Lines

            From our artistic beginnings, we learned how to draw lines. Straight lines, crooked lines, black lines, white lines. And we still do— except today, we use them among people. We divide and group individuals in our mind, and even if we don’t overtly stereotype, we all hold certain assumptions and jump to conclusions about others based on certain characteristics like their race, dialect, appearance, etc.

Even men as great as George Clooney are offenders:

            And it’s more than that. The consequences of how we think about individuals, are far reaching— they determine how we act towards them and ultimately who they are relative to ourselves. And often times we don’t recognize this, but these thoughts ultimately end up as a self fulfilling prophecy.

Let’s look at an example:

Let’s say Timmy is a fourth grader and accidentally bumped into a fifth grader in the lunch line. Now Timmy thinks that this big bad fifth grader is going to retaliate because that’s what fifth graders do. So he turns around and gives the fifth grader a good taste of his fist to land the first hit, which obviously angers the older child who returns the favor, a punch he wouldn’t have thrown had Timmy not preempted a nonexistent fight.

Now, Timmy constructed the threat that this individual posed, based off of his assumption that retaliation would be inevitable, actually leading to what he feared. Now it sounds ridiculous, but it happens more often that you’d think. And on a global scale— countries do this too, and often the conflict involves more than a few scratches and bruises, they risk war.

Let’s think about the enemies that our country has. The first that comes to mind are terrorists— a threat that’s driven our nation to an economic quagmire and military overstretch. But are they really everything that we make them out to be, do they really meet the constructed image that we've portrayed them as?

Look at Iraq. We invaded to prevent the development and usage of Weapons of Mass Destruction by terrorist groups, which by the way we still haven’t found today. And our military presence has actually incited more opposition in the region. Christopher Layne, a national editor of the Atlantic, wrote in his study, “Middle East grand strategy after Iraq: the moment for offshore balancing has arrived” that

“The US presence on the ground in the Middle East also incites terrorists to attack American interests…‘what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a…goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland’

(It can be found here)

An even better example is the Cold war. Construction of threats is literally the reason that an arms race began. Our country made the Soviets an “other”, assuming that they would develop arms to harm the good people of the United States, in turn justifying their development of nuclear weapons, which just incited further justification for the Soviets to develop their weapons of which we pointed to and said we had to keep increasing our arsenal for. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

The moral of the story is, be careful how you think and how you group and “otherwise” different groups of people, because it’s not just a thought, it affects much, much, more.

           

TRAPPED

Inequality. We're used to thinking about it in terms of different societies, a gap between an upper and lower class. And in a global context, in terms of countries, we don't realize how large that gap really is between roughly the bottom fifth of the world and the rest. Paul Collier, a professor of economics at Oxford University, makes the argument that growth is severely stunted for the so called bottom billion of the world's population, as the rest face development, increasing and increasing the inequality gap.
(If you want to read more here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Bottom-Billion-Poorest Countries/dp/0195373383/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354637064&sr=8-1&keywords=bottom+billion)

He articulates 4 development "traps" that keep the bottom billion in the third world, some of which certainly apply to even countries he considers as part of the developed world. Today we're going to look at a country that's facing their own share of problems, Spain.

There are a couple traps that really don't apply to Spain:
First is the landlocked with bad neighbors trap. The problem with being landlocked is that it makes strong economic growth nearly impossible, because the only trading partners are your neighbors if there's no coast. That being said, poor partners means more trade and economic stimulation.

Spain is neither landlocked nor surrounded by poor neighbors-- if you don't believe me, here's a map:



Second is the natural resources trap. Collier states that an abundance of natural resources can actually have negative consequences if there's poor management. Because it makes conflict and exploitation more likely, and raises the possibility of Dutch Disease-- resource exports cause the value of the currency to go up, making other export industries noncompetitive, some of which could be more sustainable avenues for economic growth. Spain does have some natural resources (i.e. coal, iron ore, lead and zinc) however, these have all been effectively managed without any conflict or the diminishing of other industries.

Third is bad governance in a small country, which may apply to Spain in terms of the economic crisis that they're currently in- but there are more reasons to believe it doesn't: First is that Spain isn't nearly as small as the countries that Collier analyzes, second is that Spain's economic crisis is primarily blamed on the housing crisis which lay to waste the tremendous investment Spain's bank threw at the housing industry, ruining their Banks. Before the economic crisis Spain was actually running smaller deficits than Germany, and its debt was only 27% of the GDP-- making them a model for fiscal responsibility.

Finally is the conflict trap-- the one that almost makes sense in the context of Spain. The conflict trap mostly revolves around civil war, with two primary effects, the first of which is economic- wars and coups cost a lot of money and stall economic growth, second is the risk of relapse which is really high following a conflict. Right now, Spain is embroiled in the possibility of civil conflict- although there's a small risk of violent escalation, Catalonia has threatened secession on multiple occasions due to economic grievances

All in all, Spain doesn't quite fit the mold for any of these development traps-- although it is headed toward crisis in its own way, hopefully it doesn't stay there.