Jobless Economic Growth?

Note: This blog took an unofficial summer sabbatical, but I hope to start posting again as the school year gets rolling.

Why does a company like Apple boom at the same time that few jobs are being created?

Over the last few years the U.S. economy has been growing (according to GDP figures) and corporate profits have been solid (record-setting, in Apple's case). But job creation is stagnant. What gives?

One big reason is the spread of automation, outsourcing, and cloud computing (using networks of others' computers to complete tasks). Today's New York Times ran a prominent  story on Amazon's cloud computing services with two rather telling quotes in it.

First was a quote from the founder of a young company called Cue, which scans huge amounts of data and provides personalized services with it. Its founder said,

I have 10 engineers, but without A.W.S. [Amazon Web Services] I guarantee I’d need 60,” said Daniel Gross, Cue’s 20-year-old co-founder. “It just gets cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper.” He figures Cue spends something under $100,000 a month with Amazon but would spend “probably $2 million to do it ourselves, without the speed and flexibility.”

So his company may become profitable (as will Amazon) but he can employ a fraction of the engineers he once would have needed.

Another quote reinforces the point. This was from the CEO of Good Data, a company that sifts through data to help with sales:

“Before, each company needed at least five people to do this work,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData’s chief executive. “That is 30,000 people. I do it with 180. I don’t know what all those other people will do now, but this isn’t work they can do anymore. It’s a winner-takes-all consolidation.”

From 30,000 to 180. And we wonder why profits and unemployment (even among tech-savvy groups like engineers) are both up at the same time?

The Arab Uprisings: 1848 All Over Again?

“I believe that right now we are sleeping on a volcano . . . Can you not feel . . . the wind of revolution in the air?” Shortly after a perceptive political observer uttered these words, the uprisings began. Unemployed workers, radical university students, reform-minded middle class workers, ordinary peasants and even women and children marched toward the square outside the parliament to demand reform.

But they were met by government forces manning barricades, and bloody clashes soon broke out as the crowds surged against the barriers, eventually pushing through. After attempts to placate the crowds with half-measures for a few critical days, the head of state was forced to flee the country in disgrace. Revolutionaries across the region took heart and charged into the streets, threatening their regimes with massive protests.

This was  not Egypt and the Arab World in 2011 but France and Europe in 1848, and the perceptive political observer was none other than Alexis de Tocqueville.

What similarities and differences can we observe between this earlier revolutionary wave and the “wave” of revolutions that swept across the Middle East and North Africa region in 2011-12? This latter wave ousted regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen; it destabilized those in Syria and Jordan; and it left no country in the region unaffected. By contrast, only France’s monarch was removed in 1848. 

Sites of major uprisings in 1848

What contributed to the uprisings of 1848? How do they compare to the Arab uprisings? And what might the comparison teach us about globalization and political change?

To answer these questions, I picked up a recent book, Mike Rapport’s 1848: Year of Revolution (Basic Books, 2008), and compared it to Robin Wright’s Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World (Simon and Schuster, 2011), Marc Lynch’s The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East (Public Affairs, 2012), and James Gelvin’s The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2012). Reading these together offers several lessons about rapid political change in a globalized world.

 

1. Comparing 1848 to the Arab Spring

Mike Rapport identifies several trends that had emerged by the mid-nineteenth century to make possible the fast-moving diffusion of revolutionary protests in Europe, and each of these has analogues in the Arab world today.

a. Increasing literacy rates and the growth of civil society leading to imagined unity

By 1848, Prussia had an impressive 80 percent literacy rate and France’s was 60 percent. More broadly, Europeans had embraced the ideal of civil society, “a cultural and social space independent of the state, where individual citizens could engage in discussion, debate and criticism of everything from art to politics” (p. 22). Embracing this ideal of civil society helped Europeans to imagine themselves as sharing something in common. If only for a moment, they were united. As an example, Rapport cites a Polish Democratic Society appeal to France on the basis of “the will of peoples—and not that of the cabinets usurping their rights—as the basis for international relations in the future” (p. 412). Both Polish and French liberals saw themselves as united.

Similarly, Marc Lynch builds on his previous book, which argued that the emergence of an Arab public sphere, seen mostly clearly in the widespread popularity of the Al Jazeera Arabic television channel, allowed ordinary Arabs to imagine themselves as part of a larger Arab public. Egyptians, Yemenis, or Libyans viewed themselves as connected to their Tunisian brothers and sisters. If anything, an Arab public space emerged more easily than a European public space, due to a common Arabic language across the region. Lynch notes in passing how the “Arab cold war” of the 1950s was inflamed by Egypt’s Voice of the Arab radio station and its appeals to the Arab masses. Thanks to al Jazeera, however, the “Arab uprising [in 2011] unfolded as a single, unified narrative of protest with shared heroes and villains, common stakes, and a deeply felt sense of shared destiny” (Wright, p. 8).

b. Widespread pressures for political reform, combined with economic crisis (Rapport, p. 105)

Across Europe, the old regime had failed to accommodate increasing desires for political and civil rights or national autonomy. But a global economic (food) crisis, combined with rapid technological changes, was disrupting lives across the continent. Regimes can easily put off political reform when people are well-fed and confident about their economic future. But when people are hungry and the economy goes sour, incumbents are in trouble. The incumbents in the European case, like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, had been around for over thirty years.

The importance of economic crisis is evident in the catalyst for the current wave. Everyone agrees that the December 2010 self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a twenty-six year old fruit vendor in a poverty-stricken townin Tunisia, was the spark that kindled the revolutionary fires and was motivated by poverty and despair (see Wright, pp. 7-8). Young people across the Arab world shared his frustration with the economic and social status quo--a frustration noted in the Arab Human Development Reports of the last decade. Adding political frustration over corruption to economic despair, young Arabs were ripe for revolt.

c. Technology that speeds up communication

As Rapport puts it, “In 1789 it took weeks for news—carried, at its fastest, on horseback or under sail—for the fall of the Bastille to be relayed across Central and Eastern Europe. In 1848, thanks to steamships and a nascent telegraph system, reports were being heard within days or even minutes” (106). These dramatic technological changes help explain why a revolt that began in late February in Paris could inspire movements in Berlin, Vienna, and Venice within weeks. Globalization itself doesn't cause revolt, but it speeds up the process of change.

Although James Gelvin is skeptical about the “wave metaphor” (pp. 30-31, 155-56) and about the role of technology in the Arab protests, Marc Lynch describes a flurry of self-declared “hashtag revolution” protest days that were announced on Twitter between February 3 and March 24, 2011. While no serious scholar would argue that technology causes revolutions or obviates traditional political structures, it is obvious that technological innovations like Twitter, Facebook, and cellphones sped up communication. Gelvin writes that “there is no evidence to demonstrate that social media have played any more of a role in the current uprising than the printing press and telegraph played in earlier uprisings” (158). But this does not deny that communications technologies have played an important role and that they hasten the networking of revolutionaries. Lynch and Wright are the better guides on this issue.

d. A crisis of confidence among (some) leaders (Rapport, pp. 107, 410)

Rapport notes that several of the leaders hesitated in the face of widespread popular protest, agonizing over using force against their own citizens and wavering between cracking down or granting concessions. Notable among them were the French monarch, King Louis Philippe Bourbon; the Austrian Chancellor, Prince Clemens von Metternich; and the Prussian king, Frederick William IV. (Only the latter survived the crisis.) By contrast, the Russian tsar, Nicholas I, never hesitated in cracking down on liberal and nationalist reformers in his domains, and he intervened militarily to crush revolts in Romania and Hungary. Other leaders, notably in the Netherlands and Belgium, “made timely concessions before anything like a groundswell of opposition could pose a serious challenge” (98).

The parallels to leadership strategies in the Arab uprisings are nearly exact. Consider the three major options for leaders in 2011:

• Neither all carrot nor all stick, or those who wavered and were lost:  Presidents Mubarak of Egypt, Ben Ali of Tunisia, and Saleh of Yemen.
• The stick strategy, or those who cracked down and survived (thus far): the Al Khalifa family of Bahrain, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (in Bahrain), and President Bashar al Asad of Syria.
• The carrot strategy, or those who made pre-emptive concessions and survived (thus far): King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (internally), Sultan Qaboos of Oman, King Abdullah of Jordan, King Mohamed VI of Morocco,

The major exception here is Libya, where Muammar Qaddafi tried the stick strategy and was defeated by rebel forces, assisted by NATO airpower (Lynch, who advised the White House during the uprisings, reviews this case well.)

e. The importance of coalitions (Rapport, pp. 108-9, 261)

Rapport contends that the uprisings in 1848 temporarily united disparate political forces: poor urban workers who wanted better economic conditions, rural peasants who were desperately poor, and middle class liberals who wanted political and civil rights or national autonomy. When these three groups could stick together and cooperate, they tended to get more results, but the conservative regimes were often able to regain the loyalty of the peasantry by abolishing serfdom and rallying the newly liberated peasantry around religious or national symbols.

Although we do not yet have detailed studies of the coalitions in the Arab uprisings, we will likely find similar coalitions of disparate groups with clashing interests and identities in the thick of it. We do know from journalists that young people, secular liberals, Islamists, and unionized workers (especially in Egypt) are key players in the revolutionary coalition.

2. Lessons about globalization and political change

Rapport’s history also yields a few lessons for those of us in the business of making sense of globalization and Middle East politics.

a. The illusion of simple narratives

As Anne Applebaum noted in Slate last year, the uprisings of 1848, like the Arab revolts, occurred for a myriad of local reasons. We must be careful to see the local and contextual factors--not just the global "wave" (and here Gelvin's cautions are warranted). While there is no question that the inspiration for revolution spread between countries, specific political grievances drove the process of change within each country. Bahrain’s fragile sectarian balance, for example, with a minority Sunni regime governing a Shiite majority, is quite different than Syria’s, where an Alawite minority ruled a restive Sunni Arab majority and pro-regime Christian minorities. Libya's regional and tribal differences are critical to understanding the opposition to Qaddafi. In short, the story is complicated, as it was in Europe. And all the politics were local, even if the mediascape was global.

b. The illusion of major change and permanent unity

Rapport borrows the term “lyrical illusion” from a French historian, Georges Duveau. Duveau contends that the revolutionaries acted on two illusions in 1848: first, “the idea that the people had indeed triumphed over the old regime and even defeated its armed forces;” and second, “the idea that the revolutions marked a new beginning, one in which the unity of all classes and people could nurture the delicate growth of a new freedom and a new, liberal order” (pp. 110-11). Neither of these ideas proved to be true in 1848: the armed forces and most regimes kept their power, while the revolutionary coalition was picked apart and peasants started backing the monarchs. As a result, the revolutions of 1848 failed to topple regimes except in France.

In the heady days of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution or Egypt’s Tahrir Square uprising, many shared the “lyrical illusion.” But 1848 reminds us to be humble about the prospects for change. The counter-revolutionary forces triumphed at the time, even in France (when the new president of the Republic, Napoleon III, made himself into a monarch within a few years). Likewise, it is not yet clear that the armed forces in Egypt have truly relinquished power. The upcoming presidential elections there will be an interesting test, and it’s quite likely that the winner will be an army-friendly member of the old regime.

c. The difficulty of keeping radicalism at bay and constructing a new order

Once the forces of change are unleashed, it can be hard to contain them. An American diplomat watching events in Vienna in 1848 noted that “the moderate supporters of the constitution were fighting a ‘double conflict . . . first, that of the people against the old form of government; secondly, that of the new form of government against the Radicals, or enemies of all government’” (Rapport, p. 227). Rapport counts this as “one of the great tragedies of 1848: that the social and political unity that had secured the victory of the opposition in the initial revolutionary outbursts proved to be so fragile” (p. 406).

Similarly, the transitional regimes in both Tunisia and Egypt have struggled to deal with continued protests from those unhappy with anything less than radical change. With the remnants of corrupt regimes often remaining in place, is moderate reform enough? The dangers of being co-opted by those remnants remain. It is difficult to construct a new regime in the midst of pressures from both radicals and old regime supporters.

As historian Jonathan Steinberg put it, “it is easier to overthrow the old regime than build a new one.” 

Nevertheless, a major lesson of the crises of 1848 is that a short-run victory for the forces of counter-revolution might only postpone a reckoning with the forces of change. Russia managed to stave off pressure in 1848, but the pent-up frustrations contributed to revolution in 1917. Prussia saw the ascent of a counter-revolutionary leaders in Bismarck, but the pressure to liberalize continued. Bismarck, despite being a conservative, instituted a welfare state in Germany as a classic “carrot strategy” to pre-empt protest. Social and economic change occurred, even when regimes stayed in place.

The Arab uprisings of 2011 have already ousted more old regimes than the European wave of 1848. And this story is far from over.

A Financial Thriller?

Review of Robert Harris, The Fear Index. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012

Several months ago, some members our family were settling down for a Friday movie night and a guest asked what we were going to watch.

"Margin Call," I said.

"What's that about?" our guest asked.

"It's a financial thriller."

"What's a financial thriller?" said the guest.

That was a great question. It's not exactly a familiar film or novelistic genre.

But the recent global financial crisis has spawned a few engaging stories, both fictional and journalistic, that also educate us a bit on the world of high finance (many of them reviewed in this space).

For a recent case in point, consider English novelist Robert Harris' most recent book. The Fear Index tells the story of Alexander Hoffman, an American physicist turned hedge fund trader, whose life is completely upended when a computerized algorithm invented by Hoffmann starts acting autonomously. This algorithm, called VIXAL, threatens to take over Hoffman's life and business. It all comes to a head in a crazy twenty-four period that begins when Hoffmann receives a rare first-edition copy of a book by Charles Darwin in the mail from an anonymous source.

Although the plot is "wholly implausible," as the Economist reviewer put it, the novel weaves together three main questions into a truly page-turning and engaging read. First, a classic science fiction strand: what would happen if machines, which dominate our lives, start taking autonomous action? Second, an interesting thought experiment: what if those machines followed Darwinian logic and sought to dominate the world? (It's significant that quotations from Darwin's works head nearly every chapter.) Third, a straightforward teaching function: what are hedge funds and how do they work?

It's this last point that interests me the most here. The Economist, which knows these things, says that "as a guide to what hedge funds actually do, [the book] is surprisingly clear and instructive." 

Two passages in the book illustrate this teaching function. First, in a few colorful (and creepy) sentences, Harris manages to explain hedging strategies of traders in a way that makes sense. Alexander Hoffmann, the main character, has just met an English financier who wants to recruit him to start a hedge fund. Hoffman asks, "What's a hedge fund?"

The English financier tells him to look across the room at a woman. He says that he is absolutely convinced that she is wearing black underwear, and he wants to bet a million dollars that he is right.

The trouble is, if I’m wrong, I’m wiped out. So I also bet she’s wearing knickers that aren’t black but are any one of a whole basket of colours—let’s say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that’s the rest of the market; that’s the hedge. . . . Now, if I’m right, I make fifty K, but even I’m wrong I’m only going to lose fifty K, because I’m hedged. And because ninety-five percent of my million dollars is not in use—I’m never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread—I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don’t have to be right all the time—if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five percent of the time I’m going to wind up very rich. (p. 177)

That's what hedge funds do. They leverage their money across multiple risky bets, while hedging those risks to try to limit the damages if their bets about the future are wrong. And they may be speculating over very intimate details of our lives. (The creepiness of speculating on the color of a woman's underwear is essential to the character that Harris is sketching here. He's not condoning it so much as trying to depict how a real hedge fund trader would talk.)

The second example comes late in the book, when the VIXAL program appears to be running out of control:

That VIXAL was purely mechanical and possessed no emotion or conscience; that it had no purpose other than the self-interested pursuit of survival through the accumulation of money; that it would, if left to itself, in accordance with Darwinian logic, seek to expand until it dominated the entire earth—this did not detract for Hoffmann from the stunning fact of its existence. He even forgave it for the ordeal it had subjected him to: after all, that had purely been for the purposes of research. One could no more pass moral judgment on it than one could on a shark. It was simply behaving like a hedge fund. (pp. 262-63)

"It was simply behaving like a hedge fund." And how does a hedge fund behave? Like the machine, it has "no purpose other than the self-interested pursuit of survival through the accumulation of money."

Most ordinary people have no idea that the hedge fund world even exists. But the recent news about J.P. Morgan's two billion dollar loss in a risky hedging trade reminds us that overly aggressive risk-taking can be disastrous for banks and the ordinary people who use them.

Still, despite the crucial importance of risk-taking in the global financial system, "financial thrillers" will always attract a small audience. Our guest stayed to watch Margin Call, but fell fast asleep halfway through. 

Money or Service? Goldman Sachs Exposed

After almost twelve years at the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs, Greg Smith resigned yesterday.

People quit jobs every day, but this executive director at one of the biggest global financing firms published his complaints against his former employer on today's op-ed page of the New York Times. Needless to say, he's making a splash in the world of high finance.

One way to interpret what he's saying is that the film "Margin Call" could have been a documentary. In that minor Hollywood release, Jeremy Irons' character (John Tuld) utters a memorable line (a far more subtle one than Gordon Gekko's famous "greed is good" from Oliver Stone's Wall Street):

"There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat."

According to Smith, this ruthless logic has taken hold at Goldman Sachs.

Consider this exchange from Margin Call:

Sam Rogers [Spacey]: And you're selling something that you know has no value?

John Tuld [Irons]: We are selling to willing buyers at the current, fair market price.

This kind of mindset, according to Greg Smith, has taken hold at Goldman Sachs, which was once the envy of the financial world for its customer care, humility, and integrity.

According to Smith, Goldman is now morally bankrupt.  As he puts it in today's Times (underlining is mine),

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. . . .

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off.

. . .

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave.  

. . .

I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer. 

This is exactly the heart of the problem (as I've put it before): the pursuit of money, a good external to the actual welfare of one's customers, is trumping the goods intrinsic to the pursuit of one's business, which would be devoted to providing the best service to one's customers.

Smith is right--and we should all applaud him. He didn't just tell the boss to "take this job and shove it." He blew the whistle on corruption at the heart of Wall Street, while pointing to a better way.

American Manufacturing and Globalization

Jason Reed/Reuters

Yesterday in a speech at the University of Michigan, President Obama stated that "when manufacturing does well, then the entire economy does well." He's trying to press colleges to lower their costs and make higher education more affordable, in the hope that they'll train more wealth-creating workers. Leaving the domestic politics aside, it was an interesting week to make this case, because two stories highlighted how globalization and technological change are hurting American workers.

Maddie Parlier at Greenville Standard Motor Products
Photo credit: Dean Kaufman for Atlantic Monthly

First, the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly ran an excellent story by Adam Davidson on how difficult it is for moderately educated workers to compete in an increasingly global, increasingly automated manufacturing workplace. Davidson, my favorite economics journalist at NPR, focuses on the plight of a 22-year old single mom named Maddie Parlier who has two kids and no college education. She's working an entry-level job at a plant that makes fuel injectors, making around $13 an hour, with little prospect of advancement.

In order to move up a level on the payscale to "Level 2" and boost her pay by about half, Maddie would need to learn a lot more in order to have the necessary skills to program the machines she currently mans. As Davidson puts it,

It feels cruel to point out all the Level-2 concepts Maddie doesn’t know, although Maddie is quite open about these shortcomings. She doesn’t know the computer-programming language that runs the machines she operates; in fact, she was surprised to learn they are run by a specialized computer language. She doesn’t know trigonometry or calculus, and she’s never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She doesn’t know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.

Maddie's plight illustrates why President Obama is pushing college affordability and job-training programs.

And Davidson's piece reminds us why workers with limited skills are struggling to keep up these days. Their jobs are being replaced by machines and/or Chinese workers.

Second, speaking of China, the New York Times ran two stories this week in a series on "The iEconomy." The first one, "How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work" made quite a splash, while the second one will disturb anyone who's bought an iPad.

In the first story, the most striking passage captured why China (and not the U.S.!) is getting so many jobs out of the explosion of demand for iPhones:

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

I'm afraid the executive is half right. American plants could probably match the Chinese speed and flexibility, but they would have to pay their thousands of workers a princely sum to be ready at a moment's notice. And then they would have to pay overtime to convince workers into grueling shifts. We just can't match China at a cost-effective rate.

Apple is currently the most valuable U.S.-based company and the symbol of American ingenuity, but it "employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s" (Duhigg and Bradsher).

Globalization of the manufacturing process is not creating enough American jobs to absorb workers with lower skills. How do we get out of this mess?

I'm not sure anybody's figured that out yet. And even if someone did figure out how to start fixing this deep-seated problem, can our politicians implement such policy solutions without politicizing them?

I guess we'll see in the next few years.

The "Leap Second" and the Flatness of Modern Time

Today's New York Times reports on a contentious issue looming at a UN-related agency known as the International Telecommunication Union: should the world do away with the "leap second?"

The leap second is an additional second that the keepers of the atomic clocks have added every few years since 1972 to keep those extremely precise clocks in line with the earth's rotation "which [as the Times reports], sadly, does not  run quite like clockwork."

Who knew that such an obscure practice of timekeeping could be divisive?

It turns out that U.S. experts are worried that inserting an occasional extra second could mess up global computer networks. Even that one second could crash servers around the world, and computers don't like such randomness. Therefore, the U.S. wants to stop adding the leap second.

But their opponents--including China, the U.K., and Canada--worry that abolishing the leap second would create a divergence. By the year 2112, they contend, there would be a full minute gap between the official, atomic clock and the earth's rotational one. And eventually, after 100,000-plus years, the official atomic noon would occur at sunrise. Sounds like a crisis, eh? It's keeping me up at night!

On a more serious note, the whole debate illustrates how the world has become flattened and globalized through increasingly precise measurement, standardization, and networking. As chapter 1 of my book points out (and as the Times story reports), this movement to standardize time took off in the late nineteenth century, with the advent of railroads. The effort culminated in the global system of time zones that still governs us today. And the current system goes a step further, down to worrying about the effects over millennia of adding a second of time every few years.

I probably won't be watching on June 30 of this year when the atomic clock gains a second. But I'll continue to be amazed at how humans have taken time--a precious gift of God, a mystery of fullness--and flattened it into an object that they can precisely measure and seemingly control at will.

Despite our brilliant ability to fathom the complexities of earthly, chronological time, we need to grasp the fullness of kairos time if we are to live peaceably during our days and years on earth.

Women Writers and the War on Terrorism after 9/11

Review of Kim Barker, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Doubleday, 2011); Anna Ciezadlo, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War (Free Press, 2011); and Megan K. Stack, Every Man in this Village is a Liar: An Education in War (Doubleday, 2010)

One of the ironic benefits of the 9/11 attacks was that we ended up learning a great deal about the Middle East. Responding to the shocking explosions, American interest in the Middle East and South Asia also exploded. Suddenly, everyone was curious to know about the region, and media outlets scrambled to report the news from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and the Arab world. In the process, they turned to young American women like Kim Barker, Anna Ciezadlo, and Megan Stack to travel to war zones as reporters.

Reading these women's personal accounts together tells us something about the state of American journalism and the state of the so-called War on Terrorism. What we learn is often troubling, but also revealing. American naivete is the first thing we learn about.

Naive Americans Abroad
Each woman's story moves along a similar arc: from young, naive American unconcerned with foreign affairs, to eager and curious reporter after 9/11, to veteran war correspondent who has seen death up close too many times. None of them had a particular passion for the region and none of them spoke any regional languages when 9/11 occurred. But all of them ended up seeing the worst of what the world had to offer in war zones.

Kim Barker, having landed a job at the Chicago Tribune by age 30, was sent to Afghanistan as a self-confessed "unilingual green reporter" (p. 302). After the Iraq War flared up, she returned to the region and reported extensively from Afghanistan and Pakistan--until the Tribune went into bankruptcy and she chose to quit rather than be reassigned to metro Chicago area reporting. The many moments of humor sprinkled throughout the book make it a pleasant read.

Los Angeles Times reporter Megan Stack, age 25 in 2001, was also sent to Afghanistan, where she was harassed by an Afghan warlord in the early days of the war. Unlike the other two authors, she remained in the region and went on to report from several other countries, including Egypt during its 2005 elections, where she witnessed brutal military violence against voters--an eerie echo of the present. Her book is clearly an attempt to make sense of her sense of shock but resists tidy lessons. Instead of a coherent narrative, she offers fragments of reporting from countries across the region (most memorably Yemen and Lebanon in 2006). This is the most writerly book, serious and a bit ponderous at times.

When 9/11 happened, Annia Ciezadlo was 31, living in New York and dating Mohamad, a Shiite Muslim from Lebanon who was a fellow reporter. (She says that they both loved discussing, of all things, urban transportation policy!) After a five-month courtship, they got married in 2002. By 2003, Newsday made Mohamad its Middle East bureau chief and Ciezadlo joined her husband in the region. "I went to the Middle East like most Americans," she writes, "relatively naive about both Arab culture and American foreign policy" (p. 9). She became a free-lance reporter, contributing a number of pieces to the Christian Science Monitor from Baghdad and Beirut. She, like Stack, reports on the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon with some memorably disturbing images.

Responding to regional cultures

Ciezado, like Stack and Barker, learned a great deal about the region. In her case, she had the added benefit of building on her husband's insider knowledge, which she furthered by learning Arabic. Her book is the most sensitive to regional sensibilities, notably in her praise of local foods in Iraq and Lebanon. She writes of sharing a meal with her husband's family right after the funeral of her father-in-law Abu Hassane: "Food unlocked memories, connecting the family to people and places no longer with us, to the dead. Like tradition, the repetition of familiar foods created the illusion that the past was still alive: we eat this food because we ate it before when Abu Hassane was still with us" (p. 208). 

By immersing herself into daily life in the culture, using food as a lens, she was able to see the universality within the particularity. She begins to see a common humanity that eludes the other two writers. Her otherwise-forgettable title refers to an Arabic saying, "youm 'asil, youm bassil"--day of honey, day of onions--which captures her deeper theme: life is bittersweet.

Barker, the author of Taliban Shuffle, is mostly clueless about the cultures in which she reports, and she gravitates toward fellow expatriate reporters in both Pakistan and Afghanistan rather than local friends. She even likens the social scene in Kabul, the Afghan capital, to high school, and we hear a bit too much about her dating life. At the same time, her light-hearted, self-deprecating humor offers a refreshing contrast from Stack's ultra-seriousness. But she also comes across as a bit demeaning toward Muslims.

Stack's Every Man, while sprinkled with autobiographical fragments, is closer to the norm of traditional, straight political reporting. To the extent that culture affects the stories, she touches on it, but she's neither as deeply embedded as Ciezadlo nor as tone-deaf as Barker. She simply navigates enough to get the stories.

Observing war up close

All three books see death up close. After reading about Barker washing the blood and guts off her shoes after a Pakistan suicide bombing, we get the gross-out reality. Both Ciezadlo and Stack tell harrowing tales about traveling into the war zone while Israel was bombarding Southern Lebanon, making me realize how little I had thought about the Lebanese side of the 2006 conflict. This humanizing of ordinary people in the midst of war zones--provoking us to start hearing the voiceless--is the central contribution of these engaging books.

None of these books attempts to teach us anything comprehensive about the so-called war on terrorism; but they do teach us something about humanity in wartime.

The role of autobiography

In contrast to many excellent books by young male reporters on the Iraq War (including Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Dexter Filkins' The Forever War, David Finkel's The Good Soldiers, George Packer's Assassin's Gate;  and Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near; with Oliver Poole's overlooked Red Zone: Five Bloody Years in Baghdad being the exception), these women generally tell us more about their day-to-day struggles with living in war zones. 

This may have something to do with their gender and their location. As liberated, educated American women in pervasively conservative, patriarchal, and gender-conscious societies, they struggled to navigate daily life. It was hard for them to travel safely to and from interviews, for example, without suffering from petty harassment--or worse.

As a result, they take a larger role in their own stories than their male colleagues do in their books. And for this we can be thankful, since we learn more about daily life--shopping, eating, drinking, traveling, dating, and writing--in a war zone. I learned a lot more about what it really meant to live in Kabul, Baghdad, or Beirut while war raged all around.

I'd recommend all three books, depending on what you're hoping to learn about. For excellent coverage of both Iraq and Lebanon between 2003 and 2006, and for mouth-watering descriptions of Middle Eastern food, go with Day of Honey. For thoughtful, serious coverage of multiple stories across entire region, All the Men in This Village would be a good start. And for a funny glimpse into how messed-up Afghanistan and Pakistan were by 2009, The Taliban Shuffle is hard to beat.