Setting a bad example

Sit down with a farmer in Moldova and he’ll tell you all the things wrong with Moldovan agriculture – bad governmental policy, lack of market access, beauracracy, high taxes, low prices for produse, etc. etc. etc. It’s not that much different than farmers anywhere. However, when you ask what should be done to resolve these problems, their first response is “well, it would be good if agricultural were protected like it is in developed countries – it would be good if were guaranteed a price before we planted by the government”… uhhh excuse me? You named high taxes, poor government, beauracracy, and lack of market access and you want the government to work more closely with you? You mean like in Europe – the place that’s keeping the prices that you face internationally unreasonably low? Well, thanks Europe, you’ve effectively convinced markets with inherent financial advantages like Moldova that they can’t compete without government subsidies. Instead of saying “they should lower taxes” or “they should negotiate better bilateral agreements with neighboring countries” or “they should make it easier for us to do business”, farmers here are looking for handouts and a 9 – 5 like job that includes guaranteed wages. You might say that’s because of their communist past, but I think as much as anything it’s because of they have heard too many good things about the European system without really understanding the consequences of huge agricultural subsidies (both in country and internationally). You have to argue for hours before they believe that in America farmers work hard or actually deal with uncertain markets. Although their viewpoint is understandable, it is also unfortunate, and I hope that the hand-out attitude goes away before they lose a real good chance at making their mark on international markets.

the communist mindset in Moldova - just my opinion

Someone asked me "so what is the "communist mindset"" and I am going to try to explain my version of it in terms of Moldova.

I will speak about what I know about, and I know about the system of Colhoz farms (Collective farms) that dotted the countryside of Moldova up until land privitization. In the Colhoz, no one owned land; instead the Colhoz owned the land and the worker was provided for by the Colhoz. Because I (as a worker) put nothing into it, if I exit from the Colhoz (which I in fact did not have the right to do), I got nothing - so in reality, I was dependent on it. My work was paid regardless of how much I actually accomplished - THIS IS THE FUNDAMENTAL FLAW. You're probably thinking "well, we have many professions that are salary based - teachers don't get paid based on how many kids get A's after all". That's true, but salary based systems usually include other incentives, like the possibility of increasing your wage, promotion, or improving your own CV (assuming you actually can switch jobs) by working hard - so in short, working hard does benefit you directly, if not exactly right now. In the Colhoz, working hard does not directly benefit you - ever. If we ALL work hard, then we COULD MAYBE receive a benefit, though we were never included enough in the decision-making process as to undestand what that benefit might be (besides meaningless propoganda). They were blindfolded to their future, bound to a single job, and given orders by their superiors, all while being told they should be happy that they receive 80 rubles a month and bread only costs 5 kopeech (cents).
In addition, the Colhoz was responsible for my work. That is, I really ccouldn't be fired. Regardless of how I worked, I had to be employed and paid by the Colhoz. That's right - the state assured me work and made sure that my pay was not connected to my output - sounds like a real winner...
and indeed it is. Societal laziness has some interesting effects (especially here). When you're lazy, you have a lot of time to do nothing. When you have time to do nothing and you lived in a closed society, you're pretty limited in what you can do. The usual result was something bad. Most often drinking. So you have a lot of lazy, drunk people whose definition of working hard 1 hour of working to every 1 hour of "resting" (read "drinking") and who have no understanding of personal initiative.
Ahhh personal initiative. I bet you didn't even know you had it as an American - well let me tell you that you do (this is where you pat yourself on your back). Because of the hierarchical nature of the Colhoz, ever person was responsable for his job and received his orders from the person above him. He had very little room to think outside of what the boss says. So there is a disincentive for personal initiative, and a general lack of incentive for thinking intensively about what you're actually doing.
I've been here long enough that what I'm saying is not just what I've heard - it's what I've seen. The communist system of learning and work, based most often on memorization and not on creative thinking and problem solving, affects people's ability to be flexible to work in many things at once, but most important, WORK MUST BE DIRECTLY CONNECTED WITH INDIVIDUAL BENEFIT. That's not a capitalist theory and I'm not a member of the burgeosie (so much so I'm not even sure how to spell it), that is the reality of being human.
We haven't even touched on the fact that the communists didn't teach classes about marketing, networking, or anything remotely connected with information sharing.
Anyway, that's enough, you get the idea. Have fun thinking in your fundamentally capitalism minds and be happy you have them.

dear Congress - get your damn act together

and solve a problem instead of creating on for once: pass immigration legislation that INCLUDES amnesty for those already in the US - just give them a damn green card for christ's sake! You have the opportunity to resolve a problem that YOUR previous inadequate immigration policies created by giving hard working people the right to continue to work hard - or does that too much to ask?

I know you've heard the whole "America was built by immigrants" argument and your probably ready with some stale response that includes "the reality of the situation is..." and "I am not against hard working legal immigrants, however...". Well, you have 2 options: kick out millions of people and spend billions doing it, create huge practically unfillable holes in the workforce and raise prices on many consumer goods, and tear the American dream from the very hands of those who want it most, or you could provide amnesty, resolve much of the current problem, allow hard working immigrants to continue working and create a good, sustainable immigration policy that will assure that the same mistakes that led to the current situation will not be made again. Of course, when you imagine that A - many republicans are anti-immigrants and B - many immigrants are not republicans, you can see the real discussion about this issue is not occurring at the level of right or wrong, but rather right or left.

This type of thinking is the unfortunate destiny of democracy, and all we have left to do is scream so loud as a people that they can't help but get it through their ballot-box brains that what they do AFFECTS US. I'm glad that 500,000 people were screaming in LA, and I hope we continue to until the problem is resolved logically and in the people's benefit.

You can write a letter to your congressperson about this - go to congress.org and the For Citizens bar. It's a little scream, but it counts.

it's baseball season in Moldova

Look on the form on that kid! We're preparing our team for the Moldovan baseball league - there'e even talk that the championship will occur in the breakaway republic of Transistria... can't do that in America!

The coming of a new and prosperous day… Amway??

To put it bluntly, rural Moldova is a pretty uncultured place. I don’t say that in a snobby American way, I say that because certain things have not yet because norms (and other things remain norms) that we would consider not very cultured, like snot rockets (which everyone fires off) and burning piles of manure in the road creating a poopy smog for all your neighbors.

And yet, the pinnacle of culture and natural products has decided to enter the Moldova market - Amway. Moldova has more natural products than Amway has ever seen – and they probably never want to see them because real natural products don’t come smelling like mint and flowers – they usually smell like dirt, plants, vinegar, shit, or some combination.

I had not heard of Amway at all in Moldova over the past year, and in the last month there are at least 3 people in my town alone who are considering or already are Amway representatives. They all say the same things: I saw people who make 1, 2, even 5 thousand euro per month and they just stay at home. When you ask who in the world is going to buy the stuff, they use the same arguments too – who wouldn’t want high quality products (not the crap you find in a regular moldovan store) that last a long time. They even always start with the same example: “Let’s take your basic toothpaste as an example…”. When you ask, “isn’t this stuff a little out of your typical rural Moldovan’s price range?”, they just start the broken record again.

It amazes me that for all of the effort we put in to getting people raised in a command economy to understand the benefits of capitalism and a free market economy, ultimately it was Amway that stirred the Moldovan’s interest. Amway is like the American dream come to life, and there are always enough examples to make everyone think they have a chance, and to make everyone think they’ll enjoy being a toothpaste salesman. If I made a seminar about being a toothpaste salesman, I think I would have much less participants than Amway’s spin on the same subject – and to that, I give them credit for their ingenuity.

One of the people who was interested in becoming an Amway rep was a cabbage farmer… something which, to me, is a very real and profitable business. He has real potential in a real business, especially because of his good standing in town and his excellent knowledge of the business… and yet Amway has mucked up the space in his dreams with their system of “points”. Points are so simple, not like real life in capitalism where you have to worry about producing, finding buyers, paying workers, etc. etc., Like in the communist system, using Amway you can always imagine somehow that some smart person thought through the whole system (after all, I met people who actually make 1000 euro per month), and all I have to do is work a little and follow the rules, and I’ll win too. In a way, from the individuals perspective, advanced capitalism with large companies isn’t all that different than communism, other than the mentality of the those working as a result of the history required to achieve advanced capitalism.

Anyway, in the end, who the hell is going to buy this crap? I agree there are people, but if we have 3 representants in our town, we don’t have that many people who will buy toothpaste for 8 dollars a tube. Even if they do buy it, this isn’t helping the Moldovan economy, this isn’t adding value to anything, this isn’t producing anything, this is just handing goods from one person to another. Someone’s getting richer, but it sure isn’t Moldova.

The other reason why rural Moldova is slow to develop

In forming an explanation for the cause of undevelopment of rural Moldova, we can always look at the usual suspects. The obvious economic factors are certainly working against development: the low avaliability of resources (natural resources, credit, land, etc.), relatively closed economy and difficulty of selling goods, poor infrastructure, huge administrative and political buearacracy and widespread corruption are all working against rapid growth in rural areas. However, attributing stagnant rural growth in Moldova to this set of issues only is incorrect, and only someone who has experienced Moldova through newspapers and press releases would do so. There are more pervasive, complicating issues surrounding the lack of rural development in Moldova, and I would even argue that Moldova serves as an extreme example of a general tendancy for all rural areas.

Let me begin by saying that we are speaking as much about social and political development as I am about economic development. Economic development, in my opinion, is usually conditioned upon a minimum level of social and political awareness among the population. Social and political awareness are developed (literally) by civil society and the institutions which make it up, with civil society in a position of extreme importance for all aspects of development, rural and otherwise, most importantly in cases in which there is a generally non-functioning centralized government and poor infrastructure. In such a situation, there is an absolute necessity to communicate and cooperate. Individual efforts are often in vain when confrunted by the huge variety of problems that appear in every aspect of life (certainly true in Moldova). Institutions that directly represent people on the local level counterbalance these otherwise confounding factors and provide a forum for them to discuss common problems and create localized solutions. Development without civil society is dependent upon top down change, which is usually wasteful, poorly targeted, and poorly implimented because local concerns are rarely represented and no one is checking to make sure things are happening as they should. The only real solution is bottom up change, which means the development of civil society at the local level.

Unfortunately, once again, there are many factors retarding bottom up development of civil society – the mass exodus of young, educated people from rural areas (and Moldova in general), the ubiquitos communist “the government must fix it” mindset, the lack of trust as a result of the theft and destruction that followed land privitization, and others. These are factors that I will not discuss here, but are certainly common to the problem of poor local institutional development.

I would like to make another argument about why rural Moldova has such an underdeveloped civil society, one as true in Moldova as it is in other countries. In my opinion, the prevelance of traditional behaviors (which occurs most often in rural areas) hinders civil society development because those activites consume so much time. Traditional activities are more prevelant in small towns for several reasons. First, small towns have better reinforcement mechanisms for traditional behavior, conversely punishing non-traditional behavior (by non-traditional, I mean activities which deviate from the norm – of course, today’s deviance may be tomorrows norm). Because “everyone knows everyone elses’ business”, non-traditional behavior is not given enough time to develop. That is, when hidden from public judgement, people are more willing to try such behavior and reinforce the deviancy before “going public” with it, whereas non-traditional behavior which occurs in the open is immediately punished and cannot gain lasting strength. In addition, because of limited information flow in small towns, new non-traditional ideas often don’t even get discussed, and because rural areas are often agriculturally based, the extreme low risk agricultural mindset further restricts the their flow and uptake. So not only is there a very small set of existing non-traditional behaviors to choose from, their integration into society is a long and difficult process. As a result, rural areas tend to be slow to develop and the strength of traditional activities is difficult to challenge.

To have an idea of what is meant by “traditional behaviors”, let me give you some Moldovan examples. Planting corn on small acre/2 acre plots is a traditional activity because the corn is almost always planted at a loss, and has been for several years. Also, you could purchase corn cheaper on the marketplace than producing it yourself, especially using the methods that they use (often without fertilizer, and almost never using herbicides or pesticides). Not working on holidays (of which there are 120 in a year) is another traditional activity that seriously affects people’s productivity. A traditional idea might be that it is shameful to buy a chicken from another person in town, because you should have your own chickens. And the list goes on. These activities hinder development in so many ways it would take a book to write them all, but in the end it is clear there are many and varied.

And so we come to the point of this discussion: being that there are so many traditional behaviors and they are so inefficient, they literally crowd out any time for the creation of an active, healthy civil society. Almost more important than physical time, people spend so much mental time concerned with maintaining the status quo that forming the institutions that make up civil society, even ones that represent their interests, tends to take a back seat. The active reinforcement of traditional ideas often keeps good, efficient ideas out of rural areas even when they are very advantageous to the individual.

Along the same lines, the agricultural lifestyle of Moldovans is also not conducive to institution-building because it is so unstructured, further reducing any plannable free time to meet, discuss, and build an active civil society. Between the crowding out of traditional activities and the non-structured work ours of small farmers, there is literally no room left for civil society (though I must say that the non-structured work ours in agriculture often act as an excuse for people who are really just averse to engaging in non-traditional behavior, even things as simple as meetings).

I could give you a hundred examples of traditional activities “crowding out” non-traditional ones, but I’ll just give you just one. Several grape farmers got together to form a marketing cooperative for table grapes. When they discuss it, everyone is very excited and agrees that the future of grape sales will require them to cooperative in order to sell in larger quantities. The date for the first meeting came around, and one left for the capital, and two others said they were busy planting potatoes. As a reader, you might say “well, this could be as a result of a lot of things: maybe they weren’t really interested in the first place, maybe potatoes are crucial to their existence, maybe they don’t trust the guy who set up the meeting…”. If you are thinking that, your wrong. These people simply decided that planting potatoes (which is not crucial to their existence) is more important than the meeting, because they have not connected this meeting with the formation of the cooperative – they don’t want to go to the meeting, but they’d still like to form the cooperative. Their decision was based both on lack of time, but also skewed priorities based on life-long reinforced ideas about traditional activities (planting potatoes) and non-traditional ones (going to meetings).

I think it is worth mentioning that it is ultimately hard to judge any behavior because it can often have both work and pleasure aspects to it. For example, hoeing a garden by hand might be both a fruitful and enjoyable activity, and even if a rototiller is more efficient some individuals may choose the hoe. However, from my experience I do not think that most people would prefer the inefficient solution to any problem, especially problems which form a part of their livlihoods, as in the case of agriculture in rural areas. So I would say that most often it is a tradition-based mindset that obstructs non-traditional behaviors from entering into practice.

So ultimately there are many reasons why rural Moldova is so slow to develop, but slow development of civil society resulting from the excess time spent on traditional behaviors is certainly one of the main ones. When I return to the United States, it will be interested to put this theory to the test in rural areas there and see how things compare.