Independent? Free To Show How To Excel?

Barbados today celebrates 43 years of Independence from British rule. But, national independence is merely relative: if it engages widely with the rest of the world, a small country is always dependent on the rest of the world for its survival. That's no tragedy, but needs to be constantly understood. Barbados does not have the luxury to mistreat the rest of the world and has to suffer often being mistreated by the same. The world and life is not symmetrical or fair. But, that does not stop a country doing a lot to help itself.

Barbados has much of which it can be proud: with a small well-educated population and few natural resources other than sun, sea and sand, it has managed to rise as a country with much hope. On that hope it can build; but the hope needs to move from just a set of promises. Barbados undervalues and underuses one of its major resources--it people's talents. It has not blazed a trail that highlights what its people value, and made that stand up to the world as representative, no matter how limited the current appeal may be. It does not matter that no one else knows or plays road tennis, it should be pushed for its uniqueness. Games like boules (petanque) or curling are obscure and maybe limited to certain weather conditions or come closely associated with certain cultures, but their proponents find pleasure in pushing them in front of others' eyes, and even managing to get Olympic recognition, and let the joy spread where it will. They can all be learnt and improved upon by others: that's clearly the case with football, and of course cricket, whose appeal though slower to spread is wider nevertheless. What better than promoting a sport that needs barely any equipment or space?

If you have a 'world champion' in a sport, as Barbados does with draughts and 'Suki' King, then that can be part of the national image, no matter how lowly the sport may seem or how eccentric that world class player may be. Let his playing skills symbolise some positives about the country and its people--as Russia does with chess or China does with table tennis. I remember the days when darts and snooker were played in pubs and bars with beer-swilling and cigarette-smoking raucous yobbos as the main spectators. Now, both are major televised events and have gained style in the way they are played and presented, even if at their base they are little changed and skills must be honed in dark snooker halls or loud pubs and bars. The main thing is that the world has learned to understand that throwing a dart accurately into a board or hitting a ball with a stick so that it hits another ball and falls into a pocket require great skills, dedication, nerves, and more good attributes. They offer positive objectives that can be presented for young people as worthwhile. They do not run counter to learning. Pride comes from mastery. Similarly, if the country is about 'excellence' then tolerance of the mediocre needs to end.

Waiting for other people to 'big you up' is always fraught with disappointment, as it may never happen. Barbados has been lucky in having Rihanna, who now represents the country no matter what she does: her confused life need not reflect badly on the country in equal or greater measure to the way that her singing reflects positively. She can become a positive 'symbol' in many ways, not least saying that it does not matter where you come from if you can raise your talent.

A country really needs to know how to put itself on the map. Barbados knows how to do this because it has maximised the positives out of its various economic and social achievements. But, it seems too content to raise one aspect of those as THE message and image: stability. Barbados need not be known as 'risky'. If the country is 'steady as she goes' then that image can be exploited to show that whatever 'rocks' and 'high waves' it encounters, it can stick to a course. But you have to have a clear course to chart. Barbados is struggling to maintain a clear course, but enough elements are there for that to not be hard to re-establish. The current economic problems it faces are yet another opportunity to show that its 'steadiness' is more likely to prevails with good results--but it needs to be shown not presumed. That way, those who want to go 'off course' are prepared to stay with the ship and its captain.

These are messages, which if believed need constant reinforcement--not mere repetition, but real action and decisions that are consistent with the messages.

Blissful Ignorance.

Barbados and I share something very special. The country gained its independence from Britain on November 30, 1966; some 340 years after the first wave of English settlers arrived, but some 800-odd years after the first signs of human life appeared on the island in the form of Carib and Arawak Indians. My relationship with Barbados seems more prosaic: I celebrate a wedding anniversary on the same date. How fitting then, that I should fly back to Barbados on November 30, after a week during which I participated in a sister-in-law's wedding.

It's funny that the day before I had been chatting with one of my brothers-in-law and a friend of his, saying that the wedding day represents one of those points of bliss for many people--maybe the highest. My contention was that people carry their highest level of hope into that day. The cynics would say quickly, "And it's downhill full speed from then on!" We punted these ideas around for a few minutes under a poinciana tree, and my wife--armed with a not-much-used-recently tennis racket--added a few glosses. As truly independent men--not a contradiction in terms if one is married--we are very comfortable having vigorous discussions with our wives. We do beat our own drum and have our own programs.

"The Law", which could be a good name for any wife, added that there are other bliss points, that are as high but of a different kind. Now you have to understand that my wife and I are both economists. In that discipline there is a clear definition of bliss points as a bundle of consumption that marks the level when the consumer is fully satisfied, and welfare is at its maximum, we would say: on the chart it is the point Z, which marks where the consumer is indifferent between two goods. It's a bit complex as discussed in microeconomics, but I hope you get the idea.

Now, in layman's terms, we continued to discuss that the day that the first child is born is also seemingly without much dispute another bliss point--at least potentially so. Again, the cynic, never far away, might jump up and say, "And if you weren't in despair after being married, now that some brat has come along to share food and hog up your personal time, then this really is staring into the abyss." There was no wag in our midst who jumped up to say, "If you got married and the bride was pregnant, then during the honeymoon night she gave birth you would call that true bliss? I don't think so." But had he/she been there this could have been another of those economist's 'on the one hand, on the other hand' moments. On the one hand, it would be good to have gotten the childbirth thing over so fast; but on the other hand, it would have been nice to have time to get used to one headache before this new one started.

The economists amongst you may already have reached the point that I am now about to touch. The discipline of economics is often referred to as 'the dismal science', because it often contains depressing, distressing, or despondency-filled predictions. What could be more dismal than all of the predictions of financial Armageddon that economists are now putting in front of us? But the dismality is that the discipline has the notion of 'diminishing returns'. This was first coined by Thomas Malthus, one of the most pessimistic of the dismal scientists, who predicted that population growth would force incomes down to the subsistence level. In Malthusian terms, the argument was that if a fixed input is combined in production with a variable input, using a given technology, increases in the quantity of the variable input will eventually depress the productivity of the variable input. Malthus argued that decreasing productivity of labor would depress incomes. Pretty depressing as it's written, eh.

Now, where does the notion of diminishing returns take us? It implies that for a man it's better to have just one wife, or really one woman: too many of them added to the one poor bloke's household must make the feller's productivity fall, and as more women are added the fall will be faster. That's the best argument I can make against polygamy. But, it also means that the Chinese approach of having only one child may not be as draconian as some would like to argue. Sure, having more bairns around when you have a field into which you can fling them to plant corn, and wheat, and pull yoken cattle may raise output. But, even the most loving of parents knows that these offspring aren't capable of producing much for a long time; in the mean time they need feeding like starving locusts. Simply put, the man--because biologically and emotionally the woman is going to argue that she hang tight with the little mites--has to go and do all the work in the baking sun, or frozen tundra, at least for about five years after the first child is born. All he reaps, they will eat. Where is the field of dreams?

So, after several years of seeing income pushed to subsistence level, first-born bairn comes along and says, "Dad, can I help you in the field?" As the dust settles after Dad falls dead faint beside his mule, the bairn looks on doe-eyed. With the words, "Sure, Tiger," the man's world will change. He will have help, that if well trained will reduce the effort he needs to expend, though the training process can be hard and seemingly unrewarding for a long time--more sense of diminishing returns. So, assume that Dadda has first child when he is 20; add five years of feeding without added help; add two years of initial training; add another year to ensure that the new kid can work unsupervised.That makes Dadda about 28. Any of you who are sportsmen will know that this is close to what is viewed as the 'prime age' of a man (see Time article).

So, where were we? Oh, yes. Bliss. It does exist. It lasts for more than a day. It can be built upon. But, you have to steer through a lot of choppy water and rough rapids along the way. Maybe it's a good thing you don't realize this at the start. So, think hard or at least differently next time you hear the phrase, 'Where ignorance in bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.'

Jamaica, land we love.

By complete accident, brought about by a need to be budget conscious, I'm in a unique phase of my life. I landed in Jamaica yesterday and for the first time I'm in the land of my birth when it celebrates its independence, on August 6. I left Jamaica in 1961, when it was still a British colony, and within a year it was waving goodbye to British rule, while I was just getting used to the real version of the British rulers, as I continued my primary schooling in London.

Forty-six years on, we should have a country that is truly grown up. Many would argue that the country's development has been one of stunted growth, if you look at the way that the economy, with its potentially strong base of mining, mineral processing, agriculture and tourism has struggled to produce enough wealth and jobs to really nurture the majority of the people.

The country has a very grown up political system, which common to the Caribbean, has never broken apart: we have never had a coup, never been ruled by a despot or dictator, never had an election whose outcome could be contested as the result of widespread fraud. Changes of leaders of parties may not always have been the result of a true choice, but a lot of democratic principles have been applied in forming and changing the main political parties and their leaders. Jamaica currently has its opposition party about to head into a contest for its presidency, with the current leader/former prime minister pitted against an aspiring lieutenant. We have a prime minister who left a party to form his own, and was "brought back into the fold" to lead the party he had left, and then went on to beat the then governing party in an election many believed that they could not, and should not, have lost. We know that many countries that gained their independence from colonial rulers have found it hard to live up to these kind of political standard: Zimbabwe is probably the most glaring failure in that regard at the current time. Jamaicans have much to be proud of in their political systems.

We have justifiably enormous pride in our cultural achievements since independence, including, but not limited to, gracing the world with a completely new musical form in reggae. We have founded a new religion in Rastafarianism which has more than a trivially small following. Connecting those two phenomena we have, of course, Bob Marley. We can take immense pride from our sporting prowess, which was evident in athletics well before independence with the likes of Arthur Wint (who gives his name to where my father now lives) and has continued in that sport since--today we stand with the amazing fact of having the current and immediate former world record holder in the 100 metres sprint (why else have a name like Bolt if you are not going to produce a streak of lightning?). Historians and sociologists can argue all they like about the why but this little island has consistently produced fast runners, even more amazing when you look at those born here and developed elsewhere. We produced many heroes in the region's favourite sport, cricket. We led the region in soccer status by getting a place in the World Cup Finals and not looking too out of place.

We have cultural icons in literary and intellectual fields, many well known in the region, many well known outside it. To me, "Miss Lou" (Louise Bennett) stands out the most. We have beauty and grace. I remember the thrill as a pre-pubescent boy in London when I heard that Miss Jamaica (Carol Joan Crawford) had become Miss World in 1963, right there in London's Lyceum Hall. I had no idea what this meant, I just felt that a Jamaican woman had been thought lovely enough to win a "world something" and that was great. Several years older, and well past adolescence, I was again thrilled in London, when Miss Jamaica (this time, Cindy Breakspeare) was again crowned Miss World 1976. Things like that put your little country more visibly on the world map, no matter what you think about beauty pageants.

Jamaicans now tend to hang their heads in shame when they see, hear or read news about social developments in the island. Our biggest claim to fame in many people's minds in that we have one of the highest rates of murders in the world (we are in the top three with Colombia and South Africa, one "medal" ranking I would gladly see slip away). Imagine me in Barbados just yesterday hearing the news that Jamaica had just registered murder number 926 for 2008. When I arrived at the Kingston airport yesterday, I met my first-born daughter who was going to visit from the US/Canada for a week. As we left the Palisadoes area, I pointed out to her the sign showing each year's road fatalities: they averaged around 330 each year between 2005-2007. "Look!"I said, "That's what greets visitors to the island as they head away from the airport. If that's appropriate publicity, then they should do full disclosure and put up the murder figures, which are more than triple the road deaths." Yet, in saying that, I had not one ounce of fear that I would meet any trouble. I nver have and I hope I never will. As my driver/friend sped me up the highway and told me that Mandeville had just had two shootings in the town centre, I could only say matter-of-fact-like, "That's close to home." He joked: "Maybe we should move to Kingston."

No debate today about who is, or what is, a Jamaican, or about the value and place of our language/dialect, Patois. If you feel pride in the sound of the name Jamaica or Jumakya then today is your day. You can read and think about the meaning of the words of the National Anthem, and deal yourself with whether the hymn contains just pretty words with no meaning, or if it holds good seeds, which if nurtured well will help to grow something very strong.

Eternal Father bless our land,
Guard us with Thy Mighty Hand,
Keep us free from evil powers,
Be our light through countless hours.
To our Leaders, Great Defender,
Grant true wisdom from above.
Justice, Truth be ours forever,
Jamaica, Land we love.
Jamaica, Jamaica, Jamaica land we love.

Teach us true respect for all,
Stir response to duty’s call,
Strengthen us the weak to cherish,
Give us vision lest we perish.
Knowledge send us Heavenly Father,
Grant true wisdom from above.
Justice, Truth be ours forever,
Jamaica, land we love.
Jamaica, Jamaica, Jamaica land we love.