Tate Watkins

Cross-dressing and snake-swallowing at Carnival in Haiti This...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:06:06 -0500

Cross-dressing and snake-swallowing at Carnival in Haiti

This gentleman dressed as a lady managed to get the entire head and then some of the snake he’s holding into his mouth and throat and what must have also eventually been esophagus. Click through for a larger version.

Faces of Haiti Carnival 2012 These are some photos I took of...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:52:00 -0500

Faces of Haiti Carnival 2012

These are some photos I took of participants and spectators at Carnival 2012 in Les Cayes. View more photos I took from Carnival here.

Craft manufacturing, from Brooklyn to Africa

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 09:17:00 -0500

Today at the Planet Money blog, Adam Davidson writes about Kings County jerky, an all-natural beef jerky operation in Brooklyn. Founder Chris Woehrle, who Davidson describes as “an artisanal food craftsman,” quit his corporate job one day to start pickling things and eventually decided he could corner the high-end jerky market.

It’s an example of what Davidson calls craft manufacturing. “Ignore low-priced commodity products,” he writes. “Focus instead on customizing high-quality goods for a select audience willing to pay a premium.”

The venture reminds me of another Brooklyn-based company that I covered for GOOD recently. Madécasse is an artisanal chocolate company that sources cocoa and processes chocolate in Madagascar, before shipping to markets in the U.S., Europe, and South Africa.

Its gourmet chocolates command a premium that ultimately makes the business’ model viable. And since the company makes chocolate in the country instead of shipping its cheap commodity, cocoa beans, abroad for processing elsewhere, most of the value is added in Madagascar and stays in local economies—just as Kings County Jerky provides a marginal boost to Brooklyn’s economy.

Olibérte Footwear, a Toronto-based shoe company that manufactures high-quality footwear in Ethiopia and exports to the West, relies upon a similar premium-quality model.

On craft manufacturing, Davidson concludes:

It’s one of the best alternatives to competing with China and other low-wage countries, which have perfected the commodity business of turning out lots and lots of identical products as cheaply as possible.

Forget that model. In America, we can focus on craft. That’s where the money is, and that’s where the hope lies for American manufacturing.

The same could be true for a segment of African manufacturers, and both sectors might rely on the same set of consumers: people in places like Brooklyn who are wiling to pay a premium for artisanal beef jerky, gourmet Malagasy chocolate, or high-quality Ethiopian leather shoes.

Bobby Philippeaux brings Carnival to Haitian diaspora in Florida

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:15:00 -0500

For the past week, I was in the southern coastal town of Les Cayes, where Haiti’s national Carnival celebration was held this year. I helped Jacob Kushner, a friend and journalist who has been reporting from Haiti for more than a year, produce a radio story on Carnival for WLRN, a South Florida NPR affiliate. Here is how WLRN described the piece:

This week millions of people across Haiti will parade in elaborate costumes and dance to the blaring horns of rara and Haitian pop music as they celebrate the nation’s largest cultural event of the year, Carnival. As Jacob Kushner reports from Port-au-Prince, one Haitian-born Florida man is working to ensure that the hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants living in South Florida will be able to join them in spirit.

You can listen to the story via this audio post. Jacob did the interview and voiceovers for the piece; I recorded all the in-the-moment sounds from Carnival—rara bands marching through the parade route, chanting and singing of performers, ambient street sounds.

The man WLRN refers to is Jean Robert (Bobby) Philippeaux, who started a South Florida local cable channel, Island TV, 16 years ago. For the past 15 years he’s been coming to Haiti to broadcast the national Carnival festival, usually held in Port-au-Prince, live to Haitians in South Florida.

I spent most of the day Sunday and into wee hours of Monday morning with Philippeaux and his two-man crew. We watched the festival, and Philippeaux and his crew filmed it, from the stand of the Ministry of Haitians Living Abroad (Ministère des Haitiens Vivant à l’Etranger). Philippeaux seemed to know everyone not just on the stand but also on the parade route.

I was standing along the route when President Martelly rode by waving at the crowds from an open-air ATV. Shorty after, Philippeaux walked up to tell me that he went to high school with the president. He’d just shaken hands with him and said hello.

Philippeaux is pictured below, with video camera, shortly after greeting the president on the parade route.

Bobby Philippeaux and Island TV bring spirit of Carnival to...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:19:00 -0500

Bobby Philippeaux and Island TV bring spirit of Carnival to Florida Haitians

I helped produce a radio story on Carnival for WLRN, a South Florida NPR affiliate. Here is how WLRN described the piece:

This week millions of people across Haiti will parade in elaborate costumes and dance to the blaring horns of rara and Haitian pop music as they celebrate the nation’s largest cultural event of the year, Carnival. As Jacob Kushner reports from Port-au-Prince, one Haitian-born Florida man is working to ensure that the hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants living in South Florida will be able to join them in spirit.

More background about the story here.

Yellowcake, cyberwar, and the cybersecurity-industrial complex

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:15:00 -0500

Today, Jerry Brito and I contributed a guest column about cyberwar and threat inflation to Wired’s Threat Level. An excerpt:

In his 2010 bestseller Cyber War, Richard Clarke warns that a cyberattack today could result in the collapse of the government’s classified and unclassified networks, the release of “lethal clouds of chlorine gas” from chemical plants, refinery fires and explosions across the country, midair collisions of 737s, train derailments, the destruction of major financial computer networks, suburban gas pipeline explosions, a nationwide power blackout, and satellites in space spinning out of control. He assures us that “these are not hypotheticals.” But the only verifiable evidence he presents relates to several well-known distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, and he admits that DDOS is a “primitive” form of attack that would not pose a major threat to national security.

When Clarke ventures beyond DDOS attacks, his examples are easily debunked. To show that the electrical grid is vulnerable, for example, he suggests that the Northeast power blackout of 2003 was caused in part by the “Slammer” worm. But the 2004 final report of the joint U.S.-Canadian task force that investigated the blackout found that no virus, worm, or other malicious software contributed to the power failure. Clarke also points to a 2007 blackout in Brazil, which he says was the result of criminal hacking of the power system. Yet investigations have concluded that the power failure was the result of soot deposits on high-voltage insulators on transmission lines.

Clarke’s readers would no doubt be as frightened at the prospect of a cyber attack as they might have been at the prospect of Iraq passing nuclear weapons to al Qaeda. Yet evidence that cyberattacks and cyberespionage are real and serious concerns is not evidence that we face a grave risk of national catastrophe, just as evidence of chemical or biological weapons is not evidence of the ability to launch a nuclear strike.

Read the entire thing here.

Jerry and I have pushed backed against Chicken Little the-cyber-sky-is-falling rhetoric for much of the past two years. We made our comprehensive case about the dangers of online threat inflation in a law review article for Harvard National Security Journal: Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy. A shortened version of the paper ran as a print feature in Reason.

Photo courtesy of Nextors/Flickr

Low-skilled immigration and the American working class

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:16:00 -0500

In his New York Times column yesterday, Ross Douthat addressed Charles Murray’s recent book Coming Apart. The book is about the decline of what Murray calls America’s “founding virtues” within the U.S. working class and the consequences of that decline. Douthat was unsatisfied with Murray’s policy conclusions and offered four of his own, one of which focused on low-skilled immigration and its effects on the working class:

If we expect less-educated Americans to compete with low-wage workers in Asia and Latin America, we shouldn’t be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with them domestically as well. Immigration benefits the economy over all, but it can lower wages and disrupt communities, and there’s no reason to ask an already-burdened working class to bear these costs alone. Here the leading Republican candidates have the right idea: We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants, while making it as hard as possible for employers to hire low-skilled workers off the books.

His argument is dubious.

If you’re worried about the U.S. working class surviving in a global economy, you should worry much much more about competing with low-wages in Latin America or Asia than competing with immigrants for wages at home. Laborers working in factories abroad where companies can operate with lower costs on many margins relative to the United States pose a much greater threat to U.S. workers’ wages than newly-arrived laborers do. If you’re going to make a nationalist argument about the American working class, the anti-trade and anti-outsourcing one is much stronger than the anti-low-skilled immigrant one, yet in the first sentence excerpted above, Douthat alludes that the two are something-like-equivalent.

Secondly, there’s no ironclad evidence about the effects of low-skilled immigration on natives’ wages. But research like David Card’s Mariel boat lift study suggest the effects are negligible or nonexistent:

The Mariel immigrants increased the Miami labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even greater because most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled. Nevertheless, the Mariel influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers, even among Cubans who had immigrated earlier.

Other natural experiments, about low-skilled Algerian immigration to France, for instance, have yielded similar results.

One thing that seems to be clear is that low-skilled immigration is correlated with higher employment, which says nothing about causation—immigrants are probably drawn to places with already thriving economies—but might suggest a crucial point. Low-skilled immigrants may not be competing with all that many native borns, let alone the working class Douthat writes about. Perhaps the only jerbs they’re taking are those that natives won’t do, like strenuous farm work, or those dish-washing and kitchen prep jobs Anthony Bourdain is always talking about.

It’s telling that Douthat’s utilitarian argument makes a veiled appeal to xenophobia: “Immigration … can … disrupt communities.” I don’t mean to imply that Douthat is xenophobic, but in most cases and places, immigrants are much more likely to speak English than rob a convenience store. Regardless, it’s probably not nearly as disruptive as, say, current backlash against foreigners in Montgomery and Tuscaloosa that seems to have sprouted overnight and not be really about “immigration” so much as weird To Kill a Mockingbird-esque societal issues.

Douthat’s correct that we should welcome high-skilled immigrants because they add to American prosperity. He’d have a more complete argument if he struck the “high-skilled” descriptor.

"Of course Haiti is not now and never has been a democracy according to the American concept. It is..."

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:30:05 -0500

“Of course Haiti is not now and never has been a democracy according to the American concept. It is an elected monarchy. The President of Haiti is really a king with a palace, with a reign limited to a term of years.”

- Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse, 1938

Mini-review of Stealth of Nations

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:46:00 -0500

The February 2012 issue of Reason includes a mini-review—that is, a 165-word review— I did on Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy:

“There is another economy out there,” writes American journalist Robert Neuwirth in Stealth of Nations (Pantheon). “It is how much of the world survives, and how many people thrive, yet it is ignored by most economists, business leaders, and politicians.” The $10 trillion economy to which Neuwirth refers is made up of the ubiquitous street markets and unlicensed bazaars in cities such as Lagos, São Paolo, and Guangzhou. Its entrepreneurs are importers of fake handbags, hawkers of pirated DVDs, wholesalers of papayas, and drivers of clandestine taxis.

Read the rest here—you’ve got a-whole-nother 58 words to go.

It’s torturous trying to review a book in 165 words, which is just long enough to make 3/4 of a point.

Neuwirth’s accounts of traveling through cities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia make for a colorful read. The book is basically one story about spontaneous orders and self-organization and informal markets that is told through many anecdotes of such systems and the merchants and entrepreneurs and customers that fill them.

Despite demonstrating his optimism about the bottom-up nature of informal markets for close to 300 pages, Neuwirth at times reveals strikingly little faith in market systems. He correctly notes many limits of the informal sector—it’s not likely, for instance, to produce the many goods traditionally provided by the state like ports, roads, and widespread generation and distribution of electricity. But in the last chapter, when advocating the “freedom to trade” for actors in informal economies, he doesn’t mince words:

Though it may sound libertarian, freedom to trade does not simply involve a Rothbard-style approach that would dismantle all rules that rein in business… Market associations intuitively understand what free market absolutists don’t—that you don’t end nefarious practices like illegal dumping or child labor by making it easier for firms to do business without oversight.

Toward the beginning of the book, when defending informal economies from critics who allege that all such activity fosters is crime and destitution, Neuwirth writes of a hypothetical carrot vendor selling her produce on the street:

… we might describe her as a self-starter, an estimable entrepreneur, a hardworking mother providing for herself and her family. But once she gets linked to the economic underground, her labor becomes a bit more questionable. Where did she get her produce? How can she afford to sell at such a low price? Are her carrots cheap because they were irrigated with contaminated water? Or did she soak old, devitalized carrots that had been tossed in the trash by merchants at the wholesale market so the would perk up? Perhaps she stole these root vegetables. Is her scale giving false wait?

His implied conclusion is that sales by this carrot vendor and by those of millions like her worldwide are regulated by customers and competition—no one else is around to make sure her carrots are indeed safe to eat, or, if they are in fact contaminated, that she won’t be in business for long. Without that insight, the book would be a travelogue about megacities in the developing world. It’s disappointing that he doesn’t always apply it critically on all 300 pages.

"I do not want to write about Nicholas Kristof. The sheer banality of his representations of Africa..."

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:52:00 -0500

“I do not want to write about Nicholas Kristof. The sheer banality of his representations of Africa paralyzes me. His columns and blogs about Africa in The New York Times are repeatedly under fire for their poor research, careless reading of studies on Africa, and blatant generalizations.”

- Kathryn Mathers,

“Mr. Kristof, I Presume?: saving Africa in the footsteps of Nicholas Kristof”

Kobe tap tap I couldn’t not hear “Kooobe”...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:04:05 -0500

Kobe tap tap

I couldn’t not hear “Kooobe” when I saw this.

Why I wear bow ties and you shouldn't too

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:05:10 -0500

I wrote an essay about bow tie-wearing:

I wear bow ties because it’s a hell of a lot harder to spill food on them than it is neckties. That’s not exactly why I wear them, but it’s a convenient excuse to give at cocktail parties and wedding receptions. And you’ll need an excuse if you’re going to wear bow ties these days, especially if you’re a twenty-something who doesn’t have the luxury of being pardoned as a cantankerous old fart who doesn’t know better than to dress like a Supreme Court justice.

Supposedly the bow tie originated in cravats that Croatian mercenaries wore during 17th-century Prussian wars. Which is fitting, because most people today wouldn’t wear one unless someone else were paying them to do it.

Read the entire thing at Doublethink.

The online war that isn't

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:59:20 -0500

In a Journal of Strategic Studies paper published online in October, Thomas Rid writes that no online attack to date has constituted a war, which he defines as “a potentially lethal, instrumental, and political act of force conducted through malicious code.” Furthermore, he says, it’s “highly unlikely that cyber war will occur in the future.”

More here.

Madécasse makes chocolate, adds value to local economies in Madagascar

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:02:00 -0500

For GOOD, I profiled Madécasse Chocolate Co., one of the few companies processing chocolate in Africa, where 70 percent of the world’s cocoa is grown. An excerpt:

Prime chocolate-making cocoa needs to ferment for at least six days and dry for six more. Madécasse’s partner farmers don’t have enough cash flow to hold onto their crop for nearly two weeks—they want to sell immediately after harvest. Furthermore, farmers had no frame of reference for quality control in the beginning. “You have farmers farming cocoa,” McCollum says, “who have never eaten chocolate.”

So Madécasse created an incentive structure to improve their lagging quality. The company offered a 50 percent bonus for delivery of high-quality beans and agreed to give farmers a portion of their payments up front and pay the rest upon delivery, and provided farmers financing for storage sheds, fermentation vats, and drying trays.

Read the entire thing here.

Photo courtesy Madécasse Chocolate Co.

Haitian singer JPerry performing “Dekole” at...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:57:00 -0500

Haitian singer JPerry performing “Dekole” at halftime of the 2012 Super Bowl

At Garden Studio in Petionville. “Dekole” is a recent hit song and means “take off” in Haitian Creole. Watch the official music video here.

The theme of this year’s Carnival, normally held in Port-au-Prince but moved to the provincial town of Les Cayes this year, is “Haiti Dekole.” Haitian Carnival begins on February 19th, although rara bands have been playing in the streets each Sunday for the past few weeks, and the festivities end three days later on Fat Tuesday.

L’Athletique D’Haiti L’Athletique...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:04:06 -0500

L’Athletique D’Haiti

L’Athletique D’Haiti is a soccer training academy near Cité Soleil that Boby Duval 18 started years ago. Duval played professional soccer in Haiti decades ago, before he was imprisoned for 17 months for speaking out against Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship. The New York Times profiled his work in 1999, as did CNN shortly after the earthquake.

Farming, hills above Port-au-Prince

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:02:05 -0500

Farming, hills above Port-au-Prince

Believing is seeing, Haiti edition

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:06:00 -0500

It’s probably never a good idea for someone who has little frame of reference regarding poverty to parachute into a poor tropical city for one week and report on the situation for all the world to read. You inevitably wind up with descriptions of capital-city chaos and disorder, omnipresent threats of danger presented without context, more interviews with expats than locals, and tropes about the resiliency of “the people of [insert country name here].”

Here’s one such example from Newsweek from November 2010, in which a reporter took his first trip to Haiti. He describes a trip to “the Cité Soleil dump”:

The dump was massive, and all along the dusty road were angry-looking men lounging outside makeshift metal houses. One of them screamed at us, and I was really glad I didn’t understand Creole because I don’t think I want to know what he said. In addition to the stench from the garbage piled to the horizon, there were herds of huge pigs, and fires, and smoking mattresses. Writers overuse words like “apocalyptic,” but trust me when I tell you it was apocalyptic. We drove in as far as we could, and then stopped so Bolfo could get out to take photos. I decided I would not get out of the car. This was because I was scared to death.

You’d hardly know that Cité Soleil is actually a quartier—albeit a slum quartier, as the writer acknowledges—home to tens-of-thousands of people, or that some communities in the neighborhood started movements years ago to clean their streets to the point that I might eat off of one of them before I would the one that runs in front of my house in Columbia Heights:

Rebirth of the Sun from TAP TAP on Vimeo.

I don’t know whether the reporter, Steve Tuttle, had seen much poverty let alone destitution before his trip, although he’d apparently spent time “deep in the hills of western Virginia”, which isn’t the same thing as West Virginia but is something. Still, it’s intriguing to wonder what exactly he expected to encounter before he set off for an earthquake-ravaged city where he knew more than a million people were living in tents. Also, anytime you find yourself apologetically writing the phrase “writers overuse words like …”, you should probably raise your internal alert to at least the level formerly known as DHS orange.

I first visited Haiti six months after the earthquake of January 2010. I rode into Port-au-Prince wide-eyed but saw pretty much what I’d expected—collapsed buildings, lots of rubble and debris, loads of people living in tents. I’d flown into Santo Domingo, and much of what I saw in the countryside between the Dominican border and Port-au-Prince reminded me of Senegal, where I lived during a stint in the Peace Corps—the same ubiquitous concrete buildings, lots of signs in not-quite-French. Which was probably just a superficial observation on my part, a result of jamming “rural tropical countryside; one-time French colony” into my Senegal frame of reference.

In Senegal I lived in a tiny village called Diadiam III, which paradoxically was better off than I and II. When two Peace Corps friends once visited from their sites in nearby towns, they couldn’t believe my modest abode. They wouldn’t even shake hands with the gaggle of village kids excited to greet them and offered their wrists instead, for which I gave them endless shit. In truth, my rural digs really weren’t as bad as they’d perceived, but I had also become almost oblivious to my environment. “Sure,” I thought, “this may be a hard village, but it could be harder. I could be living in Diadiam I or II.”

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris likes to say that “Believing is Seeing.”

“If we want to believe something,” says Morris, “then we often find a way to do so regardless of evidence to the contrary. Believing is seeing and not the other way around.” Seeing may have made a believer out of Paul on his way to Damascus. But it’s just as likely to reinforce our priors about how the world works, or whether a village is a dump.

There’s a body of writing about far-flung places, and writing about Haiti in particular, that many people consider ‘bad seeing’—the sort of tropes and stereotypes that appear in the aforementioned Newsweek piece and often result from being forced to fit new and possibly contradictory evidence into a system of prior beliefs. (Calling it ‘bad believing’ may be just as fitting.)

You could argue, as Morris might, that Tuttle objectively saw what he saw—just like my visiting Peace Corps friends indeed saw grubby-handed children—and therefore what he wrote is true or at least a semblance of truth. Fair enough. The correct response to ‘bad seeing’ is more and better seeing, which hard to come by in a week.

Haitians’ confidence in government increases nearly...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:30:05 -0500

Haitians’ confidence in government increases nearly threefold

From July 2010 to October 2011, Haitians’ confidence in their government increased 30 percentage points, as measured by a Gallup poll.

"Americans first heard about the violence in Somalia when relief agencies reported food being stolen...."

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:02:06 -0500

“Americans first heard about the violence in Somalia when relief agencies reported food being stolen. In reality, food had been stolen, for over a decade. More than anything else, Somalia’s clans operate like Mafia families, each taking care of its own, providing jobs, a share of the pie. Though the expatriate aid workers saw themselves as helping the people of Somalia, their real role had always been to deliver the pie for the bosses to carve up.”

- Michael Maren, “A Journalist in Mogadishu”