Mugabe, Zimbabwe, Inflation, etc.

My most recent Fortune article on Zimbabwe has been on the newsstands for a couple of weeks, but it's not online yet. The short version: if Robert Mugabe stays in power and continues to thoroughly ruin the economy, he'll eventually run out of money to pay his security forces (the only thing standing between Zimbabwe and official failed state status) and may find himself in a position familiar to the people he has oppressed--cowering in terror at the barrel of a gun, being issued demands he cannot possibly meet.

An excerpt:

A passage from The State of Africa by Martin Meredith, recalls the explanation offered to citizens for cutting off their food supplies [during the Matabeleland conflict]: "First you will eat your chickens, then your goats, then your donkeys. Then you will eat your children, and finally you will eat the dissidents." But most of the dissidents left the country before anyone could stick a fork in them... That Mugabe has any resources left to plunder at all is a function of what is increasingly a remittance economy.

"The World's Worst Inflation" [Fortune]

UPDATE: It's online now. You can read it here.

See also Peter Godwin's excellent piece in Vanity Fair this month.

Job Posting: Culture Blog Editor

I'm helping out with recruiting and development for a company that's launching an omnibus culture blog and we're looking for a full-time editor. The ideal candidate is a cultural omnivore who has some experience with blogging, managing/editing people (freelance contributions and submissions by internal staffers), and generating ideas for original content. The candidate should also be familiar with site traffic analysis, if only to understand how the site's audience is responding to the editorial mix.

The client is a company with an established brand that already has quite a bit of proprietary cultural content that should/would be incorporated into the site, but is looking for an editor with a strong vision for the product that extends beyond aggregation of the existing offerings. The ideal candidate is capable of developing an editorial series that draws traffic, is unique to its genre, is well-produced and appeals to both insiders and outsiders.

And those, frankly, are minimum requirements for any good editor. The primary challenge for this particular job is that several genres fit under the "culture" rubric and the editor needs to be able to navigate all of them. So if you happen to have job experience in both music and visual arts (or publishing and video games--multiple genres--etc.), a good generalist is more appealing than a niche expert. Specialists are highly valued in this economy, but we need a jack of all trades. Send resumes and/or suggestions to espiers AT gmail .

The Case for Nukes

Belatedly: my last Fortune column has been up for a while. It's about nuclear energy, which has never been popular, but which I think no intellectually serious environmentalist can credibly dismiss as an alternative to fossil fuel burning technologies. Nuclear energy is cleaner, and empirically speaking, much, much safer. But we've all seen The China Syndrome and Chernobyl documentaries, which tend to take up more emotional space in the public psyche than things like actual evidence and hard numbers. (Never underestimate the power of Jane Fonda.)

The case for nukes [Fortune]

Are You Local?

My last Fast Company column is up now. (As explained previously, my Fortune contract is exclusive for business writing, so I can't write for Fast Company anymore.) I expect that this will get me more than the usual allotment of hate mail, but you can only walk into so many Brooklyn boutiques with piles of artisanally crafted chocolate, sweaters knittedly lovingly by resident hipsters and all-caps exhortations to "BUY LOCAL" before the implied self-righteousness starts to make you twitch. (Me, anyway.) There are good reasons to buy local, but they're usually not the reasons why people actually do. From the column:

The same people who are horrified by the xenophobic implications of "buy American" campaigns also engage in a different sort of provincialism when it comes to their own consumption choices. Why? Let's face it, much of the buy-local movement has nothing to do with geography. The emotional tenor, at least, is much more about shunning corporate behemoths. If the farmer next door happens to be Monsanto, you rethink buying local. What buying local really means is buying boutique-branded artisanal products that are crafted with tender loving care by actual human beings.

Or that merely appear to be.

Neighborhoodlums: Benefits of Buying Local? [Fast Company]

Wanted: A Room with A View. Of Sorts.

I'm flooding the zone with this request (which means I put it here AND on Twitter):

I'm looking for housing (for about a month) in Phnom Penh and sadly, there is no http://cambodia.craigslist.org. (There is a http://vietnam.craigslist.org, but that's just not close enough.) So if anyone has any contacts in the region who could help, I'd much appreciate the assistance. I was in Phnom Penh in January and it was crawling with NGO Westerners, who presumably have similar real estate needs, but I don't actually know any of them. Any suggestions would be welcome. Email me at elizabeth.spiers AT earthlink DOTnet.

Administrative Note

My gracious host is making some server changes, so this site will be offline for about a week starting sometime this week and Monday at the latest. Not that it matters too much, given how infrequently I update, but just warning you so no one thinks I've been hacked or forgot to renew my domain name (both of which are totally plausible scenarios that have happened before).

We'll return to our regularly scheduled one-post-a-month shortly thereafter.

Gold Rush

"As far as I can tell, there are only three constituencies outside the mining or commodities-trading industries who have historically demonstrated consistent enthusiasm for acquiring gold: street pavers in heaven, leprechauns, and survivalists." Thus begins my most recent Fortune column.

We did a series about where to put your money in a recession and I took the a look one of the more popular options for the truly paranoid: gold investments. Something must be in the air because I pitched it several weeks ago with the notion that I wanted to talk a bit about survivalists and why they love gold, and the next weekend I amused to see a piece in the New York Times about the popularity of survivalism--in the Styles section, no less. It's an interesting piece written by my talented former colleague, Alex Williams, and you can read it here.

Alex's piece notes that interest in survivalism is the highest it's been since the late 1970s. As it happens, gold is also the highest it's been (price-wise) since the late 1970s. From my column:

...for those who remember the late 1970s, survivalism wasn't the only thing going up at the time. If you have any interest in precious metals, you may recall that period as the last time gold went up precipitously, setting a record high of $850 an ounce in January 1980. The intersection of the two is not a coincidence.

Both were in part triggered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and concerns about the economy. In 1979 inflation was high, energy prices were high, unemployment was high, and global political instability was an ongoing source of anxiety.

Now it's 2008. Inflation is on the rise (unless you're averting your eyes and focusing only on "core inflation," as the Fed would have you do), energy prices are high, unemployment is going up, and political instability is an ongoing source of anxiety. Concurrently, survivalism is enjoying a revival, and after a horrendous performance during most of the '80s and '90s (dropping to around $264 an ounce in 2000), gold has once again shot up, reaching a record high of $1,030.80 on March 17.

You can read the full article here.

Should You Rush to Gold? [Fortune]

Ch-Ch-Changes : Housekeeping issues

As announced in the NY Post yesterday, I just signed on as a contributing writer at Fortune. Which, as Alex Pareene at Gawker notes, means I'm doing the same thing I was already doing, but with a different title. My contract calls for 10 columns and 2 features over the print mag over the next 12 months and Fortune is published twice a month, so on average I'll have something in every other issue.

However, the contract is exclusive for business writing, which means I can't write the back-page column for Fast Company anymore. This is unfortunate because I really enjoyed writing the column and my editors there, David Lidsky and Bob Safian, have been incredibly supportive. My last column will be in the June issue.

Lastly, I've never emailed my articles upon publication because it feels like spamming people, but a lot of people have requested that I do that, as they don't always check this site and want to know. So I'm going to do a monthly (or maybe quarterly) newsletter, for people who have indicated that they want that. But it's opt-in, so if you want to be on it, email me at spierslist AT gmail.

Boskinomics: The Great Inflation Cover-up

I have a doom-and-gloom inflation column is this week's issue of Fortune. Summary: We're All Screwed!

So how do we account for the discrepancy between the Federal Reserve's recent assurances that inflation is under control and the 91% of the population that's worried it isn't? There are several possibilities: The first is that we're all paranoid. We simply need reassurance from the authorities: Inflation rates are fine, nothing to see here, move along quietly. The second is that the Fed's insistence on focusing on "core" inflation - a measure that strips energy and food from the consumer price index (CPI) because they're theoretically subject to short-term volatility - makes inflation seem smaller than it is, or than we feel it to be when our gallon of milk that was 12% cheaper last year gets swiped across the grocery store scanner, beeping ominously like a tiny alarm bell. (While core inflation was just 2.3% in February, the CPI was 4%.) The third and most disconcerting possibility is that the CPI systemically understates inflation, in which case we're paying for it taxwise, and the government is underpaying Social Security recipients. In the words of many a UFO spotter, it isn't paranoia if they're really out to get you.

The Great Inflation Cover-up

April Fast Company: Library of the Living Dead

My April Fast Company column is up now. It's about the self-help-ification of the business book genre and, well, its general cliches:

...There are the tortured metaphors (usually involving cute animals with simple, vaguely ambulatory problems -- mice chasing moving cheese, penguins realizing their iceberg is melting and having nowhere to go) and the slightly less persecuted similes (business is like The Art of War, business is like Winnie the Pooh, business is like having your pinkie finger pulled backward until the pain is intolerable). There is the gratuitous manufacture of new jargon that sounds like English but is in fact spoken only in hotel conference rooms near the airport...

Library of the Living Dead [Fast Company]

Bear Quick Take

I wrote a short piece for Slate yesterday on why the Fed had to bail out Bear Stearns. It's a bit simplified if you've been digesting every piece of news that comes down the pipe about the story, but if not, and you want to know why your taxpayer money should be going to Bear (or JPMorgan, as it were), take a look for a quick explanation. (The short answer: when choosing between catastrophe and apocalypse, one generally picks catastrophe.)

Bear Run [Slate]

Upcoming events

Assuming LaGuardia isn't buried under several inches of plane-immobilizing snow, I'm speaking tomorrow at Georgia Tech's "Journalism 3G" symposium. Details here.

And next weekend I'll be at Mount Holyoke College for their Future in Communications conference. (Also keynoting the conference is the lovely and intelligent Priscilla Painton, who I had the good fortune to meet when she was still at Time. Even Gawker likes her!)

Edward St. Aubyn. Again!

As previously mentioned, I foisted Edward St. Aubyn's last book (Mother's Milk) upon nearly everyone I know after reading it in 2005. It was published here by Open City and enjoyed a bit of extra publicity in when it was shortlisted for the Booker in 2006. Nonetheless, St. Aubyn doesn't seem to be as well known in the U.S. as in his native U.K., so I still recommend it constantly, along with his previously published trilogy, Some Hope.

So I was happy to see that Mother's Milk just won the Prix Femina Etranger. The Times on Sunday has an interview on the subject here. It talks a bit about St. Aubyn's two earlier novels, On The Edge and A Clue to the Exit, both of which I was desperate to read after finishing the trilogy and finally found via Amazon UK used books, although it made me $100 poorer because those books were apparently out of print at the time. Fortunately, recent accolades seem to have convinced Picador to republish them with a Feb 1 '08 pub date, so you can get them now via Amazon UK for the (relatively) low, low price of £ 4.75. (On the Edge takes place at Esalen, by the way--a detail of which should make it of interest to at least half of yuppie Brooklyn.)

Fast Company, February: This Column Contains No Transfats

My Fast Company column for February is up now. You can read it here. It's about the health-ification of junk food brands. In the interest of research, various "healthy" junk foods were consumed in the making of said column:

I bought something at Whole Foods last week called Laura's Wholesome Junk Food Chocolate X-Treme Fudge Bite-lettes. I was willing to forgive the spelling of "extreme" here as if it preceded a dirt-bike competition, but the "bite-lettes" tasted so bad that I had to chase them with a Dove Organic chocolate bar, the medicinal aftertaste of which only disappeared after the consumption of a handful of Ferrara Pan Red Hots, which are, according to the packaging, a "fat-free food." ... Certainly, it's possible to find and highlight the healthy aspects of nearly anything (arsenic: cholesterol and fat free!).

Devil's Food [Fast Company]

PC Mag's 25th Anniversary

PC Mag, which celebrates its 25th Anniversary this month, asked me to write a short essay on the future of media and how current trends will shape what happens in the next few years. It's hard to write short on that one, but I gave it a shot. The six-word summary: continued fragmentation and more consumer choice.

Also included in the issue are essays from Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Vint Cerf, John McCain and Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Shilling. (See here.)

The Media Company of the Future [PC Mag]