What's government interference got to do with it?

When I was reporting from the street markets of Lagos, Nigeria, every merchant I spoke with bad-mouthed the government. It was exploitative and corrupt. It was hindering trade. It was threatening to demolish their stalls. They washed their hands of any allegiance to it. "The government has failed," auto parts dealer Sir Israel C. Okonkwo told me. "There is no government as far as Nigeria is concerned."

As I read Shelby Grossman's provocative new book, The Politics of Order in Informal Markets, I wondered how Sir Israel might respond. For Grossman has concluded that government's punitive actions actually benefit street markets. Indeed, she says, the threat of local political interventions in the markets -- no matter how harsh -- improves the work of the merchant associations that control those outposts of trade.

"Informal institutions perform better under the shadow of government, and worse in the absence of government interference," she writes. Indeed, she suggests, this counterintuitive effect happens because market associations need the support of all their members if they are to ward off the unwanted political intrusion. "When the government keeps its hands off the economy, group leaders extort. Yet if the government threatens to intervene, leaders organize."

Her granular work provides a vital snapshot of trade in the Nigerian megacity. More than 1,000 market vendors participated in her surveys and half of them reported that they import goods directly from overseas. The average merchant she interviewed paid more than $2,000 in rent each year. And, remarkably, while much of the country still relies on old-fashioned stick phones, 80 percent of the merchants she queried reported using a smartphone for business.

Among the other intriguing implications Grossman points to:

• specialized markets -- trading zones that gather businesses in one field only -- are less likely to see better governance as as result of government interference (this, she concludes, is likely a result of the difficulty of getting traders to unify when they are in competition with one another.) As some of the biggest Lagos markets are also some of the least diversified -- I'm thinking of Ladipo and ASPAMDA (the Auto Spare Parts and Machine Dealers Association), which deal in auto parts and repair, Computer Village (the name makes its concentration obvious) and Alaba International (which concentrates on consumer electronics and household appliances), there's room here for a solid study on how these mega-markets govern themselves and interact with the political sphere.
• though common sense would suggest that well-run markets would be better for business, Grossman's research shows this is not true. Having better market associations may make life somewhat better, but it doesn't seem to make business better. This, she notes, "is an exciting area for further research."
• And in another fascinating finding, Grossman suggests that the solidarity implicit in ethnic homogeneity -- for instance, when most merchants in a market are from the same tribe -- does not ensure that market associations are transparent and fair, though it is somewhat linked to better policies. "Homogeneity may not be sufficient for good governance," she suggests, but "it is associated with better private governance." 
  

Grossman conducted surveys in street markets identified by LAWMA, the Lagos State Waste Management Authority -- and this initial reach into officialdom might have skewed her findings a bit. 

What's more, as her book is an academic monograph, Grossman seems to want the dividing line between good market associations and bad to be quite strict. "By definition," she writes, "extortion or predatory fee collection is inconsistent with good governance." My experience in the markets of Lagos was a little less binary. I found some market associations that extorted high fees from members also provided services like running arbitration courts to resolve market disputes. The idea that local market associations can both profiteer from and provide service to vendors might bear further study.

Also, perhaps because Grossman wants to keep the focus on government meddling in the markets, she steers clear of a variety of other complicated questions. For instance, though the majority of the vendors Grossman surveyed were Igbo, she avoids considering whether tribal traditions yield different market norms and structures. The Igbo make up at most 20 percent of the population of Nigeria but they are renowned as the country's "market-dominant minority." People from all backgrounds will regale you with stories about how the Igbo are super-sharks. Even Igbos push this storyline. As one friend counseled, citing an old joke: "If you go anywhere in the world and you don't find an Igbo man -- leave, because there's no business to be done." Many Igbo markets operate according to a unique customary apprenticeship system that doubles as a venture capital pool -- and this could explain their relative success in the informal ecosystem. At the same time, as a minority tribe -- the Hausa and Yoruba are the dominant groups in the country -- the Igbo have good reason not to trust government, and this might also explain a tradition of resisting government interference. It would be worth inquiring into Yoruba and Hausa markets to see if there are differences in how they are treated by the government.

In addition, over the past few years, the Lagos State government has demolished a number of markets. What explains the inability of these markets to resist? Were the associations simply too extortionist to turn around and organize? Or were pressures to use the land differently too hard to overcome? Also, I'd love to know if some market associations have started dabbling in politics -- funding parties or even putting up candidates themselves. The merchants have been quick to become savvy in business. I wonder if they can operate similarly in the political world.

Finally, a small stylistic plaint: Grossman sometimes lapses into academic jargon -- for instance using the verb 'predate.' She writes:

• "The government could be interfering in order to predate."
• "Group leaders who share the ethnicity of group members may feel more affinity toward them and be less likely to predate.
• "Private associations will predate without public institutions that force them to behave otherwise."

If you're like me, you understand the verb 'predate' to mean "pre-date," or "to come before." 

But, of course, that's not the meaning here. 'Predate' is a back-formation -- a verb created from the noun 'predation' to produce a word related to the adjective 'predatory.' So 'to predate' means "to behave in a predatory manner."

Making verbs from nouns is common in specialized fields -- workers in high-end restaurants, for instance, talk about 'plating' food -- but there are lots of common words that could have replaced 'predate.' Extort, intervene, meddle, profiteer, interfere, or just "act in a predatory way" all would have been less obscure.

Still, this slim volume is stuffed full of insights into the real life of System D. 

A decade ago or so, when I was writing Stealth of Nations, I concluded that, despite the widespread disdain for government, the street markets had to find a way to work with the politicians in a kind of shotgun wedding. The Politics of Order in Informal Markets shows that, despite the tough words from merchants like Sir Israel, the engagement has already been announced and its impact is being felt in unexpected ways.

Chejfec, a journey

I have before me -- tilted against the base of an adjustable stool that does double duty, from time to time, as my writing table -- the hardback of Sergio Chejfec’s Baroni A Journey (translated by Margaret Carson, published by Almost Island), a sparse and delicately barren telling of his encounters with three artists in Venezuela – Juan Andrade, Tomás Barazarte and, first among equals, Rafaela Baroni. Each makes painted wood carvings – sometimes devotional, sometimes not -- and Chejfec chronicles buying a number of their works, so he is present in the book not only as visitor, narrator, traveler, outsider, but as collector/customer/consumer as well. 

In its structure, the book emulates the way Baroni's carvings take shape from the grain and splits in the materials with which she works. Her life -- at once harsh and harmonious -- has merged with her artistic practice. And so, in addition to carving, Baroni also conducts psychic readings of people’s national ID cards and twice-yearly (re)enactments of her own death, which can perhaps be interpreted as performative commemorations of a number of prolonged death-experiences the artist had in life.

Chejfec's conversations with Baroni are mostly plodding, yet oddly sublime. Of one chat in her garden, he writes: “And yet again, I found myself once more in a situation of the sort that happens to me repeatedly, relating to different universes of things, the moment when an initially slight uninterest announces the impending occupation of my senses and I realize it's no longer possible to do anything to save myself, until I end up succumbing to confusion, in reality a disintegration of my sensibility.”

The book also touches on Chejfec’s feelings about the death of his telephone friend, the poet Juan Sánchez Peláez, whose body he viewed at a funeral home, laid out in a new safari jacket the dead man seems to have bought specifically for the occasion, and who wrote, in a poem Chejfec quotes, “I am dead and I live / alive and dead at once. / Without lamentation. / With an almost absurd patience/ I live / walled-up or hidden / free / dead.”

Chejfec also reflects on the death of some fighting cocks owned by a friend named Barreto (Chejfec identifies him solely by last name, but this may be the poet Igor Barreto), who breeds gamecocks but refuses to watch them fight. About those birds, Chejfec notes, Barreto has written, “In their cages, the birds scratch with human / curiosity at every detail.”

Chejfec's scratching curiosity extends to the afficionados around the cock pit, and particularly those who, unwilling to concede the reality of impending death, make what he calls the 'Bolivar' bet, wagering on a mortally wounded bird. “No one writes off the fighting cock that seems defeated,” he writes.

A Bolivar bet, of course, is a kind of mortuarial promise or lure and as such is an enigma, a gesture from the past that points to fulfillment or verification in the future -- and whether that anticipated fulfillment or verification will come is an open life-or-death question.

I have now finished the journey of the book – though not that other journey, for every time I read the last line of a text and put the volume down, I feel both ecstatic and depressed, not knowing if I'm at an end or a beginning or both. And in this indeterminate state, I consulted the electric oracle and learned that Rafaela Baroni died last month at age 85 (though El Universal mistakenly said 86), and that so far there have been no (re)enactments -- a verification and vindication of the power of her performances.

Chejfec’s voyage proceeds by accretion of detail and subtle shadings of thought across time and space. The book is a durational performance, demanding attention because of how imperceptible its movement is. In this, it exemplifies what Chejfec writes of a sloth climbing a tree: “it's not easy to keep your eyes on a sloth for an extended time span, because the slowness engraved a kind of weariness on its movements and this made the event seem of little importance. That's why you would turn your eyes someplace else, or would simply get distracted, and later when you'd look again the animal would still be in the same place, or at least that's what it would seem like, as if the intermission hadn't occurred.” This makes Baroni A Journey close to life, and, with its sloth-like cadence of immobility, to death as well, which, contra-Wittgenstein, Baroni's art made part of life.

As Chejfec puts it, “each thing is a kind of signal; an anchor, even an albatross, but also a promise owed by the past.”

 

An Inadvertent Truth

At the start of April last year, we inhabitants of planet earth discovered that we had accidentally done something revelatory. It began early in the the month, when residents of India’s capital, Delhi, realized that they could see the vibrant colors of their city, hues that had long been obscured in a foul fog of pollution. A few days later, the same thing happened in Bangkok. Previously, it was difficult to even see to the end of your block in the Thai capital – but the pall mysteriously lifted and the entire city came into focus. By the middle of the month, the change had come to Brooklyn. I remember it well. The planets and stars seemed to defy the bright lights of the big city as they packed the night sky. My partner, who’s from Switzerland, said it was the first time that the city’s air reminded her of the alpine currents of her childhood.

 

 

For the next couple of weeks, I woke early and traipsed the chastened city. My sadness after another dark night of sirens and ambulances was gradually transformed as I came upon mockingbirds that sang without competition from backfiring trucks, massive schools of fish that were somehow thriving in the polluted waters of Newtown Creek

(and the handful of cormorants that were happily diving for a free feed), a raccoon crossing the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge, a goose and gander who were rearing their 11 goslings in an industrial and commercial zone between Brooklyn and Queens. And all of this under amazingly azure skies.

This sudden sharp break in global pollution and congestion was completely unplanned, a result of the global slowdown that attended the lockdown of the planet necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A study by scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration confirmed it: on average, the global lockdowns due to COVID-19 reduced nitrogen dioxide emissions – which occur principally from internal combustion engines – in 50 of the 61 cities the agency tracks by 20-50%. Here in New York, NO₂ levels dropped by 45 percent. The impact was so intense that average temperatures on the globe rose last year -- not due to global warming but because there was less pollution to obscure the sun.

The pandemic has already killed 2.8 million people around the world and caused tens of millions more to suffer. The lockdowns also led to severe economic hardship, and this continues to this day.

But last April also proved that we residents of earth can make strides against a different killer. A joint US and UK study published earlier this year in the journal Environmental Research concluded that the pollution from burning fossil fuels is responsible for almost one of every five deaths on the planet and killed more than 8 million people in 2018.

We can do something about that ghastly number. For a few weeks last year, it was as if the Green New Deal was the new global norm, and the future, despite the awful toll of the virus, looked brighter and bluer than it has in many decades. Now, as more people get vaccinated and much of the world moves to reopen in 2021, let us not forget the moment a year ago when we got a glimpse of a world without air pollution.

Let’s start by making April an annual month of global repair. Let us dedicate the full 30 days to a reckoning – an ecological and social accounting, during which we do all we can to regulate emissions, to cut back traffic, to massively increase our efforts to clean up our all-too-trashed planet and to make ours a more just, equitable and fair world. Let us create a planetary scorecard to show our progress in repairing the harms we have created. Let us make April a month of repair, as we take stock of this increasingly bare and ruined rock we call home and the rat-race morals of the system we live by.

Change is possible. We have seen it. With cooperation, coordination and determination, we can end air pollution. We can stop millions of people from dying early due to noxious emissions. We can help save the planet from global warming.

The Chalet in History

The question you are asking yourself right now, as you motor down a deserted boulevard in this sprawling city of the interior, is: who was the first person who eyed the primeval northern forest – the shaggy lindens with their colonies of bees, the imperious, shade-giving oaks and the scores of squirrels who depend each of them, the blazingly bright larches that have stood sentinel on the alpine heights for centuries – and thought: ‘Yes! Quick, quick now! Let’s chop all this down and build a chalet!’?

And it’s not just the taiga that’s being destroyed. It’s meadow and underbrush -- sassafras and birch, goldenrod and gooseberry, wintergreen and sedum, even the mosses and lichens that create their vibrant micro-ecosystems on the moist rot and rocky outcroppings that dot the forest floor. All hacked away to yield yet another chalet.

And yes, it’s always a chalet. That tiny Swiss house, transmuted by the alchemy of acquisition into a mental map of imagined economic progress: start with a subsistence hut of primitive accumulation, move to a utilitarian split-level subdivision, spend a fortune for a quasi-feudal suburban McMansion,  and, at the apogee of capitalist desire, obtain the unobtainable: a dwelling so special you seldom even use it – a pied-a-terre home chock full of the best appliances, a chalet on stilts with its head in a cunning cloud.

God’s honest truth: Adam and Eve didn’t eat of the tree of knowledge. They chopped it down, seasoned the timbers, leveled the garden, built themselves a chalet on a 10-acre plot, and successfully claimed ownership with a fraudulent deed from the serpent. The bible tale is just a cover story.

We have toppled royalty and toppled dictators and even toppled Gods. But will we ever topple landlords, who continue to exercise their despotic dominion over the planet, grading the hills and degrading the soil, so the globe – this whirling speck in space – comes to resemble Easter Island, but instead of haughty carved heads our civilization has left a sterile sprawl of chalets across the thawing permafrost as we nose without thinking into the slipstream of a future in which we will not exist.