This is an interesting article about recent discoveries at the pyramids north of Mexico City.
Year: 2004
On the subject of Wal-Mart in Mexico, you can read this story about the location of Wal-Mart’s newest store in the Mexico City area.
You can also take a look at the view from the pyramid of the sun at the archeological site.
And take a look at a picture of the new store. That link discusses the store’s history.
And here’s a picture of the relative position of the store to the archeological site. It seems to be not too close, though it will be visible from the tops of the pyramids. They did, however, disturb some ruins in the process of developing the site.
On the store’s website, they seem to defend their position by posting pictures of even uglier stores in the area.
and…
Have I mentioned the racism and classism prevalent in Mexico?
A couple of weeks ago, I took a trip out to a Sam’s Club and Superama in the Santa Fe area of Mexico City. (Superama, by the way, is a funny compound word…super in Mexico means about the same thing in English, and ama de casa means housewife. So Superama is a play on Superhousewife. I doubt it’s a Wal-Mart creation; more likely it was a local grocery chain that they bought.)
Both are owned by Wal-Mart. In the states, we don’t shop at Wal-Mart, but it’s hard to avoid here in Mexico. They own Wal-Mart, Sam’s, Superama, Vip’s, El Portal or Porton (I forget which), Ahorro, and probably a bunch of other restaurants and stores.
I went to this Sam’s and Superama because I knew where they were and how to get there, and because the Superama is very large and has a better selection than the small one near our apartment in the Condesa. They share the same parking lot.
Santa Fe is an area of Mexico City that literally used to be a large garbage dump. Now, it is the home of high rise office buildings and headquarters for major MNC’s in Mexico, such as Ford and Coke, and a really large high-end shopping mall, like Lennox in Atlanta. The area does have a few high rise condos, but mainly it’s a big business park area with few residents and low density. There is no where to go if you’re not in car. It’s a lot like the perimeter of parts of Houston. My university is perched on a cliff that overlooks the area.
There is a lot of on-going construction of new high-rises and office buildings throughout the area. These high rise buildings are built largely by hand, hauling loads of cement up in buckets. In much of Mexico City, the workers live on-site while the buildings go up, using bootleg electricity and only minimal plumbing. I’ve seen it only blocks from our apartment in the Condesa, supposedly the Greenwich Village of Mexico City. The workers live on site usually because they are from the countryside or live in poor areas where the commute would be too difficult. On Saturdays, the workers get paid and get off work early, and head to the local grocery to buy food for lunch and dinner.
That is how I came to witness about 20 male workers in line outside that particular Superama on a Saturday afternoon at about 2pm. I was so confused by the line, I almost stopped to get in line myself. Then, I noticed other people were going into the store through the other doors, and I figured the workers must be waiting in line for some particular service.
Once I had all my groceries, I asked the kid who bagged the groceries and offered to push the cart out to the car why all the men were waiting still in line to enter the store. (As an aside, it is normal for kids between 10 and 14 to work as bag boys/girls at the supermarket here. They do not get paid by the supermarket and only keep the tips given to them by customers. I think it is part of their ‘servicio social’ for school, which requires all students (high school and college for certain, though these kids are too young for high school) to perform a certain number of hours of community service.
Anyway, I asked the 12ish boy why the men were waiting in line, and he said, quite simply, because they are not allowed int he store except one at a time because they smell bad. You see, according to him, there are lots of people who are “bien educada”, which literally means well-mannered but is also Mexican code language for wealthy, who shop at this store and they would be bothered by the smell were all these workers to be allowed in at the same time. It is quite simple really, according to him.
I asked, “Doesn’t that seem a little racist to you?” And he said no. It was understandable because those men were not clean and smelled bad. Only 12 and probably from a not-so-wealthy family himself, and he had already assimilated those attitudes.
So much for human rights. Next time, I’m going to get in line with them.
As an aside, my husband has noticed that whenever the workers enter our local Superama in the Condesa, the security guard follows them around. Silly, especially since the punk-rich snotty Mexican teenagers would probably be more likely to swipe a bottle of booze than those workers stealing even a can of beans.
Then, on the way home, I was harassed, again, by the transit police. But that’s another story.
From the streets of Mexico City….this flyer for Hermana Paola.
Tarot, cards, hand and “videncia” readings
We return your partner in hours
We show the face of your enemies
We cure ills, spells, “salaciones” and curses
We repel undesirable people
We fix inheritances, judgments, business, and love lives
We cure unknown diseases
Immediate help. Don’t be incredulous.
Good and evil do exist. This is not a great problem for me, while others fail, I triumph. Visit me and I will convince you. This visit can change your life.
All for $100 pesos (less than $10 US)
Trabajos Garantizados
Guaranteed Work.
Correction to the Top 10 Halloween costumes for small children (under 10 years old) in Mexico City….. A surprising number of very small children (under 6 years old) were dressed as Chucky. No brides of Chucky, though. Creepy, either way.
Election night in the U.S….
…Scarier than small Mexican children dressed as creepy U.S.-inspired ghouls shoving small plastic pumpkins at your knees yelling “?Me regala por mi calabaza?”…..
…I can’t even bear to look.
Halloween! Halloween! Halloween!
That was the chant of a little boy dressed like dracula on the main plaza of Coyoacan last night. Thanks to WalMart, halloween is moving into Mexico. Costumes and candy are on sale at WalMart and its grocery-store affiliate, Superama. They have nearly replaced traditional Day of the Dead candy and offerings at the large tiendas de autoservicio. Unfortunately, most Mexican families only half understand the idea of Halloween. The kids get dressed up and carry their little plastic pumpkins, but they do it for 3-4 days straight. All weekend. And since most Mexicans don’t understand that Halloween for kids is about CANDY, they give the kids coins. So of course, some kids expect coins. And worse yet, the parents that bring their kids to enjoy Halloween in public spaces, don’t even bring candy to give other parents’ kids. Lucky there were a couple of prepared gringos last night with bags of sour bloody eyeball gumballs to hand out to the kiddos.
Top 10 most popular costumes for Mexican children for Halloween:
1. Babies dressed as pumpkins
2. Wednesday from the Adaams Family
3. Dracula
4. Catarina, the famous Mexican day of the dead figure
5. Harry Potter
6. Mummy
7. Scarecrow
8. Ambiguous devil child
9. Witch
10. No costume, plastic pumkin, give me money
On other fronts, I have managed to revise a paper to submit to a Mexican journal, and have cleared off my desk.
Last night, I went with a couple of friends to a gay bar near Plaza Garibaldi, here in the D.F. Garibaldi is something else itself. For blocks around the plaza, mariachis stand on corners and run along side cars trying to get a gig. They can get pretty aggressive, nearly jumping on hoods.
In any case, the bar was a small hole in the wall (named El 33). The walls were painted a garish turquoise with bright red trim. The waiters wore tired tuxedo shirts and jackets that always seems to be askew. There were several young, nervous transvestites, and several tough guys drinking steadily. It was a friend-of-a-friend’s birthday, and he had chosen the place. My friend and I spent most of the evening talking to each other, while she surrupticiously checked out the vesties behind me. It wasn’t a place that a foreigner should go to alone. After a while, three of us girls left for another bar named Millan. It was a nice mix of age, class, and identity. The music ranged from Los Fabulous Cadillacs to Guns and Roses to 60s surf to De la Soul. No porn shades (thank heavens).
Was supposed to pick up Gretta the Jetta from the Mexican shop today….precariously located on the edge of a neighborhood not unlike those made infamous by Amores Perros.
Of course. It’s not ready. Will be ready Monday afternoon, when I teach on the other side of town.
Should be ready Tuesday a.m.
I hope.
Bummer.
I really should have started blogging as soon as we crossed the border. There is a lot to tell.
We left Austin nearly two weeks later than planned, since the Mexican government messed up my visa–sent it to El Paso, rather than Austin. So after much nail biting about all the electronics we were going to import, we decided to go ahead and enter the country as tourists. So, August 21 (or thereabouts), we loaded the car and left Austin. Well, between loading the car and leaving, the trunk got jammed shut, so we had to unload the Jetta through the backseat and reload. Also, I realized my box of books wouldn’t fit, and had to have them shipped.
So we headed southbound, and the border crossing was anti-climatic. No one wanted to search us. No one cared what we were importing. I could have brought so much more beef jerky if I had only known!!!
Our stay in Monterrey was nice, at some old hotel where Pancho Villa once rode his horse into the lobby during the Revolution. Now owned by Radisson.
The trip from Monterrey to Queretaro was also not eventful. Well, we did get pulled over once for going too fast through a wide space in the road between Matahuala (which is too small and poor to be on the government tourist site) and San Luis Potosi, but the Federale that pulled us over just told me to make my husband obey the traffic signs–grab him by the ear if need be. (There was no traffic sign, and the Fed had what must have been the only radar gun in all of central Mexico.)
We arrived in Queretaro really early….like 4 in the afternoon, but I had pre-paid our room. Turns out it takes a lot less time to go from Monterrey to Mexico City if you’re in a Jetta instead of a bus. Since I had only made the trip at least seven times round trip on bus, I had no idea. The good news was that we found a Sushi Itto nearby and had a decent dinner.
We arrive in Mexico City on Monday morning around noon as planned. I took a cab to CIDE, and taught my first class at 3:30. Everything seemed to be going well, except that the couch we thought would be in the apartment was gone….and the carpet smelled like dog pee….but otherwise, we were off to a good start.
So much for good starts.
By the following Monday, we had been pulled over by the police under dubious circumstances (I get conflicting explanations of whether they were justified or not); paid our first bribe to avoid having the car towed; been surprised when our cable internet was installed within 4 days of calling (though it took 5 hours to install); sat around an empty apartment while one man ripped out carpet and installed linoleum in the 2 bedrooms; joined Sam’s Club. After two weeks, I still didn’t have a desk. After three weeks, we still didn’t have a couch. On the other hand, I figured out how to hook our digital projector to my laptop, so we were able to watch Master and Commander and Lord of the Rings 3 (rented from Blockbuster…where they honored my membership from two and a half years ago) on the wall of our bedroom.
Now, a little over 5 weeks after we first left for Mexico City, we have furniture and things have settled down a bit.
I hope that regular blogging about academic and political subjects will resume shortly.
Oh, and I plan to add an occasional tidbit about living in Mexico City.
For instance, yesterday I headed to BuenaTierra for lunch. It’s in the neighborhood and has good breakfast, though it’s a bit overrated and the fresa and mamón young Mexicans that hang out there can be a little tiring. So anyway, people kept asking this guy at the next table for his autograph. He was with a striking woman who was probably in her mid thirties but dressed like she was 20, complete with tacky porn-shades. (Trends are a little slow down here.) According to my waiter, who told me in English, lest they overhear what we were talking about, that he was the “keeper” for the Mexican national soccer team. (I assume that meant goalie–but he didn’t seem that big. I thought goalies were always really tall and big.) Valet parkers, waiters, and staff from the nearby restaurants all came to get their pictures taken and to get an autograph. He seemed gracious enough. Another woman joined the couple and they smoked up a storm, and the women laughed a little too loud and obviously while the man talked on his cell phone about heading to Acapulco this weekend. The new woman asked him, “Aren’t you married?” (in Spanish of course) and the original woman at the table quickly chided her friend and told her not to ask him that. I got the sense that he was married, but maybe separated. In any case, the two women giggled and flirted like girls half their age, and generally made a spectacle of themselves. I just kept wondering who told her those porn shades looked good, and why didn’t the nice soccer guy tell her they looked to ridiculous.
That’s life in the Condesa. Muy mamón. Look it up.
According to a report in the Mexico City daily La Jornada, the IMF and World Bank have agreed that Latin American countries need to invest more in social and infrastructure development, in lieu of focusing on repayment of debt. According to the article in La Jornada:
Washington, DC, 24 de abril. En una discusión promovida principalmente por Brasil y Argentina, América Latina logró incluir en la agenda de la reunión anual de primavera del Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI) y del Banco Mundial la necesidad de que los gobiernos hagan más inversión social y en infraestructura en lugar de concentrarse en generar excedentes para pagar la deuda pública, como ocurre hasta ahora.
En un cambio de su discurso tradicional, el FMI aceptó que es necesario aumentar la inversión social en América Latina, luego de hacer manifiesta su inquietud por el creciente malestar social en la región, especialmente en los países ubicados debajo de la línea del Ecuador. El organismo consideró que debe buscarse un equilibrio entre elevar el monto que los presupuestos públicos destinan a inversión social y de infraestructura, pero también buscar que la deuda pública mejore su perfil en cuanto a plazos de pago y tasas de interés.
The news item indicates that pressure from representatives from Brazil and Argentina led to the decision by the IMF and Bank to shift emphasis. The IMF and World Bank have usually recognized that the state should provide public infrastructure and social services like education and health care. That part is not new. I guess what is new is the recognition that the limited shares of the budget going to these services in most Latin American countries is not nearly enough. In many cases, social spending committments in Latin America have not recovered from the 1980s debt crisis. Though social spending has increased in most countries during the 1990s, it is no where near the levels of the late 1970s in most places.
The full article can be found here.
In another version of the story, studies suggest that IMF lending policies are actually in part responsible for the deteriorating infrastructure of many Latin American countries. According to an article posted on Bloomberg,
The International Monetary Fund’s lending programs may have hurt some countries’ ability to invest in roads, ports and utilities and other public works, said Anne Krueger, the IMF’s acting managing director.
IMF board members “generally supported” plans to change accounting rules to allow governments to spend more on such projects when under IMF loan programs, Krueger said in a statement issued from the Washington-based lender….
…The IMF board said the limitations “may be an impediment to growth,” Krueger said in the statement. The lender’s policies “may have contributed in some instances to insufficient spending on infrastructure, at least in the short run.”
It will explore ways it can help boost investment from private industry as well increase spending on these projects even when the lender requires measures to cut budget deficits.
The full article is online.
Interesting that the Bloomberg article focuses on infrasture, while the Mexican article talks also about social expenditures. So, I went to the transcript of the press conference at the IMF website, which is
online. Early in the press conference, there were questions about infrastructure investment.
Anne Krueger said:
Obviously, getting good infrastructure is important for economic growth, and this is something that everybody recognizes. There can, however, also be some projects that are not necessarily so good. So, the first step always is to check and make sure that what is currently being undertaken is, indeed, the highest-return sorts of activities. There are some cases that I can—but won’t—name, where that is clearly not true.
That much said, the second thing is that, also for growth, macroeconomic stability is important. Obviously, in cases where there is room and there is financing available, and where there are no macroeconomic difficulties of either two kinds—and I will come back to that in a minute—then there is no problem. The problem arises in countries where either there is already enough macroeconomic pressure or where there is a debt sustainability issue and where, for whatever set of reasons, countries cannot raise taxes or find other room within their budget to finance the appropriate infrastructure.
Now, the trouble is that, of course, if you increase infrastructure and you destabilize the macroeconomy, you might gain a little bit of growth on the one hand, but you lose probably a lot over here by the time you have to restabilize it. So, the question is, in circumstances where a country’s debt is sufficiently high so that, even though it could borrow, it would do so only at the risk of getting its debt situation worse, what is the appropriate balance? That is where we have been grappling. We are trying to look and see if we can’t find more ways to be constructive in terms of redirecting expenditures to other things within the fiscal accounts.
And the discussion of social spending was in reference to a question about Argentina. The Argentine President, Kirschner, has been taking a hard-line stance with the IMF regarding Argentina’s debt. His position is that the debt cannot be repaid at the expense of the welfare of Argentines, especially given that the standard of living in Argentina was devastated by the 2001-2002 economic crisis. This stance is very popular with most Argentines, so Krirshner is unlikely to back down much.
So, one of the journalists asked Krueger “Coming back to the questions on the fiscal surplus and the social expenditure, in the case of Argentina there is this debate now about increasing the fiscal surplus, but the Argentine government is resisting this idea because of the social problems. How do you see the relationship between the social problems in Argentina and the payment of their debt?” And she replied:
Well, clearly both things came out of the Argentine social crisis earlier in the sense that there was a debt problem, and meanwhile one of the reasons that real GDP plummeted as rapidly as it did, especially in 2002, was precisely because of the default on the debt. So, in that sense, they are related in causation.
I guess if I have a disagreement with the Argentine authorities, I believe that in addressing the issue of poverty and social needs, the most important thing that can happen—not the only thing; social programs are important, and so on—but a very important thing is, of course, to get accelerated growth on a sustainable basis. I believe that getting a resolution of the difficulties with the debtors is going to be critical, because Argentina is going to need to increase investment as it goes forward if it is to sustain anything like its current growth rates, simply because it has had excess capacity and, as that capacity goes down, bottlenecks will appear without that investment.
So, I see addressing the issues, getting the debt issue behind, getting a stronger primary surplus, as related in the sense that that is what will give better assurance of the sustainability of growth. The authorities talk about these as being contradictory and then we look at, for example, Turkey, where they had a crisis that, in many respects, was as severe as Argentina, and they chose to maintain debt service and, in so doing, have been running a primary surplus of 6 1/2 percent of GDP while getting growth rates at around 8 percent and getting their inflation rate way down. It seems to me the record is not that these are opposing objectives but that getting economic growth back on a sustainable footing is an objective that requires, on the one hand, addressing the debt issue and, on the other hand, enables the alleviation of poverty.
You can view the entire press conference online.
Blogging will be intermittent for the next few days since it is the end of the semester and I have a revolving door on my office through which students I haven’t seen all semester pass to ask for last minute extra credit.
Apparently, Latin Americans only weakly support democracy as an institution and have quickly forgotten the crimes of the military regimes throughout the region in the 1960s, 70s, and 1980s. According to a new study by the United Nations, slightly more than half of Latin Americans would support a dictatorship if they thought it would solve their country’s economic problems.
According to a story in El Tiempo from Colombia:
Las conclusiones centrales del informe lanzan una alerta sobre la enorme crisis de la democracia. De ese modo, al preguntárseles a los encuestados por su convicción en este modelo polÃtico, un 43 por ciento se declara demócrata, un 30,5 por ciento, ambivalente y un 26,5 por ciento (más de la cuarta parte) se reconoce abiertamente antidemocrático.
En esa misma lÃnea, un 58,1 por ciento está de acuerdo con que el presidente de su paÃs vaya más allá de las leyes, y un 56 cree que es más importante desarrollo económico que democracia.
What this says is that 43% expressed a clear preference for democracy, 30.5% were clearly ambivalent, and another 26.6% were unsupportive of democracy. Further 58.1% believe their president goes outside the law and 56% think that economic development is more important than democracy. The full story is online.
According to an article in the New York Times on the same UN report:
Since 2000, four elected presidents in the 18 countries surveyed have been forced to step down because of plunges in public support, and others may now be in peril. The countries surveyed were Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.
All of these countries have either introduced or consolidated electoral democracy over the past 25 years, emerging from unrepresentative one-party politics or harsh and repressive military rule. All of them hold regular elections that meet international standards of fairness and enjoy a free press and basic civil liberties….
…The report attributes the erosion of confidence in elected governments to slow economic growth, social inequality and ineffective legal systems and social services. Despite gains in human rights from the days of dictatorship, most Latin Americans, it says, still cannot expect equal treatment before the law because of abusive police practices, politicized judiciaries and widespread corruption.
The full article is online.
In some regards, none of this should be surpising. Many of the military regimes of the 1960s (Brazil 1964, with the help of the U.S. government) and 1970s (Chile 1973, again with the implicit support of the U.S. government, and Argentina in 1966 and 1976) were ushered into power in Latin America on the heels of poor economic performance, high inflation, and high unemployment. And the authoritarian regimes did turn around those economies for a while. But in the end, another round of economic crisis in the 1980s combined with the high social costs associated with the military regimes (deaths and disappearances) led to democratic transitions. Political scientists, for the most part, don’t really think that authoritarian regimes are any better than democracies in promoting economic growth. Normatively, we certainly hope that’s not the case, anyway.
What is apparent, though, from the UN study and from talking to Latin Americans in general, is that the region needs and wants stable economic growth and will punish political leaders (democratic or otherwise) that don’t provide it.
I’ve spent the last few days at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting. So, I haven’t watched or listened to the news lately.
But, I have listened to lots of political science presentations and commentary on papers. What I’ve learned is this….additional control variables or pet explanatory variables are like, well, you-know-the-saying, and everyone has one. Nearly every discussant or commentator from the audience has some useful suggestion for some poor paper presenter like:
“I understand that you are trying to explain the breakdown of coalition governments in Europe in the 1990s, but have ever considered including the per capita coffee consumption as a predictor of coalition breakdowns? I find that it makes my colleagues and I consume different amount of coffee and it tends to make some of us more cranky than others–really quite terrible in faculty meetings [irritating chuckle and nod to the guy in a cheap suit and comfortable shoes sitting next to him]. Maybe you should include coffee consumption in your analysis to see if it has an effect.”
Luckily, the discussant for my paper had more useful things to say.
And, hopefully tomorrow, I will pass along the favor to others. We’ll see how that goes.
Geez. Great advertising for gambling here. Who knew that there were “professional gamblers” out there. Seems like a bad business to be in, since statistically you will always lose money.
Midwest paper, Part 3.
Part 3: Social spending stability and political veto players
In the final part of the paper, I argue that a theoretically appropriate test of the veto players argument requires a dependent variable that measures the amount of spending change–social spending stability. Social spending stability is constructed as the absolute value of the annual change in social spending.
To measure the number and dispersion of veto players, I use a measure of political constraints developed by a professor named Henisz. This measure represents the theoretical argument made by Tsebelis.
And…..it turns out, when you use the theoretically appropriate measure, increases in the number and dispersion of veto players results in more social spending stability.
Obvious, right. Well, somewhat, but it also explains why the other results (using the level of spending) are inconsistent.
So that’s it. I just gotta finish writing it.
Part 2 of the midwest paper….(which is still not done….EEEK).
Second: social spending and democratic political institutions. Though Tsebelis has a good argument about why veto players reduce change, some political scientists insist on trying to explain variations in levels of social spending by differences in political institutions. For instance, when you have many political parties in the legislature or parliament, you’re likely to see more (a higher level of ) spending on social programs because of logrolling. (The Tsebelis-type argument says you can’t predict the level of spending, just the rate at which it will change.) Swank calls this a characteristic “inclusive electoral institutions,” like proportional representation (which is directly related to the effective number of parties).
On the other hand, “dispersion of decision-making authority” (Swank) results in lower levels of spending. Dispersion is higher in governments with federalism, bi-cameralism (that’s 2 houses in the legislature), and the use of referendums. The book by Swank and articles by Birchfield (my friend, Vicki) and Crepaz (1998) and Crepaz and Moser (2004) all model these relationships in OECD countries.
For OECD data on social programs and inequality, this literature finds that proportional representation and more parties leads to higher levels of spending, and that federalism, bi-cameralism, and divided government lead to lower levels of spending.
So….I try to see if the same results apply to middle-income countries in my sample. And they don’t…or at least not consistently.
Why? Because….the Tsebelis notion of political veto players is probably right….Institutions don’t predict levels of spending well, but they should predict the amount of change in spending. That is, political institutions and veto players can predict the amount of “social spending stability” (an analogue to Tsebelis’s notion of “policy stability”).
Coming soon….Part 3: Social spending stability and political institutions.
BTW: Look Freaks and Geeks on video. Listen to the review on NPR.
Random news story: Princeton plans to curb grade inflation.