Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where I’ve lived since 1989, is farm country. The next town over from Lanesboro is Cheshire, MA, whose town center includes the Cheese Press Monument. The cast concrete cheese press is a reminder of the efforts of the dairy farmers of Cheshire in 1801, who donated a day’s milk production to make a giant cheese as an inaugural gift for President Thomas Jefferson. The milk from “nine hundred or more ‘Republican’ cows” produced a 1,200 pound cheese that had to be delivered to the White House via sledge because it was too large to be loaded into any available carts – as a result, it was delivered on New Year’s Day, 1802, after sufficient snowfall made cheese transport possible.

The Berkshires are actually more famous for raising sheep than for dairy cattle. In Hayward’s New England Gazetteer of 1839, the author noted, “This county is rough and hilly in many parts, but it affords considerable very fine land, and produces much wool, all sorts of grain, and exports great quantities of beef, pork, butter, &c. The number of sheep in this county in 1837 was 136,962.” At that point, the county’s population was about 40,000, implying a 3.5:1 sheep to person ratio, which approaches the contemporary Australian ratio.

Organic rocks, recently harvested in Lanesboro, MA

Note that most of the commodities mentioned in the Gazetteer are animal, not vegetable products. You don’t need to plow to raise dairy or sheep, and this is a critical factor in making agricultural decisions in the Berkshires. It’s very difficult to cultivate any crops in our soil without a healthy harvest of our most plentiful agricultural resource: the rock.

I spent much of this weekend harvesting a fresh harvest of organic rocks, pictured above. My original intent was to clear and turn over about a quarter acre of land so I can plant apple trees. I rented a Barreto 918, a machine referred to by the company that rented it to me as “the beast”, a 9HP, 210 kilogram monster designed to turn over soil 30 cm deep. It’s a very disconcerting feeling to have almost five hundred pounds of hot metal leaping out of your hands every time it encounters a substantial rock.

Midway through the process, I realized that I was clearly trying to farm the wrong crop. With a market for organic vegetables, organic milk, organic meat, it’s clear that the only obstacle to my roadside stall selling organic rocks is widespread misunderstanding of proper rock preparation and usage. As recently pointed out on my Flickr page by “plussed”: “Pan fried in some olive oil with garlic and a bit of white wine they can be great….”

Plussed is, of course, a New England native, experienced with rock preparation, cultivation and enjoyment. But I realize that many possible customers are less experienced in cooking with rocks. With that in mind, I offer an old family recipe for Pasta con la Pietre:

1 pound smooth rocks, preferably organic
6 cloves garlic
1 yellow onion, minced
1/2 cup virgin olive oil
1 bunch italian parsley
2 cups white wine
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 pound pasta

Carefully wash rocks, removing dirt and small rocks. Place in the bottom of 8 quart stockpot, fill halfway with water. Bring to a boil, hold at rolling boil for five minutes. Drain rocks and transfer to sautee pan. Add oil, garlic and onion to rocks and sautee over medium heat until onions are lightly browned. Add white wine and red pepper flakes, scraping the bottom of the pan to incorporate burned garlic and onion into the liquid. Simmer over medium heat to reduce liquid, until rocks are lightly glazed.

Boil pasta in salt water until al dente. Drain, and toss with chopped parsely and contents of the sautee pan. Remove rocks and serve. Serves four.

• How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life
  Critical look at Second Life in terms of how many unique users are actually encountering expensive corporate-built properties in virtual worlds. Includes some discussion of Electric Sheep, Millions of Us
  (tags: advertising business community hype metaverse secondlife)

Happy 60th birthday, Doc.

(I think David Weinberger is on the right track when he suggests a set of Internet elders. I’d propose this could include people who’ve both reached a certain chronological age, as well as people who’ve exceeded, say, 100 in net years, meaning they’ve made meaningful contributions to net public life for 14 human years. Doc qualifies on both fronts.)

I’m at a conference with Doc tomorrow, and, as instructed by Doctor Weinberger, I certainly intend to look up from my laptop whenever he speaks. And I’m hacking the routers at HBS right now to ensure that his packets get sent before anyone else’s… right until David Isenberg figures out what I’m doing and accuses me of violating net neutrality.

A funny truth: the more interaction we have virtually, the more important it becomes to see people face to face.

While Global Voices is a completely virtual organization, with no offices, no headquarters, no location other than that of our members, we spend a lot of time trying to see each other face to face. Georgia Popplewell and Amira Al-Hussaini are at the BlogHer conference this week, and many of the rest of us are jealous, both because it should be a great conference and because we’re missing a chance to see our friends.

When you interact with someone online, it can smoothe your offline interactions. You’ve got a common context, something to talk about. You know things about each other that could takes weeks or years to come up in ordinary conversation.

African bloggers, brought together by aggregators like Afrigator, BlogAfrica and the beautifully redesigned Kenya Unlimited, have been looking for events that bring them together face to face. The first iteration of the Digital Citizen Indaba in Grahamstown, South Africa received some criticism that the gathering didn’t represent the diversity of the African blogosphere and was heavy on South African bloggers, non-African bloggers and, to be frank, white dudes. The DCI is happening again this year and bloggers are invited to apply for scholarships – I hope that many African bloggers will. TED Global in Arusha helped demonstrate how valuable it can be for African and Afrophile bloggers to spend time face to face – DCI is another opportunity for bloggers to get together on someone else’s dime.

The Cambodian bloggers – or “Cloggers”, as they’re evidently known – are getting into the game and planning the first Cambodian Blogging Summit in late August in Phnom Penh. The conference is the outgrowth of a series of 14 workshops taught by Cambodian bloggers which have introduced 1700 students to blogging. The summit it a chance for Cambodian bloggers to work together, and to meet other bloggers in the region face to face, sharing insights, strategies and starting projects. Beth Kanter, who works closely with the Cambodian blogosphere, will be attending and offering some trainings at the summit. She’s trying to raise $4,000 to bring three “videoblogging kits” to the summit, which could be given to up and coming videobloggers at the event. If you’re inclined to support this worthy cause – either fiscally, or by offering her advice, training materials, sources of cheap video equipment – please check out her wiki space on the project.

When I was about seven years old, my father taught me how to score a baseball game. We were probably in Florida, combining a trip to a spring training game with a visit to one of my grandmothers. He explained the basics of the hieroglyphic system that both professionals and fans use to score games, the numbering of the position players, the difference between a forward and backwards “K”, and set me loose to scribble on a scorecard while he made his own illegible notes in his wire-bound, leatherette scorer’s book.

I’ve scored games ever since – only when I’m actually in the stadium, but religiously on those occasions. When scoring at our local ballpark, the elegant and ancient Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, MA, I sometimes get asked by other fans why I’m scoring the game. “Are you a scout? Are you a reporter?”

“Nah, I just like to score ballgames.” If pressed, I’d tell them that scoring a game forces me to pay attention, to be in the moment, to keep at least one eye on the action rather than on the hot dogs, the beer and the people I’m sitting with. I miss something if I’m not scoring a game. And I like being able to glance down in the seventh inning and see whether the man at the plate is 0 for 3 or 2 for 2 with a walk.

This may help explain my anti-social and obsessive attitude towards blogging at conferences. I’ve developed something of a reputation for blogging the conferences I attend with fairly obsessive detail. Some of my colleages are grateful for this “service”; some of my readers have stopped subscribing to this blog due to the volume of conference posts. If you ask me why I do it, the answers are similar to my reasons for scoring baseball games:

- Because David Weinberger does it, and David is someone worth emulating. Ditto Bruno Giussani.
- Because it gives me a record of a gathering that I can work from, quoting speakers and ideas in later blog posts.
- Because it forces me to pay attention to what’s going on at a conference, not just to visit with my friends, chat in the hallways, enjoying the spectacle.

As I’ve gotten better at conference blogging, there are at least three other reason:

- Conference blogging gets me invited to conferences I couldn’t otherwise afford to go to, and which I enjoy being present at.
- Other bloggers link to my conference posts, which raises my Technorati profile, my google juice, etc., and makes it more likely people will read my original writing.
- People expect me to. (This is a good and bad thing.)

A few kind friends have asked for thoughts on how to blog a conference in detail. I’m not convinced that there are many tricks to it, but here are a few things that help me keep pace at conferences like Pop!Tech and TED, where the talks come fast and furious:

The kit: I come to conferences with my beloved Mac, two charged batteries, a power strip, a digital camera and cables, granola bars and a lap desk. This last item is totally essential – I’ve turned my car around when driving to a conference to retrieve my lapdesk, knowing that burned knees and backpain await if I try to blog with the laptop directly on my lap.

The location: Bloggers rarely sit in the front row to blog conferences. We’re distracting to the people around us, especially people sitting behind us, watching our screens. It’s usually better to sit to a side, near the power plugs. The really big conferences often have “overflow rooms” where some of the audience can watch a talk on simulcast TV. These are a gift for bloggers. I learned this from Ndesanjo Macha, who blogged 2005 Pop!Tech almost entirely from outside the main hall, glued to a monitor and power outlet.

Some conference organizers are particularly good about creating a physical space for conference bloggers. TED in Monterey provides a table with power strips facing a monitor in their downstairs overflow lounge – it’s a great place to blog that conference, if you can wedge your way between me and Bruno.

Preparation: Conferences usually give you a speaker program ahead of time. Use it. Over breakfast before the day of a conference, I’ll type the names of each speaker and their talk title into a text file. If I’m really good, I’ll do quick Google searches on each of them and link their names to their blogs, research institutions, arrest records, etc. Prepare sufficiently and you’ve got the first paragraph of each post written ahead of time.

Macros: I write my blog posts – and, frankly, everything I write – in BBEdit, a remarkably powerful Macintosh text editor. One of several thousand reasons to use BBEdit is a feature called “Glossaries” or “Clippings”. This is a way of storing pieces of text that you use frequently and linking them to key combinations. My friend Daniel Beck turned me on to this powerful feature and developed a couple of basic clippings for me, which I use heavily.

So when I want to add a hyperlink to a document, I copy the address from Mozilla, highlight the text I want to link, and then type Shift-Apple-Comma, which inserts the following text into my file:

< a HREF="" >< /a >

around the highlighted text, and positions the cursor between the quotes. Press Apple-V and I’ve got a formatted hyperlink in two keystrokes. I have keys linked to blockquotes and to URLs I reference frequently, like Global Voices and this blog. I’ll sometimes create a glossary entry for the technorati tag associated with a conference, associated with shift-apple-T-R, or for the main website for a conference.

Even if you’re composing online, within your blogging platform, or if you don’t feel comfortable setting up macros, it can be a big help to put some useful snippets of text in a text file and cut and paste them into blogposts.

Keeping Up:
I have a hard and fast rule for myself – I complete posts on a conference session within fifteen minutes of the end of that session. This isn’t because I’m obsessive about getting up the first post on a topic – it’s because I will miss the next session if I’m still writing the former post. Better to put up an incomplete and imperfect set of notes than to miss another speaker.

Many conferences break up speeches with “lighter” interludes – videos, music, or other less-bloggable forms of content. These are excellent times to finish blog entires. I will frequently use question and answer sessions to finish posts as well – this makes Pop!Tech easier to blog than TED, which provides less time for Q&A and squeezes in more speakers per day.

I have, once or twice, been forced to give up on a talk because it’s clear that I can’t transcribe it in time. I’ve never successfully transcribed a Yochai Benkler talk – he simply packs too much into a speech for a mere mortal to document.

Hard Talks:
One of the reasons I’m able to blog so many talks at conferences like Pop!Tech, TED, Idea Festival or PUSH is that the talks are, for the most part, really, really good. Experienced speakers are easy to blog – they follow a narrative path through their talks, speak at a pace the audience can understand, emphasize key points with visuals. Write down the points that they’re starting sections with or emphasizing, and you’ll likely have a finished post with little need to edit.

It’s much harder to blog inexperienced speakers. Some will speak too fast or too technically and many won’t have a clear path through their material. With an inexperienced speaker, I’ll often take notes on the talk and try to structure it into a blogpost afterwards, doing the work the speaker should have done before giving his talk. I do this often with panels, which rarely have as much structure as a formal talk and often need you to add a narrative after the fact.

If a talk is truly out there and hard to follow, I might skip it, or blog it really briefly, summarizing it into a few lines or combining it with the next talk. Don’t be afraid to give up on a hard talk . It’s the speaker’s fault if he or she can’t interest you in the material, so long as you’re paying attention and ready to listen.

Use your commenters:
Because I’m blogging ten or more talks a day, I get things wrong. Sometimes I get things egregiously wrong. Comments allow other attendees – and sometimes the speakers themselves – to correct me. I check comments religiously while I liveblog, and I try to thank commenters who correct my errors, as they’re doing me a major service. “Mental” notes that blogposts, when commented, critiqued, linked towards, can serve as “the blogger equivalent of a peer reviewed professional article in a professional journal” – that’s only true if your peers are working with you to make your posts better.

Collaborate:
“Hash”, writing about bloggers at the TED Global conference in Arusha, used the Swahili term “harambee” to describe the ideal operation of a group of bloggers at a conference:

Harambee is a Swahili term that means “pulling together”. That mentality, the willingness to work together, was what made it possible to cover a busy event like TEDGlobal… Some of us decided to take pictures, some did interviews between sessions and others decided to summarize the day. Everyone who blogs has their own voice, and I think it showed in the coverage. What could have been an amalgamation of everyone saying the same thing turned into a fairly well-rounded coverarge of the event.

My goal in blogging a conference is not to be the sole, authoritative voice of the blogosphere. It’s to do what I enjoy doing: writing detailed summaries of each sessions. But that means I can’t take photos of the speakers on stage, can’t interview speakers between sessions, can’t monitor coverage of the conference in the blogosphere. At TED, we were able to split up the tasks, so that Hash and Andrew took photos, Ndesanjo blogged in Swahili, Juliana did interviews, June monitored blogosphere coverage, etc. It’s a whole lot more fun to blog these events in groups, even if that means sitting next to someone trying to liveblog at the same time as you are, arguing about how to spell a word the speaker has just uttered.

Digest:
I go to conferences because they give me a wealth of new ideas to wrestle with, sometimes for weeks or months to come. I try fairly hard not to wrestle with these ideas as I’m writing about them – it’s hard for me to form opinions while talks are going on, and harder to express those opinions articulately. (This isn’t always true. The occasional conference will include strong opinions I feel compelled to disclaim are the speaker’s, not my own…)

So that I have a chance to wrestle with the big ideas, I’ll often try to write a summary or reactions post a week after a conference. These summaries are generally a great deal more opinionated than my reactions to the original talks. Good conferences have big themes that aren’t always apparent when you’re sitting in the hall… and these themes are frequently not the themes the organizers intended.

Have Fun:
Not everyone enjoys blogging at conferences. I have many friends who’ve tried it and discovered that it stresses them out or detracts from their enjoyment. There’s an easy solution to this: don’t do it. Most people don’t keep score at baseball games. That’s okay, as there’s an official scorekeeper, a scoreboard and at least one journalist in the stands. We don’t need everyone to become a conference liveblogger – just a few more of us.

If you’re a liveblogger at conferences and have tips that keep you productive and sane, please feel free to share them in the comments. If you try some of these out and find them helpful – or, especially, if you find them unhelpful – let me know in the comments as well. Thanks in advance.

My friend Henok Mehari has had a remarkable journey. A 14-year old in Ethiopia, his family fled the Ethiopia/Eritrea war and he found himself living in a refugee camp in northern Kenya. In 2004, he and his family had the opportunity to come to Boston. As he put it in his graduation speech at the Notre Dame Education Center, “After the living in the hottest, dustiest refugee camp imaginable, I landed in the coldest town in the world.” NDEC specializes in adult education and literacy programs, and helped give Henok, a young man whose schooling was interrupted by war, the chance to complete his basic education.

Henok has been obsessed with technology for years. In an email he sent yesterday to a group of friends, he noted, “On June 6, 2001, I opened my first e-mail address and became so fascinated with the technology and so drawn by my first introduction that I sometimes sold my UN food rations in the camp to pay for access to the computer, to the Internet, and to email.” This fascination led Henok to apply for an internship with Year Up, a remarkable institution which works with urban youth, training them in technical, business and social skills that allow them to work as interns in a variety of business environments. John Palfrey, the director of the Berkman Center, has been a huge supporter of the program, inviting several interns to work at the center in the past four years I’ve been here.

People in the fellows program at the Berkman Center generally haven’t interacted very closely with Year Up interns. Henok has been an exception, primarily because he’s reached out to several of the fellows, sending us provocative questions, requests for advice on what to read and what to study. As a result, he’s gotten advice on writing from David Weinberger, about the history of the American legal system from Lewis Hyde, about copyright law from John Palfrey. In other words, he’s gotten the sort of education most of us only dream about.

There’s at least two ways to read Henok’s story so far. One is that of a young man who’s been incredibly unlucky and then incredibly lucky. Another is that Henok has done a remarkable job of seizing whatever opportunities have presented themselves, and created other opportunities by asking good questions and engaging with people around him. I watch Henok’s path and kick myself for the people I admire who I’ve not spoken to, the advice I haven’t sought, the questions I haven’t asked. And I resolve to get better about asking questions of the people I admire, and answering those questions that people ask me.

Today is Henok’s last day as an intern at the Berkman Center. In a few weeks, he begins the Transitional Year Program at Brandeis University, a year-long program designed for students who “have talents and native skills that exceed the resources available in their home communities to cultivate them.” For a year, Henok will have chance to take classes that will help prepare him for a university career, perhaps at Brandeis. I predict that we’ll see Henok back at Harvard, perhaps as an undergrad, perhaps as a graduate student.

Congratulations, Henok, and thanks for everyone – Notre Dame Education Center, YearUp, Brandeis, Berkman – who offer opportunities for people to seize.

• GINKS – Home
  Great resource on ICT and development projects in Ghana
  (tags: development ghana ict4d opensource africa)
• ?venturecap: Researching Ways to Fund Great Companies in the Developing World: How a consulting firm became a venture capitalist
  Rob Tudhope and Ian Howard talk about their attempts to nurture consulting businesses in Mali and throughout the develloping world through creative approaches to financing. Very useful
  (tags: africa mali business blogs venturecapital)
• PressThink: Assignment Zero Lands. OffTheBus Launches. Lessons Fly.
  Beginnings of a postmorten on Assignment Zero from Jay Rosen, and reflections on what could be different in OffTheBus, Jay’s new project
  (tags: democracy media newassignment socialsoftware citizenmedia)
• RConversation: Oiwan Lam’s expensive fight against an unpopular tribunal
  Useful commentary from Roland Soong on Global Voices editor Oiwan Lam’s fight against obscenity restrictions in Hong Kong
  (tags: freedom censorship china hongkong globalvoices)

Review:
“Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock On Global Labor Mobility”, Lant Pritchett. 2006, Center for Global Development.

On Saturday, my house was silent, two armchairs occupied by women deep in concentration, rapidly working their way through the book that’s guaranteed to be this year’s best seller. I was reading as well, intent on completing a book that’s much less likely to be carried at your local bookstore: Lant Pritchett’s “Let Their People Come”.

(Okay, I was waiting for my turn at “Deathly Hallows”. There? Happy now?)

Pritchett is an economist, not a fantasy writer, but he managed to capture my attention for a few hours with a slim, smart, provocative book on globalization and labor mobility. (It’s available online, under creative commons, should you be Pottered out and ready for something a bit more controversial.) He offers a simple, but powerful, observation: When we talk about economic development, we’ve got to talk about migration.

There’s a “standard mantra” that most development economists offer when asked what policies are most important for helping poor nations become rich: “Fairer trade, better aid and debt relief.” Pritchett believes those factors are important, but that there’s a bigger factor they fail to address:

The principle way rich countries disadvantage the poor world is not through unfair trade, or through intrusive and ineffective aid, or by forcing repayment of debts. The primary policy pursued by every rich country is to prevent unskilled labor from moving into their countries. And because unskilled labor is the primary asset of the poor world, it is hard to even imagine a policy more directly inimical to a poverty reduction agenda or to ‘pro-poor growth’ than one limiting the demand for unskilled labor (and inducint labor-saving innovations.)

The heart of Pritchett’s argument is this:
- Rich countries give about $70 billion a year in development assistance to poor countries
- If rich countries allowed a 3% expansion in their labor force over a long time period through migration of workers from poorer countries, citizens of those poor countries would yield $300 billion in benefits
- Rich countries would benefit from this influx of labor as well, yielding estimated gains of $51 billion
- Instead of easing migration restrictions and letting both the rich and poor benefit, rich countries spend $17 billion a year enforcing migration restrictions

Pritchett doesn’t address the models behind these estimates in this book – those models are outlined in the World Bank’s 2006 Global Economic Prospects: Economic Implications of Remittances and Migration. (While not a very exciting title, it’s a much better read than the CEP 1997: No, The World Bank Can’t Lend You a Twenty Until Next Tuesday. And like Pritchett’s book, it’s available for download online. The 2006 one, that is, not the 1997 one, which I just made up.) The second chapter of the report focuses on the potential for an influx of non-native labor to damage local wages, and concludes that the model is much more complicated than “foreign workers come here and wages fall.” It’s possible that an influx of labor broadens a tax base and shores up medical and retirement benefits, and that an increased supply of low-skill labor may free up native workers in an economy for higher skill and higher paid jobs.

It’s unlikely that The Minutemen, Lou Dobbs, or the other charming voices in the current American debate are considering these World Bank models before contributing their points of view. But professional economists do, and Pritchett’s goal – I think – is to convince his compatriots that their prescriptions for development are missing a key ingredient if they’re not prepared to seriously consider increased labor mobility in their policy proposals.

This is an uphill battle. Dr. Nancy Birdsall, President of the Center for Global Development, where Pritchett is a non-resident fellow and which published “Let Their People Come”, notes in her introduction that this book is arriving at a time of increased scrutiny of migration in the US and Europe. This scrutiny comes from the anti-globalization left as well as from the right. And those in favor of increased mobility aren’t exactly natural allies:

…those from poor countries who move to higher wages; the richer part of the rich country population who benefit from lower wages for labor intensive services and whose wages are not threatened; and potentially labor intensive industries located in rich countries. This makes an odd political coalition. Development advocates may have joined with people of faith to support debt relief, but a “development friendly” coalition of Oxfam and meatpacking plants in the Midwest is harder to envision.

Pritchett believes it’s neccesary to fight this uphill battle. Increased migration is inevitable, he argues, for five reasons:

- Wage gaps between rich and poor nations are huge. A migrant from Guatemala to the US increases her income by a factor of six (PPP adjusted). From Kenya to the UK is a factor of seven; from Vietnam to Japan, a factor of nine. A hundred years ago, when transport and communications was more difficult, factors of three were sufficient to spark the waves of migration that helped build America’s booming economy and partially empty Ireland, Italy and Poland.

- The ageing of rich nations. As nations like Japan and Italy age, their labor forces shrink and there’s an increasing burden on workers to support retirees. As these national workforces shrink, the workforce in nearby nations is booming.

- Capital, goods, ideas and services cross national borders. Not only does this raise the question of why labor is so immobile, it makes it easier to be a migrant, as you can eat food and watch movies from home, and call your family.

- Employment in “low-skill, hard-core nontradeables”. Yes, tech support jobs are getting outsourced to India. But Pritchett argues that 73% of the jobs likely to be created in the top 25 categories of job growth can’t be outsourced, as they require being physically present to carry them out.

- Some nations are being forced to support populations well beyond their carrying capacity. Pritchett calls these nations “zombies” – they would be ghost towns if their populations could leave, but instead they’re the walking dead. He offers Zambia as a key example – the economy boomed in the 1950s due to copper, peaked in 1964 and is now at 60% of 1964 levels in GDP per capita terms. If migration were possible, lots of Zambians would leave, and the country would have a much better chance of supporting its remaining population.

Standing in the way of these forces are “eight immoveable ideas”. Some of these ideas are familiar from Dobbs et. al. – culture clash, immigrants and crime, drain on social services, pressure on wages. Some are false – immigrants tend to commit crimes at a lower rate than the average citizens of a developed nation, in part because of fear of deportation, for instance – but some are probably true: an influx of foreign labor probably drives down wages, in certain sectors, in the short term.

Some of the ideas Pritchett identifies are much less familiar and more thought provoking. He argues that people are remarkably blind to the ways in which we let nationality become a “legitimate” basis for discrimination. We find ourselves up in arms, he argues, because people aren’t given equal opportunities because they are female, of a particular religion or of a specific race, but we rarely protest that someone is unfairly treated because they were born in a poor country rather than in a rich one. He argues that someone as poor as the average Haitian living in an American city would demand an enormous deployment of assistance, while the same Haitian a few hundred miles from our shores demands almost no response. This line of argument gets a little preachy: Pritchett is deeply offended by thinkers who argue that our current treatment of animals will look barbaric to future generations; he wonders how our treatment – or lack thereof – of fellow human beings will look.

One of the most interesting immobile ideas is that development is usually thought of in terms of nations, not of people. We talk about raising living standards in Liberia, not raising the living standards of Liberians. It’s hard to deny this simple piece of logic: let a Liberian move from Monrovia to Boston and you’re going to increase his standard of living. It’s possible that this migration will have benefits beyond remittance, especially if the laborer is able to accumulate capital, gain skills and return home to start a business.

This emphasis on short-term mobility becomes central to Pritchett’s proposals. He’s looking for solutions likely to be palatable in the wake of the eight immobile ideas, not in shifting those ideas, and he proposes a policy heavy on guest workers in a country for a fixed period of time, with penalties to sending nations if those workers don’t return home. In this, he’s looking to countries in the Persian Gulf who allow huge volumes of migrant workers to come into their countries, though under strict terms and without a clear path towards citizenship. In this sense, he’s proposing migration, not immigration – migrants are usually coming alone, not with families, and they’re coming to work, not to settle.

It’s easy to imagine how these policies could go wrong. If guest worker programs are structured without good protections of rights for these workers, it’s likely to enable situations of profound abuse. And even if rights are protected, the concept of creating a legally-constrained underclass brushes up against ideas of egalitarianism in an uncomfortable way. But it’s very difficult to challenge his arguments that immigration in America and Europe is broken and needs a realistic fix, not jingoistic nationalism and increased enforcement without considering the underlying economics.

I doubt that Pritchett’s book is going to sponsor a global pro-mobility movement… though I think it would be an excellent thing if it did. I also think it would make a lousy movie adaptation, though it would be interesting to see Daniel Radcliffe as the revolutionary economist, forced to calculate his spreadsheets barechested to tolerate the tropical World Bank heat. But it’s a provocative book that has some interesting answers for anyone who looks at efforts like the ONE campaign and wonders if aid, trade and debt relief will ever transform the developing world.

For further reading:

Interview with Pritchett at CGD on the release of “Let Their People Come”

“Rich Countries, Poor People: Should We Globalize Labor, Too?” Jason Deparle interviews Pritchett in the Sunday New York Times.

• Hummus brings Israelis, Palestinians to the table | csmonitor.com
  The politics of hummus…
  (tags: israel palestine food politics)
• Worst story of 2007 on Africa ? The sub-Saharan African roundtable
  Blake Lambert offers his nominees for the worst “journalistic” stories on Africa for 2007. I think a contest – perhaps judged by Binyavanga Wainaina – is in order…
  (tags: africa journalism media)
• Peanuts, by Charles Bukowski
  Absolutely brilliant version of the Peanuts cartoons, as if written by Charles Bukowski. Unfortunately, at least one page hosts very nasty popup ads – I don’t recommend viewing except with Privoxy turned on.
  (tags: literature cartoons humor)
• Boston Red Sox – Red Sox connecting with their cut-off man – The Boston Globe
  A feature on the Red Sox unofficial team barber. Why doesn’t a guy grew up in Washington Heights cut for the Yankees. “The Yankees are all shaved and boring.”
  (tags: redsox funny boston)
• The Pirate Hunters
  Excellent article on bluewater piracy and the strategies International Maritime Bureau uses to combat it… which include finding stolen ships through informants and paying ransoms. Since UIC was toppled in Somalia, piracy in nearby waters is up. What a s
  (tags: piracy trade shipping somalia kenya africa)

My family’s not very big on genealogy. I haven’t heard many stories about relatives who passed away before I was born. I dimly knew that my great-uncle Ben Zuckerman had been a succesful fashion designer, and that he was gay. But I hadn’t had a sense for how successful – and how colorful – he’d been.

The story my mother told was prompted by the fact that she’d recently been given a chair from my cousin. The chair had been my mother’s in the late 1960s. She gave it to her sister, who later gave to her daughter… who’s now returned it to my mother almost 40 years later. “But that’s nothing compared to the story of the suit.”

Ben Zuckerman, my father’s uncle, gave my mother three custom-made suits as a wedding gift, including a grey wool suit. A decade or more after the wedding, the suit no longer fit, and my mother passed the suit down to her sister. After a decade or so, her sister no longer fit in the suit, so she donated it to Goodwill. This upset my mother, who’d hoped to save the suit and pass it down to my sister. My grandmother, a veteran thrift store shopper, discovered the suit in a Goodwill store in the other side of New Hampshire. She’d lowered the hem on the skirt years earlier and recognized her stitching. She bought the suit and gave it back to my mother, who keeps it in her closet to this day.

“Couture never wears out,” my mother tells me. “And there’s probably a market for Ben Zuckerman fashion these days.”

There is, indeed. A vintage Ben Zuckerman gabardine jacket is selling on eBay for $225. And there’s a long trail of references to Ben’s work on the Internet.

In a Vogue article, “The Strength Beneath the Silk,” Hamish Bowles writes about Jacqueline Kennedy seeking fashion advice from Diana Vreeland. Kennedy only wore European-designed clothing and needed to find an American designer she could wear as first lady.

Diana Vreeland responded by suggesting an intriguing triumvirate of designers: Stella Sloat, Ben Zuckerman and Norman Norell. Sloat defined the signature simplicity of her well-made sportswear separates as “what is left after you take everything away.” Despite the thoroughly American feeling of her clothes, at times she included copies of Givenchy originals in her line. The Romanian-born Zuckerman was a fashion-industry stalwart working with his designer, Henry Shacter, to produce “the only clothes made in America that look as though Dior or Balenciaga made them.” It was Zuckerman’s line-for-line copy of a Pierre Cardin coat in purple wool that Jacqueline Kennedy had at first decided to wear for the Inauguration Day ceremonies (she wore it instead to tour the White House with Mamie Eisenhower).

Mom remarked that Ben had designed clothing for Mamie Eisenhower – I haven’t been able to confirm that story with my cursory online research. But according to Vintage Fashion Guild, “Zuckerman had the distinction of having the largest collection in most seasons; as many as 300 styles was common.” Perhaps one of the three hundred appealed to the first lady.

There’s an interesting story about Henry Shacter, the designer who helped Zuckerman bring French fashion to the US. According for former Women’s Wear Daily publisher James Brady:

Tailor Ben Zuckerman ( WWD called him “America’s Balenciaga”) pulled over at a New Jersey gas station, fell in love with the young man pumping the gas and drove away with him. The attractive grease monkey was a boxer between bouts named Harry Schacter. Ben taught him a little about fashion, made him his designing partner and the two gentlemen prospered as a happy couple.

I never met Ben Zuckerman. He retired in 1968, and I believe he passed away before I was born. But I’m now finding myself haunting eBay, looking for tangible evidence of my hopelessly romantic great-uncle, a high priest in a field I know absolutely nothing about.