economics | Tim Høiland

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Repaso: Mayan apocalypse, LatAm’s economy, faith predictions, Alabama & immigration, Anne Lamott on writing, 16th century social media

January 6, 2012 — Leave a comment

1. Mayans weigh in on the end of the world
We’ve all heard about the supposed ancient Mayan prediction that the end of the world would come in 2012. Kevin Rushby with the Guardian has an interesting piece taking a look at the Mayans of today, and how rumors of an impending apocalypse have been greatly exaggerated. Rushby focuses largely on the Mayan religious landscape, including a look at the historical roots of their religious syncretism born out of a survival instinct:

The Mayans have had to survive for a long time as underdogs and they have done it by accommodation. When the Spanish came in 1523, plotting total cultural destruction, the indigenous people (Mayan is a catch-all term for several related languages and peoples) responded with guile. Images of Catholic saints were stuffed with old Mayan gods; parts of temples were incorporated into churches; at Nuestra Señora de la Merced in Antigua Guatemala you can see how Mayan masons carved symbols of maize and hummingbirds into the church facade.

2. The rise of Latin America’s economy
Al Jazeera English has a 25-minute feature on Latin America and how it has fared remarkably well in the midst of our current global economic woes. The show touches on mining in Peru and the rise of middle-class consumerism in Brazil. It’s encouraging to see much of the region rising out of poverty, but obviously the situation is not 100% rosy, and it will be interesting to see how these trends shape the region in non-economic terms:

3. Faith/religion trends for 2012
CNN’s Belief blog asked 15 faith leaders to offer their predictions for the coming year. Among them is Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, representing Latinos/Hispanics in the US:

America’s evangelical community will have its hands full addressing both a presidential election and offering a biblical response to “end of days” Mayan prophecies surrounding 2012. With the economy emerging as the primary issue for the November election, America’s born-again community will have an opportunity to contextualize an alternative narrative to the polarizing elements from both the right and the left by reconciling the righteousness message of Billy Graham with the justice platform of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By offering compassionate, truth-filled solutions and focusing on the message of grace, love, reconciliation and healing, evangelicals will demonstrate that the greatest agenda stems neither from the donkey nor the elephant but rather from the lamb.

4. Churches and the problem with “welcoming the stranger”
The Los Angeles Times has a lengthy feature on one particular Southern Baptist Church in Alabama, which is seeking to navigate the difficult tension between anti-immigrant legislation in the state and its responsibilities as a faith community. The Get Religion blog also has an interesting analysis on the piece’s coverage of the religious angle in the story.

5. Anne Lamott on writing
Legendary writer and memoirist Anne Lamott had an essay in Sunset a couple of years ago (HT Michael Hyatt) with her best tips for writers, including how we use our time:

I’ve heard it said that every day you need half an hour of quiet time for yourself, or your Self, unless you’re incredibly busy and stressed, in which case you need an hour. I promise you, it is there. Fight tooth and nail to find time, to make it. It is our true wealth, this moment, this hour, this day.

6. 95 theses & 140 characters
The Economist has a fascinating take on Martin Luther and how earlier forms of “social media” had a lot to do with the success of the Reformation:

It is a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed. That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.

Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary from the past week related to the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As always, I welcome your thoughts on any of the links and ideas in this roundup!

[Photo credit: Datadirect.com]

Repaso: Josh Garrels, poverty and progress in LatAm, Barna’s top trends, global Christianity, Honduras nativity, Hemingway’s Cuba, Psalm 146

December 23, 2011 — Leave a comment

1. “Love & War & The Sea In Between”
Congrats to Josh Garrels for his “Album of the Year” honors from Christianity Today for Love & War & The Sea In Between – which, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly (proof), is still available for free at JoshGarrels.com! Here’s an interview to accompany the award.

2. Poverty and progress in Latin America
Although income inequality in Latin America is still a huge problem, as is a stubborn level of extreme poverty, and while the infiltration of drug cartels in Central America continues to wreak havoc on the citizens of those countries, The Economist has some good news: poverty levels as a whole are markedly lower than they were just a decade or two ago.

3. Barna’s top trends for 2011
The Barna Group has released its annual list of six trends that have shaped or characterized Christianity in the United States in 2011: (1) changing role of Christianity; (2) downsized American dreams; (3) Millennials rethink Christianity; (4) the digital family; (5) maximizing spiritual change; and (6) women making it alone.

4. Pew Forum on Global Christianity
While we’re on the topic of research about Christianity, the Pew Forum has released a definitive new report on global Christianity. Two top line findings: there are 2.2 billion of us, and no region or country can claim to be the geographic center of the faith anymore. Missiologist and researcher Ed Stetzer also summarizes the report’s findings here.

5. Honduras nativity turns heads
What does Christmas mean to Hondurans? This video from CNN provides a glimpse.

6. Hemingway’s house in Cuba
The Today Show got a rare glimpse inside Ernest Hemingway’s home in Cuba, where he did a great deal of his writing, and it’s fascinating (to me, anyway).

7. Walter Brueggemann reads Psalm 146
When asked by Krista Tippett from American Public Media’s On Being to read a meaningful passage of Scripture, this is how Old Testament scholar Brueggemann responded.

[Photo credit: Sasha Arutyunova via theseainbetween.com]

Emotion, geopolitics, and the reshaping of our world

December 15, 2011 — 1 Comment

What does emotion have to do with geopolitics? Everything, according to Dominique Moïsi, author of The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope Are Reshaping the World (Anchor Doubleday). Moïsi, a French political scientist, Harvard professor, and son of an Auschwitz survivor, argues that we cannot understand the events of history without careful consideration of the role of emotions, “which seem to control us much more than we control them.” The world, he says, is characterized by three key emotions: fear, hope and humiliation.

The reason I have chosen these three emotions is that they are closely linked with the notion of confidence, which is the defining factor in how nations and people address the challenges they face as well as how they relate to one another. Fear is the absence of confidence. If your life is dominated by fear, you are apprehensive about the present and expect the future to become ever more dangerous. Hope, by contrast, is an expression of confidence; it is based on the conviction that today is better than yesterday and that tomorrow will be better than today. And humiliation is the injured confidence of those who have lost hope in the future; your lack of hope is the fault of others, who have treated you badly in the past. When the contrast between your idealized and glorious past and your frustrating present is too great, humiliation prevails.

Moïsi argues that today, Asia is the region of hope, the Middle East is the region of humiliation, and the West (Europe and the United States) is the region of fear. The book reminds me of The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria, which basically says that the world has changed and while that fact is unsettling for the West, it’s not all bad news, especially if we can learn from Asia’s successes. Here, Moïsi paints for the most part in broad strokes, akin to Thomas Friedman’s sweeping assertion that the world is flat.

These generalizations are true as far as they go, but they both have their fair share of exceptions, and Moïsi concedes as much. While Asia is the region of hope, this isn’t particularly true in Japan, with its aging population being a deciding factor. While humiliation sets the tone in the Middle East, the emirates are for the most part exempt, enjoying relative prosperity and stability, at least for now. And while the West is largely gripped by fear these days (largely in response to Asia’s hope and the Middle East’s humiliation), the United States has always had an underlying sense of hope, and it surfaces here and there even still.

To his credit, he also includes a chapter on the countries — Russia, Israel, and possibly Iran — and entire regions — Africa and Latin America — that don’t fit into his sweeping generalizations. He explains these exclusions:

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the jury is still out on Africa and Latin America. Policy makers, businesspeople, and those concerned with human development cannot ignore these two continents. But they are not, not yet, the places where the future of the world is being decided, nor will they become so in the foreseeable future.

It seems a bit short-sighted to simply exclude from a book on geopolitics two huge continents with a combined 1.6 billion people* in 80 countries**. Also, though the book was published relatively recently (in May 2009), parts of it are noticeably outdated, particularly considering the events that have swept the Middle East over the past year or so. Would Moïsi still consider the Middle East to be a region of humiliation, or would it now be better characterized as one of hope? I’m not sure.

But all in all, I can’t fault Moïsi too much for these shortcomings. The so-called Arab Spring caught just about all of us by surprise, and despite my own biases, maybe he’s right that at least for now Africa and Latin America aren’t going to decide the future for the rest of the world. He is right that emotions certainly do shape how we live our lives, and reflecting on broader emotional patterns at the geopolitical level may help us better understand the complicated world in which we live.

How does Moïsi’s argument sit with you, that the world is characterized by fear, humiliation, and hope? What significant exceptions do you see? How might a better understanding of the role emotions play in shaping our world help us in our pursuit of the common good? And while I’m at it, what role do you see the rapidly growing church in Africa, Asia and Latin America playing in the reshaping of our world?

Notes:
* Based on populations of 572,039,894 in Latin America [source] and 1,022,234,000 in Africa [source].
** 56 countries and territories in Africa [source] and 24 in Latin America [source].

[Photo credit: Karim Selmaoui/EPA via The Guardian]

In Culture Africa, Arab Spring, Asia, Dominique Moïsi, economics, emotion, fear, geopolitics, hope, humiliation, Latin America, Middle East, politics, The Geopolitics of Emotion

Repaso: CEO integrity, Brazilian culture wars, rethinking nuclear weapons, Guatemalan war documentary, Derek Webb on free music, Christianity and culture, good economic news, top global thinkers, and justice for all

December 2, 2011 — 1 Comment

1. What does a CEO with integrity look like?
Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College, had an op-ed yesterday in the New York Times about Gerard Arpey, the American Airlines CEO who just walked away after 30 years out of a belief that filing for bankruptcy — a procedure that’s become standard in the airline industry — is wrong. That he is a man of integrity is worth celebrating; that he is a rare exception among CEOs, though, is lamentable. Lindsay writes:

Over the last eight years, I have interviewed hundreds of senior executives for a major academic study on leadership, including six airline C.E.O.’s. Mr. Arpey stood out among the 550 people I talked with not because he believed that business had a moral dimension, but because of his firm conviction that the C.E.O. must carefully attend to those considerations, even if doing so blunts financial success or negates organizational expediency. For him, it is an obligation that goes with the corner office.

2. Culture wars and Pentecostalism in Brazil
The days of the Religious Right might be mostly behind us here in the US, but in Brazil, it seems to really be catching on. The New York Times has a profile of Silas Malafaia, a televangelist with a massive following who is known for his polarizing views, and takes a look at the rise of Pentecostals and other Protestant groups in Brazil:

About one in four Brazilians are now thought to belong to evangelical Protestant congregations, and Pentecostals like Mr. Malafaia are at the forefront of this growth. In a remarkable religious transformation, scholars say that while Brazil still has the largest number of Roman Catholics in the world, it now also rivals the United States in having one of the largest Pentecostal populations. Not everyone in Brazil is enthusiastic about this shift.

3. Evangelicals rethink nuclear weapons
Members of the National Association of Evangelicals board of directors have written a piece for Washington Post’s “On Faith” column that’s worth prayerful consideration:

Christians hold that all people bear God’s image (Genesis 1:27).Therefore, human life and freedom are precious and should be defended from injustice and tyranny. Nuclear weapons, with their capacity for terror as well as for destruction of human life, raise profound spiritual, moral and ethical concerns. We question the acceptability of nuclear weapons as part of a just national defense. The just war tradition admonishes against indiscriminate violence and requires proportionality and limited collateral damage. New scientific studies reveal that even a limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would have profound global consequences, harming billions of innocents. The very weapons meant to restrain evil could potentially destroy all that they were intended to protect.

4. “Our voice, our memory”
Mike at the Central American Politics blog shared this 30-minute documentary about the 36-year civil war in Guatemala, which, according to the makers of the film, meets the international criteria to be considered genocide. Needless to say, it’s not for the faint of heart, but is important for the understanding of history, as well as what you might call “the roots of the present illness.” It’s in Spanish, too, by the way.

5. How free music makes more than sense
Derek Webb, one of my favorite artists who started NoiseTrade (a great place to get free music legally!), has a new reflection on the state of the music industry and what it means for those who make and listen to music (hint: he’s not a fan of Spotify):

There has never been a better moment to be a middle-class or an independently thinking artist making and performing music than right now. The costs and complications of creating, recording, manufacturing, and distributing music are at an all-time low, enabling more music to be made and more artists to make a living than ever before. If your ego can bear not being rich and famous, you can make a respectable and sustainable living as a blue-collar musician. The problem used to be access; now it’s obscurity. And this brings with it a completely new set of problems and opportunities.

6. Andy Crouch on Christianity and culture
If you haven’t read Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, you really should. But if you don’t want to do that, here’s a 50-minute podcast about Christianity and culture, the big themes of that book. If even that is too much to ask, at least take a listen to the four and a half minute snippet about how cultural change can — and often must — start small.

7. Good economic news from Latin America
The BBC reports:

Poverty in Latin America is at its lowest level for 20 years, the UN’s regional economic body, Eclac, says. From 1990 to 2010, the rate fell from 48.4% to 31.4%, which means 177 million people currently live in poverty… “Poverty and inequality continue to decline in the region, which is good news, particularly in the midst of an international economic crisis,” said Alicia Barcena, Eclac’s executive secretary. “However, this progress is threatened by the yawning gaps in the productive structure in the region and by the labour markets which generate employment in low-productivity sectors.”

8. Top 100 global thinkers
Foreign Policy has released its latest list of top global thinkers for the past year. A number of the leaders of the Egyptian revolution are atop the list. I was especially interested to see that Yoani Sánchez, Cuban dissident blogger, and Dr. Paul Farmer, medical anthropologist with a long history in Haiti, made the cut as well.

9. And justice for all [infograhic]
GOOD and Column Five Media have produced an interesting infographic on how the US is doing in terms of income equality and providing all citizens with access to the market economy (click on the image below to view the full-size infographic).

Repaso: Religion in development, immigration as civil rights, Mayan voter frustration, scavenging for gold in Guatemala, and integrated Latin America policy

November 18, 2011 — Leave a comment

1. A ‘devout atheist’ on the role of religion in development
The From Poverty to Power blog, by Oxfam research guru and ‘devout atheist’ Duncan Green, had a post a few weeks ago with an interesting case to make for the importance of religion in international relief, development and advocacy work.

2. New civil rights movement?
The New York Times has an interesting editorial and slideshow on the fallout from Alabama’s “oppressive” new immigration law, suggesting that immigration reform has become a new civil rights movement.

3. Mayan Guatemalans frustrated that their government can’t spell
Guatemalans went to the polls earlier this month for a runoff election in which Otto Perez Molina, a former army general, was elected president. The Christian Science Monitorhad an interesting story leading up to the election about how some 400,000 Mayan citizens have had trouble getting ID cards because of the complicated spelling of their names. Some aren’t buying the government’s excuses, though, saying this is just the latest evidence of anti-Mayan discrimination by the state.

4. A different kind of gold mining in Guatemala
My friend Tomas shared with me this heartbreaking story about those trying to make a living by scavenging through Guatemala City’s landfill in search of discarded jewelry and metal scraps:

At dawn, the scavengers arrive much as if coming to a regular work place. Many are wearing clean, ironed shirts and even whistling. They carry shovels and backpacks filled with their garbage bags, snacks and change of clothes. They leave their dry clothes at an improvised camp and start looking for treasures. Scavenging, which is prohibited by the government, can get particularly dangerous during storm season. The workers say many have died while trying to pick garbage out of water raging through the ravine. Dozens perished one day in 2008 when a mountain of garbage collapsed on them… Still, the “miners” call the dangerous heavy rain “the blessing of winter,” because the increased flow of water improves their chances of finding more metal.

5. Migration & development in Latin America
In October Bread for the World and Church World Service released a fact sheet about the connections between migration and economics in Latin America. Not surprisingly, economic hardship is the number one reason for migration from Latin America to the United States. These two groups are calling for an integrated approach to US development aid in Latin America with domestic immigration reform, which seems like a no-brainer to me. You can’t really address either problem on its own. I’d love to hear a presidential candidate offer a compelling vision for this sort of an integrated approach.