Browsing PBH By Articles

The Hidden Growth Of Africa

The Article: Africa rising – After decades of slow growth, Africa has a real chance to follow in the footsteps of Asia in the Economist.

The Text: The shops are stacked six feet high with goods, the streets outside are jammed with customers and salespeople are sweating profusely under the onslaught. But this is not a high street during the Christmas-shopping season in the rich world. It is the Onitsha market in southern Nigeria, every day of the year. Many call it the world’s biggest. Up to 3m people go there daily to buy rice and soap, computers and construction equipment. It is a hub for traders from the Gulf of Guinea, a region blighted by corruption, piracy, poverty and disease but also home to millions of highly motivated entrepreneurs and increasingly prosperous consumers.

Over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia.

The commodities boom is partly responsible. In 2000-08 around a quarter of Africa’s growth came from higher revenues from natural resources. Favourable demography is another cause. With fertility rates crashing in Asia and Latin America, half of the increase in population over the next 40 years will be in Africa. But the growth also has a lot to do with the manufacturing and service economies that African countries are beginning to develop. The big question is whether Africa can keep that up if demand for commodities drops.

Copper, gold, oil—and a pinch of salt

Optimism about Africa needs to be taken in fairly small doses, for things are still exceedingly bleak in much of the continent. Most Africans live on less than two dollars a day. Food production per person has slumped since independence in the 1960s. The average lifespan in some countries is under 50. Drought and famine persist. The climate is worsening, with deforestation and desertification still on the march.

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The Mormon Diaries, Chapter 3: Mormon Night Football

I didn’t mean to make the Mormons run away.

I didn’t mean to ruin their Family Home Evening night, either. But they were getting preachy, boring, and I had wine.

Family Home Evening—or FHE as the cool Mormons call it for short—is their version of Happy Hour. Every Monday night while us non-believers watch Monday Night Football or laugh-tracked CBS sitcoms, they gather. They swarm bowling alleys, campgrounds, and Red Lobsters across the globe.

The neighbors hyped FHE up all week: “attractive” girls, a free banquet dinner, “surprise” entertainment. I did not particularly want to go. But it was a Monday night. In Utah. And I wanted to be affable. Restore some goodwill after the weekend’s Never Have I Ever debacle.

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The Revolution Will Be Bureaucratic And Undemocratic

The Article: Europe’s Revolution From Above by Étienne Balibar in the Guardian.

The Text: After the fall of the Greek and Italian governments and the disaster of the Spanish left in this Sunday’s elections, what is happening in Europe? Are we looking at incidents in a minor story of political reshuffles that have failed to keep up with the financial crisis? Or are we crossing a threshold in the very development of this crisis, which will have an irreversible impact on institutions and the manner in which they are legitimated? Despite the unknowns, it’s time to risk an assessment.

There is not a great deal to be said about electoral events (such as the one that will probably occur in France in six months’ time). It is clear that voters hold governments responsible for the growing social insecurity experienced by a majority of citizens in our countries, and that they have few illusions about their successors (although there is no denying that in the wake of Silvio Berlusconi, one can understand why Mario Monti is, at least for the moment, setting new popularity records).

The more important question concerns the evolution of institutions. Resignations in response to pressure from markets, which make borrowing costs rise or fall, the emergence of a Franco-German “directorate” within the EU, and the enthronement of technicians linked to international finance, ordained and supervised by the IMF, cannot fail to provoke debates, emotions, expressions of concern and justifications.

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Foreign Policy’s 10 Stories You’ve Missed

One of the best annual webseries, Foreign Policy’s The Stories You Missed in 2011. Go read it, now!

Isolation, Dispossession, And Paranoia In American Politics

The Article: The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter in the November 1964 edition of Harper’s Magazine.

The Text: It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.…What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence.…The laws of probability would dictate that part of…[the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.

Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:

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