Halfway down the Danube

Take that, spammers!

David from AFoE sent me this wonderful link. It's this neat little code which will make life very miserable for all those spammers who've been making our life very miserable. Stefan, who wrote this, deserves a medal or something - it's really ingenious. It's simple, easy to install, and great fun.

What now happens when you want to leave a comment is that you are being asked to type a certain word into a text box in the comments pop up. It's nothing complicated, and it will keep this site much cleaner (or so we hope). I'm even going to make it fun for you by picking interesting words.

Thanks for your understanding!!

Update: Hm. It just worked like a charm. And now it doesn't let anybody post. Strange. Let me tinker a bit. I'm no computer pro, so I'm only guessing what I'm doing. Sorry.

Update II: OK. Everything is as it should be. I just forgot to tell my program which is the word of the day. D'uh.

A Fistful of Euros

Claudia and I have joined the team at A Fistful of Euros. This is a group blog about, well, things European.

I'm already signed up to be a guest blogger on tacitus.org (where I post very occasionally) and The Head Heeb (where I haven't managed to post once yet), and then of course there's this blog. Which (you've noticed if you've been reading regularly) sometimes goes for a week without a post, because work is intense or the kids or sick or, well, something. So I make no promises as to frequency or quality of posting.

But it's a good blog, run by some good people, and we'll try to keep our end up.

'tis the season

Oh, yes, and and if you think that you will be busy, imagine our situation. We're US and German living in Romania, and this is our holiday plan for the next three months:

October 31: Halloween (US)
November 2: Election Day (US)
November 11: St. Martin's Day (GER, kids parade outside with paper laterns)
November 25: Thanksgiving (US)
December 1: National Day (RO)
December 6: St. Nikolaus Day (GER, kids get their boots filled with goodies)
December 24: Christmas Eve (GER, presents for the kids)
December 25: Christmas (US, presents for the kids)
December 31: New Year's Eve (US, GER, RO)
January 6: Epiphany (GER, end of Christmas season)

Oh, and my birthday is somewhere in there, too.

Now, many of those holidays are very much kid-oriented. They also often requires certain equipment and decoration, like pumpkins, paper laterns, turkeys, cranberry sauce, advent wreath, etc.
Some of these can be quite a challenge here in Romania. I placed a huge order of craft supplies with a German craft store some days ago. My Mom will send the package on to us and then we can make paper laterns for St. Martin's. Romania is not very well stocked with craft supplies (which makes sense when you think about it but that is maybe a topic for another post some day.)
I'm also trying to get my hands on one of the original US turkeys that the US Embassy imports for their staff. Now, we're not on the list of the lucky ones who are eligible, but... well, let's just say I have negotiations going on.

We also bought a pumpkin and carved it. Now, that was quite a task. First, there were no suitable pumpkins to be had on the market. We went out to the countryside and ended up buying a huge but green pumpkin. At least it was orange inside and made a nice jack'o'lantern. The kids loved it.

Unfortunately, the fact that it was easy to carve also meant that it decayed within three days. But, wait! Yesterday, all of a sudden the market was flooded with huge orange pumpkins. I bought two and we carved them yesterday evening. They were incredibly tough and difficult to cut but we hope this means they will last at least until Sunday.

Halloween never really did it for me. I guess because I didn't grow up with it. However, this year, it is a lot of fun -- because Alan and David are getting such a kick out of it. We cut spiders out of paper and hung them up over the dinner table and Alan made little tissue ghosts at his school. Every morning, David thoughtfully looks at the chandelier and then blows to make the spiders dance. They cheer over the jack'o'lantern. Alan runs around in this batman costume all day long. It's great fun.

Since Alan's school's out this week, we had an early Halloween last Friday. The school is situated in the French Village complex, and seven local parents volunteered to open their houses to trick'n'treaters.

So we met in the afternoon, with the kids all dressed up, and started trick or treating. There were about fifty kids, divided into six or so groups. I have to say that Alan got the hang of knocking on doors and getting candy for it pretty quickly. He was dressed up as Batman (he was very proud and kept saying "I'm a bad man!"), and David was a gorilla. My little pudgy gorilla, he was incredibly cute.

Next stop: St. Martin's.

Earthquake, update

Our friend Christine sent us some links, to which we woke up this morning after a quiet night. Apparently, it was a 5.8 or 5.9 magnitude one, located some 100 miles northeast of us.*

Our friend Dragos at @rgumente and Kit have commented on it too. I have to agree with Kit -- 20 seconds seemed like an eternity. It was enough time to wake up from a light slumber, wondering, realizing, saying "Doug?", hearing the answer "earthquake!" from the study, running to the kids, getting them out of bed and standing in the doorway. Time does stretch.

For me, it also awoke memories of 1977. That big Romania earthquake? I lived in Istanbul with my family back then and I remember that evening clearly. Everything shook heavily and we, too, stood in the doorway with my parents clutching us children. The next day, we had huge cracks in the walls of our house. Not this year - our house here is built very earthquake safe. It also means that you cannot get a nail into the walls if your life depended on it, which used to annoy me mildly a number of times. Yesterday evening, though, I was quite content to live in such a sturdy house.

My nanny didn't sleep all night. She, too, was plagued by memories of 1977. She used to live in a house next to a huge empty patch of land. After the earthquake, all the rubble from the flattened houses was brought there.
She remembers seeing body parts mixed in with the concrete and pieces of buildings - arms, legs, heads. Gruesome pictures, guranteed to keep one's mind far too busy to sleep. Ceausescus Romania was an awful, awful place.

*That's pretty close to Zabola. I wrote them an email, hoping to hear back from them soon.

Update: Reuters reports that "Romanian officials said buildings, such as the historic Bucharest city hall, had suffered mostly cracks in walls and falling plaster and some roads were slightly damaged but utilities were functioning normally." The strength has also been upped to 6.0.

Earthquake

A little one. Just a couple of minutes ago.

There was a low rumbling, sort of like a subway train going underneath the house, but... rhythmic. Pulsing, with a frequency of about half a second. The desk lamp by the computer -- it's one of those with the jointed arm and the cone around the bulb -- began to sway back and forth. I felt my chair going up and down, like it was going on rollers down a bumpy road, and then the whole house began to sway.

We ran to the kids' room. I picked up Alan, Claudia grabbed David, and we stood in the doorway at the top of the stairs. That's what they tell you: stand in a doorway, if you don't have time to get outside.

And then it stopped.

Dogs were barking up and down the street, and a minute later a confused flock of birds went cawing and creaking overhead in the darkness. But then everything got quiet again. It's very quiet now. We don't hear any sirens or anything. Like I said: a little one.

Much of Bucharest was flattened by an earthquake in 1977; the whole middle and lower Balkan region is tectonically unstable. Earthquakes are a fact of life here, and there's nothing to be done about it.

We're going to go back to bed now. Eventually we'll sleep.

Walking down Strada Roma

Sunday evening I took the boys for a walk down Strada Roma.

We live in a residential neighborhood where all the streets are named after capitals: Strada Paris, Strada Londra, Strada Roma and Stockholm and Brasilia. I like walking down Strada Roma because it's lined with lovely old houses with little yards full of overgrown flowers and cats. It's nice to walk there by myself; it's even nicer with the boys, because there's always something happening. A woman sweeping the sidewalk; a man too drunk to walk straight. Birds bathing in a sidewalk puddle. Two teenagers working on a car (with power tools!). Children on bicycles, a friendly dog, interesting bugs. Something.

At the end of Strada Roma, just south of Piatsa Dorobant' (that's the one with the bust of Brancusi), is a high school. The high school is shaped like three sides of a rectangle, with the street going past it making the fourth. Inside the rectangle is the school yard: a concrete playground with a couple of basketball courts and an open area where boys play soccer. The playground is separated from the street by a high wall with a couple of gates in it.

So we're walking along, David in the stroller and Alan holding my hand, and we've just reached the schoolyard gate. We pause to look inside. Alan likes to go inside and watch the boys playing ball. A car is going slowly down the street behind us. I tell Alan we won't go inside, we have to go home, but we can watch the ball players for a minute or two. One of the boys kicks the ball high. Alan turns to say something to me --

and BANG! There's a crash from the street, just a few meters behind us. I whirl around, and there are little bits of shiny silver glass /everywhere/. It takes a moment to figure out what's happened: the soccer ball has gone high over the wall and, by unlucky chance, has hit the side mirror of the one car that was going down the street. Hit it dead on, and hard: the mirror has shattered explosively.

The car stopped dead. The ball came down from high in the air, bounced off the curb, dribbled slowly into the middle of the street. There was silence for perhaps a count of three.

Then a young woman got out of the car and stared at the place where her mirror had been. The ball was dribbling slowly to a halt in the middle of the street. Some boys had climbed up on the wall between playground and sidewalk; they started to point and yell, in that peculiar hooting way that is unique to teenage boys worldwide.

The young woman suddenly grabbed the ball, threw it into her car, and got back inside. Then -- to cries of despair from the ball players -- she drove off. Everyone stared after the car until it disappeared around the corner into the piatsa with the bust of Brancusi.

And that was that.

Vote!

If someone tells you that Europe is not trying to influence the US election with all her might -- then this someone is wrong.

I'm European, I'm not allowed to vote. However, I'm the wife of a (voting) US citizen and the mother of two (non-voting) US citizens. Therefore, I feel obligated to do my best and ensure a brighter future for my husband and sons. These are my tactics:

Blackmail
I told my US relatives that we WILL NOT live in the US as long as a Bush is president. I'm keeping this vague on purpose. This way, I have my options open if Jenna gets elected in '28 or so.

My mother-in-law is persuaded; however, she does live with her husband who is a stout Republican. I love him but he's got a political blind eye, and he tries to undermine my efforts. I shall call her on election day and remind her of my threat, just to be sure. Unfortunately, the threat doesn't work one bit with my Republican sister-in-law and her husband. I think they are not taking me seriously. Will they ever be surprised. (Of course, I'm hoping that I don't have to live up to my threats.)

Encouraging voter registration
Doug did want to vote, yes. But he's also Mr. Procrastination and while I love and trust him, I did make sure that he applied for his absentee ballot. (Opening the respective website, cajoling him into the desk chair, hovering over his shoulder until he hit "send" can, I believe, be called "making sure". Or harassment.)

Reminding to vote
I also asked him every day whether he'd sent his ballot off. Every day. Multiple times.

Stating my side
We do have a Kerry/Edwards yard sign. I made it myself. Isn't it gorgeous?

Why, you ask, a yard sign in a country where 99.9% of the inhabitants cannot vote in this particular election? So, what if an expat walked by my sign, acknowledged my deep feelings, and out of respect and friendship for me made up his undecided mind and voted Democrat? I say, if I play the lottery, I can also put up a yard sign.

I also made my husband laugh in delight. So there.

Endorsement
While I'm only speaking for myself, I'm sure my co-writers Doug and Carlos agree: Halfway down the Danube endorses John Kerry and John Edwards.

Please consider voting for Kerry/Edwards. I'm not saying they are the greatest, or that they will make everything wonderful and good. But they will make things better, because -- let's face it -- it would take a very extraordinary talent to make things worse than they already are. Remove that one talent from office and give the other team a chance.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Yours gratefully,

Claudia Muir

Two anecdotes about my kids

Back when Alan was a weeny baby, he wasn't very interested in books. I think it was because he was just a weeny baby but Doug fretted about it. He tried to read books to Alan, and then he got frustrated about his son's apparent disinterest in books, his short attention span, his obvious non-reader genes. It was a real problem for a while.

Turns out Doug was wrong.

These days, they wrestle over the amount of good-night books. Alan always wants one more book, just one more. Usually, he gets two or three. Some are long, some are short, some are actually for babies and some are quite beyond his age -- but he enjoys them all. So there really is no need to worry about the love of books anymore.

Today, Alan discovered a new book in his crate (the drawer in the living room where the books used to live gave way to the sheer weight and broke). He came running to me and said "Danke, Mama, oh, danke, Mama!", assuming it was for him. Beaming, with eyes shining, he turned the pages and commented "oh, es ist sooo schön!!" (it's sooo beautiful!). He was very, very happy, and read his new book for quite a while, turning to me every now and then, pointing things out.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that it was just a cookbook that somehow got displaced.

David is starting to talk. Besides "Mama", "Daddy" and "eh!", he's got quite a couple of words. Things like "da" for yes (it's Romanian), "da" for there (that's German) and "da" for Dad (that's English). It's really amazing how well his tri-lingualism already... What, you mean I'm over-interpreting? The loving mother overestimating her son's verbal aptitude? Well, take those:

Kikika. That's kitty cat. Clear as daylight.
Ta-to! That's tractor. It comes with pointing to the tractor in his favorite book.
Koo-kie. Yup, the bad nutrition in our house exposed. Cookie.
Ti-ga. Tiger. That one is easy.

He also can point out the tiger and the ice bear in his animal book.

I tell you, my sons are cute AND clever.

Or maybe I took too much of the meds the doctor prescribed me for my bronchitis and laryngitis. [Cough] Off to bed with me.

Our friend the Minister

A friend of ours was appointed a minister of state yesterday.

His name is Milan Parivodic, and he's a lawyer in Belgrade. We met three and a half years ago when I came to Belgrade for the first time. I was giving technical advice to the Serbian government on a proposed new law for secured transactions, and Milan was the first Serbian lawyer I met to talk about it, and, well, we just hit it off. We spent an afternoon geeking out on the details of secured transactions ("...but then, you may have a third party who takes the collateral...") and we've been friends ever since. The fact that he has an adorable baby girl who's the same age as Alan may have helped.

When we moved away from Belgrade, we lost touch with a lot of acquaintances. But some have stayed with us. We haven't seen Milan face-to-face in months, but we've been in regular e-mail and phone contact.

And then, yesterday: Prime Minister Kostunica has asked him to be the Minister for International Economic Relations. He may (should) be confirmed next week.

It's a small Ministry, but it has a lot of interesting work to do: commercial treaties (which Serbia, not being part of the EU, has a lot of), encouraging foreign investment, pre-EU-accession matters, all sorts of stuff.

Maybe I'll blog a little bit about Serbia's commercial relations in a bit. For now, though, we're just very happy for our friend.

Beet, the unknown root

OK. This is the weirdest thing and I'm not sure I got it down pat. I'm actually quite sure it can't be the way I understand it from the meagre sources I have available. Follow me and then explain to me where my thinking is wrong.

All right. Says Mr. Vasile Puscas, Romanian Minister Delegate and the Chief-Negotiator with the European Union:

Concerning the sugar sector, I must say that the negotiations were extremely tough, taking into account the low production obtained in Romania during the last years (the average production during 1998 – 2002 is 99,000 tons, with 55,000 tons in 2000) and the considering that Romania is net sugar importer country. In these circumstances we succeeded in obtaining a total sugar quota (quota for sugar beat plus processing quota), which together with the quota obtained for isoglucose covers entirely the domestic consumption in Romania. This quota is about four times as much as the quota presented by the mass media as being the Commission proposal. We have chosen this strategy in order to support the sugar industry. I must underline the fact that we obtained the best results in comparison with all the other sugar importer countries that acceded to the European Union in May 2004.
Via The Periscope

OK. This is what I understand:

1. Romania is a sugar importer.
2. Romania is allowed to export an amount of sugar to the EU that equals its sugar consumption.

Confusing? Yeah, well. Then read this:

European Union regulation number 2007/00 from September 18, 2000, and amendment RC 2563/00 from November 20, 2000 opened the market of the European Union to the import of the sugar produced in Yugoslavia and other countries of the Western Balkans without any restrictive measures or customs burden. Price of the protected sugar on the European market amounts to 650 EUR/ton, and the average price in the world are below 300 EUR/ ton. The average sales price of our sugar exported to the EU market approximated to 600 EUR/ton. In order to enable the import of our sugar the EU has simultaneously reduced the production sugar share for their sugar producers. One of the main objections to the EU regarding its market opening to the import from the countries of the Western Balkans is that these countries have shortage of sugar, which they mostly import themselves; therefore the import from these countries is in fact a fabrication.
Yugoslavian Government Anti-Corruption site

See, with the prices as they are, my first thought was -- why not export all your sugar to the EU for 600 EUR/ton, then supply for your own needs on the world market for a less than half of the price? Probably because its forbidden in the contract. (See below.)

The second thought was - why is the EU doing this? They are actively throwing away my tax money! They are cutting subsidies in the EU and redirecting them to non-EU members. Very humane, furthering poor countries and all that, but economically utterly stupid. Or is there a twist I'm missing?

I mean, they could just buy sugar on the world market for lower prices (OK, with the demand and whatnot, the prices would go up but not by 100%). They'd save 350 EUR/ton on the EU product and 300 EUR/ton on the Balkan import.

Anyhow, the ultimate goal is for those countries to up their sugar production, thus being self-supplying plus able to export sugar. Sugar beet is a highly intensive crop. You have to pump fertilizer in like mad. Not good for the soil at all. Hm.

Also, if Romania joins the union, and the EU succeeds in cutting the protected price, then Romania would end up getting a lot less for all that sugar they are now producing. Is anybody taking that into account?

It all seems rather pointless to me. But then, I'm suffering from post-pregnancy-mother-of-toddlers-brain which is a good excuse for almost anything, not the least being European economic policy. So if someone can explain this mystery to me, I'd be grateful.

BTW, the fact that the quote above is from the Anti-Corruption web site of Serbia? Well, it turns out that Serbia exported imported sugar branded as Serbian sugar.

The real surprise in my eyes is that everybody seemed so surprised by this.

Beet! Give me a beet!

It's hard to make a sugar beet look sexy. What do you think, did the PR people of this campaign succeed?

Ah. You're wondering what this is all about - and what it has to do with Romania. Good questions, both of them. The first one I'm going to answer today. If there is any interest at all, then I'll answer the second question tomorrow.

Personally, I encountered this particular sugar beet for the first time about three hours ago, as I turned a page in my beloved Zeit magazine and saw a one-page ad by the German sugar beet industry. Until then, I had been blissfully unaware that the EU plans to recklessly ruin the livelihood of thousands of German (and other EU) sugar beet farmers. In order to understand the sheer magnitude of this problem, you have to know that large areas of Germany look like this:

Sugar beets are an object of pride to Germans, you have to understand. Until the 1800s, sugar was made only from sugar cane. As this is a tropical plant and even the most favorably minded person would not call the German climate a tropical one, this meant that Germany had to rely entirely on imported sugar cane. However, in 1747, a German chemist by the name of Andreas Sigismund Marggraf discovered that beet juice contains a comparably high percentage of sugar. He developed a method of extraction which, unfortunately, wasn't very economical. Then, in 1801, another German chemist, Franz Carl Achard, refined the process and thus laid the foundations for mechanical extraction. In the same year, the first sugar beet factory was opened in Silesia. (Not to forget that the sugar cube is also a German invention. Knowing all this, you cannot but call the Germans sweet guys, eh?)

Anyhow, the Germans having a sweet tooth, sugar from sugar beets took off like rocket. It helped that Napoleon sealed off the European harbors in 1806 and sugar cane was not to be had anymore. These days, 55% of the world sugar production comes from beets.

Back in the good old days, namely in 1968, the then EEC passed a decree that guaranteed fixed prices for sugar beets to European farmers -- to protect them from price swings and cheap imports. (Sugar from outside the EU is up to 50% cheaper.)

WTO called this sugar decree "medieval", the German Wise Economic Men (a group of, well, wise economic men) criticized it, as did the OECD. To no avail -- since this subsidy is not tied directly to the budget of the EU, there has been little incentive to change or simply abolish this law. It's all coming out of the consumer's pockets -- an estimated 6.3 billion Euros in additional costs for the expensive sugar per year.

The decree has been extended numerous times, and in its current life will run until 2006. The excitement stems from the fact that the EU is thinking of not extending the decree anymore -- or rather, changing it considerably. In essence, the fixed price is to be cut by one third and the European production quota is to be cut by 16%. (This move may have to do with law suits that some countries threatened to file.)

In plain words, it means that the good times for sugar beet producers will be over. The "license to print money", as one German politician put it, is about to be revoked. Yeah, I'd be pissed too.

Mind you, I'm all in favor for opening markets. I don't like subsidies (as a former, reformed economist I actively despise them). Susidies always create problems in the long run.

That's why my first reaction was, so what? Chocolate will get cheaper and the farmers will lay their fields fallow, cashing in EU subsidies for that. You have to understand that sugar beets are EVERYWHERE in Germany. So the argument that cutting down on sugar beet production would result in a monoculture? I'm not biting.

I'm willing to be proven wrong, though. Show me that the sugar beet is important for the German eco system and I might give the guys from "Existenzfrage Zucker" (existential topic sugar) another look. It has to be a good argument though -- I'm reacting slightly allergic to the claim that the fight for keeping the sugar decree is, "well worth fighting for" and a matter of national pride.

Tomorrow: What the sugar beet decree and its demise mean to Romania.

Kosovo again

Just read this interesting piece by William Montgomery, former US Ambassador to Serbia. Montgomery was in and out of Belgrade for over a decade, speaks Serbian, and has done his homework. I agree with pretty much everything he says here.

Key grafs:

The Kosovo experience should be a case study for the limits -- and risks --of international intervention. The United States and its Western allies tried virtually everything to encourage Milosevic to treat the Kosovar Albanians humanely... [But it] was an effort doomed to failure, as the combination of Milosevic's desire to remain in power, historical enmity among the ethnic groups, growing national awareness on the part of the Albanian population, and the conflicting views of Kosovo itself of the Serbs and the Kosovar Albanians were too much to overcome...

Basically, we solved one problem at great cost (Serbian government massive human rights violations in its treatment of its ethnic Albanian minority) but we created others that thus far have defied solution. What to do about Kosovo? How does it fit into modern Europe? How does it interact with Serbia? How to dissuade the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, southern Serbia, and Macedonia from the use of violence? How to proceed in Kosovo in a way that does not re-radicalize Serbia? How to moderate the still raw forces of nationalism in Serbia and among Serbs, which the bombing campaign fuelled?

So far, pretty standard stuff -- some handwringing, some obvious hard questions. Now here's where it gets interesting:

The job has been made much, much more difficult because of the international community's unwillingness or inability to come to terms with what future it expects for Kosovo and to act decisively to bring that about. Most speeches and policy statements emphasize the importance of a multi-ethnic society. Certainly we make considerable efforts to portray Kosovo as moving towards that ideal end. But the reality is that the degree of hatred, fear, and suspicion among the various ethnic groups remains at or near the levels seen immediately after the cessation of bombing in 1999. For most of the past five years, the international community has failed to recognize that fact and even in the face of incidents to the contrary, continued to portray Kosovo as making great strides toward multi-ethnicity. Even after the violence of this March, a depressingly large number of the UNMIK personnel (and influential government and non-government people in key capitals) do not understand the depth of the problem.

This isn't simply a question of naiveté. There has also been an underlying double standard in Kosovo on the part of the international community, based on the very real persecution of the Kosovar Albanians under Milosevic and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians that took place at and around the initial NATO bombing. The overwhelming feeling of the vast majority of international personnel that flooded into Kosovo in June 1999 was rather black and white with the Serbs as the oppressors and the Kosovar Albanians as the oppressed.

What the international community has been fundamentally unable to fully comprehend and accept is that the situation is now turned on its head with the oppressors becoming the oppressed and vice-versa. [emphasis added]...

I agree with this. I strongly agree with this. As we saw last March, Kosovo is still producing eruptions of violence. Only this time, they're (mostly) directed against the Serbs.

Montgomery keys in on three related problems here. One, the tables have turned in Kosovo. The former victims are now the victimizers. This is a plain fact. Unfortunately, it seems to be very hard for people to adjust their thinking; either the Serbs are Bad and the Albanians are Good, or vice versa.

Therefore, second problem, nobody in authority is willing to acknowledge the reality on the ground. -- Actually, I do differ a bit from Montgomery on this point. I do think that some of the UNMIK and NATO authorities have publicly acknowledged the problem. (Some, not all.) But even those who acknowledge them aren't willing to take the steps to deal with them .

So, third problem, deep-rooted Polyannaism on the part of UNMIK. Everything's just fine here, they'll learn to live together any day now.

This leads to some problems, which Montgomery lays out for us:

[S]ome (perhaps most) of the civilian international personnel in Kosovo even today still have major problems with this concept. And it has led to a lack of sympathy to the very real plight of the Serbian minority even today and a corresponding lack of toughness in response to provocations by the Albanian majority. This has limited the efforts of the international community to effect return of Serb refugees in the face of Albanian intransigence...

The International Community has also accepted and funded the Kosovo Protection Corps, which is the successor to the KLA, is led by General Ceku, the head of the former KLA, is staffed by former KLA members who rather routinely are found responsible for acts of violence against the Serb or Macedonian communities, and whose head (Ceku) routinely declares that he is the head of the Kosovo Army. While it should seem rather obvious that the Kosovo Serbs could never be comfortable with such an organization and that it would be a major impediment to chances of a true multi-ethnic society, it still exists.

Right. Would you want to live down the street from some heavily armed ex-KLA guys? Me, neither.

So what to do about Kosovo now? On the one hand, if the Kosovo Serbs do not come to feel that their religion, culture, language, and way of life are secure, they will never accept rule by an Albanian majority. They will leave, as they left Sarajevo in 1996. There is no question that this exodus will be fuel for the nationalists in Serbia and will also force even moderate politicians in Belgrade to take radical stances in order to survive politically...

On the other hand, Kosovar Albanians will accept nothing less than full independence in current borders. A significant percentage are determined to drive all Serbs from Kosovo, reasoning that as long as any remain, the possibility of Belgrade re-imposing itself over them remains.

Right again. In 1999, Milosevic drove hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians out of their homes and into refugee camps. So pretty much everyone over the age of twelve has bleeding memories of oppression, terror, and flight.

Also, the idea of independence seems to have just fascinated the Kosovar Albanians. They don't believe in autonomy -- they don't see how it's going to work, and they don't see why they should settle for it.

Meanwhile, the Kosovar Serbs have their own, more recent memories of terror. And the fragile coalition government in Belgrade doesn't dare make any major concessions.

Montgomery does at least have an idea:

My solution is pretty simple. Give every city and town in Kosovo the same degree of autonomy and responsibility enjoyed by any single town or city in the United States. I grew up in a town of 10,000 people. We had our own school system, police force, local government, hospital system, and taxing authority. There were clear guidelines for which things were the responsibility of the local government, which belonged to our State governments, and which were the purview of the federal government. If this were done - NOW - and with the full authority and power of the international community to make it stick and be effective -- it would be far, far easier to deal with the broader questions of the future of Kosovo later on.

But the trick is to persuade, force, cajole the Kosovar Albanians to accept this, as the radicals among them will be bitterly opposed -- wanting all authority to be centralized under majority Albanian control. It will also be critical to get the Serbs to accept this concept, because while they may well embrace it totally in Kosovo, they have proved to be very reluctant to de-centralize in Serbia proper despite recurring promises to do so.

Oh, boy, is that ever true. Belgrade is very reluctant to cede any power to the provinces.

I'm not sure why, but the gruesome experience of Yugoslavia might have something to do with it. When Belgrade ceded power to Zagreb and Ljubljana in the 1970s, it greased the skids for the breakup of the country a decade or two later. Decentralization and local autonomy are associated with instability and civil war, I guess.

But, geez, most of Kosovo is already out of Belgrade's control. So we're really only talking about a small region here. I don't know if Montgomery's idea would work or not, but it doesn't seem obviously wrong and stupid; and, really, somebody's got to think outside the box here.

Finally, this:

If this solution or a similar one is not instituted well in advance of any decision on final status, my prediction is that any "final" solution will not be final at all, but we will just move into the next stage of the Kosovo tragedy.

I think any discussion of Kosovo is required to end with a scare. Unfortunately.

The Tomb of Dracula

We visited Dracula's tomb last weekend.

(You know, it gives me a quiet but real pleasure to be able to write that.)

We've been living in Romania for well over a year and we haven't once blogged about its most famous son. And I know y'all have been waiting for it. So: a few words about Vlad Dracula.

Dracula -- the real, historical Dracula -- was, as everybody knows, a king named Vlad who lived about 500 years ago. This was back in the days when not-yet-Romania was a collection of petty kingdoms, under constant threat from the Hungarians on one side and the Turks on the other. The politics got mind-bogglingly complicated. Vlad ended up being king no less than three separate times. (His younger brother, who became his enemy, also got to be king for a while.) He also spent years in Istanbul with the Turks (as a hostage) and more years with the Hungarians (as a prisoner, then as a guest). It's a long story.

But here's the part that everyone remembers: Dracula was one hard bastard. Even in a time and place when rulers were often callous and cruel, Dracula was noted for an excess of fiendish malevolence. He was commonly known as Vlad Tepes (pron. tsep-esh), Vlad the Impaler, and he's supposed to have killed between 20,000 and 50,000 people by this means.

A couple of sample anecdotes, not for the squeamish:

"[Dracula] invited 500 boyars [noblemen] to a banquet and asked them how many princes had ruled in their lifetimes. They said they had lived through many reigns. Shouting that this was their fault because of their plotting, Dracula had them all arrested on the spot. The older ones were impaled; the others were marched 50 miles to Poenari where they were forced to build a mountaintop fortress. They worked a long time; when their clothes fell off, they worked naked. Most of them died, of course. And of course Dracula seized the boyars' property and passed it out to his supporters. In that way he created a new nobility, loyal to himself."

"A visiting merchant once left his money outside all night, thinking that it would be safe because of Dracula's strict policies. To his surprise, some of his coins were stolen. He complained to Dracula, who promptly issued a proclamation that the money must be returned or the city would be destroyed. That night Dracula secretly had the missing money, plus one extra coin, returned to the merchant. The next morning the merchant counted the money and found it had been returned. He told Dracula about this, and mentioned the extra coin. Dracula replied that the thief had been caught and would be impaled. And if the merchant hadn't mentioned the extra coin, he added, he would have been impaled, too."

A word or two on impalement. This method of execution seems to have been introduced into the region by the Turks, but it got picked up and passed around. It was brutal in its simplicity: two or three strong men held you down, while another one pounded a large stake through you lengthwise. They then lifted you up on the stake, popped it into a hole in the ground, and left you to die -- which could take hours or, if you were very unlucky, more than a day.

As I said, a Turkish innovation; but Vlad picked it up and ran with it. He seems to have actively enjoyed impaling people, sometimes doing it more or less on a whim:

"Dracula once noticed a man working in the fields while wearing a too-short caftan. The prince stopped and asked the man whether or not he had a wife. When the man answered in the affirmative Dracula had the woman brought before him and asked her how she spent her days. The poor, frightened woman stated that she spent her days washing, baking and sewing. The prince pointed out her husband's short caftan as evidence of her laziness and dishonesty and ordered her impaled despite her husband's protestations that he was well satisfied with his wife. Dracula then ordered another woman to marry the peasant but admonished her to work hard or she would suffer her predecessor's fate."

"Dracula... issued an invitation to all the poor and sick in Wallachia to come to Tirgoviste for a great feast, claiming that no one should go hungry in his land. As the poor and crippled arrived in the city they were ushered into a great hall where a fabulous feast was prepared fore them. The prince's guests ate and drank late into the night, when Dracula himself made an appearance. "What else do you desire? Do you want to be without cares, lacking nothing in this world?", asked the prince. When they responded positively, Dracula ordered the hall boarded up and set on fire. None escaped the flames -- and that was the end of their problems, as he had promised. "I did this so that no one will be poor in my realm," he said."

"On St. Bartholomew's Day in 1459 Dracula caused thirty thousand of the merchants and nobles of the Transylvanian city of Brasov to be impaled. In order that he might better enjoy the results of his orders, the prince commanded that his table be set up and that his boyars join him for a feast amongst the forest of impaled corpses. While dining, Dracula noticed that one of his boyars was holding his nose in an effort to alleviate the terrible smell of clotting blood and emptied bowels. Dracula then ordered the sensitive nobleman impaled on a stake higher than all the rest so that he might be above the stench."

Well, I did say they weren't for the squeamish.

Dracula eventually died and was, probably, buried at a monastery at Snagov. There's some controversy about this, mind. The burial area was excavated in 1931, and they did find a body -- a skeleton clad in silk, wrapped in burial cloths embroidered with gold, and buried with a crown and a goldern ring.

But... the skeleton was intact, whereas the historical chronicles state pretty clearly that Dracula was decapitated and his head sent to Istanbul for the viewing pleasure of the Sultan. To make matters weirder, the skeleton (and its accompanying treasures) seem to have gone missing during the chaos of the Second World War and the subsequent Communist takeover. They may have departed Romania in 1940, along with the wretched King Carol II, when he abdicated -- Carol made off with literally a train load of interesting stuff, and not all of it ever came back. And grabbing the crown and the gold while dumping out the old bones seems like the sort of thing Carol would do. But then again, maybe not. Nobody knows.

But Dracula probably was buried at Snagov at some point, and -- who knows? He might still be there -- tucked away quietly under some obscure corner, the gold-wrapped skeleton an elaborate red herring to fool would-be grave robbers.

Anyhow: we visited Snagov two weekends ago. To reach the monastery, you have to pay rather a lot of money (700,000 lei, or about $21) to a guy with a rowboat. He then rows you out to the monastery, which is on an island in the middle of the lake.

(The lack itself is a popular weekend getaway from Bucharest -- there are hotels and villas and whatnot all around it. The largest of the villas used to belong to Ceausescu, though I don't know if he built it or not. It's still there. It's quite large.)

We were the only visitors to the island. It's a small place, a few hectares. The monastery itself is a single rather small building, though it looks like there were once larger structures. The island is mixed trees and grass, and very green. The monks have planted a lot of flowers.

Alan ran off after a cow, and David toddled after him. The cow turned its head and mooed. Alan stopped dead in his tracks. David fell on his bottom and burst into tears. A burly monk with an enormous beard came over and smiled at us; David clung to my leg while Alan wandered off after some ducks, keeping a thoughtful eye on the cow.

There's a church, a very nice one. It dates back to the 15th century, in pieces, and is believed to have been built by Dracula himself. It was locked, but a young monk came along and let us in.

Inside the church was cool and dark. There were signs of renovation work everywhere, ladders and scaffolding and whatnot, but nobody was working. The walls were covered with paintings of saints and angels -- armed angels, brandishing spears and swords.

Up by the altar was a picture of Vlad and a single candle. Around the back was... well, I'm sure it's not right to call it a shrine. But that's what it looked like. A little one. Another picture of Vlad, set up like an icon, and some dried flowers in a vase.

We walked around for a while, admiring the paintings (which were really very beautiful) and occasionally lunging after the boys whenever they were about to pull something down on themselves. And then we gave the young monk some money, and stepped back outside into the green light of the afternoon, where the cow chewed its cud and bees droned cheerfully among the flowers, and got back in the little rowboat and went home.

And that was our visit to Dracula's tomb.

This is how it was

Dragos from @rgumente asks:

so how was it? hope you had the chance of a better weather than the one from Bucharest today :)

Indeed, the weather was good. It didn't start to rain until we were already on our way back, past Sinaia. And it was just lovely. The area east of Braşov which was once (still, really) inhabited by Hungarians is potato country, so both Doug (Irish) and I (German) felt quite at home.

I'm quite busy at the moment but here are some pictures to give you an impression. If you find yourself in the region, we can only recommend Mikes Castle and the Swiss Hunting Lodge. I had the best food ever in Romania, and we came back happy and relaxed. More to follow.

The Swiss Hunting Lodge, now a B&B

Dinner time!

As happy as a boy with a stick

The fortified church in Hărman

Posted by claudia at 11:06 PM | Comments (0)

Weekend trip

We're going away for the weekend, to a place named Zabola, or rather, in Romanian, Zăbala. It's northeast of Braşov and we are staying at the hunting lodge. There are fortified churches nearby and lots of autumny greens and golds and reds. We've packed the kid carrier and the hiking boots and are hoping for lots of time outside in the fresh air. See you all on Monday!

I'm amused

Very amusing.

All the Queen's men

Mommy guilt

Over at 11D, Laura is having a very interesting conference this week about Moms, Dads, kids and work (and life in general). Go check it out, it's really a great concept and very interesting, and maybe you can even add your 2 cents.

I haven't, so far, although not for the lack of trying. I have started a comment to almost every topic. I then let it sit before posting, re-read and noticed I was being really defensive, then trashed it. (Or I showed it to Doug and he said, why are you so defensive?) This happened some five or six times before I gave up and no I'm just reading the damn thing.

Is that bizarre, or what?

Maybe it's because I'm not a working mom, but I also don't really qualify as a SAHM. I have a fulltime nanny, after all. Not only do I not add to our income or do something productive for the feminist movement, I'm also not a dedicated mother who spends hours teaching her two-year-old the ABC's. Needless to say that he can't tell an A from an X. And he insists that blue is really green. Oh, and we almost never have desserts. You'd think with all the time I have on my hands, we'd have a fancy dessert every night.

Now I could become all defensive again and tell you about my days, how full of errands they are and how long it takes to pay the internet bill... but the truth is, although I do a lot and drive a car pool three days a week, although I run around every day for hours and cook a dinner and a lunch, although I have a magnetic board in the kitchen with all the tasks I need to do this week, I do have enough time most of the days to kick back and goof around online, or rest a bit, or have a leisurely cup of coffee over the newspaper -- or even do all three.

So, it seems I'm a bad mother. But here's the strange thing: my kids really like me. Huh. Granted, it's probably not the best indicator there is, scientifically speaking the poll is heavily skewed, but as long as my kids are happy, I must be doing something right. So why all this guilt?

Truth to tell, I don't know. Maybe it's because of conversations like this one, which I had with an acquaintance back in November 2003:

-- So, how do you like life in Romania?
-- Oh, we like it just fine.
-- Are you working?
-- No, I don't have a work permit, I'm not allowed to work. [And why this particular fact boggles Americans so much, what with their green cards, completely eludes me.]
-- Oh? But didn't you say you have a nanny?
-- Yes, we do.
-- And didn't Doug mention you have a maid, too?
-- Yes.
-- So what do you do all day long?

(Mind you, this was in the house of my sister-in-law, who has four kids, worked until kid no. 3, is now a SAHM who always has kids over for playdates, has no help and a clean house. No desserts every night, though. Talk about a guilt-inducing evironment.)

I'm always on the verge of firing my maid because she enrages me and I think I could really do all the housework myself. And then I don't because I know she needs the money badly. So I just continue feeling vaguely guilty. I'm sure this all will come back to haunt me when we eventually move back to the States. I will not remember how to iron a shirt or clean the toilet. I will get a low-paid job because I never finished my degree and have no work experience to impress McDonald's with. My kids will hate me because all the other mothers are doing cool things. (I'm very Catholic in this respect -- a lazy, comfortable life will be punished!) I guess I will have to deal with that when it comes to it.

So what do I answer when people ask me what I do all day? Heh, I could simply say "I'm feeling guilty." I suppose it would stop some people in their tracks. Nobody is going to be impressed when I tell them I make the world's best brownies.

This morning, I asked Alan, "Are you having a nice childhood?" and he answered, "yes". Of course, he would have also answered in the affirmative had I asked him whether he likes dog poop, but it did make me feel better.

For about five seconds.

I shouldn't, I have other things to do

This boggled even my mind, non-American that I am, when I first heard Cheney say that he had never met Edwards personally before the debate yesterday. It's doing nothing to increase my sympathies towards him (disclaimer: I have none.)

Oh, and: A funny thing, via the Washington Monthly. Cracked me up.

More about the Logan

A bit more about the Logan, the new built-in-Romania car that Renault hopes will be the developing world's Model T.

First, here's a picture:

Not too bad looking. Although: I recently chatted with a Romanian acquaintance who had bought a Solenza. (The Solenza was the model immediately preceding the Logan. It was only made for a year or two.) "It looked great in the show room," he said, "and I thought, finally I'm going to buy a car that doesn't let the rain in."

And?

"It let the rain in."

So, looks may not be everything. Still, the Logan is at least an interesting car. Fun facts:

-- It is the most labor-intensive car being produced on a large scale anywhere. Wages in Romania are very low -- less than a tenth of French wages. So, for a lot of the assembly work, it's cheaper to use a lot of workers than to invest in industrial robots or whatever. So the Logan is, by modern standards, almost a hand-made car.

-- Despite that, the Dacia factory in Pitesti shed more than half of its workers between 1996 and 2003, slimming down from more than 15,000 to around 6,700. Some of the workers found jobs elsewhere, but many did not. Apparently Renault's relationship with the locals remains... complex.

-- Much of the Logan is made elsewhere, shipped to Romania, and assembled at the Pitesti plant. However, Renault would like to have more components assembled in Romania... if quality can be assured, which apparently is still an open question. The Romanian government is hoping that eventually there will be a constellation of auto parts suppliers all around Pitesti. Exactly this has happened in the last few years in Slovakia and northern Hungary; this region, nobody's candidate for an economic boom ten years ago, has become a buzzing hive of manufacturing activity. On the other hand, they have four or five large factories, while Pitesti only has one. So the secondary manufacturing picture is still murky at this point.

-- The Pitesti factory is the first one to produce the Logan, but it won't be the last. Renault wants to build factories in Russia, Columbia, and Iran. It's all part of the "western car for an eastern price" strategy; they want to sell cheap, reliable Logans all over the developing and post-Communist world. But for the next couple of years, at least, all the planet's Logans will come from Pitesti.

-- Renault recently announced that it will also sell Logans in developed countries. This seems a bit odd to me, since the whole point of the exercise was to produce a rugged good cheap car for the emerging middle classes of the east. But maybe Renault knows something I don't.

-- Three years ago, Romania passed a law stating that no car older than eight years could be imported into the country. Officially, this was because older cars were dirtier, less fuel-efficient, and less safe, and also Romania wanted to move quickly towards European standards on things like fuel emissions. I have heard a theory that the government did this as part of a deal with Renault to create a captive market for the late-model Dacias -- the SupeRNova, the Solenza, and especially the Logan. After all, very few Romanians can afford new European or American cars; almost everyone is buying either secondhand imported cars, or Dacias. On the other hand, I've also had a Romanian tell me that this is a dusty pile of nonsense, and that the law was just another stupid, over-broad, poorly thought out attempt to be "European". [shrug] We don't know.

-- Nobody can tell me where the name "Logan" comes from. I'm sure there must be a good reason. (I do notice that it's a name whose pronunciation will be pretty much the same in Bucharest, Moscow, Bogota and Delhi.)

If any of our Romanian friends have driven a Logan, or have anything to tell us about it, we'd be very interested to hear.

The beast is rearing its ugly head

"Rich countries must provide practical support to developing country governments that demonstrate the political will to curb corruption. In addition, those countries starting with a high degree of corruption should not be penalised, since they are in the most urgent need of support," said Peter Eigen, Chairman of Transparency International (TI), speaking today on the launch of the TI Corruption Perceptions Index 2003 (CPI).
Transparency International

On the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, Romania scores 2.8 points on a scale from 1 to 10 (worst to best), leaving it in 84th place behind such countries as Colombia, Ghana and Bulgaria (3.9/55). That's not so great but we all knew that.

I haven't had much experience with this dark side of Romanian culture, mainly because I'm not venturing much into bureaucracy and politics. This morning, however, we received a letter from Alan's school. And suddenly the whole issue was brought uncomfortably close to home.

The school is small, and there are a lot more applications than there are places for children. So there are waiting lists for most classes. We were lucky -- Alan got in after just a short wait -- but it's not unusual for children to be on the list for six months or even longer before a place opens up. Because of this, the school has a strict first come-first served policy; if you want your child to go there, you apply, pay a fee, and wait your turn.

So, the letter. This morning all the parents who dropped off their children got a letter from the director. Key paragraphs:

We had an unscheduled (3 hour) visit on Monday from the Sanitary Police who are asking for wide ranging changes regarding the lunch arrangements. They also informed us that we would be liable to 20 million lei [$600] fines and possible closure. However, it was suggested that if we admitted 2 children (one on the waiting list and one not) then these problems would go away.

Today, I was also approached via an intermediary of the President of the [deletia] who was intervening on behalf of another parent who has a child on the waiting list.

The letter went on to say that the school had decided not to move the children up the list.

This is upsetting and appalling. I do not want the school closed but I am absolutely supporting the decision of the Head of School and the Board of Administrators not to give in. I so do not want a child of such a person in my son's class. It actually makes me want to punch someone. (Someone who deserves it, of course, so don't worry about Doug or the kids!) I guess it's a good thing that we have some kids from Diplomats and that other parents are high-ranking business people. Maybe there is some counter-pressure that can be applied. Personally, we're thinking of spilling the story to a journalist we know.

Ironically, Transparency International has just a month ago or so launched a big campaign called "Nu Da Şpagă!" (Don't bribe!). They have a web site, and a very cool TV spot which they air on national TV and on National Geopgraphic. (It a big file, so not for dial-ups!) Is it going to help? I don't know. Webster's Online Dictionary states that " the campaign seeks to solve a problem which has remained since Communist times in Romania but which has recently improved."

I have to say that the bribery problem is not a Communist product. It existed before Communism, and, obviously, has outlasted it. Suggestive that it might not be so easy to fix, eh?

I don't know what the answer is. But in this case, we support the school, and we hope (a little nervously) that their brave stand will not be punished.

Economic growth, watch out for that tree!

This one is for the Three-Toed Sloth, who kindly linked to some of my past entries.

So I was paging through Dani Rodrik's recent anthology on conundrums of economic growth, In Search of Prosperity, when I got to the chapter on the Philippines. The Philippines is the sort of place that makes growth economists' heads hurt. It's a nation of eighty million avid consumers steeped in American institutions for fifty years, and American popular culture for fifty more. English is the lingua franca to such an extent that Scrabble is incredibly popular there, that and basketball. I mean, they show the high school games on the sports channel.

And the general level of education is very high; the Philippines may export housemaids to the Persian Gulf, but it exports computer technicians and medical personnel to the United States, where they're the highest-earning immigrant group here. You can't throw a stone in Manila without hitting a diploma mill.

But it's been economically stagnant for decades.

In Rodrik's anthology, Lant Pritchett has a paper which compares the Philippines versus Vietnam, or in his words, "a Socialist Star and a Democratic Dud", the Philippines being the Democratic Dud. Elsewhere in his paper, it's "Tarzan of the Jungle" versus "George of the Jungle" growth. There is something about the Philippines that brings out bad pop culture wordplay in people, including Filipinos themselves. Come take comparative advantage of us.

Pritchett's conjecture is simple:

[A]lthough in some ways 'institutions' may have improved under democracy, 'institutional uncertainty' has increased. This increase in institutional uncertainty -- the reliability with which economic actors can anticipate the rules of the game (no matter how good or bad those rules might be) -- may account for a stagnation in the level of supportable output that accounts for the Philippines' growth dynamics.

But that's not the interesting part of the paper.

Pritchett does something very unusual in his paper. He analyzes economic transitions -- say, from low growth to high growth -- in the same way a spectroscopist analyzes atomic transitions. The analogy is a little complicated, so bear with me.

In emission spectroscopy, light is given off when an electron in an excited atom moves from a higher energy state to a lower energy state. The frequency of the light is proportional to the energy difference, so if you measure one, you can determine the other. In days of old, this was done by measuring a fine ruler against the light's projected spectrum; hence the name, spectroscopy.

While there are an infinite number of energy states in an atom, they're like rungs on a compressed ladder, with the uppermost levels kind of smearing into each other, but the lower ones remaining discrete. This means that not all frequencies of light are going to be emitted when an atom is excited, say in a vacuum tube, which is why neon lights are red, and not white, which would be a mix of many different frequencies.

From this thumbnail description, you might think an electron could hop from any rung to any other. But it turns out even in the simplest atom, some hops -- some transitions -- are very very unlikely, or 'forbidden', for reasons based on the rules of quantum mechanics. These can be seen (or not seen, as the case may be) via spectroscopy.

Upshot: by analyzing an atomic spectrum, one can determine an atom's internal quantum structure.

So far so good. Pritchett is attempting to come up with a generalized model of growth, the world economy's equivalent of its quantum structure, by analyzing the pattern of its economic transitions. Yearbooks are his spectroscope.

He comes up with six "growth states", analogous to energy levels in an atom: technological leadership with steady growth; subsistence economies with zero growth, or the poverty trap; nonconvergent moderate growth; rapid growth; growth implosion; and non-poverty zero growth, or stagnation.

From these, he constructs a six-by-six grid, or in the jargon, a transition matrix. One side of the grid is the before axis, the other is the after axis. It's like a logic puzzle, or a dice chart.

After analyzing the historical data on the grid, it turns out that some economic transitions just plain don't happen. In the jargon, they're forbidden. Growing technological leaders don't implode, moderate growth doesn't ever turn into technological leadership. Also, the grid is not symmetrical. Some transitions don't occur in reverse.

Pritchett assigns numbers to this grid to come up with a five-by-five probability matrix -- or actually, a four-by-four one, and an assumption that once you are a growing technological leader, you will remain so. The four remaining categories are stagnation, implosion, plateau, and boom (he merges the stagnant and the subsistence poverty trap categories together). After a lot of implied tweaking, he came up with a set of results that fit the world situation from 1870 to 1995. I'd be amiss if I didn't provide them to you.

In Pritchett's model, if you start off as a country in economic stagnation, you have an 88.5% chance of remaining stagnant the next year, a 10% chance to implode even further, a 1.05% chance to hit a plateau of moderate growth, and a 0.45% chance to boom.

If you are a country that is imploding, there is a 40% chance that you will recover to stagnation, and a 60% chance that you will implode even further.

If you are a country experiencing a moderate plateau of growth, you have but a 10% chance of stagnating in the next year, an 80% chance of maintaining your plateau, and a 10% chance of an economic boom.

And finally, if you are a country in a boom, you have a 10% chance of dropping down to a moderate plateau, and a 90% chance of keeping that boom going another year.

I leave the long-term behavior of this probability matrix as an exercise for the reader.

What does this say about the underlying factors of growth? Well, Pritchett isn't sure:

After this low growth persists for an extended period, then it is not clear how one escapes this "non-poverty trap, low or zero growth" state into a rapid (or at least moderate) growth. If the problem is systemic uncertainty -- that is, uncertainty about economic prospects and performance under the system of institutions as operating -- it is not clear that individual, piecemeal economic reforms, even cumulated, can shift the growth state. [...] I have attempted to make some progress, not in producing such a model, a task for another day, but in producing what such a model will produce.

But it sounds like an interesting start.