Holiday in Cambodia
I have just returned from an amazing trip to southeast asia. Truly extraordinary to be in places where one has a completely different perspective on free trade and globalization. While most of the trip was spent in Vietnam (more on that another day), we did spend a few days in Cambodia. Enough to convince me that I owe my friend Jesse an apology: we don't have real poverty in America, at least not that I've seen. You were right about that. While I am sure that there is even deeper poverty elsewhere, the poverty in Cambodia makes American ghettoes seem middle-class; although the violence in many poor American communities makes life less tolerable than the basic living conditions would indicate. Yet it is unclear how replacing aid with freer markets, as recently proposed by Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank, would help these people. Cambodia is a country that has not only been torn apart by thirty years of civil war, but also lost an entire generation of it's intellectual class. The Khmer Rouge saw to that.
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