Memories of Itza

I've been looking through old photos and came across this one from July 2002 as me and my Mexican friend Mario Andrade tried to reach the peak of Itzachihuatl (5260 m) outside Mexico City. It's a thrilling photo as my body is covered by at least 5 kilos of ice as we went into a snowstorm. We never reached the top as Mario, who was the expert, or 'el alpinista' as he said, considered the wheather to be too bad. But I got up over 5000 m and that was good enough for me. A 'gamberro' I was Mario said; somebody visiting the mountain. The on our way downhill we ran into a cow, 'safely' grazing at 3200 m. Gets you into perspective, doesn't it?

However, I also met a big gray rat on the top of the Gunung Kinabalu (4100 m) on the island of Borneo. It turned out to be the very special Kinabalu rat, only living above 2700 m, feeding on tourists.

Kids - A Blessing?

Sometimes as being childless you long for children. But then, occasionally, you end up in situations where you realize how lucky you are. Sometimes kids aren't nice and cute, but end up making life on earth a living hell for their parents and others. Todays pic from Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes illustrates this. This is the moment before all hell breaks loose. If the father has been doing his military service and feeling post-traumatic stress from those experiences, he might end up in an asylum somewhere for quite some time. Women, on the other hand are tougher and will perhaps not act as harsh as that... but you never know...

The Swine Flu

It was a sunny October afternoon and the Garden Gnome was having the day off, doing gnome stuff. He spent his afternoon dwelling in a sparsely visited cafe. As he was waiting for the waiter to deliver his order, he suddenly felt he was under attack. At first he had trouble of identifying the threat, but as the minutes went on he realised that this was an attack of the infamous swine flu. At first he realised the threat coming in from the left, but it intensified and turned out to approach from the right as well. As he sat there he wondered: Can Garden Gnomes really get this flu? Aren't we immune?

People of Reality Part II

A couple of weeks ago the Swedish Minister Göran Hägglund, Christian Democrat, started to argue about something he called the People of Reality. To the non-political scientifically trained this sounds like a harmless expression, especially as he talked a lot about ordinary people sitting at their kitchen table reasoning of how to deal with the troubles of everyday life. That image is supposed to fill the Swedes out there in their cottages with some kind of identification with Hägglund and his rhetoric.
Hägglund claimed that the People of Reality had had it now and would not be bullied by the intellectual cultural elite, harassing them about their taste in art, literature and entertainment. He failed to mention that he is a part of another elite – the ruling elite. Slip of the tongue maybe?
The problem with Hägglund’s arguments is that they link in to discourses that everything but democratic. But as a friend of mine once said: - Just because you have the word democrat in your party name does not make you a democrat! Pierre Bourdieu looked into this problem in his Distinction and came to the conclusion that our understanding of art comes from basically two sources, our family or upbringing and the type education we get. The latter is important as it orients us towards an ability to appreciate abstract art if we have a humanist or social scientist training, while engineering or a practical training tend to orient us towards more figurative art. This means that those who argue that you should see what the art work is actually wants to reach a certain public who appreciate that kind of art.

Igor Golomstok wrote a wonderful book about totalitarian art in the beginning of the 1990s. There he made the reflection that when the Soviet Union and the Third Reich presented their Pavilions at the World Exhibition in Paris 1937, the similarity in design was striking. You could actually see exactly what the motives were on every art item in the Soviet Pavilion as well as in the one of the Third Reich.

The Soviet and Third Reich Pavilions at the World Exhibition in Paris 1937.

Also in 1937 the Hitler regime had an art exhibition in Munich, called Degenerate Art. The idea was to show the German public the horrors of the art work performed by artists that the regime claimed was degenerated. There were painters like Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Marc Chagall, just to mention a few.

Adolf Hitler visiting the exhibition of Degenerate Art in Munich 1937.

After the war this exhibition has been put together again because some art connoisseurs think that it actually is the greatest collection of early 20th century art exhibited at the same time ever.
This road is now taken by Hägglund and the Christian Democrats and of course it is because they are having a rough time in the opinion polls. It seems easy enough to try and take some of the would be voters of the xenophobic Swedish Democratic Party.
Maybe Hägglund wants to put together his own exhibition of the art preferred by the People of Reality as they dwell by their kitchen tables… here is a good start…

Classic mass produced painting of Fisherman with pipe.

Sources:

Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.

Golomstok, Igor (1990) Totalitarian Art - in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China.

Swedish Politics - the People of Reality

Last week the surprised Swedes heard about something very intriguing. The Minister of Social Welfare, Göran Hägglund Christian Democrat, started to talk about the “People of Reality”. He claimed that certain sinister cultural elitist people, presumably on the left side of the political specter were making fun of what the People of Reality really thinks and enjoys. He said that this kind of discrimination and ridicule of this yet not clearly defined majority of the Swedish people, now had had it; enough was enough!

The People of Reality did not want art where they did not see what it represents. They did not want books that they did not understand and they did not want to listen to an intellectual cultural elite telling them that they were ignorant and narrow minded.

The concept of the People of Reality is indeed interesting. Exactly who are these people? As they are a majority, according to Minister Hägglund, they would be fairly easy to identify. A majority would consist of about 5 million people! So they are many! Is it everybody except those who are homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, intersexuals, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Feminists, Communists, environmentalists, anarchists, socialists, human rights activists, anti-globalists, writers, journalists, directors, actors, poets, songwriters, Chess-players, Go-players, Social Democrats, Bicyclists, pedestrians and so on? … and slowly we will come down to the less than 4 percent of the Swedish voters, who actually vote for the Christian Democrats. And that… is a very small majority! In fact, it is so small that it in practice is an insignificant minority.

Minister Hägglund seems to remember a Swedish society that used to exist in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, where everybody was watching the same TV channel (in the two first decades), because it was only one available. There were only three Top-lists (in the end of the period) which contained pretty much the same sort of music. But Swedish society is very different today. If you like opera, you go to the opera. If you like to watch football, you go to a soccer-game. It is your choice! It is up to you! As Hägglund has been helpful in implementing these policies you would expect that he understand them as a concept...

But Minister Hägglund has sadly enough missed this important point. He seems to identify the cultural elite with the Swedish authorities in the 1950s and 1970s, who actually could tell people, from time to time, to do this and that. The cultural elite of today don’t have that ability. And he has also missed the evident fact that he, as a Minister in the Swedish Government is the ELITE. So who is telling who what to do?

An interesting observation in this context is that the mostly sold fiction writers in Sweden today is largely consisting of leftist cultural elite intelectuals. So how come Swedes buy their books? Is there a conspiracy going on that threatens to brain-wash the poor Swedish people? Is this why Minister Hägglund's voters seems to look for other political parties to vote for in the up-coming election next year? They are being indoctrinated, bullied and ridiculed. so now is the time for retaliation...

Diskursiv förändring

Seriestripen nedan är klippt ur Bill Wattersons "Calvin & Hobbes" (på svenska Kalle och Hobbe). I den svenska översättningen går betydelsen av Kalle som Calvin, den sanne idealisten och Hobbe som Hobbes, den oförbätterlige realisten förlorad. Calvin är naturligtvis religionsreformeraren Kalvin och Hobbes refererar till Thomas Hobbes, den intill cynism realistiske filosofen. Seriestripen nedan är intressant ur en diskursiv synvinkel.

I den första rutan, ovan stipulerar Kalle den vedertagna sanningen, eller som Michel Foucault skulle ha sagt, den dominerande diskursen. Vi kan också tänka oss en parallell, hyptoetisk diskurs: Antag att Kalles pappa istället sagt, för att lugna den lille Kalles oro för att hans materiella välstånd naggats i kanten av en ekonomisk och finansiell nedgång: "Kalle, känn ingen oro, de här nedgången är bara temporär, snart är allt som vanligt igen! Pappa kommer snart att arbeta igen! Vilket år som helst nu!"

På ett liknande sätt försöker han lugna den orolige Kalle, som kanske börjar fundera på om detta kommer att få inverkningar på hans födelsedags- och julpresenter och den status de skänker i hans umgängeskrets. "Det är dåliga tider nu bara för att ekonomin måste leta sig fram till bättre och mer vinstgivande produkter! Därför kommer givetvis nya arbetstillfällen att uppstå, så att jag slipper gömma mig här hemma!" Det är egentligen bara den gamla visdomen att efter regn så kommer solsken, förr eller senare.

Sedan fyller han i med en vedertagen "sanning" som inte kan förnekas. Vinter är ju ett begrepp som bara framgångsrikt kan bekämpas som diskrusivt begrepp i tropikerna; även om en thailändsk buddhistmunk frös ihjäl förra året. Här kan man tänka sig att för att försvara och gjuta mod i Kalles tilltro till ekonomin, att hans orubblige far börjar svamla om osynliga händer och marknader och annat vidskepligt trams.


Kalle har dock insett, som alla småknattar gör förr eller senare, att hans pappas kunskap inte är obegränsad eller ens är omöjlig att utmana. Kalle ser det som hans far inte vill se; en konkurrerande eller utmanande diskurs. Kalles utmanande diskurs tycks säga att det ekonomiska system som hans pappa tillber har kört rakt in i en tegelvägg och pappans lösning på problemet är att backa ut från väggen, tillräckligt långt och sedan ta fart och köra in i den igen. Och fungerar inte det då backar han igen...


Vetenskapsfilosofen Thomas Kuhn kallade sådana här fenomen för paradigmskiften, då den tidigare kunskapsbasen inte är förenlig med nya empiriska fynd. För det var ju så här att de nyliberala ekonomerna, de läser bara en av Adam Smiths böcker; den som handlar om marknaden och den osynliga handen och den där andra boken, den som handlar om den synliga handen; dvs det sociala ansvaret, den väljer de att inte läsa och inte ens låtsas om som den skrivits...

Mongolian Economic Report

Nowadays we hear and read a lot of analysis on the economic situation in the developed world. What we hear and read a lot less about is the effects of the current economic and financial crisis in developing countries. As I have taken a special interest in economic, social, and political developments in the Mongolian Republic I can provide you with a glimpse on how life is on the other side of the Ural Mountain Range. Actually you have to go beyond the Altai Mountain Range as well in order to reach Mongolia. I took that particular trip on the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 2005 and arrived in time to see Nambariin Enkhbayar become the President of Mongolia. The train ride was an experience that I warmly recommend.
Now there is a new President in office, as Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj has taken office since the election held in late May 2009. President Elbegdorj is among those heads of state, like US President Barack Obama, that enters office in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. That is the general Western understanding, but in the East crisis has followed quite another pattern. In the Far East, of which Mongolia at least is a geographical part, crisis tend to originate from the political sector of society, rather than from the economy. That means that in the minds of Mongolians the worst crisis in the remote past was the purges of the communists against the old power structures in Mongolia and the fact that this tended to affect a lot of people.
Nevertheless, the present crisis has been hitting Mongolia far worse than most other countries. Mongolia differs from other countries in the respect that it has been hit by the crisis, not via the financial sector, but through the so called commodity channel. The Mongolian economy is basically based in three sectors hearding (and the products derived from that practice), mining and crude oil. The main source of income for Mongolia, exports of copper, fell with 65 percent, from April 2008 to March 2009. The other commodities, like coal, cashmere and crude oil, also fell to a much lower level than the previous year.
The period right before the current down-turn, the booming years of 2003-2007, meant modest surpluses in public finance, but this proved insufficient to absorb the effects of the economic down-turn. During the peak year of 2007 the revenues from the mining sector was as high as 15 percent of GDP. The non-mining sector of the economy fell to a deficit of 15 percent in 2008. The effect of the economy is that shrinking revenues from the mining sector is supposed to pay for a growing deficit in the non-mining sector. Furthermore, wages and salaries increased rapidly between 2006 and 2008, and further increased the budget deficit. On top of this Mongolia experienced the highest inflation rate in East Asia, no less than 33 percent in August 2008. The Mongolian finance policy of loose monetary policies led to a boom on the credit market, leading to a massive increase of non-performing loans (NPLs). This, in turn led negative real interest rates on local currency deposits and resulted in flight of capital into other currencies and markets, where the interest rates could be as high as 12 to 18 percent. In the second quarter of 2009 the budget deficit peaked with 15 percent of GDP.
The Mongolian Government led by MPRP Prime Minister Sanj Bayar has been presenting an action plan to its development partners, during spring 2009. The IMF approved an 18 month Stand-By Arrangement of USD 229 million to assist Mongolia to adjust to the external shock and to stabilize the economy. The World Bank approved USD 60 million as single-tranche development policy credits for 2009 and 2010. The Asian Development Bank provided USD 60 million and Japan UDS 50 million. Together this contributed to no less than USD 130 million during 2009 to fill in the gaps and balance the Mongolian economy.
This has affected the bulk of Mongolian society as firms and companies have lain off their personnel as constructions and investment has soured. The registered part of unemployment reached almost 4 percent in July 2009. Unofficial estimates of the unemployment rate consider it as high as 21-26 percent. At the same time as unemployment has risen, the increase in wages and salaries has meant that the inequality rate has actually risen.
In the aftermath of economic crisis and social downturn follows crime increase, social and psychic problems. There are reports on increased consumption of alcohol, gender-based violence and abuse of children following the economic down-turn. As inequality rises the increased crime rate and social problems affect those at the bottom of Mongolian society in general and those living in the bigger cities, as Ulaanbaatar, Darkhan and Erdenet, in particular.
This article paints a rather dull picture of the present state of the Mongolian economy and I would like to end it pointing at the loans and aid from the international organization and foreign donor community has succeeded in filling in the gaps at least for this year.

Sources: UB Post September 15 2009; UB Post September 8 2009.