Common Stereotypes - Defending and Embracing Working Roots

On vacation, at the Mediterranean.

When we went out for beer at the beach with a couple of my wife's cousins (people who were at our wedding here in southern France 26 years ago), I found myself trying to simplify my thoughts so that my French vocabulary would be less of a struggle.  My French isn't too bad "for an American truck driver".  But I admit I don't try as hard as I used to.  My wife and kids speak exclusively in French, but most of my vocabulary is now about reminding teenagers to clean up a mess in the kitchen.  It's not very philosophical stuff.

Anyway, when you're my age and you come to visit inlaws in France once a year, you wind up retelling and re-asking and re-recounting a lot of the same stuff anyway.  And one of the "small talk" topics is always whether I fit a stereotype of "American" based on the French news.

When Formal Market is Criminal, is Informal more Moral?

Quick thanks for a tip from a pal via Tweet, here's a thought-provoking article on Informal Trade in East Africa.  Kate Douglas writes in HowWeMadeItInAfrica.com

Wheelbarrows of dollars: Understanding informal trade in East Africa 

I'll leave you to read it, it's about the underestimation of the power and importance of "informal" markets in Africa, and how "off the books" trade makes African commerce look smaller than it really is.  That's not a huge surprise - how much of the growth in China's economy came from record-keeping of trade previously off the record?

The thoughts provoked here are based on my sadness and disgust at the levels of corruption I witnessed while living in Africa in the mid-80s.  I remember going through checkpoints in East Zaire (Dem Republic of Congo) which were set up by soldiers on dirt roads in the jungle.  Using a fallen tree to block the road, the soldiers would stop taxivans and demand bribes, while waving machine guns.

When "formal" is run by criminals, the moral market may be the informal.