THE CONTENTS OF VOICE AND NOISE
The World Bank Group? (WBG)/ The Executive Directors?/ The Nongovernmental Organizations?/ The Millennium Development Goals?/ 205 Development Topics! —listed on the World Bank Web site
My ED trips 1
Airport #1/ Airport #2/ The First Country: Gender; A rural road to the town; Motorbikes; Are we few track minded?; Death penalty for corruption!; A luxurious hospital / The Second Country/ Airport #3/ The Third Country/ As far as you can go/ The fourth country/ A fifth country—China- while an ED but not as one/ Small memories from my Central America/ The social contract of Teotihuacan/ Small memories from my transitional hometown: Assaulted; Washington and the GPS; Snowing in Washington; This would never have happened to John Wayne; A monument to transparency
Why was it such an issue for me?/ A word of caution about Financial Leverage/ An Unsustainable Sustainability/ Odious Debt/ Odious Credit
BASEL—Regulating for what? 37
Puritanism in banking/ A warning/ About the Global Bank Insolvency Initiative/ Some comments at a Risk Management Workshop for Regulators/ Let the Bank Stand Up/ BASEL and microfinance/ The mutual admiration club of firefighters in Basel/ Towards a counter cyclical Basel?/ A new breed of systemic errors
The debate about using Country Systems 55
Why did I spend so much time on this issue?/ Let them bike/ About El Zamorano and the use of country systems/ Lost in the water of globalization
My very private fight for better privatizations 65
Where do I come from?/ Transmission and Distribution—T & D/ Electricity for Brazil—and Isla de Margarita what?/ Pay now and pray for the light/ Hit in the head by the SENECA sale/ The present value and short circuits/ Reform fatigue opportunities/ Fiscal Space—Public or Private
About indexes and their disclosure 83
The Riskiness of Country Risk/ Disclosing the IDA Country-Performance Ratings/ A first round of comments/ About the Panel of Experts/ Some follow up comments/ US GAO Report
A bit on some other indexes 95
The through-the-eye-of-the-needle index/ The index of perceived Corruption/ Today, let us talk about the bribers/ A dangerously failed index/ How good or bad is your municipality?
EIR & Environment 107
My answer to the NGOs/ The Amazon/ Our quixotic windmills/ Earth, the cooperative/ A better alternative than a hybrid
Oil 121
About an Oil Market Update/ It’s an oil boom, stupid!/ Kohlenweiss 1979/ The search for transparency in an oil-consuming world/ We need the world price of gasoline (petrol)/ Sovereignty/ The Oil Referendum/ Why do they point their finger only at us?/ About accountability in energy planning
Trade, agriculture, services, and growth 135
On the road to Cancun…with new proposals/ Place us next to something profitable…/ Time to cover up?/ An encore on nudism and WTO negotiations/ Hosting the spirit of free trade/ Time to scratch each other’s backs/ Of Mangos and Bananas/ Local strawberries in season
About remittances and immigration 147
The nature of remittances/ Remittance fees: The tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg/ What GDP?/ Family Remittances/ Some notes on the securitization of remittances/ Safeguarding resources/ Scaling up imagination about immigration/ The Skin of the United States/ A de-facto USA enlargement
About cross-border services and emigration 165
The prisoners, the old, and the sick/ A wide spectrum of services for the elderly/ The ethics of solving the shortage of caretakers/ Are we truly a World Bank?/ Get moving!
Intermission…Out of the box tourism 173
Lessons from Florence/ A niche in crookedness?/ Dead and Useful/ Adventure tourism/ Vanity tourism/ Guaranteed boring
On our own governance 181
A real choir of voices/ Voices, Board Effectiveness, and 60 Years/ WB-IMF Collaboration on Public Expenditure issues/ The Normal Distribution Function is missing/ Board Effectiveness and the ticking clock/ WBG’s fight against corruption/ The Annual Meetings Development Committee Communiqué/ Hurrah for the Queen/ Diversity/ About the board and the staff/ A very local World Bank or…the not in my backyard syndrome
Budgets & Costs 193
On the urgency and the inertia of our business/ Medium Term Strategy and Finance Plan/ Unbudgeted costs/ Budget tools/ The remuneration of our President/ About our central travel agency
Reshuffling our development portfolio 201
Let us scale up the IFC/ An encore on the BIG capital increase for IFC/ The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency—MIGA
On some varied homespun issues 209
The Poverty Reduction Strategy/ There should be life beyond 2015/ There should be new life beyond HIPC/ We need to make more transparent our harmonization/ Transparently Understandable Debt Management/ The Financial Sector Assessment Handbook —a postscript/ Too sophisticated/ About the addiction of guarantees to Municipalities/ About risks and the opportunities/ Financial Outlook and Risks
Some political incorrect Private-Sector Issues 219
Is the private sector the same private sector everywhere?/ Private vs. local investors/ Some thoughts about financial good governance/ What is lacking in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act./ Too well tuned?/ Alternative Millennium Development Goals
Communications 225
Communications in a polarized world/ Some other global communication issues/ Red and blue, or, red or blue?—a postscript
Some admittedly lite pieces 237
The World Bank Special/ Thou shall not PowerPoint/ Deep pondering on labels/ To write or not to write…by hand/ Three bullets on punctuality
On common goods and some global issues 247
Towards World Laboratories/ Daddy…the original or the copy?/ The rights of intellectual property user/ Who can enforce it better?/ Moisés Naím’s Illicit—a postscript/ Global Tax/ Labor standards and Unions
A mixed bag of stand-alone issues 259
My insecurities about the social security debate/ About the SEC, the human factor, and laughing/ Roping in the herd/ A paradise of customs illegalities/ Human genetics made inhuman/ Justice needs to begin with just prisons/ Real or virtual universities?/ Brief thoughts on Europe/ Some spins on the US economy/ Is inflation really measuring inflation?
My Venezuelan blend 283
A Proposal for a New Way of Congressional Elections/ Let’s all whakapohane!/ We enjoyed/ Hugo, the Revolution, and I/ April 11-13, 2002/ To the opposition/ Synthesizing my current messages to my fellow countrymen/ 167-to-0—a postscript/
What is the financial world to do with Venezuela?/ Massachusetts, please show some dignity!/ Colombia & Venezuela
My Farewell Speech on October 28, 2004 299
Did the Minister do right? 305
And now what? 307
The President’s succession 309
My thoughts on the issue/ The OK Corral and the World Bank/ A letter to an another new American World Bank President
On some current books, a movie, and a future book 315
The World’s Banker by Sebastian Mallaby/ The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs/ The Elusive Quest for Growth by William Russell Easterly/ The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman/ The Pentagon’s New Map by Thomas P. M. Barnett/ And the Money kept Rolling In (and Out) by Paul Blustein/ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins/ The Constant Gardener and the UN/ The future very last book about Harry Potter
My book, Amazon’s profits and the value of its shares 325
The last items in my outgoing tray 329
Pray for us, Karol/ We must aim higher!
List of my fellow passengers who also dined at the captains table 333
A too long C.V. or a too short memoir, and acknowledgements 337
Shutting down 353
Keep in touch/ The Buck Stops Here
In search of a title
1/24th
By
One of twenty four Executive Directors of the World Bank Group
November 2002–October 2004
Some respectfully irreverent questions and suggestions about a great multilateral financial public-sector institution that the world needs more than ever to be a lean and mean poverty-fighting machine and that at sixty years of age should perhaps be renewing its vows in order to move up from “knowledge” into wisdom and instead of trying to advance impossible agenda like justice and social responsibility might do better settling for fights much easier to monitor against injustices and social irresponsibility … all made by a perhaps a somewhat naive but very well-intentioned former executive director equipped only with his long private-sector experience, and his willingness to speak out … sort of.
Or
HAVE THINK-TANK, WILL TRAVEL
Or
ANOTHER MOUSE WHO TRIED TO ROAR
Or
Mr. KUROWSKI GOES TO WASHINGTON (My daughter’s suggestion)
Or
VOICE AND NOISE
That’s it!
VOICE AND NOISE
Having an opinion and voicing it is what Voice is all about. Putting together thousands of perfectly pure voices might synthesize into a harmonious symphony but, without some noise, it will never ring true and that is what Noise is all about.
The world I remember when I was young moved forward on carrots and hope in the belief that it was going to be a better place, while today’s drivers are more the sticks and despairs of those looking only to hang onto what they’ve got.
To stand a chance of a better tomorrow, we need the Voice to recreate our dreams but also the Noise to make us want them come true.
A shrinking world that makes isolation impossible presents the human race with the challenge of really having to get along. If we resist facing this challenge, the world will be a much-saddened place: let me get off. However, if on the contrary we truly try to make it work, we will at least have some beautiful dreams again.
This book with all its simplicities and contradictions is but an effort to put my voice and noise on the table. All yours are needed too.
P.S. After having decided on the title I found on the Web an article by Ingo R. Titze, Ph.D., titled “Noise in the Voice” that originally appeared in the 2005 May/June issue of the Journal of Singing. It reassures me a lot, as it argues that “A little noise, turned on at the right time, can go a long way toward enlarging the interpretive tool."
A fifth country—while an ED but not as one. "The Chinese of China"
Let them bike
Friends, listening to your exhaustive list of concerns, I was reminded of the moments when I had to teach my daughters how to ride their bikes: I heard their mother’s anxious calls in the background; I felt my own nervousness; nonetheless, I just knew I had to let them go.
A monument to transparency
This would never have happened to John Wayne
Snowing in Washington
Washington and the GPS (Global Positioning System)
Assaulted
My insecurities about the social security debate
Red and blue, or, red or blue?—a postscript
Voice and Noise questions donated to Dropping Knowledge
Comments or answers, please!
From my CV: Mangoes
Local strawberries in season
Is inflation really measuring inflation?
The World Bank needs to go truly Global
Although we proudly name ourselves the World Bank, the fact is that we are more of a “Pieces of the World Bank”, with 24 Executive Director representing parochial interests. As a consequence I sadly had to conclude in that the World itself, call it Mother Earth if you want, in these times of globalization, is in fact the Bank’s most underrepresented constituency.
This needs to be fixed, urgently, as we need to be able to stimulate a profoundly shared ownership for the long-term needs of our planet, if we want to survive as a truly civilized society, worthy of the name civilization. As I see it, adding a couple of truly independent seven-year-term Executive Directors, whose role would be to think about the world of our grandchildren, way beyond the 2015 of the Millennium Development Goals—could be what the World Bank most needs now.
And, while at it, we should perhaps also ask one of the current Directors to give up his Chair for a new constituency—call it, if you will, the Constituency of the International Rovers, by which I mean all those workers, skilled or unskilled, legal or illegal, who nowadays represent jointly one of the largest economies of the world. By the way, the first thing that the Rovers’ ED would need to do is to make clear the enormous difference that exists between an immigrant with a long-term plan to emigrate from motherland and forever assume a new nationality, and, on the other hand, a temporary worker who just wants to make a buck in order to help his family to a better life, and who wishes with all his heart and soul to return home as soon as possible. Forcing temporary workers to swear allegiances to foreign flags, just so that they can have the right to a better income, cleaning toilets, seems only like a new generation of artificial trade barriers.
Currently we are too stuck in the geography of the non-globalized world to be able to see what is truly happening around us. For instance, El Salvador has about 2 million of its people working abroad, more than a third of its total workforce and so if to the current GDP figures of El Salvador we add what these workers are earning, gross, well then perhaps El Salvador’s growth rate could actually be higher than China’s. And you tell me, why should we not do it this way? Is not an El Salvadoran still a real El Salvadoran just because he or she is working abroad? The internal emigration in China from west to east might take a Chinese from 50 to 150 dollars per month, but the El Salvadorans going south to north go from 120 to 1.200, and no one is heard complaining about an over or undervalued currency.
(Extract from a presentation of Voice and Noise at InfoShop on May 16, 2006)
On the World Bank’s fight against corruption
To invest more scarce resources into anticorruption efforts than what the corruption could itself potentially cost is managerial corruption.
To fight corruption among third parties without fighting it first and foremost among your own is hypocritical corruption.
To create the impression that certain risks of corruption are effectively taken care of is collaborating with and camouflaging for corruption.
To focus the attention on the small fish while letting the big fish free, even though the small can grow to be big, is plain cowardly corruption.
To believe it is only when money is involved that it really matters creates the space for self-righteous corruption.
And finally, to believe that corruption can be contained to some pockets and not contaminate the rest of the world, and that some nations are by nature more immune to it, has nothing to do with corruption; it is just plain stupidity.
And so what shall it do? Well, as Dori in the Finding Nemo movie would have said, “Just keep fighting . . . just keep fighting!” I would start by recommending that all projects, urgently, include in their documentation, a very simple one-page Public Notice that lays out the most important risks of corruption in the operation, making clear what World Bank is doing to diminish them but, much more importantly, what it is not in their hands to do. That page should then transparently surf the Web in order to enlist the civil civilians in the fight.
(Extract from a presentation of Voice and Noise at the InfoShop on May 16, 2006)
Diversity
To write or not to write … by hand
As an economist, concerned about input/output productivity, I have to question whether there still is a valid reason for including learning to write by hand in the general school curricula. Just think of the number of hours you put into that effort and then calculate the estimated number of letters you are expected to handwrite in the future where even your signature is perhaps about to be supplanted by a scanned image of your right eye pupil.
“Dear God, another economist gone mad believing life is just about efficiency!” I can hear the purist cry out. No, friends, I am among the first to acknowledge a real human need for inefficiencies but perhaps even from this perspective, we should be able to find more enjoyable and useful inefficiencies than writing—and also with much less potential for creating conflicts with our perfectionist fathers.
Many write-defenders will put forward the argument that it promotes coordination of mind and muscle. However, if this were the whole purpose of the exercise and if we look at what seems to be future needs for coordination, derived from the many hours children invest playing handheld games, then I would argue that what we have to do away with is single-hand writing. Forget about right handed or left handed, let Darwin work, and have children learn to write with both their hands.
“But writing helps you to understand the language!” Nonsense! That you do by reading, listening, speaking, and nowadays by typing. If you really must cling to writing because of contractual clauses carefully crafted by your writing teachers association, then, at a minimum, you should convince them to use those sessions to teach writing in Chinese.
Want your children truly to stand out and be able to master future technologies with the same flair as Cirque du Soleil acrobats? Let them then practice to write with both hands in Chinese and Arabic, simultaneously, while humming Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin'.” That should do it!
But my purpose is not to eliminate writing as an art form but to recapture it as a true art form. You know how much I worry about how the world seems incapable of creating new good-paying jobs. Well, limiting the teaching of writing now allows us to visualize in a couple of years the resurrection of the profession of writing clerks. May I offer you my services then?
What on earth has this to do with the World Bank? If you can’t figure it out, you should not be in the business of development!
A quite interesting spin on this same issue is made by Willam Easterly in his book The Elusive Quest for Growth, since when he argues that “the productivity gains of the computer are slow to be realized . . . because there are still too many traditional people out there with ink and paper,” he is actually making the point that perhaps we should prohibit handwriting as such, so that the world can move forward. [Jim, my editor: “Plato suggested—I suspect jokingly—that the invention of writing was a bad thing that ruined human powers of memory.”]
In the WBG cafeteria, we read that by using its napkins made with 100%-recycled paper, the WBG Food Services was proudly saving 268 trees annually, 110,000 gallons of water, 47 cubic yards of landfill space, 65,000 Kwh of electricity, and 945 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions. As the WB Board’s 100% paper-intensive proceedings alone might consume several times these “savings,” not being able to write by hand could presumably also have some favorable environmental implications.
Thou shall not PowerPoint
• When we were small, our fathers taught us never to FingerPoint anyone, and today we also need to teach kids not to PowerPoint one another.
• Yes, I have seen some splendid use of PowerPoint presentations, but, in general terms, the world is not a better place for it.
• PowerPoint has empowered so many people with so little to say with a deep belief that the world is waiting for them to predicate, for hours.
• PowerPoint is little by little replacing all decent readable issue papers with thick bundles of copies of PowerPoint sheets, each one containing less than 15 words, in beautifully irrelevant colors, except when replaced by thin bundles containing miniature unreadable copies of aforementioned sheets.
• PowerPoint is forcing the world to structure its whole thinking process in terms of bulletpoints.
• NO, thou shall not PowerPoint me and I promise not to PowerPoint you … too
much.
• Happy Holidays
• Per
• December, 2003
The ethics of solving the shortage of caretakers
Of Mangos and Bananas
“It is harvested in abundance, and there are many who, during the season in which they are ripe, dedicate all of their time to the search for this fruit which for some time then becomes their only source of nourishment, very often to the detriment of their health. One can vacillate, then, on deciding whether the introduction of this tree [from Asia] has been a blessing or a curse. The writer of these words is inclined to believe the latter since the mango leads to idleness, to the invasion of another’s property and to vagrancy; additionally, no matter how good or healthy it may be, when ingested in moderation, it sometimes provokes digestive disorders and is far from being wholesome food. It alters, then, both morality as well as public health.”
This interesting quotation shows us that, in addition to oil, the mango should be classified high on the list of culprits that have been the cause of our poor economic development. Most assuredly, in addition to the mango and oil, we must also add to this list the sun, the beaches and all those variables that undoubtedly make it easier to survive an economic recession in a tropical Caracas than in a wintry Moscow.
Since it seems evident that the simplicity of living in the tropics leads to laziness while the hardship of winter promotes the discipline and work ethics that have ultimately inspired today’s global economic development, it behooves us to view global warming with renewed preoccupation and from a totally new angle.
I have made my own empirical observations about the evolution of global warming. Every Carnival weekend, for example, I stroll out to my beach in Margarita, the tropical Venezuelan island in the Caribbean Sea, and take note of the width of the shore from the water line to the roadway. Even when I had terrible difficulty in finding a spot in which to anchor beach umbrella, I never really worried about it. I simply attributed this difficulty to the increased popularity of the island and not to an invasion by the oceans.
Today, however, I harbor serious doubts as to the validity of my method of measurement since wherever I look I find much new and more concrete evidence of a very advanced state of global warming.
How else, other than by assuming a certain displacement toward the north of the parallel of the Banana Republics, can we explain the current enormous fiscal and commercial deficits that currently thrive in the United States.
How else, other than by assuming a certain displacement toward the north of the geographical boundary of the Banana Republics, can we explain the opposite positions recently sustained by superpowers like Europe and the United States on the issue of bananas, as if they were some modern versions of Lilliput and Blefuscu.
How else, other that by assuming the creation of climatic conditions conducive to the cultivation of mangos, can we understand why Japan has not been able to combat idleness and stimulate the reactivation of its economy? We have all read that Japan has reduced interest rates to an annual rate of one per one thousand. Can you imagine how impressed a botanist like Henri Pittier would be upon observing this unique specimen of a mango?
From The Daily Journal, Caracas, March 1999 (Abridged version)