The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

The conventional wisdom on the marriage of Alyce Abdalla and David Galbraith:


Yan-kees suck! Yan-kees suck! Yan-kees suck!

Mr. Galbraith, 33, is a staff assistant in the office of the United States ambassador in Cairo. He graduated with an associate's degree from Deep Springs College in Deep Springs, Calif., and received a bachelor's degree from Harvard.
...
The bridegroom is a grandson of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

That John Kenneth Galbraith? Yes, that John Kenneth Galbraith. I'll have more on him later, but I must now admit that I'm a bit frightened to lock horns with the Galbraiths. Anyone who's seen "The Lord of the Rings" scene when the Galbraiths, draped in menacing black robes, are chasing Frodo through the forest, and he has to put on the One Ring to become invisible and they're right on top of him and he can feel their breath...terrifying!

Beyond his fancy genes, our darling groom doesn't have much else going for him that I can find. His family is filled with famous economists. He likes the Red Sox. The zipper lining on his jacket is purple (very nice). He shares a name with a prominent blogger. Other than that he's so unremarkable that it can only be considered some sort of rebellion against his hyper-successful bloodline.

I guess he and his wife both have MPA degrees in international development. I'm not impressed. MPAs are the third-nipple of academic degrees--anyone who has one already has two others that are perfectly sufficient, and the third is useless beyond generating small talk at slow parties.

As for Alyce, she's lived her life with the double-edged sword of having the initials "A.A." That means she was always first in line for snack time, but she may also have been the first one called on to answer or perform some task in front of a group of people without any exemplar precedent. Except for those teachers who reverse the order, in which cases Zachary Zises probably flew into a rage.

Ms. Abdalla, 28, is training in Washington to be a public diplomacy officer with the American consulate in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. She graduated from Brown. In 1999 and 2000 she was a Fulbright fellow in Amman, Jordan, researching ways Jordanian women can make a living through crafts projects.

I guess "crafts projects" is Fulbright-speak for "sweatshops."* Maybe she's dating the grandkid of a prominent economist so she can apply all of that "widget" talk, then let the profit trickle down to the Jordanian populace. Lord knows the world needs more nation-themed, cheaply-made trinkets. Coincidentally enough, if you had mentioned the word "Jordan" to any Southeast Asian sweatshop worker in the 90's they would have lost their shit.

I found this short bio on Alyce's abroad program page:

Alyce is from New York, New York, but arrives from Amman, Jordan, where she has spent a year as a Fulbright Fellow, researching the role of traditional crafts in Jordan's economy. She graduated from Brown University with a BA in Economics, and plans to continue researching the economies of developing countries. Alyce speaks fluent French, Jordanian Arabic, and basic spoken Nepali.

Basic spoken Nepali!? I guess that shows the level of education Brown offers. Where I come from we take our Pahari languages seriously--written Devanagari balls to the wall. With her sweatshop background I bet her spoken vocabulary was limited to नेपालमा बनेको** or "nepaalmaa baneko." (What, you guys don't like Nepalese humor?)

Odds are, she put "basic spoken Nepalese" on her resume because she knew nobody could call her out for it. It'd be like me putting "Conversational in Native Kawesqar" and hoping that the six-or-so living speakers didn't happen to be my interviewer. Or saying that I'm a world-champion knife thrower or fire-breather or some other outlandish skill impossible to prove in an interview setting (exclusions from rule: circus, Brown admissions dept.).

Finally, it seems the praise for "The Great Canadian" economist J.K. Galbraith may be overly laudatory. I'm not very well-studied in economics myself, but a friend of mine (who prefers anonymity) emailed me this persuasive little rant. I haven't the time nor interest to fact-check any of these accusations, but the logic seems sound. I'll let you kiddies work it out in the comments if you disagree with him, though I doubt this'll spawn the kind of fervor my feminism post did.

What to say about J.K. Galbraith, other than that his brilliant theories and books and wit and lectures and microeconomic investigations led him to get almost every macro-human issue of the 20th century dead wrong.

About the Viet Cong (rel. to the South Vietnamese): “A comparatively well-equipped army with a quarter million men is facing a maximum of 15-18,000 lightly armed men. If this were equality, the United States would hardly be safe against the Sioux.”

On careful encouragement of industry, rather than central planning: "The lesson of the whole post-Keynesian world is that governments are now responsible for economic performance. Any notion that poor performance can't be remedied by the state is a reversion to 19th-century attitudes, which I'm not prepared to accept."

On the Brezhnev (read: broken) USSR: "On the economic front, for the first time in its history the Soviet leadership was able to pursue successfully a policy of guns and butter as well as growth. . . . The Soviet citizen-worker, peasant, and professional—has become accustomed in the Brezhnev period to an uninterrupted upward trend in his well-being,"...
and...
"Partly, the Russian system succeeds, because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower." (This was in 1984, some 70 months before the USSR's collapse.)

It goes on and on. Price-fixing in the New Deal, federal loan insurance policies in the post-war, the welfare policies of the Great Society, etc. All ideas wonderfully generous and gentiley argued for. All terrifying in their unintended consequences (i.e., huge, ugly corporatist state, with huge, ugly people, sprawled across our huge and now-ugly landscape).

It's sorta like he knew it was wrong, though. Master of the quotable had this smarmy defense: "The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary, no economist should be denied it, and not many are."

Thanks, John. We'll get back to work on our restoring our civilization now.

...I forgot: maybe the worst party of JKG's legacy is the assemblage of rabid free-marketers he spawned, all frothing at their cretinous, greedy mouths over the muddleheaded pinko policies of a kindly Canadian farmboy they uphold now as the posterchild of the liberal elite intelligentsia.

Boo-yaaaah! Oh no he dih-unt! JKG don't take no shit from noone!

* Knowing Alyce is a reactionary Brown grad, I guess I need a disclaimer: The sweatshop joke was humorous hyperbole and was not intended to be taken as fact. I have no knowledge that she really set up sweatshops in Jordan. That would be ridiculous. I'm sure she's a thoughtful, generous, God-fearing humanitarian--just like all Fulbright scholars who join the program to "make a difference" worldwide. To imply that she or her fellow Fulbright alumni are self-serving and only participate in order to juice-up their resumes would be preposterous.

** "Made in Nepal" for you lazy bastards who refuse to use Google.

One more time!

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This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough!

This should be enough!
This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough!


This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough! This should be enough!

Let's fill up the body of the blog!

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Tsetse

Tsetse.