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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. Nowadays the state of education is still deplorable. My local sources told me that the country has a 40% literacy rate. And school is not compulsory (the natives optimistically conclude that statement with 'yet'). And even if children receive an education, it is no guarantee of any employment, let alone well-paying work in one's field of study. Not even learning IT or computer programming skills makes one employable. Working as a tour guide, or in a big hotel, is considered a good job. So it's a complicated situation. The people must become educated to benefit from globalization, yet those who are educated currently just end up in the servant class. The Khmer Rouge set out to bring the country back to 'year zero' and didn't miss by much. And what the Khmer Rouge failed to accomplish, government corruption seems intent on finishing off. While their neighbors in Vietnam are known for their own problems with corruption, it seems significant that it was only in Cambodia that I had to bribe someone at the airport to get my film hand-checked instead of run through the x-ray machine. Yet one thing that is very clear while one is here is that the Cambodians are not poor because they are lazy. Everywhere one goes one encounters people eagerly trying to sell one things. While there is some begging, raw commerce is the rule. And those Cambodians who have jobs take them seriously. Sure they don't have the same hustle and bustle urgency of New Yorkers, but they work hard. And seeing six-year old kids riding to school at 6:30 in the morning on bikes that are twice their size really drives home how coddled American children are. Yet they are all poor, and likely to stay that way. These people have no skills of interest to manufacturers. Too few educated people to draw IT work from abroad. Insufficient capital to start their own global businesses. A countryside still strewn with over a million landmines. A corrupt government. One can easily see why foreign investors are disinterested in such a place. The existence of such a doomed population vividly illustrates the moral bankruptcy of an attitude that claims that free trade is the solution to world poverty. Free trade can only help when a country has something to offer. And while it is very easy to point out all of the technical changes that the Cambodian government should be making to reform their system, none of that will replace the intellectuals slaughtered in the killing fields. And, as with the poor in America today, the fantasy of a more perfect world in some mythic, indeterminate future, offers neither solace nor sustenance to those trapped by the unfortunate accident of being born at the wrong time and in the wrong place.