Posts Tagged ‘commerce’
“One bullion cube… one Concord grape… one Philly cheese-steak… and a jar of garlic pickles! No one will want to kiss me after these, eh, Smithers?”*…
Kunwar Khuldune Shahid explains how immigration patterns and global politics — plus a bit of serendipity — intertwined to make Philadelphia’s iconic sandwich a hit in a 13-million-resident Pakistani megalopolis…
… [Chef Mazhar] Hussain has worked at some of the most high-profile restaurants in Lahore — Monal, Tuscany Courtyard, Chaayé Khana and Café Aylanto, among others — covering a wide range of cuisines. His experience at Philly’s Steak Sandwich, though, has been unique. It’s a smaller restaurant than those, he says, and the guests come from all walks of life. The one thing that connects them: “The steak sandwich is extremely popular with everyone.”
Philly’s Steak Sandwich sits on a small highway apart from Johar Town’s main food centers, atop a hair salon. The shop fights for customers with a biryani restaurant across the street and buzzes all evening with motorbikes and cars jammed into the cramped parking spaces. The cheesesteak is especially popular among nearby students, who can enjoy it for PKR 579, or a little over two bucks.
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Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city and the capital of the historic Punjab region, is considered the country’s food hub (although citizens of Karachi loudly dispute that claim). Its location at the crossroads of the many empires to have ruled over the Indian subcontinent, from the Mughals to the British, has added multicultural layers to Lahori heritage and culture. This is reflected in the city’s food, which blends Persian and Afghan flavors, a combination we now deem synonymous with the cuisine of North India — which Lahore was an integral part of before the 1947 partition created what is today called Pakistan, in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent.
That Indic syncretism, which Lahore has oozed with for centuries, is today introducing a new cuisine to the city’s taste buds: Philadelphian. But while Philly’s Steak Sandwich might be the first to put our city’s renowned sandwich on local billboards, Lahore’s love-in with the cheesesteak is, in fact, decades old…
More fission than fusion: “The Amazing Story of How Philly Cheesesteaks Became Huge in Lahore, Pakistan,” from @khuldune in @PhiladelphiaMag.
* “Montgomery Burns,” in The Simpsons
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As we muse on migration, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that the St. Lawrence Seaway opened. A system of locks, canals, and channels in Canada and the United States, it permits oceangoing vessels to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes of North America– as far inland as Duluth, Minnesota, at the western end of Lake Superior. The Seaway handles 40–50 million tons of cargo annually, about 50% of of which travels to and from international ports in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood”*…
… so the quality of those thoughts matters– as does their diversity. Ha-Joon Chang surveys the monoculture of current economic thinking, explains why that’s problematic, and proposes a remedy…
… Up to the 1970s, economics was populated by a diverse range of ‘schools’ containing different visions and research methods – classical, Marxist, neoclassical, Keynesian, developmentalist, Austrian, Schumpeterian, institutionalist, and behaviouralist, to name only the most significant. These schools of economics – or different approaches to economics – had (and still have) distinct visions in the sense that they had conflicting moral values and political positions, while understanding the way the economy works in divergent ways. I explain the competing methods of economists in my book Economics: The User’s Guide (2014), in a chapter called ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom – How to “Do” Economics’.
Not only did the different methods coexist but they interacted with each other. Sometimes, the competing schools of economics clashed in a ‘death match’ – the Austrians vs the Marxists in the 1920s and ’30s, or the Keynesians vs the neoclassicals in the 1960s and ’70s. At other times, the interactions were more benign. Through debates and policy experiments tried by different governments around the world, each school was forced to hone its arguments. Different schools borrowed ideas from each other (often without proper acknowledgement). Some economists even tried the fusion of different theories – for example, some economists fused the Keynesian and the Marxist theories and created ‘post-Keynesian’ economics.
Economics until the 1970s was, then, rather like the British food scene today: many different cuisines, each with different strengths and weaknesses, competing for attention; all of them proud of their traditions but obliged to learn from each other; with lots of deliberate and unintentional fusion happening.
Since the 1980s, however, economics has become the British food scene before the 1990s. One tradition – neoclassical economics – is the only item on the menu. Like all other schools, it has its strengths; it also has serious limitations… neoclassical economics is today so dominant in most countries (Japan and Brazil, and, to a lesser extent, Italy and Turkey are exceptions) that the term ‘economics’ has – for many – become synonymous with ‘neoclassical economics’. This intellectual ‘monocropping’ has narrowed the intellectual gene pool of the subject. Few neoclassical economists (that is, the vast majority of economists today) even acknowledge the existence, never mind the intellectual merits, of other schools. Those who do, assert the other varieties to be inferior. Some ideas, like those of the Marxist school, they will argue, are ‘not even economics’. It’s claimed that the few useful insights these other schools once possessed – say, for instance, the Schumpeterian school’s idea of innovation, or the idea of limited human rationality from the behaviouralist school – have already been incorporated into the ‘mainstream’ of economics, that is, neoclassical economics. They fail to see that these incorporations are mere ‘bolt-ons’, like the baked potato beside a Pizzaland pizza, rather than genuine fusions – like Peruvian cuisine, with Inca, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese influences, or the dishes by the Korean American chef David Chang (no relation), with American, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Mexican influences…
The problem… is the almost total dominance of one school, which has limited the scope of economics and created theoretical biases and blindspots. In the same way in which the country’s refusal to accept diverse culinary traditions made Britain before the 1990s a place with a boring and unhealthy diet, the dominance of economics by one school has made economics limited in its coverage and narrow in its ethical foundation…
Economics… influences who we are by affecting the way the economy develops and thus the way we live and work, which in turn shapes us… economics influences the kind of society we have. First, by shaping individuals differently, varying economic theories make societies of contrasting types. Thus, an economic theory that encourages industrialisation will lead to a society with more forces pushing for more egalitarian policies, as explained above. For another example, an economic theory that believes humans to be (almost) exclusively driven by self-interest will create a society where cooperation is more difficult. Second, different economic theories have different views on where the boundary of the ‘economic sphere’ should lie. So, if an economic theory recommends privatisation of what many consider to be essential services – healthcare, education, water, public transport, electricity and housing, for example – it is recommending that the market logic of ‘one-dollar-one-vote’ should be expanded against the democratic logic of ‘one-person-one-vote.’ Finally, economic theories represent contrasting impacts on economic variables, such as inequality (of income or wealth) or economic rights (labour vs capital, consumer vs producer). Differences in these variables, in turn, influence how much conflict exists in society: greater income inequality or fewer labour rights generate not just more clashes between the powerful and those under them but also more conflicts among the less privileged, as they fight over the dwindling piece of pie available to them.
Understood like this, economics affects us in many more fundamental ways than when it is narrowly defined – income, jobs and pensions. That is why it is vital that every citizen needs to learn at least some economics. If we are to reform the economy for the benefit of the majority, make our democracy more effective, and make the world a better place to live for us and for the coming generations, we must ensure some basic economic literacy…
Economics is the language of power and affects us all. What can we do to improve its impoverished menu of ideas? The case for economic literacy: “The Empty Basket,” in @aeonmag. Eminently worth reading in full.
* John Maynard Keynes
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As we go to school, we might spare a thought for a candidate for study, David Ricardo; he died on this date in 1823. A political economist, he developed a labor theory of value in his seminal Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, published in 1817; he was instrumental in the development of theories of rent, wages, and profits; and at a time of mercantilist sentiment, he introduced the theory of competitive advance and advocated free trade. Indeed, most economists rank Ricardo as the second most influential economic thinker working before the 20th century, after Adam Smith.
“You are where you are today because you stand on somebody’s shoulders”*…
Leon Prieto and Simone Phipps, two management professors who are husband and wife and and the co-authors of African American Management History, have been working to fill in the gaps in business history left by the omission of Black business stories. The pair argue that the ideas supported by African American managers during the first few decades of the 20th century, a relative golden age for Black business, hold lessons that are relevant in this century– perhaps especially the example of Charles Clinton Spaulding, who led North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest African American life insurance company of the times, for 50 years until his death in 1952…
Several years ago, reading a book about Black business history, and then checking the bibliography for original sources, Prieto discovered a kind of manifesto Spaulding had written in 1927 for the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest Black newspaper of the era, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers. Under the headline “The Administration of Big Business,” Spaulding shared his views on running a major firm. To his mind, the eight fundamentals of operations that demanded a leader’s attention were: cooperating and teamwork; authority and responsibility; division of labor; adequate manpower; adequate capital; feasibility analysis; advertising budget; and conflict resolution.
His article, the scholars note, was published 20 years before similar theories about the functions of management by Henri Fayol, a French theorist and textbook mainstay, were translated for American readers. Despite the overlap in the two men’s thinking, only Fayol has been awarded institutional recognition. (The podcast Talking About Organizations, which invited Prieto and Phipps to be guests on the show last year, has transcribed Spaulding’s article in full, here.)
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In the writings and speeches in Spaulding’s archives, housed at Duke University, Phipps and Prieto discovered an unrelenting call for cooperation and consensus-building within organizations, and an emphasis on the symbiotic relationship between a company and the world outside its doors.
Spaulding’s devotion to a collective style of working and to corporate social responsibility was not an isolated case of the era. Nor did it materialize strictly as a response to the times, the pair assert. Rather, they hypothesize that the cooperative model that was popular among Black businesses then—and which infused the way free-market enterprises operated in the Black Wall Streets of Durham and other American cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma—grew out of a much older African philosophy called Ubuntu, a Nguni Bantu word meaning humanity, derived from an idiom that’s sometimes translated as “I am because we are” or “a person is a person through other persons.” Ubuntu as a world view that stresses our interconnectedness was popularized globally in the 1960s, primarily by Desmond Tutu, the South African archbishop emeritus and Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights activist.
The sense that ubuntu defines our human experience is common in several African cultures, Prieto says, and manifests in a range of cooperative financial models that flourish across the African diaspora. (For example, he had grown up contributing to sou sou, or a savings club, he tells his students in lectures, and it was a sou sou that allowed him to purchase the plane ticket that brought him the US.) It may not have been called ubuntu, but that moral code survived as a shared value among Africans enslaved in the US, Prieto and Phipps say…
Stories from which we can learn: “The history of Black management reveals an overlooked form of capitalism,” from @qz.
* “You are where you are today because you stand on somebody’s shoulders. And wherever you are heading, you cannot get there by yourself. If you stand on the shoulders of others, you have a reciprocal responsibility to live your life so that others may stand on your shoulders. It’s the quid pro quo of life. We exist temporarily through what we take, but we live forever through what we give.” – Vernon Jordan
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As we rethink the rules, we might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that Dr. Carter G. Woodson, a noted, historian, journalist, author and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, began “Negro History Week”– the forerunner to Black History Month.
“I like coffee because it gives me the illusion that I might be awake”*…
It’s Monday morning, an occasion to contemplate the favored fuel of the workday. Here, a late 18th century treatise..
How did coffee become so popular in the Middle East, turning the Yemeni port city of Mokha into a global marketplace of beans for nearly three centuries? Benjamin Moseley, eighteenth-century physician and early anti-vaxxer, offers an origin story for coffee culture in the expanded fifth edition of his Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effects of Coffee (1792). Noting that the account is a “ludicrous tale”, he nevertheless reproduces it in full. One night a Yemeni goat herder found his flock restless. They would not sleep, but “jumped and frisked about as if they had been infatuated”. The herder summons a religious official from the local mosque, who notices that the goats had foraged on “shrubs and berries [that] had always been considered among the wild and useless productions of the earth”. Intrigued, the holy man goes home and steeps himself a cup, which he “supped off hot”. Soon he too “began to dance and frisk about as the goats had done”. After the jitters wane, the man’s thoughts turn back to God, and he realizes that this concoction would “be an excellent thing to keep the Dervishes awake, when their duty obliged them to pray after dinner”. The experiment was an “utmost success” and soon the drink spread through every nearby nation and “among all the religious of the East.”
Moseley was the eighteenth-century precursor to today’s third-wave connoisseur. He had strong opinions on roasting that might still hold water — “the closer it is confined at the time of roasting, and till used, the better will its volatile pungency, flavour, and virtues, be preserved” — and high standards of taste: following François Bernier, he relates that only two people in 1650s Cairo were capable of making a proper brew. As a practicing physician, Moseley’s interest in coffee was mostly medical and, although these debates still continue, he had little time for the uncaffeinated. In a terribly-aged analogy, he compares coffee alarmists to those who raise “declamations against mercury” and “nonsense against tobacco” — equally bunk. Some of the proclaimed benefits of coffee are familiar. It combats “lethargy, catarrh, and all disorders of the head”. It “accelerates the process of digestion”, affects “the gastric powers”, and “diffuses a genial warmth that cherishes the animal spirits, and takes away the listlessness and languor”. It also helps hangovers: that “disorderly condition brought on by drinking bad fermented liquors, and new rum, to excess”. Other benefits are perhaps less well-known today. If bedridden with “bloody flux” or dysentery, drink four cups of hot coffee and cover yourself with heavy bed clothes — you will soon be cured through perspiration; for messengers commuting long distances, “the alternate effects of opium and coffee” can sooth “their tedious journies”. Aside from a caution to pregnant women and those with serious illnesses, the only negative account of coffee in this hundred-page treatise comes from a person Moseley met in Leyden: he “seldom drank much coffee, or continued the use of it for several days successively, without having a hæmorrhage from the nose.”
When the first edition of Moseley’s treatise appeared in the 1780s, Europe’s urbanites had been hooked on coffee for more than a century. London’s original coffee house opened in 1652; the French, who “knew nothing of it until 1645”, could enjoy a public café in Marseilles come 1671. As Matthew Green details, these were intoxicating spaces where strangers mingled and discussed news, politics, scholarship, and everything in between…
[Indeed, the London Stock Exchange was born in Jonathan’s Coffee House (later, Garraway’s coffee house), as stock trading was not allowed in the Royal Exchange. Until the LSE went fully electronic, the clerks who carried orders and papers to and from brokers were still called “waiters,” the title by which they are still known at Lloyds of London, which had a similar genesis.]
A 1792 appreciation: “A Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effects of Coffee,” from @PublicDomainRev. Read the Treatise at the Internet Archive (@internetarchive).
On a more modern note: “Nope, coffee won’t give you extra energy. It’ll just borrow a bit that you’ll pay for later.”
(Image above: source)
* Lewis Black
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As we contemplate the cuppa, we might spare a thought for Prospero Alpini; he died on this date in 1617. A Venetian physician and botanist, he wrote several botanical treatises, many based on his travels in the Middle East, which covered exotic plants of economic and medicinal value. Because his description of coffee and banana plants are considered the oldest in European literature, he is said to have introduced them to the continent. (He was also the first to artificially fertilize date palms.)
“The international situation is desperate, as usual”*…
… so desperate, an increasing number of pundits argue, that globalization– the “flat world” proclaimed by Tom Friedman– that was to totem of the turn of the century, is no longer possible. But as the estimable Martin Wolf argues, we shouldn’t be too hasty– nor too sweeping and blunt– in our judgements. Trade in goods may be slowing, but the potential for technology-enabled trade in services remains huge…
What is the future of globalisation? This is among the biggest questions of our time. In June, I argued that, contrary to increasingly widespread opinion, “Globalisation is not dead. It may not even be dying. But it is changing.” Among the most important ways in which it is changing is via the growth of services provided at a distance.
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A crucial point is that the expansion of trade in such services has depended little on trade agreements. The regulation of service activities focuses on final services, not intermediate ones. There exist, for example, strict rules on selling accounting services in the US. Yet there are few rules on the qualifications of the workers that do the paperwork behind the provision of such services.
Thus, a “US accountant can employ pretty much anybody to tally up a client’s travel expenses and collate them with expense receipts”. Examples of occupations that provide intermediate as opposed to final services include book-keepers, forensic accountants, screeners of CVs, administrative assistants, online help staff, graphic designers, copy-editors, personal assistants, X-ray readers, IT security consultants, IT help staff, software engineers, lawyers who check contracts, financial analysts who write reports. The list goes on. As Baldwin argues in The Globotics Upheaval, the potential for this sort of technology-enabled trade is huge. It will also be highly disruptive: the white-collar workers who provide these services in high-income countries are an important part of the middle class. But it will be hard to protect them.
In all, the evidence suggests that natural economic forces have largely been responsible for past changes in the pattern of world trade. Growing concern over the security of supply chains will no doubt add to these changes, though whether the result will be “reshoring” or “friendshoring” is doubtful. More likely is a complex pattern of diversification. Meanwhile, technology is opening up new areas of growth in services…
“Globalisation is not dying, it’s changing,” from @martinwolf_ in @FT.
* Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
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As we contemplate commerce, we might send muckraking birthday greetings to Upton Sinclair; he was born on this date in 1878. A writer, activist, and politician, he is probably best remembered for his classic novel, The Jungle, which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.
Many of his novels can be read as historical works. Writing during the Progressive Era, Sinclair describes the world of the industrialized United States from both the working man’s and the industrialist’s points of view. Novels such as King Coal (1917, covering John D. Rockefeller and the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in the coal fields of Colorado), Oil! (1927, the Teapot Dome Scandal), and The Flivver King (1937, Henry Ford– his “wage reform” and his company’s Sociological Department, to his decline into antisemitism) describe the working conditions of the coal, oil, and auto industries at the time.
Sinclair ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a nominee from the Socialist Party. Then he ran, as a Democrat, for Governor of California during the Great Depression, under the banner of the End Poverty in California campaign, but was defeated in the 1934 election.
He was awarded he Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943 for Dragon’s Teeth, which portrayed the Nazi takeover of Germany during the 1930s.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair, ruminating on his gubernatorial loss
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