disdain in Economics departments accross the country than any other economist will ever boast.

He was appreciated not becuse he was a brilliant theoretical economist, but an economist with great insight into the American political system, a system from which most economists--by choice or circumstance--are ostricized. He was unusually popular for an ambassador, and Salman Rushdie explains that, "the period that John Kenneth Galbraith was ambassador to India, back in the 60s, was one in which intelligent people still wanted to be involved in politics." I can wholeheartedly reccomend a more obscure book of his, The Triumph, a piece of satire about the State Department's clumbsy efforts to develop the ficticious banana republic, Puerto Santos.

Here is an interview he gave in, yes, Esquire:

A good rule of conversation is never answer a foolish question.

Giving an opinion that people don't want to hear can work both ways. If it's a person you like, it can be very hard. If it's a person for whom you have a major distaste, it can be extremely enjoyable.

My mother died when I was very young, and my father was the dominant force in the family. In southern Ontario, he would have been called a political boss. In good Galbraith fashion, he took his eminence for granted. The most important lesson I received from him was that the Galbraiths had a natural commitment to political adventure.

I would hope I laugh quite a few times a day. I don't seek to add to the solemnity of life.

For any sensible person, money is two things: a major liberating force and a great convenience. It's devastating to those who have in mind nothing else.

Modesty is an overrated virtue.

One of the characteristic features of John E Kennedy was his wonderful commitment to the truth. We had breakfast together on the day I left to be ambassador to India in 1961. The New York Times was on the table and there was a story on the front page about the new ambassador to India. Kennedy pointed to it and said, "What did you think of that story?" which, needless to say, I had read. It wasn't unfavorable. I said I liked it all right but I didn't see why they had to call me arrogant. Kennedy said, "I don't see why not. Everybody else does."

I have no capacity to cook. It's a field of ignorance which I have carefully cultivated.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was good on great issues or small. A great war. A great depression. He presided over both. No question about it--he's the person who most impressed me. In my life, he had no close competitor.
I met Winston Churchill once. I went to a gathering that he assembled one night for a discussion on European union. I was principally impressed by the way his wife grabbed his arm every time he reached for another drink.

I've always thought that true good sense requires one to see and comment upon the ridiculous.

Kitty and I were married in 1937. No question--there is a secret to maintaining a marriage over time: Each partner must systematically subordinate himself or herself to the other. That is the only formula for a happy marriage.

Is it good to have friends whom you don't agree with? Temporarily. But it has always been my purpose to get them to change their minds.

I have managed most of my life to exclude religious speculation from my mode of thought. I've found that, on the whole, it adds very little to economics.

The terrible truth with which we must all contend is that the day may come when nuclear arms fall under the control of some idiot someplace in the world. And that will be the day of reckoning.

I've long been an admirer of Adam Smith, who's greatly praised by conservatives--who unfortunately have never read him. They would be shocked to find some of the things Smith advocates.

Strong government, to some extent, is in response to huge problems.

In richer countries such as ours, I want to see everybody assured of a basic income.

Kennedy sent me to Vietnam in 1961, and I concluded from that visit that this was a hopeless enterprise. The jungle was something with which we could not contend.

I saw John Kennedy on the Cape a few weeks before his death. We spent a day together. Much of that was on a) that he was going to get out of Vietnam, and b) the pressures that he was under from the military.
LBJ and I were both from rural backgrounds--he in Texas and I in Canada. That was the origin of a closer relationship than if I had spent my life as a Harvard elite. We'd been friends for many years, back when he was in Congress. It was very sad that we clashed on Vietnam, but it was an overriding issue. Johnson had one answer which was not entirely unpersuasive. I recall his exact words: "Ken, if you knew what I have to do to contend with the military, you would be glad for what I do." The pressures of the military were very powerful. More powerful than most of us then realized.

If I had to pick out perhaps the greatest achievement that I've seen in all my years, it is in the diminishing role of race and discrimination. We have made greater progress there than I ever anticipated.

A shield against nuclear weapons is foolish. It owes much to the fact that the people advocating it are the people who would be benefiting from the effort.

How much money should a man carry in his wallet when he goes out of the house? I never thought of that.

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0F15FE3A5B0C738FDDAD0894DE404482

http://www.esquire.com/features/learned/060501_mwi_galbraith.html

Iranian Letter To United States

It's pretty interesting. I wish our president could write pointed, informed, insincere letters like this.

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-727571,36-769886,0.html

Monday, May 08, 2006

Work

So the firm I will work with this summer is putting together some kind of picture book or yearbook for firm members so we don't have to wear nametags when the whole company (some 150 people) goes to Key Byscane next month. I'm really grateful that they are bringing summer associates (me), but I just recieved an e-mail asking some questions for picture-book related program activities, and I'm confused. Some of the questions are a bit cheasy, but it's better than nametags. More concerning is that I do not have honest answers to the questions. Maybe someone else can help me make up answers. Here they are:

1. If you could go back in time to any era, what date would you choose and why?
2. What future discovery do you anticipate the most and why?
3. What storyteller has been most influential in your life? What story is most vivid to you?
4. If someone made a movie of your life, what genre would the film fall under (e.g. comedy, drama, science fiction, etc) and who would play the leading role?
5. What restaurant in your home-office city have you enjoyed the best meal?


Also, Jennifer Lee sent me an interesting news article. Mexico is well on its way to decriminalizing consumer-quantities of even 'hard' drugs like cocaine and heroin. The intention of the legislation was to allow law enforcement to focus on drug narcotraficos. I don't know how I feel about it. It is good for Mexico becuase it's a step in the right direction, but I generally favor consistent public policies. I they are begining to legalize the demand side but continue to criminalise the supply of drugs. If this law increases the demand for drugs, it will only make the drug trade more profitable and thus more violent and corrupt. A big step for Fox though, whose party is (unfortunately) not likely to win in the next election.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1903350

Saturday, May 06, 2006

A Bogotá Emergency Room, Immigration

I haven't written anything meaningful on this thing in a long time but I wanted to write about a few things. I am still in Bogotá and feeling much better. I even went out last night. This is a significant improvement since Tuesday, which I spent in a Bogotá emergency room. Any day about which you can say, 'I spent 13 hours in a Bogotá Emergency Room´is a bad day. Tuesday was not bad because I was sick, though I was quite sick with the Malaria making me insane and dizzy, but the day was really ruined by all of the blood and needles and waiting that were involved. Those are three of my least favorite things in the world (and if you add cockroaches, I would go ahead and say they are my four least favorite things on earth). I sent Anisha, who, again, shares all of my fears, a pretty graphic e-mail about it. I don't care to relieve the memory so I'll copy and paste:

I went to the hospital to get blood tests and they took a vile of blood with a needle and did a test for hemoparasites which came back negative (big surprise since malaria is a hemoparasite). An hour later a doctor told me to go to the emergency room. So i waited in a Bogotá emergency room for five hours and before I saw a doctor who said, 'you seem like you have malaria, let's do that test again.' And then we're going to do another test to see if you have other tropical illnesses like dengue. And so they took TWO MORE viles of BLOOD with BIGGER viles and LONGER NEEDLES. And THEN both of those tests were negative, which indicated that I am fine, except that I was clearly not. SO THEN they put an IV in. I never realized how good american hospitals are until I got an IV in a colombian hospital.

The first thing you need to understand is that I have ENORMOUS veins. The second thing you need to understand is that I have a pathological fear of hypodermic needles. I've had IVs twice before when I had surgery, and it was EASY for them to stick the thing in my HUGE VEINS. But this nurse messed up FOUR TIMES putting an HUGE needle in me but missed the vein. (I'm shaking just writing about it). Thank god the FIFTH time she got it, but even when the needle was in, it was the worst IV ever. I had to spend THREE HOURS with a HUGE NEEDLE in my hand that was taped very badly and it made me shake and it was like living the squeemishness that you have when they draw blood and you don't want to look, except it was like doing that for THREE HOURS. IT WAS TORTURE. THEN THEY WANTED TO KEEP ME OVER NIGHT BECASE IT WAS LATE.
I said 'NO!' 'NO WAY AM I STAYING HERE SIMPLY BECAUSE IT'S LATE. TAKE THIS BIG NEEDLE OUT OF ME AND LET ME GO'. and THEY WOULDN'T TAKE THE NEEDLE OUT OF ME. AND I WAS MAD AND SQEEMISH and at one point I just started laughing hysterically and that hurt like hell because every time I moved I was shaking the needle in my vein and that made me squeem more and that hurt moree. IT was a vicious cycle or a Catch-22. I hated it.

So the nutrients they were putting into me drained after an hour of needle-in-hand terror, but I waited through TWO MORE HOURS before I removed the IV MYSELF. And then I left the hospital after quite the bureaucratic ordeal, an argument with a nurse, signing papers that said I was leaving despite their reccomendation not to (becase it was late), and paying my 30 dollar bill.

The ER was really sad. The waiting room was about 200 mothers crying about the condition of their babies and some people with very serious problems. I felt pretty terrible but the realization that there was a good chance that some of the children in the room would not live until tomorrow made me feel a lot... worse. At about 9 PM the gun shot wounds started to come in. While gunshot happen everywhere, I was shocked by how quotidian it was here. On the form you fill out explaining why you are in the ER you can check a box to indicate that you were hurt in a terrorist attack.

So here is what the doctor's opinion on what happened to me is: I had malaria that I must have contracted the day I got to Leticia and I treated it really early (saturday night) with anti-hemoparastics which explain why it doesn't show up on blood tests. There is no other explanation of the symptoms of the fact that the anti-hemoparastics work so well (unless it was Dengue, which has similar symptoms and is also a blood parastie). Because it was treated early, I am going to be fine. The intravenious nutrients, while painfull and I certailny would not have admitted it at the time, did help. I feel fine now.


This is the last time I want to write about my health.

In other news, I gave a lecture last thursday (moved because of the night I spent in the hospital). I talked about immigration, as this is in the news in the US and concerns Colombians in no small way (Miami being the third largest Colombian city in the world).

I don't know which reform I do support with respect to immigration law, but I can criticize all of them. From what I can tell, the problem people in American have is a problem with ILLEGAL immigrants, who number 11.5 million and account for 4.5% of the labor force. I am stealing a summary from Gary Becker here, But it seems there are six different approachs one could take toward the problem of illegal immigration. It's important to distinguish these proposals from ways to address the IMMIGRATION issue. As long as the US is not legally open to everyone, there will be people illegally entering. These problems propose to deal only with them :

1) The US can continue its current policy of beefing up border security, and sending apprehended illegal immigrants back to Mexico, or wherever else they came from. Meanwhile undocumented workers who are not caught remain eligible for various kinds of health care, schooling for their children, and other benefits.
2) Illegal immigration could be discouraged by giving apprehended aliens jail sentences before sending them back to where they came from.
3) Employers could be punished for hiring illegal workers.
4) Illegal immigrants could be allowed to come, but would be ineligible for government transfers, such as health benefits or schooling (read: legally codified second-class citizenship)
5) Illegal immigrants could come and be eligible for all the public benefits available to other residents.
6) Illegal immigrants could be allowed to remain for a certain number of years if they have jobs, but then they would have to go back after their time expires, whether or not they are still employed.

Becuase I think none of these solutions 'work' (what it means to 'work' I don't know), I propose that the only thing that will reduce the number of illegal immigrants is that the United States complete the annexation of Mexico. By this I mean to say, nothing that is feasible will reduce the number of illegal immigrants:

1) The present policy of sending back apprehended aliens is not effective in deterring illegal immigration since many of them simply turn around and cross the border again. Various studies show that it is easy with enough persistence to come across from Mexico, guided by "coyotes" who do not charge very much relative to what immigrants would be willing to pay. I doubt whether the recent tightening up of border patrols will do much to raise the cost of crossing illegally. It is commong to read about people putting themselves in shipping containers for months at a time and risking their lives with very dangerous ploys to get into the country. This makes me believe that it is, on the margin, very costly to prevent one more person from entering the country, and ery unlikely that, once sent back, they will not try again.

2) It's both unpopular and cruel to give significant jail sentences to illegal aliens whose only crime is that they want to come to the US, usually seeking higher wages and better working consditions. Without such a punishment, immigrants will continue to cross the border in large numbers, attracted to earning that are greater by a factor between five and ten. Since a punishment is the only thing that really could deter them, and since that punishment seems both cruel and costly (locking someone up in a country before making them leave), illegal immigration is going to be a reality so long as the US remains a realtively better place to live.

3) The 1986 immigration law barred employers from hiring illegal immigrants, but it did not help employers determine when potential employees had forged documents. It is cheap to buy forged social security cards, green cards, and anything else that would certify an employee is in this country legally. Unless that defect is overcome, and it will not be easy, the courts will continue to be reluctant to punish employers for hiring workers who turn out to be here illegally.

4) As for allowing immigrants to come and work but denying them government services like education and mandatory legal protection, I think this would be a perhaps acceptable solution if I would convinced that immigrants were a costly burden in terms of the services they use, but when you consider that most of them pay social security tax and are ineligiable for benefits, they are probably a net wash (though the effect is disproportionate, becuase education is the burden of local governments and social security taxes are paid to the federal government). Given what I think is a pretty negligable cost, I don't think it is in any way acceptable to have second class citizens who cannot attend public schools and are not afforded mandatory legal protections on the basis that they were born south of the Rio Grande. This is the kind of solution that is easy to talk about before the fact, but when there are groups of children not in school and sick people unable to go to hospitals, we realize it was not a very desireable solution. That said, even if we did this there are plenty of people who would be happier in the United States without government services than in their native countries.

6) Finally the president's proposal. In 2006 he said:

"I propose a new temporary worker program that will match willing foreign workers with willing American employers, when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs. All who participate in the temporary worker program must have a job, or, if not living in the United States, a job offer. The legal status granted by this program will last three years and will be renewable -- but it will have an end. Participants who do not remain employed, who do not follow the rules of the program, or who break the law will not be eligible for continued participation and will be required to return to their home.

Employers who extend job offers must first make every reasonable effort to find an American worker for the job at hand. Employers must not hire undocumented aliens or temporary workers whose legal status has expired. All participants will be issued a temporary worker card that will allow them to travel back and forth between their home and the United States without fear of being denied re-entry into our country.

This program expects temporary workers to return permanently to their home countries after their period of work in the United States has expired. Some temporary workers will make the decision to pursue American citizenship. They will not be given unfair advantage over people who have followed legal procedures from the start. I oppose amnesty, placing undocumented workers on the automatic path to citizenship. Granting amnesty encourages the violation of our laws, and perpetuates illegal immigration. America is a welcoming country, but citizenship must not be the automatic reward for violating the laws of America.'

If a good idea is an idea that solves the problems it seeks to solve, then this is not a good idea. You cannot solve the problem of illegal immigration by calling them legal immigrants for six years. That creates a bigger problem for a different president. There is no reason to believe someone who is illegal today will willfully leave after working in the US for six years. I'll go a bit further and say that there is every reason to believe that they won't. I can imagine the news stories in six years about the millions of well established, hard working, property owning families being forced to leave the country where their children are in school and leave the job they have been performing for the last six years.

Second, a long term policy of occasionally affording legal status to illegal immigrants only makes illegal immigration more attractive. Making illegal immigration exceptionally attractive is not heplful to someone who wants fewer illegal immigrants.

Assume for a moment we are sure that we want fewer illegal immigrants (I don't think this is at all clear): short of annexing Mexico, there are two things that will reduce the number of illegal imigrants in the country: making illegal immigration harder and making legal immigration from the home-countries of most illegal immigrants easier . I mentioned why I don't think making illegal immigration harder is going to be very worthwile so we are left with making immigration easier, which I personally support.

It is a usefull question then, what the cost to the United States is of allowing one more immigrant in legally? I believe it is a net gain becuase I believe that the bigger and freer the market for labor is the more likely it is that labor will be allocated to its most productive location. Why should anyone care if labor is allocated to its most productive location? Becuase this is what makes the economy effecient, or producing the most output with the least effort. It makes the most of everyone's skils. It is the same reason we like the division of labor in the first place, and don't like being self-sufficient in the absence of markets. In short, it is why people like markets.

But since it makes the most of everyone's skills, free flow of labor is unattractive to people who lack skills but live in places where skills are common. There are many Mexicans who would like to work in the US becuase it pays better (because the work is more productive) and there are many employers who would like to hire them at that higher wage. This is a mutually agreeable transaction. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of people who perform jobs that require little skill and that a lot of people can do. These people had the good fortune of being born in the United States where low skill labor pays relatively well (Now, I'm not saying these people are lucky people, they are generally poor high school dropouts in the US with no shortage of other problems aside from their lack of human capital).

So the problem is, while immigration is a net gain, there are people who immediately loose. This is the same problem faced when reduced tariffs allow the outsourcing of jobs. I also believe strongly that outsorcing or globalization are in the general long-term interest of society, but the same group of people will feel the burn. But it is not obvious that even the least skilled native-born Americans loose.

There are many who say that immigrants steal american jobs. This succumbs to the falacy that there are a fixed number of jobs in the economy. Immediately, the argument seems to make sense (And people like the Minutemen love to explain it in economic terms!): You have more people willing to perform a job so the price of labor goes down ('Supply and Demand!' they exclaim) and Americans are unwilling to work for low wages so immigrants do the work.

But if the price of labor goes down, opperating any business becomes more profitable. If I own a restaurant and my labor costs are, say, cut in half and let's say labor is half of my total cost, my resturant (and all other potential restaurants) could be as much as 25% more profitable (not a small 'raise'). The raise makes me or other investors want to build more restaurants or farms or Home Depots or whatever. What anti-immigration advocates don't realize is that the wage depends not only on the supply of labor but on the capital stock. Of course, this takes time. So you should have a lower wage, yes, but also more restaurants, and if you have a lower wage still, restaurant food or farm products or consumer services that employ immigrants will be cheaper, which means people will have money left over to spend elsewhere, creating new opportunities for employment and increasing the demand for labor. This is progress, and the theory would predict that, in the long run, there is no effect on the wages of native born workers, but that there are more good produced. And if there is complementarity between their jobs, both groups could expect to earn more because the total productivity of the workforce would improve.

The total effect of immigration on the wages of a native worker depends on the capital stock and the substutability of labor. If you have a college degree, immigration is probably not a threat to you since it tends to be low skilled. Immigrants compose 11 percent of the total work force but 24 percent of the workforce of high school dropouts. There is a greater degree of substutability, so these are the peole who stand to loose. (But I suspect the degree of substability is still small, based on what I imagine is a pretty strong preference for native born workers, all else equal).

One way to test this is to look at cities with a large percentage of immigrants and compare them with cities with few immigrants. According to David Card, an economist at Berkeley, the relative number of immigrants doesn't make a difference in the wages, even for low skilled workers. But there is a problem with this: If it did make a difference, and wages at Wal-Mart were higher in Indianapolis than in Los Angeles because of the relative number of immigrants, the market would correct that and workers would leave LA to work in Indianapolis. There doesn't however, seem to be much evidence for this, especially since there is no obvious reason immigrants wouldn't go to where wages pay the most.

Another approach is that of George Borjas at Harvard. He tries to tease out the effect of immigration from national wage statistics. Borjas divides people into categories, according to their education and work experience. He assumes that workers of different types are not easily substitutable for each other, but that immigrants and natives within each category are (strong assumptions, I think). By comparing wage trends in categories with lots of immigrants against those in groups with only a few, he derives an estimate of immigration's effect.

In English: using regression analysis, he estimatees the value of a year of education and how well it explains (predicts) income, assuming years of education effect income linearly (each extra year increases income by the same amount). He can therefore estimate how much of a category's wealth is explained by their education level, but sees that education alone does not explain the difference in income. He observes that high school dropouts and people with no college experience earn less than more educated people, but they earn TOO MUCH less. Then he factors in the percentage of immigrants in each group and concludes that the percentage of immigrants in each group negatively affects wage even when holding for education (This was much harder to explain in spanish!).

His headline conclusion is that, between 1980 and 2000, immigration caused average wages to be some 3% lower than they would otherwise have been. Wages for high-school drop-outs were dragged down by around 8%.

There are a couple problems with this study too. He assumed that workers within the same category were perfectly substutable. That is, he assumed the only thing that explains the difference between the wage of a native worker and an immigrant are education levels, an assumption that would overstate the effect of immigration.

The much larger problem is that these numbers do not take into accunt the re-allocation of capital. He did not consider that people invest and build new factories because of immigration, and thus immigration's effect on wages could only be negative. The number of jobs increased because of immigration, which he ignores. When he adjusts for this, the effect of the overall average wages is zero and the effect on high school dropouts is less than five percent.

There is a tendency to want to have an bianary opinion: Immigration is either good or bad for America. But it's hard to talk about what's good for a nation of 300 million people. At the end of the day, I believe more immigration is not very bad for anyone and for most people it is are very good (a more efficient economy produces more stuff with greater ease). This kind of cost-benefit analysis does not take into account the real winners from immigration: immigrants. When I consider how much better many peoples' lives are because they have come to the United States it becomes very clear to me that in general there are not engouh legal immigrants in the United Satates. I think in general the conversation about immigration in the US ignores the effect on immigrants, which if we are concerned about the general welfare of the world, matters very much. The optimal number of immigrants in the United States depends on the extent to which they increase productivity, decrease wages, increase purchasing power, but also on the amount by which their own lives improve.

For this reason, I believe we probably have too many immigrants from Mexico and too few from Sudan. Assume that the first people who will break the law and risk their lives to get into the United States are the most desperate, or the people with the worst opportunities outside the US (this is partly why we have more illegal immigrants from poor countries than rich countries, it's also much easier to immigrate). Then the easier it is to immigrate from a nation, the less desperate the immigrants from that nation will be. Becuase it is easier to be an illegal immigrant from Mexico than any other country, the marginal immigrant (the person indifferent between illgealy immigrating and staying in Mexico) is probably in a much better situation than the marginal illegal immigrant in Sudan, who probably takes a much more serious risk when he tries to illegally immigrate.

That said, because I think the marginal Mexican immigrant is still improving his or her situation grately and is not a burden on society, I think more immigration from every nation is ideal. But it is a problem that, becuase illegal immigration (as opposed to legal immigration) is a common means of immigration into the US, people from Central America have an undeserved advantage over immigrants from Africa, Asia, or Eastern Europe. If we legalized more immigration we could make better decisions about who can come to the United States (that is not to say that allowing more Sudanese in will reduce illegal immigration from Mexico!).

There is something that should be said about the burden immigrants impose on society. The New York Times ran a story that said immigrants, even illiegal immigrants, do not commit any more crime than native born citizens. The Minutemen criticize this statistic citing a the fact that the latino population has an incarceration rate much higher than the anglo population. I think this is profound racism in practice: when discussing immigration, we are not considering an anglo nation versus a latin population. The native-born, legal residents of this country are 15% latino and 15% black and 4% asian. They have ignored 34% of the country because they are not white. This supports my opinion that the minutemen are not motivated by rational economic motives but are a bunch of racists.

I don't know if i believe that illegal immigrants commit less crime or more crime. On the one hand, as an illegal immigrant, the cost of commiting a crime is high becuase it's very likely that you will be deported for even misdemeanors. On the other hand, when you are an illegal immigrant, you have no legal recourse in settling disputes and become an ideal target for crime, thus it makes sense that they would live in societies where crime is more abundant. One thing I am sure of, though, is that legal immigrants commit significantly fewer crimes than legal residents since the stakes are high and they do have access to the law and protection from the police.

If you believe that the only way to stop illegal immigration is to develop the nations from which illegal immigrants emigrate, it is important that immigration (legal and illegal) has a negative effect on the countries which immigrants leave. Immigrants, legal and illegal, tend to be exceptional. The type of person who leaves the land where he was born is not an ordinary person, but someone willing to take risks and accept large changes in their life. They are the sort of person a developing country like Mexico needs in their economy, becuase they tend to be entrupenurial. I remember hearing Carlos Salinas (former Mexican President/Caudillo) speak in Chicago; he finished his speach with a very moving appeal for Mexican emigrants to consider coming back.

This is why you see so many immigrants driving taxis or owning small businesses in big citties relative to their share of the population. There is no shortage of people able to drive a cab, but there is a shortage of people willing to take out at huge loan and invest $200k in a taxi medallion. The reason you don't see the same percentage of native born citizens driving taxis and building restaurants or their own grocery stores is because most people with that kind of work ethic or ambition who were born in the United States got an education and does something else. I have no trouble believing that most of the Cab drivers in Chicago would not be driving cabs if they had been giving a good public education in America. In countries where an education is not allocated to those most willing to work for it, (but allocated by something arbitrary like parent's wealth) you find abmitious people with little formal training. In my opinion, immigrants are exactly the sort of people most Americnas should want in their country and the fact that it is a nation composed almost wholly of immigrants explains why it is the most productive economy in the world.

Finally, I want to say something unrelated to economic effeciency, and that is that people born south of the 42 parallel and north of the Rio Grande river don't, for any reason I can explain, deserve more based on that merrit. Even the poorest people in the United States live with standards of health, security, and comfort unknown to more than a billion people in the world. (the second income percentile, the second poorest 3 million Americans, have a life expectancy that is at least fifteen years longer than some one billion people in the world). I simply cannot think of an ethical reason for disallowing desperate people who want to work in this country from doing so. I know a lot of people regard culture as being at risk when immigration is discussed. I do not know how I feel about such arguments, but maybe I'll think about it and write more later.

I also wanted to mention a solution that a lot of economists find attractive and that is the market solution, selling immigration rights in the U.S. If you had effecient capital markets, this would ensure that spots in the States were rationed to those most willing to work or who wanted to enter the most. These immigrants would be younger than older, as a young adult would have more years of a higher income to gain from the purchase. They would also tend to be more skillful workers, as these workers tend to gain the most from immigrating (read: doctors driving taxis in Iran). People who intended to leave the country after a few years would be discouraged.

If the government could pick a number of immigrants they wanted, they would simply fix the price so that the market cleared at that quantity. Say the U.S. charged sixty thousand dollars for the right to immigrate. If we assumed people are not capital constrained, the pay-back period for most immigrants of a sixty thousand dollar or higher entrance fee would generally be short-less than the usual pay-back period of a typical university education. For example, if skilled individuals could earn $10 an hour in a country like India or Iran, and $40 an hour in the United States, by moving they would gain $60,000 a year (no taxes and assuming 2000 hours of work per year). The higher earnings from immigrating would cover the fee in about a year. It would take not much more than four years to earn this fee even for an unskilled person who earns $1 an hour in his native country, and could earn $8 an hour in the U.S. On top of that, if one million people immigrate in a year, the U.S. will see 50 billion dollars in revenue.

I don't know how I feel about this. For one thing, I believe most people are rather capital constrained and the apparent fairness would be lost. Secondly, I think other constraints, like refugee status, make a more selective program desirable.

Friday, May 05, 2006

I Am Still Okay

More later... Really.

Monday, May 01, 2006

God Parts Clouds, I Make It To Bogotá

Apparently, some people were worried I died or something. I am in Bogotá, I'm just late because my flight was five hours late. It's also may first, the international labor day (and the day the statue in from of Pick Hall at the U of C is supposed to cast a hammer and sickle shadow, but no doubt it was cloudy), which is a holiday in all places not the US. So every internet cafe was closed and every telephone booth was closed. I had to come to a hostel I'm not staying in to send a few e-mails. I should go, but worry not, I am alive. I also feel much better. more later.