There is talk about building a drain again in back of the houses. This drain would cost around $8000 and would not solve any problems. I am probably the only one who will actually stand out in the rain and watch the drainage and soak away characteristics and I see how it really works.
The problem is that the decks, board fences, houses and vegetation creates shade, enough shade that grass won’t grow. In a heavy rain the water running off the rooftops can cause erosion. The culprit is the lack of vegetation, not the water.
Although grass won’t grow, lots of other things will. A couple years ago I planted some lily turf. It cost me nothing, since I took the shoots from the front of the house. The only improvement that I had to make was to put in some timbers to stop the water in the short term. I also knocked down the board fence at the end of our house, letting in more light.
Look at the pictures. I took them from my deck today after a few hours of rain. Notice how the mud starts exactly where the planting stops. If the problem was water or sunlight, it would not be like that. My plantation not only greened up my space; it also slows erosion up and downstream by slowing or stopping the water flow. Things will grow back there, just not grass.
The drains would not work because they address the wrong problem. Beyond that, it would make everything worse by quickening runoff. It is exactly what we don’t want to do to our local streams and Chesapeake Bay. So we would be spending $8000 to help break down stream beds downstream and ultimately dump more silt and pollution into Chesapeake Bay.
I am afraid such backward activities are common when we make collective decisions.
Big issues are perennial. Just details and names change. I recall debating industrial policy back when I was studying for my MBA more than twenty-five years ago. Conventional wisdom back then held that Japan, with its mastery of industrial planning, would overtake the U.S. as the world’s leading capitalist economy. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, with its capacity to focus and centrally command resources, would catch up in the security arena. Our only hope, some argued, was to adapt their methods to our own ponderous, unorganized and chaotic economy through industrial planning.
Things didn’t turn out the way experts predicted/feared. Within a decade, Japan had plunged into an unpleasant and persistent recession that called into question the prowess of the planners. The Soviet Union went out of business entirely, collapsing under the weight of its own centralizing bureaucracy and structural inefficiencies. Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) failed to change the facts on the ground or in the factory; his glasnost (publicity) served only to show the people the previously hidden hideousness of the decaying communist system. But these things that are so blindingly obvious with hindsight eluded the analysts at the time. *
The U.S. did not adopt a coherent industrial policy, but over the next quarter century grew much faster and created millions more jobs than those places, such as France or Japan, that had something approximating one.
Last time we talked seriously about an industrial policy was in the early-mid 1980s, when we were just coming out of a hard recession and people were uncertain about the future. It is no coincidence that in the conditions of today we are talking about it again. It is a hardy, perennial weed that thrives when things get bad and pessimism dominates. But I think the debate has improved, since it is informed by a generation of real experience. Beyond that, researchers have finally begun to explain in theory what people understood in practice for long time – how distributed but aggregated (i.e. market mechanisms) work. The “hidden had” is not as indecipherable as it once was.
I am a simple person and I like the “Economist” magazine because it explains things in simple ways. I suggest you look at these links if you want more background. here & here.
We can all recognize that every country in the world has something we could call an industrial policy but that none (even the most monotonously oppressed such as North Korea) has complete control of its economy. We spent a lot of time arguing a kind of yes or no industrial policy when I was back in school in 1983, but we were just stupid kids scoring rhetorical points on each other. Like most things in life, the question of industrial policy is one of gradations and implementation. In that regard, a little industrial policy is good, but at some point it becomes poisonous and some applications are better than others.
The best policies take advantage of preexisting advantages or propensities. Identifying exactly what those are is easier said than done, but let me give an obvious example. The State of South Dakota probably doesn’t want to invest a lot in becoming a low cost exporter of bananas. You CAN grow bananas there, in greenhouses. And there are some wise guys (sorry wise men) who will correctly tell you that there is plenty of naturally occurring hot water underground in parts of the state to heat them. But how stupid would you have to be to follow that advice? Politicians often don’t want to hear this, since much of the business of politics is to reward followings. Ironically, the reward is much sweeter when it is for something silly. If the recipient can do it w/o the help of the politician, he is likely to feel less grateful.
Another characteristic of successful industrial policy is NOT to pick winners and losers. The government does best when it creates general conditions for prosperity and then allows the people to make choices & investments that make the most sense to them. In other words, there is a good place for planning but not for the planner. More correctly, the planning is done by the people in that effective distributed but aggregated fashion I mentioned above. Remember how much trouble centralization caused the Japanese and the Soviets. Don’t do it. Once again, this is not something that comes easily to politicians. Picking winners and losers is a big part of political power. That power is the reason lobbyists line up to kiss the politicians asses and contribute big money to political campaigns. How is it that big firms are willing to cut big checks to “charities” recommended by politicians? They expect it to pay off if/when the guy they are backing wins.
The pressure to politicize decision making – for good as well as bad motivations – is the second biggest hazard of industrial planning. The first biggest hazard is lack of timely, useful and accurate information in sufficient detail to allow decision making by the experts. That is precisely why we should not give them much decision making power. Like the watch making god of the Deists, they should set up the system, with its incentives and attributes, enforce the rule of law but otherwise let it grow by the decisions of the participants, intervening only to address true emergencies. This is essentially how it worked with the Internet, one of the most successful U.S. forays into “industrial policy.
The idea that you COULD have an industrial policy that was centrally run, comprehensive and innovated – all at the same times – is a supreme example hubris. Even stipulating that they are smart and honest, what are the chances that politicians or bureaucrats have the information or vision needed to choose tomorrow’s technologies and technology leaders? The record is not encouraging.
And the record goes way back. The Roman Emperor Diocletian did what we would call comprehensive industrial planning. It helped lead to bankrupting the empire and hastened the development of what we would later call serfdom. In more modern times, industrial policy has been associated with mercantilism. A lot of that originated in France in the early 1700s, when France was Europe’s predominant economic power. Suffice to say, it didn’t work out and France didn’t stay on top.
The free market requires government for some infrastructure projects, rule of law and provide for the common security. There are some things that have to be decide politically. But for everything else, we are better off deciding for ourselves the things that we care about the most and have the most information about and having faith that our fellow Americans will do the same for the things they know about.
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* My professor for business policy, a guy called Bruce Erickson, is one of the only serious people I know who openly and unequivocally predicted the imminent demise of Soviet tyranny. I still remember his simple structural proposition. He understood there were other factors, but this was the new part. Again, today this looks obvious, but in 1983 it was fairly new. He explained that the mainframe computer had been the salvation of communist central planning. They could control access to information and still do the needful computations. But the personal computers, which were just becoming common at the time, would be the death of central control because they decentralized information and decision making.
The communists had two options. They could give up a lot of control and then it wouldn’t really be communism anymore. Or they could resist the new technologies and make their system obsolete a little faster. In fact, the Soviets tried first restrictions and then let loose, so that both things hasted their system collapse. The Chinese saw this and refused to liberalize their political system, repressing dissent in a bloody crackdown of which Tiananmen Square was only the part we saw on TV. But they continued to liberalize their economy, essentially conceding many aspects of economic control (defacto abandoning communism) in return for continued political power. The Chinese experiment continues.
It is very important to describe positions well. Generics just don’t do it. Never accept the same description as your predecessor or the same one that “like” officers have. For example, saying that your PRT is one of 31 PRTs in Iraq w/o saying much (or anything) about the particulars is unhelpful and, IMO, indicates a certain intellectual flabbiness. Also be very clear about who you manage, how many and what they do. Recognize that quality and diversity count. Managing 100 low level employees who all do well established and similar things may not take as much leadership as running an operation with ten colleagues doing a variety of changing duties.
Experience counts in similar ways. It is possible – and I have seen – people get twenty years worth of experience in five years. It is also possible to get five (or less) years of experience in twenty years. Some people just repeat the same sorts of things. I suppose they are getting better at doing them, but it doesn’t add much to experience. It reminds me of watching CNN and hearing them claim that they have 24 hours of news each day. No. What they often have is a half hour of news 48 times a day. Watching an endlessly repeating loop of the same event doesn’t add much to understanding. Experience can be that way too.
Of course, there is a caveat. There is always a caveat. You need to develop expertise and some specialties. Beyond that, simple variety also does not produce useful experience. Focus is important. Ideally, experience should build on previous experience creating a capacity to do and understand more. Change for the sake of change makes no more sense that the opposite.
Experience teaches, but learning is not automatic. If things just happen to you and you don’t think about them it may be useless energy spent. I was impressed when I could see how people learned from experience and applied it in analogous situations. This demonstrated not only that the experience was good, but also that the individual had the ability to reason by analogy and make reasonable distinctions among situations.
Finally, I am reminded of what Mark Twain said about not learning more lessons from an experience than it has to teach. The cat that sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again; of course he will not sit on a cool one either.
The panel works a lot like a jury is supposed to work; it aggregates the experience of a reasonably well informed group, sometimes tapping into expertise that single individuals could not use. Our group had five senior FSOs from various cones and with various career paths, alone with one member of the public for proper leavening. We made special efforts NOT to fall into either groupthink, where we have too much early consensus, or chaos, where we don’t achieve consensus at all. This meant initially ranking files w/o deliberation and then voting on those we thought were high, low or middle.
I was surprised how often we came independently to similar conclusions. There were often overwhelming majorities on one side or the other. We discussed some of them briefly as a form of quality control. Perhaps more interesting than the near unanimity of the results was the fact that often the reasons for the decisions were very different. This made me more confident of the decision, since each person bringing his/her experience to bear on the aspect of the decision they knew the best had led to this aggregated decision.
Of course, there were some close votes and those required more deliberation. Nobody tried to dominate the group, but each member came to be recognized as having particular expertise in some things. I, for example, had more experience in public diplomacy and in running PRTs and that experience helped me understand if particular claims or achievements were really significant or just things that would have happened anyway. I could also point to instances where officers had tried very hard to achieve a very difficult goal and even in failure had demonstrated the characteristics we are looking for in our senior leadership. We tried not to penalize innovators, even if their reach sometimes exceeded their grasp, but of course you have to draw distinctions between innovation and recklessness. This is not always as clearly evident as we might like. I was glad to contribute my own expertise and grateful that my fellow board members also brought a lot to the table.
I believe we made good decisions and that our group decision was better than any one of us could have done alone.
I have more formal education than I can practically use and that is the way I wanted it. I just liked to study when I was in college and for my leisure today I do things very much like studying. I read books and write essays (now known as blog posts). But I think you don’t understand real education until you understand that all of life is – or should be – about learning.
I took the formal “book learning” education route; others chose different ways. Sometimes we make too much of a distinction. Learning, whether it comes from books, experience or anything else, has to be integrated into a person’s life and outlook. Some people despise “useless” education. Others boldly assert that no education is useless. I think both miss the point. Education of any kind is useful if it changes how you look at and/or do things, if it spawns new ideas or skills or if it just makes you think. This definition would seem to include almost everything, but it doesn’t. There is useless education, although it has more to do with the recipient than the subject. Some people just don’t pay attention or don’t integrate what they learned into their behaviors or thoughts. They don’t turn information into knowledge. These are the kinds of people who memorize lots of things, but cannot recognize them when they are a little changed or in different contexts. Unfortunately, these are often the people who call for more “education” and are most interested in official credentials. These are the guys that try to trump you by quoting experts or citing their own expertise. I recall discussing economics with a guy who didn’t like my opinion. He said something like, “Wouldn’t you feel stupid if I told you that I wrote my PhD dissertation on this subject?” I just said no. I should have elaborated, “Wouldn’t you feel stupid if I told you that you went through all that trouble and learned so little?”
I have to admit that I take some refuge in my own formal education credentials. I can be a lot more of a smart-ass because I have some of the smart papers. Lately I have been in closer contact with practical people who know things I want to learn about buying land, developing property, building roads and sustainable forestry/agriculture. These guys know all sorts of detailed things, like the quality of dirt or the type of rocks you need to use to shore up a bank. Lots of these things seem really easy until you have to make the decision yourself. As with anything else, some people are better at what they do than others. I was thinking about the type of education you might need and how you could figure it out. There are some places where my education has a very direct connection. For example, figuring out how much I can pay for things and still make profits and payments is something I did indeed learn in finance class, although I have to admit that I really didn’t understand it until I bought my first house. Let me jump back to my other life for a minute.
I have been sitting on promotion panels and trying to judge which of my esteemed colleagues should move to the next level. Many of us get formal training at the upper-middle or lower senior level. I valued that training, but I wanted to see what they did with it two or three years later. I wanted to know if it took root and grew or if it was just a pleasant sojourn in academia. I found some of each. Some people were clearly changed and improved by their educations, i.e. they learned something. Among others you just couldn’t tell. Everybody had earned the same credentials, but it was different. So I guess I am advocating a kind of “Gold’s Gym standard.” I go to Gold’s Gym three times a week. I do an intense workout that takes me less than 15 minutes and then I am out. People make fun of me for that. I get a variation of “Leaving so soon?” with monotonous regularity. Most people spend more time than I do and many spend a lot more time, but time in doesn’t matter. It is like the credentials. The only thing that matters is whether or not you can pick up the weights. The answer to the question, “Can you bench press 250 lbs?” is not, “Well, I come here every day and workout really hard for at least an hour.” All that matters is yes or no, probably followed by an actual demonstration if you answered in the affirmative. Educational achievement is harder to measure, but the same type of standard should apply.
College is not the only place you get educated. Increasingly, there are other options. Many firms have their own training programs, which are often more up-to-date and almost always more specific than the program at the local college. Community colleges are increasingly important because of their low-cost, almost universal access and flexibility. Of course, online options are exploding. Aristotle thought that the best education was just to live in a good city. I think if he were alive today, he might call it lifetime learning and advocate a learning culture. Learning, like art, truth and beauty, is ubiquitous. We just need to be aware and constantly searching. And our needs are protean. (Me use hard words from education). I never thought that variations in rocks and dirt would absorb so much of my intellectual energy.
I apologize if this post has gone off in so many directions, but I think the idea of education is like that. We talk a lot about the need to educate our population. We say that education is the key to the future. This is true. But too often we are thinking narrowly of a specific place and time where education will be delivered by certified professionals who will hand out certificates when all the education is done. Maybe instead of education, we should think more about learning.* *How about a little display of etymological erudition, which is usually not of much value but fits here? Think about the words. Education is a Latin-based word. It means to bring out or lead out. The one being educated may be a little passive in this case. You can be educated by someone else. Learn is a Germanic based word. Its original meaning was to get knowledge. It requires that you take an active part. Learning is what you are supposed to do during your education. Some people do.
The reason I made the distinction between Latin and German was because of the nature of our wonderful English language. English is a Germanic language, but it is heavily Latinized, much of it through the use of Norman French (descended from Latin). After the Norman conquest, since the rich guys spoke French, the educated people read Latin and the poor guys spoke Anglo-Saxon (old-middle English), we tend to have a rich vocabulary of overlapping words; the Latin-French words tend to be classier than the Germanic-Saxon ones that mean almost the same things.
Most swear words are Germanic. In Latin-French based English, for example, people have intercourse in the bedroom and they defecate in the bathroom. The German-Saxon words for those things cannot be spoken on network television. But the twin words do not always mean exactly the same things. So it is with education and learning. My education taught me the things I just wrote, but I have learned that most people don’t know or care about them. That is another difference between learning and education.
I wrote these notes for these posts during my time on promotion boards, but held off posting them until the work was done.
After many years of trying to figure out the tricks of getting promoted, I finally got it. It is an epiphany. After now reading the files of 100s of my very competent colleagues, I found that the secret of success is to be good at what you do. Of course, the write up is important. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, it doesn’t make a sound for any practical purpose. But you have to have something to write about. A week of energetic writing and spinning won’t make up for a year of lethargy on the job. You just cannot sell Edsels. On the other hand, people stand in line to get the good products they want.
I like the fact that people write their own first pages on their assessments. It gives a better look at what they can do and what they think is important. Some people “get it” more than others. In their own write-ups they emphasize the right things first and they make logical and meaningful connections among the things they accomplished.
There is focus. In the good EERs, I notice a “purposes principle” at work. They explain the “so what?” and list the results and outcomes of what they have accomplished. I also get the impression that they frequently ask the purpose question. When someone gives you a task, it is not impertinent to ask, “what do you plan to use it for?” This will often make the person focus more, give you a better idea of what is necessary and maybe make it more of a partnership. The person getting the task might know, for example, that there is a better way to achieve the goal. Of course, you have to ask the question in the right way, but a good leader should be glad to have subordinates who try to improve on what they are given.
Nobody is perfect and I like it when I can find areas of actual conflict or mistakes that provided learning opportunities. This is perhaps the hardest part to get right. Nobody likes to be criticized and it is always a risk to have any criticism prominently mentioned. However, it may be a acceptable risk that sets you apart. Nobody has a good year every year. It is unlikely that someone goes from one success to another w/o any setbacks. I was reminded of the juvenile lovers who ask their partners whether they love them more today than yesterday. Despite what we hear in song and story, the inevitable true answer eventually must be “no”. It doesn’t mean that careers, or love, do not or cannot grow over a long period, but it will never be a straight and clear path in either case.
That said, it makes no sense to dwell on failure. One of the things I dislike most is when people seem to revel in the hard times they have suffered. Difficult conditions are a mitigating factor, but the fact is that there are two sorts of criteria. You either did something or you didn’t. Almost fought the great chicken of Bristol just doesn’t compare to actual achievement. Ideally, you should mention the problem immediately followed by how you moved on from it. And remember that most FS careers have had some hardships. I served a year in the Western Desert of Iraq, with dust in the air and bad guys behind the rocks; many of our colleagues have had worse. The bad plumbing or poor phone service at someone’s post just doesn’t sound very impressive.
Overall, some files just seem to sing beautifully, others are a little off key and a few are bad. Sometimes one person manages to be/do all three. That is why I like to see the person in more than one type of job or place. Some people can do well one time and in one place. That is admirable but doesn’t mean they should be promoted to more responsibility. It is not the one home run that counts but the day-to-day success that adds up over a long period.
I made an unexpected trip to the farms yesterday. I wanted to look at a piece of land near the Nottoway River. FM wants to buy the timber and wants me to buy the land. In other words, he gets the wood; I get land to grow new trees. It is a long-term proposition for me. I couldn’t even thin until around 2025. On the other hand, I can get the land cheaper and grow the trees later.
The land would not be only for forestry. There is a lot of road frontage and the property is across from the Nottoway River, which you see in the picture. (It was a very foggy morning, as you can see and chilly. It later got hot and humid.) They would leave the trees near the streams etc, so it would remain wooded and attractive. There is a public boat launching place across from one corner of the property. It was a very foggy morning, as you can see and chilly. It later got hot and humid. Under the right conditions, I could sell off some lots right at the corner with the river, where people could build “farmettes” or cabins. I have no idea how that works, but I bet I can figure it out. That would help pay for the land.
Land is inexpensive these days because of the recession. It won’t stay that way forever and this may be a good time to buy. But the timing is always tricky and I don’t have that kind of money to just risk. The forest land and its produce will essentially fund large chunks of my retirement, or not. In a rational market, this land would become more valuable. Markets are always rational … in the long run. But as John Maynard Keynes said, “Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.”
Anybody want to come in on a forestry investment? Or maybe buy a beautiful home site near an officially designative senic river? Well, I have to figure out the finances. I really just don’t know.
Pictures
The first picture shows the boat landing on the Nottoway River. The picture under that is the part of the property I was looking at that was cut in 2001. This is natural regeneration and would remain on the land. I would have to mange it a little, but the trees look healthy. As comparison, you can see my trees on the CP property (same day. The sun came out.) They are only six years old (planted 2004) but they are bigger by a couple feet and fuller because of better genetic stock and some management. The second lastpicture shows the pines on our Freeman property. They were planted in 1996 and will be thinned later this month (first thining). They need thinning. Light will reach the ground and it will be better for wildlife. The last picture is a dog that just wandered by. He has a tracking collar, so he is probably a hunting dog. I offered him a piece of ham from my sandwich. He took it but remained a little spooked.
Northern Virginia has an interesting hitchhiking system called slugging. Drivers who want to use the HOV lanes, but don’t have the required three passengers, pick up “slugs” at various lots south of DC. The occupants allow the use of the HOV lane and get both drivers and passengers there much faster. No money is exchanged and there are some simple rules, such as no talking unless the driver initiates it. This form of transport has been around since 1975 and it is evidently as fast or faster than taking the bus and significantly faster than driving as a single person in traffic. A couple of my colleagues slug to work w/o any significant problems.
It is interesting that such a cooperative market has grown up w/o outside regulation. Local governments accept it and welcome it as a way to reduce congestion. There have been occasional calls for the government to somehow regulate the system, but that would probably make it collapse. If it ain’t broken …
Hunters are the backbone of rural society. People who live in cities and suburbs rarely appreciate that fact. I thought of this in relation to my own land and was reminded when Chrissy’s sister Diane visited a friend who lives in western Virginia. The friend owns some forest land in the Shenandoah. Local hunters watch over it, make improvements and generally take care of the place. She was a little surprised at the role of local hunters. I used to be too, but not anymore.
The hunters on my land have been there for generations. Much of what I know about the land comes from them. They knew how long the roads had been in place. They remembered when the streams had flooded and when they had gone dry. They had experience of fires and storms. And they loved the land and understood the relationships with the animals on them.
Deer hunters are working to create better habitat for the animals they hunt and improve the herds. They always have done this. Much of the county’s wildlands were conserved by hunters. Lately the equations have changed a bit. The burgeoning wildlife and especially deer population has shifted emphasis from any deer to quality deer. Hunt clubs are actively managing the herds through selective hunting, feed plots etc. I get a magazine called “Quality Whitetails” from an organization by the same name that provides a place for the exchange of information and experience. It is very interesting the things hunters are doing in the conservation field, literally out in the field.
Another big factor is development and urban encroachment. A generation ago, there were a lot fewer deer and they were spread over a bigger area of undeveloped land. Today deer populations have grown to almost nuisance levels in some areas and this is exacerbated by the fragmentation of the forests. This is another reason to emphasize quality of the herds over mere numbers. The numbers problem is no longer a problem.
Hunting keeps people closer to the land. One of my friends down in Southside Virginia spends most of his free time working on conservation projects on land his hunt club leases. He helps restore wetlands, makes wildlife corridors etc. He has helped a lot on my farm, at no cost to me since we work in our mutual interest. This guy doesn’t hunt very much anymore in the traditional sense. He just really enjoys the conservation and wildlife management aspects of hunting. Most of the hunters I know enjoy the sport more for the insights it gives them into nature than the actual shooting deer, which is only one part of a full-year, multi-year effort.
The numbers of hunters has been declining over the past decades. There still are enough, but if the trend continues, this will be a serious threat to the health of rural communities and the rural environment. Somebody else – probably at taxpayer expense – will have to do what as work hunters do joyfully and for free. In fact, they actually pay to do it.
I am not a hunter myself, for the same reasons that the number of hunters has been declining. I was a city kid, with no hunting tradition. I am also a terrible shot. I support hunting by working with the hunt clubs on my farms and supporting some hunting organizations, such as Quality Whitetails, that provide hunting education and advocacy.
Beyond the environmental benefits, hunting has a long tradition in American culture. It is very different in the U.S. than it was in many parts of the world. In Europe, hunting was a rich man’s sport. When the ordinary people hunted, it was usually called “poaching,” especially when talking about bigger game, a crime that was severely punished by the aristocrats. Besides just wanting to keep the animals to themselves, aristocrats sensed the fundamental democratizing nature of hunting. Besides giving the common man access to weapons and the training to use them, hunting allowed individuals a personal connection with nature, unfiltered by the hierarchy of the old world. It also provides a means of support. One of the older hunters down near the farms told me that when he was young, hunting wasn’t just a hobby; it was needed to put meat on the table. One of the things that impressed former-peasant immigrants to the early America was that they COULD hunt. They were the owners of the land and didn’t have to kiss the ass of the local baron or “his” deer and elk untouched in the forest where only the fat-cats could hunt.
So this is my paean to the pastoral pursuit of hunting in our great America, whether it is deer, turkey, geese, quail, ducks or bears (yes we have a few on the farms now). We should appreciate what hunters and hunting have done for us.
A practical and effective cultural relativism would start with the premise that if people are doing something for a long time, they must have a reason. It does not suppose that the reason is a good one or that it remains valid. Many parts of culture become fossilized. People continue to do things that were once useful and adaptive but are no longer. This has been most tragically-comic and obvious in military affairs, where warriors often continue to use weapons and techniques made obsolete by advancing technologies. A Samurai warrior, all decked out in his panoply of armor and edged weapons is a wonder to behold, but he is no match for a kid with a pistol. The Japanese, BTW, addressed this cultural problem by banning firearms (as European knights had tried to ban longbows and crossbows) and managed to hold technological progress at bay for a couple centuries.
You must acknowledge that the cultural trait is done for a reason and has/had value. After that you try to put the trait in context. This helps understand the culture. Seek first to understand before trying to be understood. But at some point soon after that, you have to start making judgments and choices.
I have been trying to brush up on my things Brazilian. I have a favorable attitude toward the place and a general affection for the people left over from when I lived there twenty-five years ago. But I recognize that there are challenges. I just finished reading a book on sociology called “A Cabeca do Brasileiro” (the mind of the Brazilian) and I have been watching Globo (Brazilian TV) every day on the Internet. All this reminds me of things I liked about the place and some things I didn’t like. It is condescending to talk about only the good things and churlish to emphasize only the bad. Anyway, many of the traits have aspects of both.
The author, Alberto Carlos Almeida, devotes his first chapter to “jeitinho brasileiro.” I don’t know how to explain what that is to an American reader and it is obviously hard even for Brazilians to explain it to each other if the guy writes a whole chapter about it. Suffice to say that it lies in the twilight zone between a favor and corruption. The jeitinho is a way around something, often a way around a regulation or procedure that everybody knows doesn’t make sense. One of the things I loved about Brazilians was/is their cleverness and flexibly. They can always think of a way to get something or get something done. You can easily see how this “good” trait could cut both ways.
So should we accept, celebrate or condemn the jeitinho? You really cannot ignore it because people will be asking you for it and doing it for you even if you don’t ask. Would you be an “ugly American” if you insisted that you – as an American – don’t do Jeito? Or would you be an even uglier American if you took advantage of it?
