Joseph Stiglitz: You're a vegetable and they hate you.

The other day I was talking with my instructor Milton, and I think we were talking about CAFTA and the trade and agricultural land situation in Guatemala. We love repeating our statistics about the concentration of wealth in the U.S., and of course these statistics are interesting and important to know, but I feel like the Guatemalan people would laugh at us. Something like 80% of arable land here is on 8% of the fincas (plantations). The Guatemalan people are forced to migrate on two fronts: the first is actually internal - to get by, it's necessary for many people to move place-to-place chasing crops in season. The second is more well-known to us: emigration to the U.S. A speaker here yesterday said that 2/10 Guatemalan people live in the U.S., and that Los Angeles is the only city in the world with more Guatemalans than Guatemala City.

This being the backdrop of the conversation, Milton was saying that he thinks socialism is a much preferable economic system. When you look around Guatemala there is no argument against this. There is a saying here that 12 families own Guatemala (or 7 depending on who you talk to), and people mean this quite literally. Among average folks, even those who are doing okay are doing, um, not so well. Honestly an economic system that handed out money based solely on winning games of blackjack would probably put more actual money in the hands of people here.

But in the middle of the conversation, Milton kept mentioning how he has heard a lot of criticisms of free trade agreements from an American economist, "an American economist from the left." He searched for the name for a few seconds . . . Joseph Stiglitz! All of a sudden we're talking about Joseph Stiglitz, and how he got the boot from the World Bank, and Milton was saying that "leftist capitalism" like that espoused by Joseph Stiglitz would be acceptable to him.

Anyway, I was really excited about this conversation, but for some reason I just steered it right off the tracks and crashed. "Joseph Stiglitz! He's from Gary, Indiana. He was born in the same city as Michael Jackson! They're both from Gary! Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Jackson!" And . . . back to the imperfect form.