On the Denial of U.S.-Mexico Firearms Trade (with Rob Muggah)

Online gun enthusiast message boards elaborate two recurring themes related to U.S.-Mexico firearms traffic. First is a palpable disdain for Mexican requests to curb weapons flows into the country, such as the studiously ignored formal request from the Mexican Congress on 9 January to create a border states gun registry. Responses to such requests range from the sardonic (“How about Mexico creates a registry of its citizens and tells us who isn’t at home?”) to the churlish (“F*** Mexico”) to the indignant (“How dare they infringe my God-given rights!”) to the genocidal (“Let them all kill each other”).

Second is a suggestion that Mexico’s government, unable to staunch the rising tide of cartel violence, will shortly collapse. After all, as many as 120,000 homicides have taken place in Mexico since the beginning of then-President Felipe Calderón’s drug war in 2006, with the proportion committed by firearm rising from 20 to 50 per cent over the last 15 years. Having a failed state just south of the border will, some argue, require Americans to defend themselves by force of arms. (Yet at 15 guns per 100 people, Mexico’s guns are still about six times less prevalent than in the United States.)

Some gun advocates seem to acknowledge the contradiction between blaming Mexico for the coming anarchy, and brazen indifference to firearms traffic enabling cartels to operate in the first place. These deny that the traffic is noteworthy.  The NRA and Fox News both attacked the estimate that 90% of traceable guns seized in Mexico came from the United States, claiming that the subset of traceable guns is bound to be skewed toward U.S. provenance – though the 17% number they substituted ridiculously assumed that no untraced guns were US-sold.  The Right asserts that guns shouldn’t flow north to south because Central America is “awash” in cheap guns from civil wars of the ’80s and ’90s.  This is not wrong because the U.S. was the single largest supplier of arms to Central American counter-revolutions (which it was).  It’s wrong because it’s a highly stylized argument that confuses the Republican view of what they want to happen with empirical observation.

There’s no doubt arms flow from the U.S. to Mexico.  Econometric studies (1, 2) have shown unequivocally that the U.S. Assault Weapons Ban reduced homicide rates across the border in Mexico.  Moreover, there’s a price gradient reported within Mexico: the farther from the U.S. border you are, the more an AK-47 costs.  Most obviously, in 2009 alone, U.S. and Mexican authorities seized roughly 37,000 U.S.-sold firearms.  But what proportion of the total traffic does this represent? Due to the intentional lack of information on gun sales in the U.S., no one seems to know. Our team at University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute and Brazil’s Igarapé Institute sought to estimate this volume econometrically in a recent study. We employed data from the Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to create a demand curve, predicting the number of Federal Firearms Licenses to retail (FFLs) as a function of distance from the border.

We estimate that around 2.2% of U.S.-sold guns go south of the border – a proportion that has steadily risen since the early 1990s. This implies an annual value of roughly $127 million, and an annual volume of 252,000 firearms.  It also implies that U.S. and Mexican authorities are seizing just 15% of the total traffic. Stunningly, some 47% of U.S. gun shops depend economically on demand from the U.S.-Mexico trade. They are, wittingly or no, merchants of death.

The U.S. can no longer ask Mexico and other Latin American countries to pay the price for its lax gun regulations. And while recent bills outlawing firearms trafficking and “straw purchasing” are a step in the right direction, we need to get smarter.  Background checks should be able not just to verify a clean record, but to look for straw purchaser profiles. ATF should be allowed to keep disaggregated data on FFLs to alert them to dubious transactions. Cash sales of firearms should be prohibited in border states. And the ATF should assist Mexican authorities not just with the adoption of their e-Trace tool for arms tracing (long-delayed, ostensibly due to the process of translating it into Spanish), but also building their own registry of seized weapons.

Rights come with responsibilities. U.S. gun owners and the NRA would gain some badly needed credibility if they acknowledged that simple fact.

On the reaction to the Newtown, CT shootings

I’m increasingly disturbed by how quickly the liberal intelligentsia seems to be adopting the now-faddish, counter-current claims that “it’s not about gun control, it’s about <the culture of gun worship> <the media’s focus on the perpetrator instead of the victims> <the lack of investment in public health, and mental public health in particular>, etc, etc.”

Yes, America has a deeply ingrained cultural obsession with the gun that is bound up in national mythologies and the construction of national identities.  The fact that the democratic process itself does not seem to quell the American fear of tyranny should be the basis of a national dialog; it is almost certainly behind not only the 2^nd amendment fervor, but also our collective reluctance to ratify the most reasonable and inoffensive international treaties (like the one on disabilities that was modeled on our own ADA, and which just failed to pass the House). But Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras don’t share our national mythologies, and their societies suffer from the fallout of lax gun laws in the US to a much greater extent than ours does.

Yes, the media steeps us in the details of the perpetrators’ lives and hypothetical motives, mindsets, and psychological torments, turning a ‘nobody’ into a posthumous ‘somebody.’ And yes, the persistent cuts to public health budgets have predictably disastrous results for those with mental illness.  But the magnitude of the negative spillover associated with an overly-deluded, underserved mentally ill population is not set in stone.  Not every poor deranged soul need end 20+ other lives in his tortured death throes.

My fear is that these sorts of “deeper-than-thou” arguments will ultimately sap the gun control effort when it just might have a tiny but tangible shot of getting something done for the first time since the assault rifle ban of 1994.  My misgiving is not due to a conviction that these factors don’t have a place in the discussion, but to the observation that those advocating for them actively sideline the tangible policy option of gun control in favor of amorphous ‘societal conversations’ that, at best, will take a long time to produce cultural change and, at worst, will serve only dissipate the momentum behind reasonable reform.

Dynamic Duo: Budget Austerity & Bigotry

Anti-US protests continue to spread across the Muslim world, and Mitt Romney continues his campaign-long series of tacks to the right, remaining steadfast in his misleading condemnation of the Obama administration’s “sympathizing” with Egyptian embassy attackers.  Steve Klein, the promoter of the film that sparked the unrest, small-town insurance salesman, and founder of the right-wing (some say hate-mongering) group Courageous Christians United, is just the sort of “Republican base” voter that Mitt Romney is trying so desperately to win over.  And while some would contend that fiscal and social conservatives have an uneasy marriage in the GOP, I’m more interested here specifically in what budget austerity and bigotry might have to do with one another.  More than you might imagine, I would argue.

Over the course of the two parties’ national conventions, I have found myself in a number of conversations with fellow democrats who complain about two ostensibly irreconcilable characteristics of the Right.  On the one hand, it’s clear that Republicans, Libertarians, and Tea-Partiers share an ever-shrinking Big Tent, increasingly inhospitable towards a proliferating number of scapegoat groups, both foreign and domestic, including gays, poor Blacks, Hispanics, women, Muslims (terrorists!), public transit-goers (get a car!), Labor, the Northeast generally (Wall Street and, sporadically, New Hampshire excepted), France (wusses), China (currency manipulator!), and Russia (reprise!).  The result looks like a party of white males, increasingly out of sync with the modern world, and clinging to a kind of minority Apartheid rule through voter ID laws (ahem… South Carolina) and redistricting schemes (looking at you, Texas).

On the other hand, the GOP polls well in states like Alaska, Arizona, and Mississippi, where federal government spending outstrips tax dollars collected – despite party rhetoric castigating government for its profligacy and indebtedness.  By contrast, states like New York, Connecticut, Illinois, and California are solidly Democratic, and receive less than they contribute to the federal coffers in tax dollars.  On average, “Red States” receive more than 30 cents more per tax dollar from the feds than “Blue States.”  The phrase “We built it!” doesn’t accurately reflect, say, Alabama’s fiscal contribution to a federal highway, bridge or rail system; Alabamans can credibly claim to have paid for around 49% of it.

Imagine a scenario in which the North (and the West Coast for good measure) reneged, 150 years later, on its Civil War-era decision to insist on a union, and unilaterally kicked out all Red states.  The new Blue State Union (BSU) is more densely urbanized (and therefore more productive and energy efficient) than the Red State Confederacy (RSC), more supportive of public goods and services, hosts the lion’s share of the former nation’s top universities, and far outstrips the RSC in technology patents in innovation clusters like Silicon Valley and Route 128.  Under current spending patterns, the BSU would run a budget surplus, while the RSC, for all its austerity-loving budget hawks, would run a massive deficit.

So here’s the conundrum: if only Blue states have this powerful economic incentive to be exclusionary and kick out the Reds, why then is it the Red states where we witness the rise of out-group hostility?  While the answers to this question are probably as numerous as they are complex, the most powerful answer to my mind is an economic one.  When investment grows the size of the total economic pie, people are more willing to spend their own resources on it, knowing their own piece of it will grow, too.  Modern, urban, knowledge-based economies are the paragons of this scenario because their production growth increases with investment and depends to a large extent on public goods – e.g., spatial proximity that reduces transactions costs in intermediate goods, “thick” labor markets of the well-educated allowing less costly private sector scale-ups, and knowledge spillovers that produce greater innovation.

When investment doesn’t grow the collective pie as much, though (as in rural areas and sprawling suburbia), people are more likely to attempt to enlarge their allocations by redistributing the pie, taking pieces from others.  It might seem difficult to square the all-American virtue of self-sufficiency with the fact of taking more from society than you contribute to it.  But if you redraw the boundaries of your “society” by (just to take an example out of the hat) preventing tax-paying Mexican workers from becoming citizens, collecting social security, and getting health care, then what was manifestly an intentional social injustice starts to look – if you squint at it just right – like a unintentional trade surplus vis-à-vis Mexico.

So it shouldn’t be surprising to note that economies forced to undergo austerity measures, shrinking the size of the collective economic pies, experience rises in xenophobia, bigotry, and ethnic nationalism.  The Nazi party arose in a period of forced austerity (and resultant hyperinflation caused by the flight of gold for reparations) that wiped out German purchasing power, and spread during the consequent period of economic stagnation.  More recently, austerity measures in Greece have coincided with the rise of that country’s right-wing “Golden Dawn” party and an uptick in hate crimes against immigrants.  Far-right nationalist parties in EU countries as diverse as France, Spain, and the Netherlands have gained in popularity as fears of austerity measures have risen.

Golden Dawn supporters in Greece.

The difference in the case of the GOP is that its own politicians actually advocate the same “pro-growth” austerity measures that will so damage the life chances of their own constituents.  (The military is, of course, exempted, as it is needed to deal with the ever-expanding list of enemies.)  The GOP brand of economics, far more ideology than empirically-based social science, encourages us to “starve the cold” of stagnation – but when that fails, blame some shirker or some “enemy of freedom” somewhere.  And scapegoating is a slippery slope, inclined towards intolerance.

GOLD! (and other Haitian liabilities)

Haitian road worker near Trou-du-Nord

So for those who don’t keep up with the news on Haiti, gold and copper have been found in promising sample quantities following test drilling in the north.  Estimates for the total recoverable value of the find range up to $20B.  Ironically, this sum is almost identical to the inflation-adjusted $21B that Haiti’s former president and international gadfly, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, demanded from France in 2003 as reparations for a 19th-century debt imposed upon the Haitian government for having stolen French property, including themselves, as they had been slaves.   (Many speculate that Aristide’s importunate demand may have piqued the international community into supporting the “revolt” that toppled the government early the following year.)

Responses to the find have ranged from the naively enthusiastic (“[h]ere’s praying this recent find of precious metals will be the long-awaited windfall the country needs to finally get on its feet”) to the skepticism underpinned by the phenomenon that is the namesake of this blog.  Falling into the latter category is the well-researched AP news story which, of necessity, quotes UCLA’s Michael Ross (“The great irony of mineral wealth is that those countries that most desperately need infusions of mineral revenue — low-income countries with weak governments — are also least likely to manage these resources wisely”), and dwells quite a lot on the question of corruption in the Haitian government and how it might affect the likelihood of environmental disasters and the benefit ordinary Haitians will see from the mining boom.  To its credit, the AP story even makes allusion to the gold trinkets that the native Tainos (called Arawaks in the article) wore when the Spanish arrived, and the brutal genocide brought about largely as a result of forced labor in gold mines.

Strikingly, a Canadian mineral exploration firm was able to buy on the cheap all the shares in the Haitian mining company with the appropriate permits in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.  The AP article cites an almost unbelievably bald statement by the company’s president:

“Investors want to get in at the bottom,” said Dan Hachey, president of Majescor Resources, the Canadian company, “and I figured after that earthquake, Haiti was as low as it could get.”

The media emphasis has been on the economic improvements that Haitians may see, or even have already seen, in terms of construction jobs and new roads – even though many of these “new roads” presumably lead only to remote mountains, soon to be turned into remote, heavy metal-contaminated lakes upstream of less-remote tailings dams.  And though that may sound cynical, the lack of regulatory environmental protections (or even the officials and agencies to enforce them) in Haiti is worrisome.  Dan Hachey believes that the earthquake will have the effect of tightening regulatory corporate oversight and improving government accountability, because of the “$10B” in aid that the international community has pledged to the country for recovery efforts.  That argument might hold if (a) the $10B in aid were actually going to the government of Haiti in the first place, and (b) the international community had ever cared about the Haitian government’s accountability (at least in the sense of being accountable to its own citizens).

On the first point, see this.  Basically, the World Bank is the arbiter of how, and on what projects, those monies get spent.  The disbursements are made through a majority-foreign Commission Intérimaire pour la Reconstruction d’Haïti.  The country that came to be known in the 1990s as “the Republic of NGOs” is now “the Republic of NGOs and Other Republics,” its sovereignty once more trampled beneath the heavy hooves of foreign interests.  This time, though, the international community can feel better about itself for having done so: after all, it was a natural disaster (bad luck!), and it crippled the (already weak/ corrupt/ inept) government.  It’s just lucky Haiti could count on us!

On the second point, the “international community” has always cared far more about having a Haitian government that was favorable to ownership of Haitian property by foreign corporations, low or no corporate taxes and import tariffs, and low minimum wages, than about accountability to the people of Haiti.  These were the motivating factors behind the blatantly racist US occupation of 1915-1934 (during which time the 1918 law rescinding the ban on foreign property ownership was passed by way of a “plebiscite”), and they were the same in the decades of US support for the Duvaliers, père and fils.  How else to explain that regular and substantial embezzlement of state funds that occurred under both regimes and with the knowledge of the international community, went completely without remonstrance.  For instance, of a 1981 IMF disbursement of $22M, $20M was withdrawn for the personal use of “Baby Doc.”  A US Department of Commerce report once indicated that fully 63% of Haitian government revenues were misappropriated each year, and yet the US continued to support Baby Doc right up to the point of facilitating his sumptuous 1986 exile in the south of France.

The same motivations underpinned the US’s 1994 reinstatement of Aristide on the conditions of government retrenchment, “flexible fuel pricing,” and overall “structural adjustment” that, in combination with domestic American agricultural subsidies, so predictably and entirely devastated Haiti’s rice agriculture, drove up consumer inflation, and deepened the already-grave poverty in the country.  Aristide eventually proved too troublesome, however, refusing to budge on the World Bank’s privatization scheme for nationally-owned companies, and later embarrassing France with his call for reparations, and so was dismissed.  After a 7-year exile, he is now finally back in his country, but too late to have run for office in 2010.  In his place is a man called a “stealth Duvalierist,” accused by the Left of supporting the Doc-era military and the  reactionary groups that carried out the 1991 coup and cracked down so brutally on Aristide supporters and the populace at large, and obviously favorable to the idea of inviting foreign corporations to “help” in the wake of the earthquake.

So is the exploitation of Haiti’s new found gold by foreign corporations going to change things in Haiti for the better?  Here’s praying.

(Another) Farewell to Alice Amsden

Based on my prior remembrance of Alice Amsden, an MIT grad student asked me to write something to be read at her departmental memorial service.  Since that took place yesterday, I decided it was safe to post what I wrote here for anyone who might be interested.  Please overlook the self-plagiarism in the last paragraph.

I was recently putting together an article on economic agendas in transitional justice, and came across a line in one of the many manuscripts that Alice churned out faster than publishers could keep up with:

 Peace requires rethinking “policy rights,” or how much freedom countries should enjoy over their policy choices for economic development. The greater their policy rights – outside a shared core of global values – the stronger the developmental state and the greater the chance for peace.[1]

This, essentially, was the crux of my 15,000-word article, which rambled from the French Revolution through the wilds of cooperative game theory.  This was it: distilled, strikingly lacking in any academic references, unapologetically straightforward.  Alice always expressed herself in a manner that was direct, matter-of-fact, sometimes whimsically alliterative, and yet disarmingly brash.  Like all great economists, she had a genius for parsimony, and ruthlessly stripped out unnecessaries to arrive at what she thought mattered.  (She would likely have balked at the four adverbs I just used.)  But more than that, she had amazing courage.  Courage to throw out cherished theories when they didn’t fit facts.  Courage to pull the pants down around the ankles of mainstream Economics; to discredit its claims to sterile, technocratic knowledge and expose it as a fundamentally unjust system of values that real people choose to endorse and that real people die from.  Courage to ask uncomfortable questions of people – students, colleagues, foreign ministers – and not let them off the hook when they started to squirm.

It’s Alice’s courage to call a duck a duck I try to emulate when considering what project to tackle next.  I will sometimes even imagine myself sitting on Alice’s office couch, trying to explain to her why some phenomenon or other is interesting, unexpected, important.  I recreate her dismissive incredulity at ideas that miss the mark, have her ask impatiently: “What does that have to do with jobs?”, “Who cares?”, “How does that affect the capital-labor ratio in any way?”  And I recreate her slyly suggestive “ah-hah…,” accompanied by a an upward-pointing index finger and a raise of the eyebrows, when I feel I’ve struck on something I should follow up.

Her seeming disregard for etiquette ruffled feathers, no doubt.  An ethnic Taiwanese classmate of mine, upon meeting her advisor, Professor Amsden, for the first time, was shocked when she entered the office and was immediately asked not to speak while Alice tried to judge her ethnic origin from her facial physiognomy.  Alice had prickly relations with IDG, and wound up recusing herself from the group altogether.  She was on my Doctoral Committee, and demanded that I bring “ginger cookies, and lots of ‘em” to my oral exam.  I did, and she ate them, but we wound up in a heated argument, anyway.  Whenever I said something she didn’t like, she would get up from the table and pace in long strides around the room while waving her arms as though trying to swat annoying flies buzzing near her ears.  Then she passed me.

I have missed her.

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[1] Alice Amsden, A Farewell to Theory: How Developing Countries Learn from Each Other, Cambridge, MA., p. 1.

Abyei, Kony 2012, & America’s Devil

I have really made an effort not to write about the Kony 2012 campaign.  Mostly this is because others have written it to death – especially the debate between the starry-eyed activists and the cynical experts.  There were those who celebrated the campaign’s tech-savvy ability to raise awareness of “the issue.”  And of course, there were those scholarly voices who coldly pointed out those pesky facts – that Joseph Kony left Northern Uganda in 2006, that the region has been in a process of reconstruction and recovery for the past six years, that the child soldiery statistics alluded to in the campaign’s film were cumulative totals of the LRA’s history, that the LRA inflicts a far smaller human toll than many other non-“brand name” militias in the region – that the campaign seemed to gloss over so blithely.  Some respectable voices, such as Chris Blattman’s, generously pointed out that, regardless of the fact-check score card, Invisible Children seems to do good work in country.  But when the advocacy group’s co-founder, Jason Russell, enrobed the whole shoot-and-match in seven layers of delicious irony even as he maniacally disrobed himself just a couple of miles from here, the debate sank to the level of tabloid fodder and I fully divested.

So why bring it up at all, now?  There have been reports today of forced (and uncoerced) recruitment of men and boys into an armed group presumed to be the Sudan People’s Liberation Army – and concomitantly displacing 100,000 more – in the contested Abyei region of the newly created national frontier between Sudan and South Sudan.  The development threatens to bring all-out war to the world’s newest nation-state – one whose people have experienced numerous complex and overlapping conflicts over the last half century.  And while this is happening literally hundreds of miles from Northern Uganda, it is an example of the same type of violence – roving bandit militias that use local populations against themselves to clear or claim territory – that has come to characterize armed conflict in the entire East-Central Africa region.

There are persistent social and economic dynamics at work in the region, including, but certainly not limited to, grinding poverty and widespread lack of employment, underdeveloped communications infrastructure, oil dependency and soaring oil prices, and a weakened social fabric.  The most insightful pundits have already made the point: the Kony 2012 campaign focuses with laser precision on the vilification of a single man, while inexplicably ignoring the structural causes of violent conflict in East-Central Africa.  The campaign places Kony’s stylized image alongside those Adolf Hitler and Osama bin-Laden, both of whom became personifications of unalloyed evil in the American popular consciousness, both of whom were brought low by American military might in the end.  But Kony, like Hitler and bin Laden, is a product of his environment, and the Kony 2012 campaign succeeds in obfuscating reality and entrenching the American myth of the Devil Without.  If you think that evoking the Devil incarnate is hyperbolic, read this.  Russell himself is a passionate Christian who has spoken about his faith at a university founded by Evangelical Jerry Fallwell – and during his meltdown rant, accused a passerby of being the Devil.  Indeed, one of the reasons that the Kony 2012 campaign resonated so deeply may have been the very lack of a national scapegoat in the wake of bin Laden’s killing, in the context of a protracted economic crisis, the US’ inextricable engagement in the broader Middle East and increasingly North and sub-Saharan Africa, the loss of Mexico as a Spring Break destination to the cartels, etc, etc.

We have the sense that the world is becoming less hospitable to us, and why shouldn’t it just be pinned on this dude we’ve heard has massed an army of 30,000 child soldiers and slouches toward Bethlehem?  Because responsible engagement in the region is harder than arresting one man.  It may even require some introspection.

Farewell to Alice Amsden

It saddens me to report that Alice Amsden – brilliant ‘heterodox’ development economist, Barton L. Weller Professor of Political Economics at MIT, and all-around belligerent battleaxe – has passed away.

Alice studied under Hla Myint and Arthur W. Lewis during her PhD at LSE, and was one of the rare famous, female economists of her day.  She was noted particularly for debunking the neoliberal myth of market-driven industrialization in Asia, building an expansive argument for the important role of robust state interventionism in industrialization across her many seminal books (including Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (1989), The Market Meets Its Match: Restructuring the Economies of Eastern Europe (1994), The Rise of “The Rest”: Challenges to the West From Late-Industrializing Economies (2001), and Escape from Empire: The Developing World’s Journey through Heaven and Hell (2007)).

Alice was lionized by the political Left, but remained prickly towards it.  She contended that Dependency  and ‘World Systems’ theories could not account for the rapid rise of previously poor countries.  Instead, she argued that the developing world was held in check as much by Western economic dogma as by Western institutions.  Indeed, for Alice, industrialization – and not what she deemed namby-pamby grassroots development, like community-scale literacy, housing or water projects – was the only serious way to make massive inroads into world poverty.  She recently asked me to look over a book in progress, which she had titled From Blood Hounds to Bleeding Hearts: The Power Shift in Developing Countries.  The “blood hounds” are the industrialists who actually create jobs where there are none; the “bleeding hearts” are those feckless development workers who “minister to the poor.”  She was a strident advocate for the developing world in the WTO.  She harbored a deep resentment toward Paul Volcker for failing, as Secretary of the US Treasury, to disclose the impending interest rate hikes of the early 1980s to developing countries struggling under dollar-denominated debt – and she challenged him personally on this score.  Then she partially forgave him when he admitted that Keynes was his all-time favorite economist.

Alice was perhaps the most irascible, least politic person I have ever met.  I recall one PhD admissions committee meeting in which she became fed up with a colleague’s recommendations and demanded, “Haven’t you passed mandatory retirement age, already?”  No one smiled openly, but everyone must have been thinking that she was no Spring chicken, herself.  She was on my Doctoral Committee, and demanded that I bring “ginger cookies, and lots of ‘em” to my oral exam.  I did, and she ate them, but we wound up in a heated argument, anyway.  Then she passed me.

Her intellectual legacy will certainly live on.