On Not Getting Married, or, Nobody Better Tell Me What to Do

The latest sign of the ongoing disintegration of society is the viral spread of this painting, The Hesitant Fiancée by Auguste Toulmouche. Back in 1866 this represented, one assumes, the displeasure of a young woman at a marriage being pressed on her by her wealthy family.

Now that arranged marriage has disappeared from the lives of most of us, including all the people reposting this painting, it represents – what?

At the NY Times, Callie Holterman summarizes some of the ways this meme has been used:

Others on the app have used the painting as a punchline in response to phrases like “You’re overreacting” and “You really should smile more.” 

One commentator

thinks the painting has taken off online because so many women respond to the frustration on the bride’s face in a situation in which she is expected to appear grateful. The painting shows that women have been bristling at such societal expectations for centuries, she said.

And:

Joan Hawk, an owner of Bedford Fine Art gallery in Bedford, Pa., which has sold some of Toulmouche’s work, wondered whether the painting’s resurgence had to do with young women’s changing attitudes toward marriage. The light in the painting highlights the bride’s face, which, Ms. Hawk said, communicates something along the lines of: “Ugh, do I really have to go through with this?”

I see something deeper. To me, this is a symbol of the unending struggle between self-affirmation and social reality, between freedom and belonging. 

All the liberatory crusades of the past 250 years have sought to free us from this basic problem. We demanded the right to choose our spouses, our careers, our living arrangements, our sexualities, our genders, our beliefs; we insisted on pursuing our passions and chasing our dreams. And yet here we are, still frustrated with other people and their expectations. Somehow, despite our extraordinary freedom, we still feel confined, still feel that we are always lashing out at limits and barriers and people trying to control us. And we always will, because that is the price of living with other human beings.

The only way out is through loneliness, and I think it tells us something important about our world that millions have essentially chosen that path.

To the extent that posting The Hesitant Fiancée is just a good-natured way to share a bit of grumbling about our nagging relatives or annoying bosses, that is healthy. Everybody has these feelings. But to the extent that represents a belief that all demands on us are illegitimate, that is precisely our problem.

I was primed to react this way to a silly little story about TikTok memes by another Times piece. This was Anna Louie Sussman's reaction to all the talk about how people should get married, which includes this gem:

Harping on people to marry from high up in the ivory tower fails to engage with the reality on the ground that heterosexual women from many walks of life confront: that is, the state of men today.

If you're thinking I'm going to fault her for saying that and claim it shows there's something wrong with women, well, no. She's probably right. She's right because, I would say, men are even more susceptible than women to the call of freedom, and this manifests in everything from a refusal to tell your partner where you're going to criminality. Many, many American men bristle at any sort of restriction on what they can do and say. This turns some of them into Trump supporters and a few into meth dealers, but it makes it hard for many of them to maintain relationships.

We are just not, as a society, in a mood for compromise. It shows in our politics. It shows in the decline of every kind of communal organization. And it shows in the difficult many people have finding love and settling into marriage.

Aging Populations and Rising Wages

Piece in the NY Times today about Vermont, which has the oldest population in the US, from which I extract these:

At Lake Champlain Chocolates, the owners take shifts stacking boxes in the warehouse. At Burlington Bagel Bakery, a sign in the window advertises wages starting at $25 an hour. Central Vermont Medical Center is training administrative employees to become nurses. Cabot Creamery is bringing workers from out of state to package its signature blocks of Cheddar cheese. . . .

Vermont’s unemployment rate was 1.9 percent in September, among the lowest in the country, and the labor force is still thousands of people smaller than before the pandemic. Employers are fighting over scarce workers, offering wage increases, signing bonuses and child care subsidies, alongside enticements such as free ski passes. When those tactics fail, many are limiting operating hours and scaling back product offerings.

This is presented as a sort of doomsday demographic scenario, but does that sound like a crisis to you? OMG, companies have to pay a living wage to attract workers!

My own business has already experienced this transition in the form of a severe shortage of archaeological field techs. Our field crews used to be made up mainly of recent graduates with anthropology or history degrees who would work as field techs for a few years, bouncing from company to company and project to project – shovelbumming, it's called – before either moving on to a more lucrative field or going to graduate school to get the master's degree you need to hold a professional position.

But that pipeline is pretty much broken. You may have heard that college students these days are much more career oriented, and it seems that many fewer of them major in anthropology with no idea how they plan to make a living.

Hence, the shortage. Our starting wage has risen from $13.50 an hour to $22.00, with more generous provisions for travel time to projects and the like, and we still have trouble finding people. Like bakeries in Vermont, we're paying good techs $25 an hour. As a result we're scheduling more projects to be done with smaller crews (often two techs) over longer time frames. 

The drying up of the field tech pipeline means fewer people getting into archaeology and deciding to get the crucial master's degree, which translates into a growing shortage of junior archaeologists. Their wages have also climbed, and the shortage means that some mid-level jobs that used to be filled by more experienced people are now filled by newly-minted MAs. I had an interesting experience a few years ago when a new state regulator told me she was excited to read the report I had submitted for review "because I've never read a CRM report all the way through before."

I am not discounting the challenges here; there is a lot of stuff in our world that only gets done because we can pay people miserable wages to do it. Taking care of the elderly is the most obvious, and the most likely to become a severe economic and social challenge.

But imagine a world in which no one is economically exploited, because everyone has the leverage to demand a decent wage, and everyone can afford to quit and go elsewhere if their bosses abuse them. To me that isn't a crisis, it's a fantastic opportunity.

Dawoud Bey Documents Landscapes of Slavery

African American photographer Dawoud Bey (born 1953) has a new exhibit touring now titled "Elegy." These images document landscapes where enslaved people worked and suffered, mainly in Louisiana and Virginia. Above is a recent picture taken on the Richmond Slave Trail, which winds through the weedy woods that now occupy the site of Richmond's old docks. Richmond was a significant site for arrivals of slave ships from Africa and then a major port for the export of slaves toward the south and west in the 1820-1860 period. Bey's photographs of this strange place are collectively titled "Stony the Road," 2023. The title come from James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (1917):

Stony the road we trod,

Bitter the chast'ning rod,

Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;

Yet with a steady beat,

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered.

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,

Till now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

Conjoined Trees, Field, 2019

In This Here Place, 2019

Irrigation Ditch, Louisiana, 2019

Sugarcane II, 2019

More at the NY Times.

Mirror Worlds

John Dee's obsidian mirror, made in Mexico

If you want a simple definition of magical thinking, try this: the world we see can't possibly be all there is.

This basic belief manifests in a thousand different ways, but the one I'm going to focus on today is this: there are other worlds besides the one we live in, and there are ways to cross from one world to another, in both directions. To which a common corollary is, magical power comes from other worlds. The basic paradigm here is the shaman, whose souls leaves his or her body and travels to other worlds in search of knowledge and power, but there are of course many other versions. 

In worldwide folklore, one way to access other worlds is with a mirror. This idea appears to be extremely ancient, and it persists to this day in the form of superstitions about covering mirrors after a death in a house and so on. Horror movies love it. One of the amusing things I stumbled across researching this post was detailed instructions on how to create a photograph that seems to show your face and its monstrous reflection.

Egyptian mirror, c. 1500 BC

Mirrors have been endlessly fascinating to humans since we first learned to make them, and they appear in our lore in, again, a million ways. They are just cool objects to play with and think about. 

J.W. Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, detail

Our reflections fascinate us. What are they, and what is their connection to us? There is worldwide folklore that associates the reflection with the soul and asserts that injuries to the reflection can hurt the person. (E.g., vampires have no reflections because they have no souls.) There is an even vaster lore in which the reflection soul is trapped, either by an enemy sorceror or a sinister being residing in the reflecting pool. One school of thought maintains that the story of Narcissus as it comes down to us is an altered, civilized version of an ancient story in which Narcissus' soul was trapped by the spirit of a pool. Which is, incidentally, an important caveat about mirror lore, especially in the modern world, which is that it sometimes gets mixed up with denunciations of vanity.

(Here is an excellent Japanese folktale about a mirror spirit that traps humans in a well. If you want more, James Frazier collected hundreds of examples in The Golden Bough, along with the often parallel lore of shadows.)

Mirrors can show you ghosts, or fairies; they can show you the past or the future; they can show you the truth or confound you with demonic lies; they allow sorcerors to project their power out of their bodies, but they can also become gateways that allow enemies to come in and make mischief.

Mirrors, as reflective surfaces, can be used as traps. The most common interpretation of the mirrors Mongolian shamans wear on their costumes is that they hold the helping spirit that guides the shaman through the other worlds, or else the "wind horse" on which the shaman rides. But it is typical of mirror lore that other shamans have different views, for example that mirrors confuse evil spirits, allowing the shaman to bypass them. The mirror is an object of power in a way that seems to transcend the particular interpretation put on it.

The Chinese have what may be the most extensive mirror lore, along with a great many surviving bronze mirrors. These were retained in families for generations and became part of ancestor worship, on the theory that they retained some essence of all the people who had gazed into them.

The Aztec and Maya loved mirrors; that's a Maya king above, staring at a propped-up mirror.

This was a magical, shamanistic act, as you can see in this wonderful painting. On one side of the mirror is the shaman, on the other jaguar spirit that resides in the other lands; speech flowing from this being shows that he is imparting knowledge to the shaman.

One thing that makes modern mirror lore different from older stories is that we have much better mirrors. Many old stories depend on the ambiguity of what could be seen an in imperfect surface like a bowl of water or a polished disk of bronze. For example, one of the standard tricks of "cunning folk" across Europe was to catch thieves by asking victims to stare at the image on a small piece of tin and identify the face they saw; one supposes that they saw the person they already suspected. One could search for one's future spouse in the same way.

So it was a commonplace that what was gleaned from gazing into mirrors might be obscure. As St. Paul wrote, seeing "through a glass darkly" is quite different from seeing face-to-face. 

These days mirror lore is dominated by the monstrous: ghost stories, urban legends like Bloody Mary, horror movies with mirror monsters, and so on. Mirrors have joined the vast horror complex by which we make our safe lives more interesting.

The theme of the monster in the mirror has spun off into a hundred metaphorical uses, from a way of understanding anorexia and poor self esteem – which spawned a Sesame Street meme in which Elmo is the monster in the mirror, telling kids that they are ok – to an article I just found called  "Covid-19 is our monster and our mirror."

All of which, I think, points to something important about folklore and magical thinking: the what (mirrors are magical) has a way of overriding the why and the how. There is something interesting, uncanny, hard to grasp: dreams, reflections, coincidences. Around these basic themes stories grow like thorny vines around Sleeping Beauty, reflecting the preoccupations of the people who tell the stories. A mirror can hold a shaman's wind horse or a Confucian gentleman's great-grandfather; it can be a symbol of faith or self-loathing; it can be an instrument of power or a crack that allows in demons from hell. It can be, really, anything we can imagine.

Links 10 November 2023

Oasis in the Libyan Desert

Japanese Navy accounces a crash program to build 12 new frigates by 2028 due to "the increasingly stern security environment around Japan."

Massive hoard of coins dating to the 4th century AD found on the seabed off Sardinia. The hoard had to be massive because the coins are the debased, silver-free folli of the declining empire, worth very little compared to the silver pieces of the 1st century.

Substantive NY Times piece on the intellectuals who have embraced right-wing "catastrophism," the belief that the US is somehow on the verge of collapse and liberals are promoting that collapse because they hate America. Ungated summary by Kevin Drum here. I have to say that it takes a weird mindset to look around America and see a collapsing society. Compared to what? Mexico? Russia? Brazil? The US in the 1960s?

Today's headline: Four Men Charged in the Case of the Missing Golden Toilet (NY Times). You'll be pleased to learn the object it is not merely a toilet but an "artwork." Thank you, Marcel Duchamp.

Microsoft announces an initiative to apply AI and cloud computing to chemistry in a big way: "Our goal is to compress the next 250 years of chemistry and materials science progress into the next 25." They think chemical analysis will be the "killer ap" for quantum computing when that becomes available.

Bizarre goings on among wikipedia admins: wikipedia statement, thread on X.

French police are investigating claims that antisemitic graffiti was spraypainted by Russian agents (Post on X, French news story).

Drunk grizzly bears keep being killed by trains in the Rockies. It seems they get drunk eating grain that falls off trains and ferments, and then pass out on the tracks. We're not talking about a few grains here and there but whole cars full, because, it seems, trains derail up there all the time.

Citibank fined $25 million for discriminating against Armenian Americans. 

Kevin Drum thinks it may be time to stop forcing To Kill a Mockingbird on high school students.

The fascinating origins of the jungle gym in four-dimensional math.

FBI will move its headquarters to Greenbelt, Maryland. I worked on the environmental impact statement for this move back in 2015-2016 but then Trump nixed the plan as too expensive. Biden must have revived it. I think the FBI always prefered the Greenbelt site but there was a lot of local opposition, which I guess was overriden by the state government and Maryland's Congressional delegation.

Wolves eat elk and moose, which helps beavers to thrive, but on the other hand they also eat a lot of beavers, focusing on those who travel too far from their ponds, thus confining beavers to smaller ranges. (NY Times, original article)

Besides the big wins for abortion rights, Tuesday's election was a major defeat for Moms for Liberty, the book-banning ladies from Florida; they seem to have lost in all their high-profile efforts. I am actually a little ambivalent about this because I think there is a lot of harmful racial rhetoric on the left that I would rather not have in schools, but in practice teaching about Kendi-style antiracism seems to be quite rare and the rules people write to ban it could be read as banning all discussion of race.

NPR story inspired by a new book on American Girl dolls. Another product that has fallen into the uncanny valley where you can either ignore slavery entirely and be attacked for that or try to deal with it and be attacked for that.

Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor on the glass harp.

Ukraine

Spectacular video showing the destruction of a Russian column at Avdiivka.

Russian exile Vladimir Pastukhov argues that Putin needs the war in Ukraine to continue indefinitely, because Putin  thinks staying on a war footing is the only way he stays in power. (Like Napoleon, I guess.) War, say Pastukhov, is a drug to which Putin is addicted. And at Threadreader.

Ukraine attacked the Zaliv shipyard in Kerch, damaging a new Russian frigate, the Askold (Uri, Noel Reports, Kyiv Independent) OSINT guys were divided about the damage shown in satellite photos, some calling it catastrophic, other not so impressed, but an up-close photo shows significant damage. And video of the attack. Interesting that shipyards in Crimea are full of Ukrainian sympathizers who gloatingly post all this stuff.

A threat on why Russia has lost so many tanks in Ukraine: lousy tanks, lousy battlefield doctrine, and not caring how many they lose.

Kyiv Independent on the Russian Lancet kamikaze drone.

British military official on the rate of munitions consumption in a contemporary peer conflict like Urkaine: "Think of a ludicrous number, double it, add a zero, and you’re still not there."

European military capacity: "Norwegian ammunition maker Nammo told lawmakers in Oslo...The company estimates Europe would need around 20 million shells for about a month of combat operations, with industrial capacity in the region at less than half a million shells."

Interview with a Ukrainian Captain who has been fighting since 2014. Says many Russians are very tough soldiers, including some who were just mobilized a few weeks before, and Russian commanders are willing to take losses in a way Ukraine cannot.

Fall

It was a lovely Autumn here, now fading away into gray-brown November.

Below, zinnias before and after our first hard frost on November 2.

Edmund Dulac

Born in France, Dulac (1882-1953) spent most of his career in Britain. Most of these illustrations were done in 1904 to 1916. Above is an illustration from The Dreamer of the Dream, a book by the Queen of Romania, who was one of Victoria's granddaughters.

And A Circle of Mist from the queen's other book, Stealers of the Light

Stealers of Light

Illustrations from an edition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám that appeared in 1909. I've seen first editions of this selling for $10,000 online.

The Firebird

Beauty and the Beast

Not sure where this comes from; I found it with the title Alone

The Conceptual Arsenal of Climate Collapse

Via Pessimsits Archive on X.

While I'm at it a few more old news items from the same source:

Unhelpful Tarot

Ace of Wands and The Devil

All you have is a blunt instrument, but that’s okay, because you’re pretty sure that everything you encounter can be dealt with by thumping it.

I just discovered a hilarious Tumblr, Unhelpful Tarot. Each post is just two cards with an amusing or absurd interpretation, like the ones above and below.

Two of Cups and Seven of Wands

You were so busy looking deeply into one another’s eyes that you completely missed the fight at the next table.

Remaking the Golden Tree of Lucignano

The Golden Tree of Lucignano is a spectacular reliquary made for the church of Saint Francis in Lucignano, Tuscany. It was made in two phases, first in 1350 by an unknown goldsmith, then expanded and completed in 1471 by the  top goldsmith of 15th century Siena, Gabriello D’Antonio. The form follows the Lignum Vitae, Tree of Life, that was a regular object of contemplation among Franciscans friars.

Back in 1914, the Golden Tree was stolen. The culprits were a gang of local thieves who immediately broke it into pieces to share out among them. Much of it was recovered right away as the thieves clumsily dispersed across the countryside. Many more pieces were found between 1927 and 1929, presumably because the thieves fell out and began to rat on each other. The Tuscan regional government paid to have the tree re-assembled by a master goldsmith, using drawings to recreate replicas of the still missing pieces. It has been on display in the museum at Lucignano ever since.

And now, thanks to a "tip from on elderly man," more pieces have been recovered from a nearby cave.

A certain Commander Mauti from the Carbarneri cultural crimes unit made an extensive statement to the press:

What was foundwere four plaques in gilded copper and enamelled silver, 16 votive offerings in silver, once placed on the base, a miniature on parchment and a ground rock crystal.

The discovery has the characteristics of exceptionality because it occurred over a century after the sensational theft of the work, which occurred in 1914. As evidenced by period images, only small portions of the branches and the heavy base were spared at the time, although depleted of the most precious elements.

Between 1927 and 1929 many fragments of the Tree, torn to pieces by thieves to facilitate transport, were found – Superintendent Gabriele Nannetti recalls this – in the countryside of the municipality of Sarteano, in the province of Siena, where they had been hidden by the perpetrators of the theft. However, elements of great importance such as the terminal crucifix, the pelican, one of the branches, four of the circular medallions, five silver plaques, at least three miniatures and the upper part of the temple knot were not recovered. Even those few sprigs of coral that the reliquary still had at the time of the theft were lost.

What a fabulous story: the gang of incompetent thieves who stole something they had no clue how to sell, the pieces hidden in barns and caves for decades, no doubt the subject of endless rumor and gossip, and now the reunion of the broken masterpiece.

Links 3 November 2023

Huang Yong Ping, Sea Serpent, 2012

Amuse yourself with the Medieval Murder Map, which shows the locations of killings documented in Coroner's Rolls from London, York, and Oxford, with a link to the Coroner's Inquest for each. Lots of good details, mainly about violent fights over insults and the like.

Orca goes for the seal-toss world record.

Dark, post-apocalyptic art by Yuri Shwedoff.

Scott Siskind donates a kidney.

Drilling is getting better fast; according to this article, the productivity of drilling rigs has increased 50-fold in 20 years and is still rising fast: "drilling is far from physical limits." If that's true it has major implications for the future of geothermal power, which might fall greatly in price.

More aerial photographs of ancient earthworks in the Amazon.

Impressive black and white photographs by Drew Doggett of the Mundari people and their cattle.

New study finds nearly 400 Roman forts in the Middle East using old Corona spy satellite photos.

People are traveling to the hotel that inspired "The Shining" to stage spooky weddings, complete with flower girls dressed as the Grady twins (NY Times)

For the Commonplace Book, Maria Abramovic: "I don't see any good art made out of happiness."

Speaking of art by unhappy people, how about Michelangelo: are the drawings on the walls of the "secret room" in the Medici Chapel in his hand? (NY Times, NPR)

Strange photo-story by Karolina Jonderko titled Bebok, more or less Polish for Bogeyman, about a group of teenagers and their fears.

Another study finds little to no evidence that YouTube's algorithms radicalize anyone. I don't want to say that the Internet has had no impact on people's political beliefs, but it seems to me that it acts mainly by helping people find support for what they already believe rather than turning people into fantatics. I think there is just a lot of evil out there and always has been.

Kevin Drum on The strange case of professor Ivonne del Valle.

And Kevin Drum on the miniscule number of degrees awarded in gender and ethnic studies (0.36%)

Opening a lovely Etruscan tomb that dates to around 600 BC.

Nobody meets our standards: in order to avoid naming birds after "people with racist pasts," the American Ornithological Association has committed to replacing all bird names derived from people. (NY Times; statement)

Ben Pentreath at home in Dorset, wonderful garden photos.

Offshore wind power faltering: major projects off New York and New Jersey are cancelled due to high costs. The companies say the already large subsidies they were granted are not enough to make the projects profitable. (NY Times)

Fertility falling rapidly in Argentina, down to TFR of 1.36; that's a decline of 40% in a decade. From this same X account (Birth Gauge) I learn that fertility is very low in Puerto Rico, down to a TFR of 0.91 and still falling. Quite a change from the rhetoric of West Side Story. And the fertility of US Mormons has just fallen below replacement. (Note that people make the Mormons seem unusual by comparing them to the US as a whole, but if you instead compare them to other white suburban churchgoers they aren't very different.)

Ukraine Links

Ukrainian blogger says both Bakhmut and Avdiivka, and in fact the whole eastern front, are complete sideshows with no strategic implications, and the war has to be won either in the north or the south, that is, by Russia conquering Kyiv or Ukraine conquering Crimea.

Good example of a "FrankenSAM," an old Soviet Buk SAM system modified to fire NATO RIM-7 shipborn anti-air missiles. Allegedly the US is making five of these conversions a month. Again, the ability to change how missiles are used throws off all the counts of how many of what kind of missile each nation has.

In Ukraine, return of WW II "floating island" camouflage.

Geoconfirmed, a very reliable outfit, counts more than 200 Russian vehicle losses in the Avdiivka offensive.

In a paywalled interview with The Economist, Ukrainian commander in chief Zaluzhnyi, says the war has entered a phase of static, "positional" battles, and the only way to escape this is via massive application of missiles and drones, which he hopes Ukraine will manufacture for itself. (Yahoo, TCH)

No Deaths of Despair in Italy

Interesting to note that in Italy, where the economy has been much worse than in the US, and the political scene even more chaotic, life expectancy has risen well above the level in the US. The obvious difference is the availability of opiods, although one might also point out that in Italy nobody has any sense of decline, since things there have never been particularly stable or prosperous. (Compared to the US or the rest of Europe, I mean.)

Tyler Cowen Interviews Stephen Jennings about Development

Stephen Jennings, former economic official in New Zealand, now leads urban development projects in Africa, notably the Tatu City special economic zone in Kenya; I found this whole interview fascinating; some of it is economics, Cowen's speciality, so he asks great questions, but it gets beyond economics into societies, cultures, people.

Here is Jennings, in response to a question about the literature on development:

I think I’ve read just about everything in development. There’s nothing I really like very much. Development is a black box. I don’t think there’s anything that has much predictive power. There’s a lot of ex post explanations, whether they be policy settings, location, culture. I think 90% of them are ex post; very few of them are predictive. Some of them are just tautologies. I really like factualization.

It’s descriptive more than analytical, but it just makes it clear that most of the world has been on a very similar development trajectory. It’s just not sequenced. Sweden started early; Ethiopia started late. But the nature of the transition and the inevitability of that transition, other than very extreme circumstances, is kind of the same. . . .

I don’t think we really understand development at all, because if we could, we could predict it. We can predict virtually nothing. It’s just too complicated. It’s too connected with politics. I think there’s a lot of feedback loops and elements of development that we don’t understand properly. We certainly can’t quantify them because the development’s happening in such a wide range of settings, from communist dictatorships through to very liberal systems and with all different kinds of industrial — on every dimension, there’s a huge range of variables.

In terms of his Kenya project, Jennings identifies the biggest obstacle as finding the right people:

Biggest constraint we face is human capital. We’re obviously not land constrained. We’re unleveraged, we have very good cash flow, we have very, very good financing partners. We’re absolutely not capital constrained in any way. We’re trying to do some world-class infrastructure, world-class execution, world-class buildings, world-class technology. And by definition, a lot of the human capital to do those things doesn’t exist in this market. City scale, landscaping, urban realm — these schools don’t exist. You either have a lot of foreign consultants fly in, fly out; they’re not particularly focused; they’re not necessarily the best consultants in the world; and it’s just extremely inefficient. The constraint is embedding world-class technical people within a Kenyan team.

The issue in creating a modern economy is changing how people live, usually from a peasant or herder way of living to one focused on acquiring new skills and getting a steady job. The biggest obstacle to building a city in Kenya, says Stephens, is the lack of people who know how to plan and build a city.

I am doing a little work these days on a project to build a new light rail line through an older city, and the amount of knowledge needed to do this makes my head spin. To take just one example, the proposed line crosses a pipeline that carries aviation fuel to a nearby airport, and I thought relocating this pipeline might prove to be a major obstacle. But there are people on this team who know how to do that: how to approach the pipeline owner, how to get regulatory approval, how to overcome the engineering challenges involved in moving a mile of active pipeline without any major interruptions in flow, what kind of measures have to be taken to make sure the operation of the rail line never damages the pipeline, or that a pipeline leak doesn't stop the rail line. etc., etc. 

To picture the team involve in this project, imagine that knowledge base multiplied by a thousand: people who can convene and run a public meeting about a new transportation project, who design the project web site, who keep local political leaders up-to-date on developments, who know the price of land in this market, who know the electrical demands of a light rail line or a station and whether the local grid will support it, who know how to drain stormwater away from a rail station or a tunnel, who know what the impact of a busy train line will be on old bridges nearby, and so on and so on.

 Development means producing people with all of those skills; and yet, who would go to school to get those skills until the economy exists to provide them jobs? And how can they acquire experience? That is the challenge of development.

Here is Jennings on how he recruits people – I think he is talking about non-Africans here – to work on his project:

Interviews are a very inaccurate way of selecting and evaluating people. . . . We’ll check their prior work in a lot of detail, and we’ll spend a lot of time with them, and we’ll put them in a lot of situations without their actually knowing that we’re deliberately doing that, to see how they will react with our local staff or without. It might be a dinner after a long day when they think it’s time to relax, but we’re actually looking to see how they interact with our clients. Do they listen? Are they respectful?

Are they really interested, or are they just going through the motions? A lot of the recruitment information comes [when they’re] away from the interview process. How do they behave when you’re actually negotiating their deal? Are they timely? Are they honest? Do they play games? Do they change their position? We rely on a lot of those kinds of data points.

So, you know, never relax around a potential employer.