The Martin H. Crego Lecture in Economics will be delivered by Ha-Joon Chang tomorrow at 8PM, Taylor Hall 203, Vassar College. Chang is a Cambridge economist and author of Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Here’s a review from Bookforum which offers the following summary:

But neoliberalism turned out not to be the panacea its advocates promised. Even as developing countries opened up their markets, sold off assets, and cut back on spending, their economies for the most part stagnated. In fact, over the past twenty-five years, growth rates in most of the developing world have been lower than they were during the 1960s and ’70s, when state interventionism was in economic vogue. And while there have been some massive success stories in recent decades—most obviously China and India—the gap in wealth between the developed world and most developing countries has actually widened. Plenty of explanations have been given for neoliberalism’s failure, including the persistence of corruption, the importance of culture, and the simple failure on the part of many countries to follow the neoliberal agenda completely. But in his new book, Bad Samaritans, the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang offers a more succinct solution to the puzzle: Neoliberalism didn’t work because the advice it gave made no sense. In thrall to the “myth of free trade,” Chang argues, neoliberals ignored the “secret history of capitalism”: If developing countries’ embrace of the free market has failed to deliver what it promised, it’s because “free markets are not good at promoting economic development.”

A more admiring review from the Independent here.

From my article about going back to India to do research, in the Chronicle dated February 1, 2008:

The tourist in India is expected to complain of the heat and the dust. I suffer terribly from the infernal conditions in which I sometimes work, but worry that to notice it would immediately mark me as the outsider that I have now become. I am also aware that my taking comfort in small pleasures — for example, the cool air coming through a straw curtain splashed with water, is a dubious form of nostalgia. And yet I’m not always certain of the correctness of that reading. The truth is that I want to distance myself from the Indian rich, who to my eye appear more greedy and grasping than the rich in the West. This judgment governs my social behavior when I’m home. They speak English, I immerse myself in the vernacular; they stick to the cities, I go to the hinterland; they appear arrogant and uncaring, I sullenly cultivate my guilt.

If I had a moment to spare while in India, I would notice that the difference I was asserting was, for the most part, an academic one.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 54, Issue 21, Page B7

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SAJA Forum reports that Arun Gandhi, the South African-born grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and the founder of the MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, has resigned from the institute following charges of anti-Semitism. The uproar arose over his remarks in the Washington Post’s “On Faith” section online, in a Jan. 7 post titled, “Jewish Identity Can’t Depend on Violence“:

“Jewish identity in the past has been locked into the holocaust experience — a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews. The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger.

“The Jewish identity in the future appears bleak. Any nation that remains anchored to the past is unable to move ahead and, especially a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs. In Tel Aviv in 2004 I had the opportunity to speak to some Members of Parliament and Peace activists all of whom argued that the wall and the military build-up was necessary to protect the nation and the people. In other words, I asked, you believe that you can create a snake pit — with many deadly snakes in it — and expect to live in the pit secure and alive? What do you mean? they countered. Well, with your superior weapons and armaments and your attitude towards your neighbors would it not be right to say that you are creating a snake pit? How can anyone live peacefully in such an atmosphere? Would it not be better to befriend those who hate you?”

Click here for Gandhi’s apology and clarification–and here for the statement by the University of Rochester President Joel Seligman.

Both Gandhi and his critics might want to read Judith Butler’s chapter “The Charge of Anti-Semitism” in Precarious Life. An excerpt:

“…every progressive Jew, along with every progressive person, ought to be vigorously challenging anti-Semitism wherever it occurs, especially if it occurs in the context of movements mobilized in part or in whole against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. It seems, though, that historically we are now in the position in which Jews cannot be understood always and only as presumptive victims. Sometimes we surely are, but sometimes we surely are not. No political ethics can start with the assumption that Jews monopolize the position of victim. The “victim” is a quickly transposable term, and it can shift from minute to minute from the Jew atrociously killed by suicide bombers on a bus to the Palestinian child atrociously killed by Israeli gunfire. The public sphere needs to be one which both kinds of violence are challenged insistently and in the name of justice.”

Outlook has published an abridged version of a lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper, Agos.

The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it’s yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a way, the battles are not all that different. There is one crucial difference, though. While in Turkey there is silence, in India there’s celebration, and I really don’t know which is worse.

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Soon after I posted the link yesterday to Roberto Bolaño’s “Dance Card,” I got an email from Carl Bromley from Nation Books leading me to the latest issue of Bookforum where we get “The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys” by Roberto Bolaño from his Nazi Literature in the Americas. (In his note, Carl said: “I read this in Book Forum and thank god, they have posted it online… I love Bolano, the translation of his work into English over the last four years has been a rare literary joy to behold, imagine a fandango between Borges, Joyce and Proust, throw in some Bukowski, Genet, something down and dirty and you get the idea… This story will appeal to soccer/futbol fanatics too…”) An excerpt:

It is probably true to say that no poet has ever been more diligent than Italo Schiaffino, not among his contemporaries in Buenos Aires at any rate, in spite of which was he was eventually overshadowed by the growing reputation of his younger brother, Argentino Schiaffino, also a poet.

The boys came from a humble family, and there were only two passions in Italo’s life: football and literature. At fifteen, two years after leaving school to work as an errand boy in Don Ercole Massantonio’s hardware store, he joined Enzo Raúl Castiglione’s gang, one of the many groups of Boca Juniors hooligans that existed at the time.

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PEN American Center

A Tribute to Chinua Achebe

When: Tuesday, February 26
Where: Town Hall: 123 West 43rd Street, NYC
What time: 8 p.m.

PEN American Center
If you visit the PEN website, check out the link to Roberto Bolaño’s “Dance Card” from Last Evenings on Earth & Other Stories, by Roberto Bolaño (New Directions, 2006). Translated by Chris Andrews

Vijay Prashad has a review of the new book by Mike Davis. Excerpt:

After 911, a shocking incident in each of its meanings, the US government pledged not only to go after those who had conducted the event (endless war), but also to better protect the American people. The government now spends tens of billions of dollars on homeland security (the National Priorities Project shows that whereas the Department of Homeland Security spends $43 billion, the government-wide homeland security expenditure is $58 billion, with some overlap between the two). Some of it on senseless projects. The two thousand residents of Dillingham, Alaska, for instance, should now feel safer with eighty surveillance cameras (cost: $202,200), and the good people at the Kentucky Office of Charitable Gaming should feel better for the $36,000 slated to “prevent terrorists from trying to raise money for their plots at the state’s bingo halls.” These are easy to pick out from the thousands of disbursements. It is harder to figure out which targets are more plausible.

Buy the book!

Yes!

Why I went to sleep late last night and then woke up again only an hour later and stayed up till four….

Elizabeth at Verbal Privilege presents this wonderful poem by Nazim Hikmet that begins:

In the Istanbul Detention House yard
on a sunny winter day after rain,
as clouds, red tiles, walls, and my face
trembled in puddles on the ground,
I–with all that was bravest and meanest in me,
strongest and weakest–
I thought of the world, my country, and you.

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I especially find very poignant the lines “Me and and our corner grocer, / we’re both mightily unknown in America” and “my people / ready to embrace / with the wide-eyed joy of children / anything modern, beautiful, and good– / my honest, hard-working, brave people, / half-full, half-hungry, / half slaves…” In the post-9/11 world, these seem like lines from our past written to a stillborn future.

Photo from here.

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For readers of this blog in the subcontinent, here’s a report by Somini Sengupta in today’s New York Times about education in rural Bihar. The accompanying photos by Ruth Fremson.

The school’s drinking-water tap had stopped working long ago, like 30 percent of schools nationwide, according to the Pratham survey. Despite the extra money, the toilet was broken, as was the case in nearly half of all schools nationwide.

Thankfully, there was a heap of rice in one corner of the classroom, provisions for the savory rice porridge that is one of the main draws of government schools. Except that Mr. Hassan, the head teacher, said the rice was not officially reflected in his books, and therefore he had not served lunch for the last week.

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