New research boys and girls. Making long story short, it’s all about slums and underdevelopment. I’m back into swing of things reading about hunger, climate change, unemployment, corruption, malnutrition, poverty… hell yeah, bring on the party. Any how, I spent last 2,5 years of research in Goldsmiths on the safe waters of cultural sociology. And that was culture of the western world (I use the term loosely). All this research is like crawling through the fog to get a clearer picture of something no one really likes to look at.
And so I crawled through old issues of the Guardian, which always lay under my desk awaiting the recycling. Very patiently I cut out the article from G2 on Stiglitz estimating the total costs of the war in Iraq (Feb 28.2008).
I will have to read his book. What is it with journalists and numbers? Do they really not understand them or chose not to understand them? Maybe fourth of the numbers mentioned in the article were given with complete contextual information, which you need to make any sense of them. The rest is colourful and persuasive, except they mean absolutely fuck all. Example: the total costs of the war could, apparently, have bought the US ‘15m schoolteachers’. How do you buy one? Do they come with packing (and if so is it recyclable…)? Seriously, no mention on whether that’s educating them to be teachers, paying them for a month, paying them for a year, having Gorge W pet them on the heads. Not to mention that the article doesn’t tell us what date Stiglitz considers the beginning of the war, which costs are to date and which are estimated future costs.
I trust he explains that in the book, which is called ‘3 trillion dollar war’. That he says is a ‘conservative’ estimate.
Meanwhile, I’m reading in another Guardian (Feb 26.2008), the UN says it doesn’t have enough money ‘to keep global malnutrition at bay’. Prices of commodities go up and the World Food Program is half a billion dollar short of meeting even their current tasks (which is helping less than the 10th of world’s underfed). This is a lot, and the UN report is panicky in tone.
Half a billion dollar needed to feed people while 3 trillion is pumped into the war in Iraq. And yes, this is oversimplified, but if one started being more precise about it the numbers would only look worse.
This is, as Kevin Smith said once, my political material for the night.