God's World is One

This is a reply from Santa Claus, the longest living good and kindly soul whom I wrote for his friendly advice on the rich word’s current dilemma – ‘Import workers or export jobs’. 

(written in 2005)

Dear P,

I am pleased to receive your letter but must admit I am a little surprised because I rarely receive mail from grown ups like you. I am sad to know that the people in rich world are losing their jobs to poorer places. I don’t know how I could help. I must tell you that I am more comfortable bringing gifts and happiness to children than giving advice to elders. All I could do is only to tell you a thing or two from my experience if it helps.

If you had lived several centuries like me, you would look at the world, events and the people in an entirely different way. With your current life span- your focus of history is barely 50 years behind (unless you are doing academic research) or 50 years ahead if you are looking into the future. It is difficult to relate to an age that one does not belong. Having lived several hundred years- the entire events of these years are right before my eyes in the same way that the last fifty years’ are to you.

So what would I see in those years that passed by? It would be kaleidoscope of events that you call history, but for me a chain of memories that I personally experienced. These memories are of how the world, borders of nations and empires changed or the nations changed themselves, and new ideas, knowledge and goods came up. All of these have been a part of my life. I have seen the world changing too often.

Nations are therefore not important to me, but the people are. Despite the disadvantage of a relatively short life span man has managed to continue his life and improve it. Man has vastly improved his existence against all odds and particularly violence. All my life I have seen people moving to wherever they feel their life would be safer or better. Nationality, culture, and similar considerations take a second place. People have been migrating to other continents even when the transportation was the most hazardous- some as conquering army, some as defeated army, indentured workers or as plain adventurer seeking better life.

I could tell you from my experience that people not only move for employment but also to live away from strife and to live in peace- which essentially means security of life and property. Man is happiest to relate to fellow men in a peaceful country- not necessarily his own.

I believe God has programmed the humans that way to continue preservation of their race by continually trying to improve the conditions for survival. But survival to what end?  There must be a bigger goal. As I see the ultimate goal for humans is perhaps to relate to or unite in some way with one another and therefore they need to survive through procreation until that happens. Nationalities, civilizations and culture may be just a stepping stone to the eventual goal of a united humanity. League of Nations, United Nations, WTO – perhaps these are God’s pointer to that end. I do not know for sure as yet. I think I will know when I have lived into the next millennium.

What I know for sure, countries and nationalities have no place in God’s program. He has no preference or soft corners for any particular nation or any geographical area. The entire world shares the calamities or his wrath if you like- earthquakes, draught, floods, typhoons and terrorist attack. In fact He does not appear to have any soft corner at all or to be judge mental of human actions. He seems to have programmed humans to face all odds, to fight and often suffer but eventually win so that human race can survive and continue.

Of course God we are referring could actually be a mad scientist making an experiment or our fore fathers in another world in the universe who have programmed us to behave in the fashion we do. I do not know. But to keep matters simple let us call whoever is him or are them, God.

As you look a little deeper into the developments taking place in the sphere of activities that you call economy you would clearly see God’s (or the mad scientist’s in another world) program unfold. God’s program aims to spread prosperity evenly. I try to follow his way but I have no wealth. I therefore try to spread happiness. God, I must repeat, is not interested in preserving the privileges of a prosperous few. He has worked out a channel to benefit the poor and the weak and therefore eventually all.

As a country or a region grows more prosperous more goods and services are asked for. Therefore there is a need for more workers and merchandise to meet the demand particularly of the basic goods and services. What however, is the interesting situation here is that as prosperity in a region rises the population gradually shrinks because replacement of those died does not take place fully and the family size gets smaller. God probably slows down the procreation activity because life becomes safer in such places and there is much less threat to preservation of human race. 

The smaller workforce as a result, becomes extremely prosperous compared to others but they become too few to fill all the jobs available. As a result wages and prices rise. Naturally goods and workers from other regions rush to fill the void. Prosperous societies shed their low skill menial jobs to foreigners. Immigrants take those jobs- considered outright drudgery, of domestic help, waiters, gardeners, street sweepers, construction workers.

No country can entirely stop goods, jobs and workers from entering an attractive market. If goods are stopped from entering into a country, smuggling takes over the process of exchange. Lowly industrial jobs get transferred to foreign manufacturing units. In recent times you have seen jobs like assembly line work, data entry and computer code writing have been going abroad.   The process extends prosperity to the people in poor regions to be able to repeat the process after a while with other poorer people.

In God’s program, prosperity is something that must spreads to other people. Any attempt to change his program hurts the prosperous society the most. God’s program is a ‘win win’ for all. More prosperous a society- jobs they do are more complex and specialized like consultancy, technology research, education and training. This is essentially what has been always happening but somewhat slowly by our measure of time (about two to three generations). God’s has been there for too many millennia (may be much longer) and therefore time for him is measured in much larger units. You could safely assume that a span of fifty years is only a blink of his eye. So for Him it happens pretty quickly. Also by the God’s time the outside workers assimilate into a society quickly while adding a bit of their culture, and their next generation becomes a part of the milieu.

So then what is the fuss about? Well it is the short sightedness. In the enthusiasm to protect the privileges and prosperity in the short term, societies build walls of protectionism in goods, immigration barriers. All these mean a higher cost to the very people sought to be protected.  The prices rise if inefficient producers are protected and real earnings of people usually fall because wages do not rise as much as the prices of things one needs to buy. This cost that gets diverted to  the own people through imposition of protective trade and immigration barriers may be actually a penal provision built into God’s scheme for those stray from His program.

Till 100 years ago trade and immigration barriers were negligible. Of course the smaller nations were captured by the stronger powers by sheer brute force to colonize countries, create captive markets and destroy local industries there. Wars were fought by the rich countries to dominate markets. God has been enlarging international trade and commerce so that fear of loss of business would reduce armed conflicts.  This has already happened and you can see that wars are few and far between now. But the insecurity of the rich and the privileged few has risen as poorer nations have worked hard to catch up and started competing with them in their home markets with their merchandise and workers. It is also perhaps part of God’s program that last hundred years saw a drastic improvement in speed of travel and communication technology. No one now is too far from anywhere. This is what you call globalization and is the smartest part of His program. 

I can understand it is miserable loosing your job. But I can’t believe you would not get another. I know for sure God’s program is not a “plus here, minus there”  for benefiting one at the cost of the other. It is ‘plus’ everywhere. If your locality (country for you), is losing one kind of jobs, another kind is filling in. The numbers and types of jobs going and coming sometimes may not exactly match in the short run but squares up eventually.

I suppose your problem is, your time frame is different from God’s. I have been thinking what would help. My only problem is I am not aware of national borders and therefore not used to thinking in terms of this country or that.

If the whole world was one country, it could have been easier. There would be no case for protection. There would have been no subsidized agriculture because all farming would go to those places within the country where it was cheaper to produce them and so would manufacturing industries, ITE services. People would move freely from one part of the world to another. There would be no talk of loosing jobs to another place (Bangalored!) because you could go where the jobs were going like one could go from Puerto Rico to New York if jobs moved there.

There would be no emotion charged speeches or apocalyptic stories in press and legislature, of invasion by a huge army of immigrant workers and ‘sweat shop’ companies as all would be citizens of one country. Academics would of course research it and write dry and boring titles like, ‘Structural Adjustment driven by Regional Wage Differentials’. Being part of the same country with Europe and North America, Rwanda, Ethiopia and others like them would receive generous development packages and would be quickly out of poverty.

Well, it could exactly fit Gods program. I have got an idea. Why not remove the national borders!  You think that’s not possible. OK, I am sure you could start by lowering the tall barriers that stop people and merchandise to cross over easily. I know it will work. After all it’s God’s hand. It is difficult for most of us to see it unless you have lived 500 years. But a few could do even with a much shorter life. I knew two of them. One was Adam Smith who saw His ‘invisible hand’. Another was David Ricardo who saw regions (countries for you) not as having or lacking absolute economic advantages- but as each one having a comparative advantage. Well just as He wants. Unfortunately they are no more and you cannot consult them in person. I suggest you look up their writing.

By the way did your son like the gift I brought last Christmas?

Best Wishes.

Yours Truly

Santa

The New York Story

(Written in 2007)

We arrived in New York city on a sultry August afternoon.

I expected It would be a surreal- larger than life, experience in the city we already heard of so much. But it was more like setting foot on a lonely island – far away from home and near and dear ones.

We called, e mailed our friends and relatives back home constantly to cut our loneliness. We mailed about the Manhattan’s most neatly organised street and  anvenue grid,  open air performances at Central Park, Dakota House and the spot where John Lenon wrote is songs, East River Park, Ground Zero etc

I realized I was telling them all that anyone would find in tourist literature.

I must discover new and untold stories of New York that I could tell in few words on e mails. Such stories have a lot of appeal to people like me- lazy enough to write anything longer than a post-it note (or SMS or twits).

I heard Ernest Hemingway, as a young newspaperman in the 1920s, bet his colleagues $10 that he could write a complete story in just six words. He won the cash with "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."  
My favorite is a two-word story Nokia writes on its mobile phone ads- “Connecting People”. Nokia’s story is- our business is connecting people by giving them a mobile phone each - in Himalayan Buddhist Monasteries, African or Indian villages or wherever they are - so that they have a choice to connect to one another across the world. That we earn a profit in billions is only incidental.

We finally got over our loneliness in a few weeks time.

But quest for a story that defines New York stayed in my mind.

New York though , had surprises from day one.

The taxi driver at New York airport was or precisely I thought he was, African American.  I told him we just arrived from India. “Welcome to New York” – he said with a smile.

But he did not speak as I had expected him to like Will Smith or Eddy Murphy. He spoke English rather like I did. He turned out to be from Ghana. An Indian teacher taught him English at school. After graduating in English literature from University in Ghana he came chasing his American dream and thought driving taxi was better than chasing an elusive English teacher’s job in Ghana.  I felt tickled- if news of our arrival in New York was good enough to be reported in press the headline would read- “African Immigrant Welcomes Indian Family to New York”.

In the days that followed-, I met immigrants and Americans of descents ranging from Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, several South American nationalities at stores, my apartment building and taxies. In the number 6 Lexington Avenue subway that I took to work every day- one could overhear people speaking in several different languages or at least several different accents of English. Sitting in the subway compartment- I gave myself a test – guess the ethnicity/ country of origin of every person present. And I would go about- Chinese/ Japanese, Indian/Pakistani/ Sri Lankan/ Bangladeshi, Middle Eastern/Egyptian. Iranian/ Central Asian, Mexican/ South American and so on till my stop came.

‘New York- where the World Meets’, I thought, will make a good story to be told in my e mails.

But is it a new story? Everyone knews- people from everywhere came to New York, United Nations Head quarters have been here for decades. Our Bollywood producers have made tons of money by shooting their films here with such regularity that Brooklyn Bridge and Howrah Bridge seems close to one another; Manhattan sounds like Manoharan (Hindi for one that steals my heart); New Jersey and New Delhi come up in the same breath.

It was the first few weeks and I had not yet got an opportunity to socialize with an American born within the country. All my exchanges with people had been on business- at counters or the doormen in my apartment building etc.- all very polite and helpful but no personal exchanges. I asked a colleague, why are the people in New York so reserved?  "I think they are tense", he said. I wanted to know why and he said thoughtfully, "I think they want to make money". The whole world wants to make money, I laughed- how are they different.

"They want to make more money". So do we, I wondered what he wanted to say. "The point is- in rest of the world- you only dream. Here you actually do", he said with the air of finally giving out the answer to the puzzle. For me the puzzle was not yet solved- they
should be happy, not tense if they make more money.

"The trouble is- when you have made money or more money- your friends or neighbors made still much more and so you are tense again. But do not bother- you will enjoy New York", he dismissed any further searching question from me.

“New York- where Dreams Come True”- I thought, is a real story. But on second thought -has not the story lost its shine somewhat now after the Wall Street meltdown?

After some months- we were planning a trip home. A friend called up and asked if I could bring with me the last six volumes Marx and Engels.  I said instantly- I thought you would look for them in Cuba or North Korea. He explained that New York has one of three publishers of these volumes in English language- other two being in Moscow and London. The Moscow publisher  used to be the least expensive but had  stopped publishing and the New York publisher was selling at lower price among the remaining two. I looked up the website of the publishers and called my friend if he would like to waste $200 on books on what most of the world think is a lost cause? He said he would as he wants to have complete volumes for the library. Out of sheer curiosity- I went the publishers’ office to know while placing the order, who buys these books anyway. I was told hundreds of universities in USA and elsewhere in the world regularly buys them for their research libraries and conducts research work even though far fewer people believe in communism. After all it is a free country, I was informed.

Free country it is. My son Rubu told me that in the East village there is a bar with an eyebrow raising name of KGB Bar (actually  a neighbourhood bar and a literary society I was told) . East village- described as the place of counterculture, protests and riots by wikipedia  is also the place where you could get to hear singers from the farthest corner of Africa, meet struggling artists, musicians, independent film makers from all over the world. Manhattan is dotted with China Town, Korea Town, Little India, Little Italy etc.

‘All Cultures and Beliefs Meet at New York’- I said while thinking if it would make the best New York story.

But would not  it sound a bit like a promotional line for inter faith conference?

It was two years and the real story of New York was still not found- I thought as I was heading home after work. Grand Central station was teeming with people.  An Andean band was playing- with lead on flute- in a corner in the main thoroughfare. Bits of the music sounded like Bihu on buffalo horn ‘Pepa’ in my hone state Assam in North Eastern India. I was told that any one is free to perform at subway stations. I had seen scores of musicians and bands of people of all ages play at Grand Central and other subway stations- jazz,blues, violin solo, Andean music, Christmas carol and instrumental music played by an African musician on an instrument made of a huge bottle gourd shell. Many of the performers are selected by MTA – the owners of subway lines but it is not necessary for anyone to be selected to perform.

The platform of Number 6 train was full of the Bronx crowd waiting for their train and of noise of trains coming and passing by at other platforms. Yet- a familiar sound of drum beat was coming clearly from somewhere nearby. A man - who looked South Asian or could be Caribbean - was completely immersed in playing fast paced beats on his drum of the shape and size of a giant half egg of a dinosaur. A few people were watching him play perhaps out of curiosity but most people paid no attention to him.  He did not seem to care. Clearly he was enjoying what he was doing. In many places- he would be considered a nuisance by the society if not by law. But in this crowded subway platform at New York he created his own little space.

Space!! Eureka! I found the New York story I was chasing all this long.  That New York gives space to everyone including the nameless drummer from another land.

‘New York- Space for Everyone’- I decided- would be my story of New York. I felt lighter in my head as I tried to squeeze in to get a foothold in the Number 6 train. An elderly woman made some room- just standing space, for me in the compartment where every inch was now filled.

Is Economic Progress All about Counting New ‘Commodities’?

(Written in 2009)

It was in three years ago- I realized that the word’ commodity’ had a wider meaning.

I was home in India on holidays after a gap of two years and there was one change visible everywhere. Everyone - however poor had a mobile phone. The barely literate maid asked my wife if she could charge her phone while working in our house. When I had left in 2007- a mobile phone was still a luxury. It  was not given to my school going son then.

I was told- there were 500 million mobile phones (now more than  a billion) in India- that was a phone for less than 2 people in a poor country of more than 1 billion people. It was when someone told me, “Mobile phone is a commodity now,”  - I suddenly became aware that a commodity was anything that is routinely available and bought at prices affordable to all or most people. I came to see ‘commoditization’ in new light, as a process of turning luxury goods into those of mass use.

Till then the word ‘commodity’ had an undertone of contempt appropriate for inferior goods. But it was no longer so. I was too excited by the mobile phone revolution in India. If ‘commodities’ make one’s life better, what could be wrong with them?  Living in US for 3 years- I had seen an average American having many such ‘commodities’ starting with 24 x 7 electricity, running water, kitchen gadgets, washer/dryer, entertainment gadgets, computers, phones- all that gave him comfort and saved his labor. Many of these ‘commodities’ are however still luxuries for an average Indian. It did not take me any time to conclude that in the final count it is ‘commodities’ that makes an American richer than an Indian or US a richer country than India.

Technology has made it possible to mass produce or commoditize what was once a premium or luxury product, each piece exactly same as one another and in a shorter time and  at a lot lower cost. Of the first commoditized products, I learnt one was T-Model car built on conveyor belt assembly line by Ford Motor Car Company. Another was a mass housing project by Arthur Levitt in New York- who borrowed the same assembly line principle to meet the huge housing demand of soldiers returning from Second World War.  In the last two decades- developing countries, particularly China, have taken commoditization to new heights. Clothes, shoes, toys, electronics, mobile phones, home tools, air travel now actually cost much less than 20 years ago when related to income of buyers. Besides the process of turning premium products into commodities has been a continuous process and better ‘commodities’ continuously keep replacing lesser ones. Think of the top premium mobile phone 5 years back. Chances are- it is a ‘commodity’ and placed at the bottom of the range today and available at a fraction the old price or may have been removed altogether.

Then why should not commoditization measure economic progress of a country? It may be a better measure than GDP. GDP is only an account of money spent and does not include any activity not paid for like labor put in by dads and moms at home (when added up- labor of all dads and moms for cooking, cleaning, gardening, child caring is substantial). Commoditization- on the other hand is about real benefits received by people. As a result of massive commoditization- a far larger number of people are better off than before. Therefore, if commoditization increases- people gain and so the nation gain.

I threw my new idea at the dinner table but it did not receive any excited response. My wife said, “Gadgets do no good to anyone”. She sounded like her oft repeated belief, “Money does not bring happiness, success does”. Or may be she thought I was building my case for a new gadget.

A friend was more insightful.  He said that it was an interesting idea and it could even go beyond clothes, shoes, or mobile phones to other things that also added to the quality of life. Democracy- is actually commoditizing of political power down to the reach of masses (he said that mass production can also be called democratization of luxury products). Rule of law and independent courts – is commoditizing the privilege of protection to life and property otherwise available only to ruling elites. Similarly low cost or free education and health care services for all is commoditization of what only rich could buy. All these relate to benefits to people and have a value and therefore should have a place the measure of commoditization.

How about having a "Commoditization Index"  for each country to reduce over emphasis on GDP measure?