WILD ECONOMY

September 9, 2009
Kgalagadi Transfrontier National Park
Ten lions, a dominant male, two females, five cubs and two young males nearby, rest in the afternoon heat. The male Kalahari Desert lions are known for their flowing, dark, beautiful manes, which grow fuller than most due to the lack of vegetation and underbrush. It’s hot, dry and primal out here in this bright African afternoon. The cubs rough-house, chew on sticks and nurse; the dominant male lazily sits up to survey his domain; the mamas nap only moving to stay in the shade; and the young males shift restlessly to survey the main pride to which they hope to have access someday. Mostly they all sleep.
They pay us no mind even though we’re but 20 feet away for two hours in the 35 degree heat. A few german tourists in self-drive 4x4’s toting massive cameras and lenses come and go. Still we sit, sweating yet mesmerized by the spectacle of wild lions in this wild place.
Like the Germans, we are on a self-safari in this remote game park on the border between Namibia and South Africa. We are in a rented Kia Sportage bound from Cape Town to the Angola/Namibia border and have our own small array of electronic recording devices (not too much: remember our carry-on provision), and are in the process of surveying two dry river valleys where the game collect from Twee Riverien to Nossob and over to Mata-Mata searching. Watching the King of Beasts playfully swat an frisky cub, it occurs to me that our ‘market economy’ means nothing to these wild creatures. They are affected by markets surely; but they know and care nothing of them. For them life just is.
In contrast, I live, observe lions in Africa, and am able to write this by virtue of my active participation in market economies. What’s especially interesting about Africa is that there are fair numbers of people who, like the Kalahari lions, are influenced by market forces, but as a practical matter they know and care little about them. For a good portion of humanity life is still pretty basic – living moment by moment hunt for food, shelter, sex, and harmonized social relations. And this is an economy of sorts – a wild economy. It’s older, more raw and as I gaze at the lions, realize isn’t going away anytime soon. Market economies are a structure of human interpretation with agreed to rules and norms; wild economies are somehow different.
In New York I met with folks from Millennium Promise, an NGO committed to eradicating extreme poverty consistent with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. In early October Marci, Skye and I will visit one of their projects in Malawi to explore how to develop markets for agricultural goods in communities with no infrastructure and no investment capital. Theirs is a problem of transitioning people from a wild economy to a market economy. According to Millennium Promise there are one billion people living in extreme poverty world-wide. That’s a lot of people living close to wild economics. I’ve grown up in market economics – I know nothing else – and the last 5 years have looked deeply into the unintended impacts – good and bad – of markets. What I’ve learned is there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Participation in the global economy has clear benefits, but also its costs. And because it works on human-created rules, one has to choose to participate in order to make it work. Thus I suspect that this is why most ‘aid’ fails and why the WTO will continue to have challenges. Ultimately, people must choose to participate in markets; to let go of the wild, ancient and raw – with all its benefits and costs – and embrace the new.
And as I sit, sweat and commune with the Kalahari lions I can almost see a kind of picture into that wild human economy. But not quite.