Views of a Nepali Economist

"Kabul--A City At Work" is a website devoted to highlighting the people who are working to remake the Afghan city. Click here to read about Sayed Jalaladin, a fortune teller.

An excerpt:

I have been telling peoples fortunes for 15 years. Before that I worked with my father who told fortunes. I was his assistant.[...]

The procedure I follow is Raml. There are two sticks of 4 dice, which I roll and then ask the customer their name and their mother’s name. They have to point to a sign at random and then I make the assessment. It is a huge wisdom. Those 6 sides of dice know the secrets of the world. Through them, I know everything about everything and all the treasures of the world...[...]

I have between 2-10 customers a day and they are mostly men. They come to ask me about disputes with their neighbours or differences between tribes, which I am good at resolving. Women ask me about their children.

Under the Taliban such practices were banned however and we moved to Quetta. I was telling fortunes there but not making enough money so my sons had to sell snuff on the streets. I can’t say those days were happy, but we survived. No, those days were the worst. We were so happy to be returning to Kabul when they fell but it was like returning to a ghost town. There was so much destruction everywhere.

I don’t think the Taliban could ever come back. I mean the foreign soldiers are here now so they can’t. All they can do is blow themselves up. Let them.

Labels: Afghanistan, fortune teller, Kabul, Taliban

The Secret Document That Transformed China

In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village called Xiaogang gathered in a mud hut to sign a secret contract. They thought it might get them executed. Instead, it wound up transforming China's economy in ways that are still reverberating today.

The contract was so risky — and such a big deal — because it was created at the height of communism in China. Everyone worked on the village's collective farm; there was no personal property.

[...] In Xiaogang there was never enough food, and the farmers often had to go to other villages to beg. Their children were going hungry. They were desperate.

So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest. [...]

[...] One evening, they snuck in one by one to a farmer's home. Like all of the houses in the village, it had dirt floors, mud walls and a straw roof. No plumbing, no electricity. [...]

[...] Despite the risks, they decided they had to try this experiment — and to write it down as a formal contract, so everyone would be bound to it. By the light of an oil lamp, Yen Hongchang wrote out the contract.

The farmers agreed to divide up the land among the families. Each family agreed to turn over some of what they grew to the government, and to the collective. And, crucially, the farmers agreed that families that grew enough food would get to keep some for themselves.

The contract also recognized the risks the farmers were taking. If any of the farmers were sent to prison or executed, it said, the others in the group would care for their children until age 18. [...]

[...] Before the contract, the farmers would drag themselves out into the field only when the village whistle blew, marking the start of the work day. After the contract, the families went out before dawn.

It was the same land, the same tools and the same people. Yet just by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed.

At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined.

That huge harvest gave them away. Local officials figured out that the farmers had divided up the land, and word of what had happened in Xiaogang made its way up the Communist Party chain of command.[...]

Labels: capitalism, china, communism