POSTING #41

Apology; Mowing and Blowing; International Conference in Helsinki in 1991; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

Apology

I am sorry that this week's posting is a few days late.

Pat and I have been totally preoccupied with the arrival of our fourth grandchild---a handsome young fellow born on Saturday, October 10th. Mom, son and dad are all in super shape.

The grandparents are pooped.

Mowing and Blowing

For the last 10 years or so, we have had a contractor mow our grass and snowblow our driveway. At first it was because we were busy with 'bed and breakfasting' and consulting.

Now it's just laziness.

This is the first year that the contractor has mowed the lawn each and every week since spring. In other years, there was always a dormant period somewhere in July or August when it was just too hot for the grass to grow.

Not this year!

It has been a great season for our current contractor---Paul---who does a first class job looking after both the grass and the snow.

In a sense---from his point of view---this was payback for a lousy winter. He only had to clean our driveway three times all last winter. Hard to keep a business going with the revenue from three visits.

Looking ahead, we don't have any squirrels in our part of Virgil so we can't check their nut-storing activities or the thickness of their fur to give us a feel for the kind of winter that lies ahead.

We suspect, however, that the law of averages will take over and that Paul will like this winter more than we do.


International Conference in Helsinki in 1991

In last week's posting, #40, October 4, 2009, I talked about a trip to East Berlin in 1974 when the Wall was still in place, and about my amazement that someone raised in East Germany---Angela Merkel---had just been re-elected as Chancellor of the reunited Germany.

The success of the liberated nations of Central and Eastern Europe has been equally impressive. There were initial problems in most of the countries and there have been times when some of them seemed in danger of slipping back into dictatorship---this time not a dictatorship imposed by a foreign power but one controlled by a national group. But things have worked out pretty well.

The European Union has been enormously helpful. And international agencies such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have also provided help at critical times.

In September 1991, I was in Helsinki presenting a paper at a conference organized by the OECD for officials from Central and Eastern European nations who, after the collapse of the USSR, were trying to create market economies. A number of experts from Western countries presented papers on a variety of subject dealing with the transfer from a state-controlled to a market economy.

My paper dealt with work we had been doing in Canada to increase the responsiveness of our public employment service to the needs of its clients. Under the communist philosophy that governed the USSR, there could not, by definition, be unemployment. There was no need, therefore, to have a public employment service to help workers find jobs or to pay unemployment insurance benefits.

Now that they were putting in place market economies---in which there would always be at least some unemployment---the nations were interested in how to create efficient, effective and responsive public employment services. The need was heightened by the astronomical levels of unemployment each faced at they made the transition to a market economy.

Here are some stories about the attitudes and ideas that circulated during the conference.


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The Hungarian delegates were impressive and given the nature of their questions it seemed that Hungary was further along than most of the nations in making the transition to a market economy.

After one of the early papers (not mine) that went into great and glowing detail about the successes of a certain western nation's economic initiatives, I noticed that the Hungarians were a bit restless.

When the question period came, the head of the Hungarian delegation led off---with some gentle irony---saying that it was always very interesting to hear about the successes of other countries. It would however, he suggested, be even more interesting and helpful if the experts could describe the mistakes they had made. Sometimes, the Hungarian said, one could learn more about what hadn't worked. In that way, the newly independent nations could avoid making the same mistakes.

To give him credit, the expert appeared a bit chastened, and he managed to come up with a few examples of things that hadn't worked.

This seemed to me to mark a turning point in the conference. After that exchange, the presentations were less self-laudatory, and therefore more helpful to the nations who were struggling to find answers to some terribly challenging problems.

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One of the delegates from a nation that was clearly not as advanced as Hungary, responded to one of the papers with a speech that became angrier and angrier. Speaking through an interpreter, he protested that the Western nations were not being helpful enough, they were trying to keep the ex-USSR nations poor so they could exploit them. For example, he said, the Western nations were not prepared to share the manual for democracy.

When I heard this statement, I thought that I hadn't heard correctly or that the interpreter had got his comments wrong.

But the speaker went on to say that western officials he had talked to had even denied that a manual existed but everyone knew that there had to be a manual for democracy.

The person chairing the session cut in and said that he would meet with the speaker during lunch and discuss his concerns.

Afterwards, I realized that it wasn't too surprising that people who had grown up in a political and economic system in which everything was controlled by the centre might think that there had to be a manual for democracy.

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An official from the former East Germany told about the problems he and his colleagues were having in introducing democratic values.

He said that a city in what had been East Germany had its first free election for a mayor since before the Nazi time. (There had been 'elections' during the USSR times but the winner was pre-determined.) Some time after the election, some citizens were unhappy with the behavior of the new mayor. A delegation went to the head of the state in which the city was located and demanded that the head remove the mayor. The head responded that this was now a democracy and therefore he couldn't remove the mayor. The people would have to remove him in the next election.

No, the people protested, you don't understand. He has misbehaved and you have a duty to remove him.

The people left, grumbling that this new democracy wasn't worth much if mayors couldn't be removed by the boss of the state.

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There was a small delegation from Russia, which was now just another country that was trying to make the transition to a market economy.

I noticed that the delegations from the other countries shunned the Russians---perhaps understandably. The Russians, for their part, kept a low profile in the conference, asking few questions.

At the end of one day's discussions, I went for a walk along a pretty Helsinki lake while I waited for that evening's dinner.

I ran into the head of the Russian delegation, who was also taking a pre-dinner walk, and stopped to say hello. He was a tall, slender person with gray hair and a scholarly air.

His English was excellent and we walked on together chatting about ourselves and the conference. He had been a senior planner in the Kremlin under the USSR and he said it was hard for him and his colleagues to grasp (and, I suppose, to accept) the concepts of a market economy.

He saw value in some of the new concepts but thought that there was still a place for some central planning. He pointed to Japan and France, two countries in which the national government played an active role in giving guidance and maintaining control over major economic issues.

In time, he suggested, the newly independent countries would find the value of some central planning---that an economy could not be left totally to the operation of the market.

I imagine that after the catastrophic economic and financial events of the last year, he may be saying to himself, "I tried to tell them".

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I didn't imagine at that time that in four years I would be living in Moscow, working on a project to improve the Russian employment service.


Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

In the summer of 1979 we went as a family to Europe. We started with a week in Britain and the two boys (16 and 14) and our daughter (9) adjusted well to the tourist life. We ate from time to time in department store cafeterias and the children learned to grab trays and rush ahead to select their food without waiting for Pat and me.

Then we took the ferry to The Netherlands and found a department store cafeteria in Amsterdam. As usual the children rushed ahead with their trays and examined the pans of sausages, mashed potatoes, and so on.

The clerk behind the counter asked them what they wanted---in Dutch. The three kids looked at him in horror, and then scooted back behind us.

It was wonderful to watch the expression on their faces.



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See you next Sunday for Posting #42 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting, or email me at johnpathunter@cs.com.