The Swissmakers

"We believe that the assimilation of a foreigner
happens when the subject has spent enough time in our country without having been noticed". This is one of the opening sentences of "The Swissmakers", an acute satire about integration/assimilation policies of foreign citizens in Switzerland.

After immigrants have made a formal request for citizenship, it is the duty of the agents from the "office for assimilation" to compile a report of "good candidacy" which, together with an interview with a commission of local citizens (mostly about Swiss history but also on other aspects of private life) determines whether or not the “Swiss wannabe” deserves his/her passport.

According to Rodmer, the strict, inflexible, super-efficient, thick-headed agent from the Zurich office and one of the main character of the movie, every decision of the commission is based on this report. This is the reason why his approach to the job is extremely rigid. “An agent has to pose precise questions to get precise answers: no empathy has to be established with the candidate otherwise the decision is fatally flawed”. The other agents of the office, Fischer, who is absent-minded, romantic and day-dreamer, has a different view. He thinks that sometimes “also instinct may provide a valuable judgement”.

The cases they have to examine are an Italian-communist pastry chef from Apulia, a dancer from Yugoslavia and a psychiatrist from Germany. "Everybody is welcome in Switzerland...the tourist as much as a worker...but things become different when somebody wants to become citizen..." are told the agents on their training. Their job is to constantly monitor how these people live: the conditions of their apartments, the amount of savings in the bank, the stability of their private life... They have to check this constantly and even randomly. If things are not clear, extra-work on Saturdays is needed to make an informed decision. Any single aspect of the candidates’ life has to match what somebody should expect from a Swiss citizen. No deviation from the norm is considered licit if anybody has serious intentions about citizenship. For example “curtains on the window are a symptom that you house is in order, you cannot live without any”, says a neighbour of the Yugoslavian dancer to Fischer, in one private conversation. As Rodmer puts it, even “happiness” is worthless: what counts is for people (foreigners) to learn how to integrate themselves.

The two guys work together, but then Fischer gets tired of the methods imposed by Rodmer. Being loyal to his role though, he “makes” a Swiss citizen, but in a different way…

The dialogues are highly enjoyable, while the direction is sometimes too pedantic. The movie was released in 1978, and apparently, it is one of the most successful Swiss movie ever made. It was blockbuster until 1997, when it was surpassed by Titanic..but honestly it’s way better than Di Caprio’s worst movie..

Economics Focus

Ethnic hatred, civil wars and genocides. There is much violence in the developing world, and this has been found to be one of the reasons for poverty and underdevelopment. However, the cause of such violence is not fully understood. Some blame it on hunger, others on religion, and some on deeper geographic reasons. One of them is Jared Diamond. As he explained in his awesome book, “Collapse”, it is how a society reacts to geographical constraints that determines its survival. Easter Island failed, Icelanders didn’t. But if the Rwanda genocide was due to a lack of food, does this mean any society would react the same way, killing each other?

It is impossible to know for sure, as they are so many event specific conditions that permitted this atrocity. But would Europeans react the same way in they were put in Rwanda, or are they relatively less violent? We could try this as a field experiment. We could send a group of Congolese on a small island with limited resources, and do the same with a group of French, a group of Chinese and a group of Paraguayans. We could then examine how the situations evolve and determine if, between these four cultures, some are more violent than others. All we need is four very similar isolated small islands, some sufficiently large and representative samples of people from these countries and wait 10 years.

Ted Miguel, from Berkeley, and his colleagues had a better idea, at least a less costly one. They found in the real world a “natural experiment” where many different cultures interplay in the same environment to examine if acts of violence can be explained by a society’s “culture”.

This natural experiment is offered by the presence of thousands of international soccer players in the European professional leagues. It offers acts of violence (think Zidane), for which data is gathered under the number of red and yellow cards, in a fixed setting: Europe. What the authors find is that a player’s home country’s history of violent civil conflict is strongly associated with violent behaviour on the soccer pitch. And this, of course, is when controlling for origin country characteristics (e.g., rule of law, per capita income), player characteristics (e.g., age, field position, quality, team). “The leading interpretation is that persistent national cultures of violence accompany these soccer players as they move to Europe.”

In a previous similar paper, also exploiting a natural experiment, they found that “corruption culture”, another impediment to development, was persistent. Diplomats from all around the world working at the UN in NYC had way more unpaid parking tickets if they were from more corrupt countries.

Reassuringly, they find no meaningful correlation between a player’s home country civil war history and his soccer performance!

References

• Edward Miguel, Sebastian Saiegh and Shanker Satyanath, "National Cultures and Soccer Violence", working paper
• Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel, "Corruption, Norms, and Legal Enforcement: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets", Journal of Political Economy, December 2007, Vol. 115, No. 6: pp. 1020-1048
  
  
  

Humans are in essence evil

Michael Vick was a superstar. He was the rebel, the boy from the ghetto, who made it to the National Football League (NFL), as a quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons. But there was too much gangster left in him, or too much violent culture left in him, and even though he was making way enough money, he got into an illegal money-making activity. He organised dog fights and illegal gambling as you may have seen in Amorres perros (the best movie by Iñarritu, before he became a sell out), in his own millionaire-type residence. America, the home of the golden retriever family and animal rights activists, was shocked. It sent him to prison and ended his career. The Chinese, who eat dogs, must have thought this exaggerated.

Violence on animals and gambling on organised fights is widespread around the world. Coq fights are ubiquitous in Asia and Africa while the Spaniards brought with them the killing of the bull practise in most of its colonies, where the matador, the “bull killer”, is now praised. In the Philippines, in the remote villages of the southern island of Mindanao, they even have horse fights. They get them to fight the same way you get any animal to do it. You put two males near a horny female. I keep on wondering how the locals can applause and cheer such a violent, abusive and bloody contest, which would never happen without humans starting it.

In Nicaragua, the residents of Managua had the misfortune to host an exhibition of dying dogs, by a sick Costa Rican artist, Guillermo Vargas. His 'work of art' consisted in watching the agony and suffering of dogs who were tied to the gallery’s walls by a short rope and were left for days without food or water, until death.

It even gets sicker. Sexual tourism is not only human sexual tourism. Some go to Thailand to have sex with underage boys; others go to a prostitute village in Borneo, in Indonesia, to have sex with Pony. Pony is a chained and shaved orang-utan, lying on a mattress. Apparently, it took 35 policemen armed with AK-47s to rescue her form the villagers who were violently resisting giving away their source of income.

The westerners may care about animals more than the rest of the world, but it might still be a matter of culture, or survival (to earn a living income). Westerners poison rats and organise bull fights and rodeos. While Indians treat bulls and cows as gods, America and Argentina slaughter them massively. Japanese fishermen hunt whales while Canadians kill deer with bows and arrows and African poachers kill elephants. Should the West, or the UN, impose animal rights as they wish they could impose human rights, such as women’s right in the Middle-East? Is it a universal right or national culture? Why do I care so much about animals, if others don’t?

Without hesitation, I think humans are, in actual fact, evil, and not just when it comes to mistreating animals. For example, some UNHCR employees just want to go work on the field to rape refugees in camps. See this story from Vice.

Pollution

Man we humans are really disgusting. The ocean is so full of trash it makes me wanna cry. I was reading this article and man, we're doomed. Turns out all the ocean currents bring all the trash dumped all around the world in rivers and seas to what is called a Gyre in the middle of the Pacific ocean, where it all accumulates. Scientists who studied the composition of the waters "estimated the ratio of plastic to the regular components of seawater in what we were pulling up as 6 to 1. As we moved closer to the middle of the Gyre, the ratio got visibly higher, until we started pulling in samples that looked like they contained solely plastic". The problem with plastic is that it's not biodegradable. So we are altering the composition of the ocean, for good. Jellyfish become completely made out of plastic particles as they drift at the surface, dead. Then they get eaten by fish and then by bigger fish that we eat. And here comes the shit: the chemicals contained in these plastics were found to cause "an absurd suite of health problems including low sperm count, prostate cancer, hyperactivity, early-onset diabetes, breast cancer, undescended testicles, and sex reversal", on mice, in lab experiments.

So why do educated people still throw away trash on the street, or fail to recycle plastic bottles or even paper?

By the way, here's a video on this story. If you feel that you're being too brainwashed by The Economist sometimes, try this magazine, it's my second favourite. It also gives good fashion advice.

Only one "Champagne" will survive

The story is, you have a region in France that produces one of the most popular wine in the world, wiht outstanding reputation as "the" wine for celebrations. Then you have a little town in the Vaud Region in Switzerland, that happens to have the same name. Since 1974 the town has been ordered by the WTO to cease using the word "Champagne" for the wine produced there (non-sparkling). More you can read here. The villagers have decided to go on with the fight, as they claim, their first production started already in 1657. Banning the use of the same name for "competing" products may be plausible, but what's wrong with these bakery products which are very popular in Switzerland?Why should they also change their name?

Economic Gangsters

Now here's a book I am so looking forward to read:

Economic Gangsters
Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations
by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel

From the intro on the book's website I'm sure I'll just love it:

"Meet the economic gangster. He’s the United Nations diplomat who double-parks his Mercedes on New York streets at rush hour because the cops can’t touch him—he has diplomatic immunity. He’s the Chinese smuggler who dodges tariffs by magically transforming frozen chickens into frozen turkeys. The dictator, the warlord, the crooked bureaucrat who bilks the developing world of billions in aid. The calculating crook who views stealing and murder as just another part of his business strategy. And, in the wrong set of circumstances, he just might be you."

Here's what Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics, thinks of it:

“Economic Gangsters is a fascinating exploration into the dark side of economic development. Two of the world's most creative young economists use their remarkable talents for economic sleuthing to study violence, corruption, and poverty in the most unexpected ways. Subjected to their genius, seemingly inconsequential events (like New York City parking tickets and Suharto catching a cold) become potent tools in understanding how the world really works. Rarely has a book on economics been this fun and this important. ”

I'm adding it to my list after "The logic of life" by Tim Harford. By the way, here's another super interesting paper by Miguel on National Cultures and Soccer Violence . And one by Fisman, Gender Differences in Mate Selection: Evidence from a Speed Dating Experiment.

Am I the only one here interested in that kind of stuff? I mean, behavioral economics and development?

Be kind, rewind

A few words about a light and enjoyable movie (written and directd by Michel Gondry)I saw last night.

When the nostalgic owner of a VHS renting shop (Danny Glover) goes away for a week to spy on the competitor’s DVD shops, he tells his adoptive son (Mos Def) to take care of the shop. But he has a clumsy friend (Jack Black), who, when trying to sabotage a power station, becomes magnetized. So when he enters the video club, he erases all the tapes just by being there.

So when the shop’s best client wants to rent “Ghostbusters”, they quickly realize that the only way to have a VHS copy of the movie is to film a remake themselves. It turns out to be very crappy, but with a lot of heart, so the best client’s son and friends find it fascinating.

When asked what the hell is going on, Jack Black answers that the movie has been sweded. “That’s not a verb, that’s a country”, the young gangster reacts. “Exactly” retorts Jack Black, “that’s why it’s expensive”!

Turns out they start making more of this hilarious and “feel good” sweded versions, including 2001, a space odyssey, Rush Hour 2, the Lion King and Driving Miss Daisy. But just as they’re starting to make enough money to save the building from being destroyed by urban developers, the copyright lawyers come and destroy all their sweded versions.

They conclude by filming a documentary on Fats Waller, the jazzman who supposedly lived in that same house where the video club is today and the idol of the shop owner. When they project it the night of the building destruction in the video shop, the entire neighbourhood has gathered to enjoy the craziness and human feeling of their filmmaking.

Anyway, this is a crazy movie about how people care about social assets such as friends and neighbourhood culture in Passaic, New Jersey. The point is not that change or progress is a bad thing; the point is that the best things in life are the ones from the heart.