Rasheed Griffith discusses the factors impeding progress in the Caribbean and shares his optimism for the region. He identifies the decline in public sector quality since the 1960s as a major obstacle.
Griffith suggests that reforming the public sector could significantly advance the Caribbean by attracting international talent and improving policy implementation. He also discusses the historical impact of British technocracy in the Caribbean, proposing that adopting a more internationalized public service could be beneficial. Griffith urges a shift towards leveraging global trade for growth.
The discussion also touches on the potential of dollarization, the limited utility of charter cities in the Caribbean, and the importance of understanding regional culture through food and history.
“every Caribbean country should be dollarized. No exceptions. Caribbean countries, any small country, there is very little utility of having your own currency except for having the ability of the government to mismanage it at some point in time. And that has historically been the case in the Caribbean, been the case in Latin America, been the case in Europe, Asia, it goes down the line.
There is no real extra benefit you have from having your own currency, as a very small country, dependent on a global currency anyway. This manifests even stranger things. So for example, Caribbean still has very harsh capital controls, not all Caribbean, but the ones that have their own currency do, and that limits people's freedom to consume as much as what they want.
It also has again, the ever present risk and reality of the government abusing the exchange Abusing money creation tool obviously hurts the exchange rate hurts inflation all those kind of things So when you really look into it, there's no proper counter argument to dollarization to me when someone says What's the counter argument to me?
That's like saying what is the argument in favor of having an unsound currency? It's a non starter in that sense.”
We talk about culture including reggae, VS Naipaul and Rastafarians. And on food:
“when you understand why you, in Barbados, eat curry goat and roti, of course that has a very big impact on how you think about your own history. Jerk chicken, is very famous in Jamaica. I think it's very difficult to get good jerk chicken outside of Jamaica. There are some spots in London that have some good jerk chicken, but usually, if you go to a place that has jerk chicken, it's likely not actually jerk chicken.
Any case, even jerk chicken, for example, if you understand how it works is very deeply into how Jamaican history operates. So it came from Mexico after the slaves, this plantation has this thing called Maroon, like free slave holdings in the mountains in Jamaica. And jerk chicken is one of the food products they actually created.
It goes really far back. And one of the current ingredients of jerk chicken that we usually use in sauce is soy sauce. Now soy sauce, of course, it's not from Jamaica, it's from China primarily speaking. So you see how the Chinese influence in Jamaica, for example, goes back to the food, like the core Jamaican food has this Chinese influence as well.”
We discuss how to assess talent, what questions to ask in an interview and how to be better for interviews.
We play underrated/overrated on: GDP, Universal Basic Income and carbon tax.
Griffith shares insights into his creative process and the importance of public intellectual engagement.
Finally we end on some advice thoughts. Advice:
I think people should try to be a lot more public in their thoughts.
Writing things online for the public is a nice constrained device.
Podcast, transcript and headlines below. Video above or on YouTube.
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo
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Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh
All links: https://pod.link/1562738506
Contents:
00:20 Challenges and Optimism for Caribbean Progress
00:33 The Impact of Public Sector Quality on Caribbean Development
04:37 Exploring Solutions: International Public Service and Technocratic Reforms
06:03 Debating the Viability of Charter Cities in the Caribbean
08:42 The Case for Dollarization in Caribbean Economies
10:50 China's Economic Influence in the Caribbean
17:51 Policy Recommendations for Caribbean Growth
21:26 Cultural Shifts and the Role of Art in the Caribbean
28:48 Reggae Music: A Reflection of Caribbean Culture and History
33:55 Understanding Caribbean Culture Through Food
37:18 Exploring Global Food Contexts and Talent Assessment
37:43 Assessing Talent Beyond the Surface
39:29 The Importance of Project and Person in Ventures
41:11 Communication Skills in the Digital Age
46:13 Creative Processes and Writing Insights
52:11 Evaluating Economic Measures and Policies
01:00:18 Current Projects and Future Thoughts
01:06:30 Life and Career Advice
Transcript (AI transcribed so errors possible)
Ben: Super excited to be chatting to Rasheed Griffith. Rasheed hosts his own podcast, The Rasheed Griffith Show. He leads the Caribbean Progress Studies Institute, and he also has roles as a Schmidt Fellow and Emergent Ventures Program Director. Rasheed, welcome. Hello. Thinking about the Caribbean, what do you think is most holding back progress?
And on the other side, what are you most optimistic over?
Rasheed: Progress. So a lot of the reason why the Caribbean has not progressed much since the 1960s has to do with the quality of the public sector, where the quality of the public sector was actually a lot higher. In 1960s, late 1950s than it is now, and people find that very ironic.
And because of that, the ability for the government to actually implement good, sound policies or programs, reorganize different priorities, has not tended to go very well. In terms of, for example, education, science policy, monetary policy, all of these things are going to go a lot more haywire as you go further and further into the independence period.
So I think if the public sector in the Caribbean were able to be reformed in a way to allow for more competitive international workers, then you would get quite far and get more progress in the Caribbean. It's not that hard.
Ben: And I guess that's a reason to be optimistic in the sense that if you can improve the public service part, then you could unleash quite a lot of progress.
And I guess is that the same reason for the stagnation for a lot of Caribbean? Is that it is mostly around your public services in your view?
Rasheed: Yeah, I think so. Because, you can say things like, okay, there's not that much capital formation or things like that. But the problem is that you have a very direct path between very poor bureaucratic or very poor sighted public sectors to having less capital formation.
For example, if you have a hotel that wants to open, In the Caribbean country, it takes five years to get the paperwork done because of the bureaucracy. You already installed capital formation, you can install everything else. So it really comes back to the public sector, in my view, especially for very small countries that don't have that broad view of coordination.
Where in America, you have a lot more complex problems for England, for example, but for very small countries, to me, the problem is a lot more simple.
Ben: And so your idea that growth in the 1950s and 60s was better would probably stem from the fact that public services were better. And that, correlates with post colonial having a lot of that still infrastructure, which has essentially been imported from, foreign talent.
Is that primarily your view or there are other nuances to consider?
Rasheed: That's a big part of it. Coming to the end of the colonial period, I'll say during the colonial period, a lot of the public, her technocracy was British influenced. At that time, then Britain hadn't even itself a better public sector.
So a lot of the British technocratic systems were used in the Caribbean, that allowed things to be a lot more efficiently ran, but as you move away from that kind of technocratic nature of public service into essentially changing the public service into a jobs program, which was almost an explicit idea, for example, with the First Prime Minister of Barbados, Ariel Barrow, he had this idea that you can create a middle class via public engagement.
And that, somewhat, definitely is true, but at the same time it lost the technocratic, competitive nature of public service work. But therefore, the ability of people to properly implement policy just went down dramatically as you move into the independence period. So yeah, so the colonial administration of Britain At the time, actually had a very big impact, positive impact on the public sector governance of the Caribbean and therefore growth.
A lot of it was actually very British influenced.
Ben: And how much weight do you put essentially on the demographics of the Caribbean, in the sense that populations are quite small. So for a good technocratic institutions, perhaps ideally you'd want to import talent from anywhere in the world in order to Help your own institutions out.
And I've read that's one of the solutions that you're thinking about. Would that be one of the primary tools you would think about, or are there other things to consider as well?
Rasheed: Of course, there are other things to consider, but yes, having a technocratic public service is, I think, priority number one, in terms of like deep reform, structural reform.
And you do that by having a more international public service. This was, again, pretty common for example in Hong Kong, for example, pretty common your area, for example, parallel, so right now, let's say, Bermuda, a Caribbean country, but still a British dependency right now, they have a much more open public service.
You have very many accents you hear in some policy calls in Bermuda, for example, you hear Kenyan accent, you hear Australian accent, you hear British accent, you hear Caribbean accent. Canadian accent. Where in Barbados, it really is this Barbadian accent here. You can see numbers. Barbados performs a lot better than Barbados in essentially everything you can look at.
So having an internationalized public service, which is antithetical to post independence thought in the Caribbean, is something you have to get back to. Because as I said, they have a very small population, so Grenada has, 100, 000 people or so. You're not going to get enough high talented people to run the entire country from that very small pool of talent.
Ben: Do you like the idea of charter cities and do you think it would be helpful in the Caribbean or it'd be better placed in other geographies?
Rasheed: I have a complicated thought on that. Essentially, I would usually You know, if someone have a good idea, it wants to, for some funding for EV, for example, and it has a charter city tinge.
I probably would still give them money. I have done that before. However, in the Caribbean, I don't think it's actually necessary. Because, again, these are very small countries. The Caribbean countries themselves are charter cities. That's usually, that's literally how they started. They were started by.
Essentially conquest in most cases, there are people who had private interests and they wanted to go to this random new land and start building up. That's what a charter is. So history of the Caribbean is essentially very charter centric. However, to me, when you see that, that kind of gives you more pessimism towards charter cities, because they slow down.
They really don't really go that much very long. And essentially, if you don't have outside influence, you really have a not a very good chance of it working. It's why I always find the people always use the Hong Kong example. It's a terrible example because it was again Outside influence. It was an internally constructed from private enterprise So I don't actually think there are any good examples of properly Working charter cities as they're moderately in let's say conceptualized, I think in theory, it can work.
But for the Caribbean, again, because these are so small, I think the effort you put into trying to build a charter city should be spent and put into reforming laws that already existed and getting better talent in the city. government, for example, like it, both are hard problems, but I think the, my hard problem has more utility.
Ben: Yeah. That's really fascinating. Cause we have the same I guess issues in a lot of places between do you want to build a new institution or reform institutions that you have both kind of quite difficult. Challenges, but the balance of weight in the
Rasheed: city isn't building a new institution. It's let's say making it to a very simple thing.
It's like building a thousand new institutions. Yeah. It's all at the same time. And I don't think that's usually very feasible.
Ben: And where do you think dollarization helps or doesn't help. Would it help places in the Caribbean? Or again, do you think it's for geographies and countries in a different circumstance?
Rasheed: So every Caribbean country should be dollarized. No exceptions. Caribbean countries, any small country, there is very little utility of having your own currency except for having the ability of the government to mismanage it at some point in time. And that has historically been the case in the Caribbean, been the case in Latin America, been the case in Europe, Asia, it goes down the line.
There is no real extra benefit you have from having your own currency, as a very small country, dependent on a global currency anyway. This manifests even stranger things. So for example, Caribbean still has very harsh capital controls, not all Caribbean, but the ones that have their own currency do, and that limits people's freedom to consume as much as what they want.
It also has again, the ever present risk and reality of the government abusing the exchange Abusing money creation tool obviously hurts the exchange rate hurts inflation all those kind of things So when you really look into it, there's no proper counter argument to dollarization to me when someone says What's the counter argument to me?
That's like saying what is the argument in favor of having an unsound currency? It's a non starter in that sense.
Ben: I guess the counter argument would have to rely on very reliable government, which is obviously not not necessarily what we're looking at here.
Rasheed: No, but even then the problem is that even if you rely on very, if you say you had, okay, we have a very good government, therefore, let's have a national currency, there's still no extra benefit you'd get from doing that, right?
It's like having the currency is also stable if you have a very common government, but why do you put the effort into it? Sure. Should Canada have its own currency tied to USD if it had a stable government? What's the benefit of that?
Ben: I can see the argument. I think that leads me to think about the role of somewhere like China in the Caribbean or even Africa.
How do you see Chinese influence and do you see the sort of positives and negatives of that? So China's.
Rasheed: Influence has usually to do with economics. China has very little, if any political influence on anything in the Caribbean and in economics is still okay. So it depends on how you look at it. The correct way, in my view, is to see that if you go to any store in the Caribbean, you will see, made in China.
That's not unique to the Caribbean. It's a very world phenomenon. Everything is made in China. But if you go, let's say, to the trade data, you wouldn't see a particularly large trade surplus or deficit in China. You would see it in the U. S. still. So you assume, okay therefore, the U. S. is the most important trade partner.
Partly Caribbean, but everything is still made in China. Cause when you think about it, it gives a bad view. When you look at trade numbers in this sense, because the goods go from China to the U S then it goes from the U S the Caribbean, Miami and New York, Pennsylvania or so on, something like that now, but different issue.
So it seems like Caribbean, the major trade partner is the U S but clearly it's China because all the goods are in China. I mean in China. So it's that kind of phantom trade issue you look at. So when you think about that more deeply, you realize that, okay Chinese companies exist for their own profit motive or other things.
But what they did is that they pushed down the prices of most goods. That you have to consume. So for Caribbean countries, very poor countries, the benefit of China economically is the cost saving you get from your imports. And you can really apply that money to other priorities. So just the existence of China in the global trading system is the biggest economic benefit that Caribbean countries get from China.
It's not for example, a loan for a stadium, a loan for a road, which are, there are many of those things. But the macroeconomic benefit is just China existing as a global trading partner. People tend to not realize that's the real benefit. Now, China also puts like loans into Caribbean countries via like hotel loans, rural loans, bilateral loans, mostly infrastructure projects that are essentially more difficult to fund.
The caribbean country find it hard to fund via non policies, but i would say that it was difficult to fund via capital markets because the caribbean governments themselves are very poorly fiscally coordinated so they have a hard time getting money from the capital markets so china has less you Essentially, not to say the bad thing, but they give the money a bit easier to Caribbean country.
So therefore they like that. But I think that's generally not a good thing. Anyway, we'll be done.
Ben: One interpretation of that is that The Chinese institutions are prepared to accept below a market return, or in other words, they're getting on taking on increased governance risk. In exchange for that, they are winning, in their view, political or social gains.
capital or influence. But your suggestion was that maybe these infrastructure projects aren't giving as much political influence as you might have thought, obviously important within the business communities who'd want those projects. And presumably if they are taking risks that the other capital markets don't want, they probably are taking on higher risk.
Rasheed: It's not fully correct. So a lot of the loans that Chinese institutions give to let's say small countries. It's not from the explicit commercial process. It's from the state owned enterprises. So when the SOEs get the loan, their portfolio of risk is a very higher tolerance because of the more cash to have more liquidity to do those kinds of things.
But also more importantly, the amount of money the Caribbean infrastructure project gets from China is tiny in comparison to what they actually loan per year, even in China, for example. 200 million loan for a massive road project. In the Caribbean is nothing compared to what they would spend less similar institution would spend in, in China.
So because of that, it comes from that same pool is not as difficult to loan money relative now. So let's say you want to issue a bond. From Barbados to earn some, to raise some money on the capital market to build the same road, for example, the bond process is a lot more complicated, a lot more difficult fiscal policies have to put in place and so on, because the origin of the capital is a different origin.
It's not as, let's say house or skelter, they give the money out. Because it's an SOE. If the Caribbean relied on commercial, let's say, more explicit commercial loans from China, it would still be quite difficult to get the money in many ways. Now also the, again, I mentioned where Caribbean countries could raise Any amount of money they want from the US capital markets, but they're not organized enough to do it So a good example to use is during the height of covid bermuda issued a bond For a billion dollars and they got it filled quite quickly and that same period of time Barbados had to go to the IMS to get a loan because they couldn't actually get money from anywhere else.
Same Caribbean countries, one has good fiscal coordination, one does not. Because you're so small, any amount of money you want you can get from the market if you are properly organized. It's not a matter of the lack of money. The Caribbean governments often say, oh, lack of money for our priorities. It's not true.
Ben: Yeah, I could I could buy those arguments. To put that in the scale. China issuance in China, where you're talking hundreds of billions. So when you're looking at something, which is essentially in the millions, you're talking about probably not even a percent of the kind of loans that are doing it.
And even, it sounds Oh, a country wants to raise a billion, that might be a significant amount. But in terms of debt issuance, again, it's so small, even in just the US capital markets, let alone when you go globally. That I can see it's probably more to do with process knowledge and governance knowledge and the stuff which is the bigger bottleneck rather than access to capital.
So I'm interested then if you had, say, three policies that you would like to see enacted on the Caribbean, and I understand actually different nation states are a little bit different, what are the kind of policies that you would like? So I see one around dollarization, and I see one around, the technocratic sphere may be getting more outside nationals but there were any others you would, policies you would like to add in terms of thinking about economic growth or political economy?
Public reform is a basket of policy. It's not one policy in that particular thing, but a lot of the policies will be revolved around making the bureaucracy. Less rigid and making it more conducive to capital formation. That has the real thing, but that's like a large, blanket term for as many small policies, for example. Why is it take it so long for the countries to farm, a company, why it takes three weeks, why take two months is actually quite long in some Caribbean countries are, for example, why can't I get access to good central banking data, all these smaller problems are, for example why do we think this is all policy per se, but it's, yes, it's Political economy after your question.
Rasheed: Why do we think that the internal domestic economy is the more important aspect of growth? So that's a big issue. So the correct way to think about it is something like the nation is not the economy. And for small open economies, that is the fundamental truth you have to start with, where your economy benefits and can grow only when you act as a louver between global trading and global capital.
You can't think of your dimensional geography as like the thing you have to optimize. That's not true. Optimize the louvering between your geography and outside geography. And very often in Caribbean, you don't have that mindset, you have that mindset of we have to do everything domestically, like food security, the domestic problem, things like that, climate issues, domestic problems, and so on.
But you cannot have that mentality to start growth. You have to have the mentality of the Caribbean country is a global vehicle. Of growth. And until you have that mindset shift, a lot of these policies I'm talking about might actually seem abrasive when you have that shift where it's like, Oh, of course you have to do that way.
Ben: Yeah. So actually sitting right at the top is this kind of cultural or mindset shift change, because I see, we'll give a couple of your examples, the speed of business formation or the speed of a planning permit taking so long. Presumably some of that is it's sitting in front of a person who doesn't feel any urgency in pushing it on.
Some of it was technology because I'm assuming you could do some stuff more digitally via paper and there's an element of it. But if you had more of this urgency, which would be in a better person or a person who had that kind of agency, which is either a cultural mindset or the type of person that they are, then those are things which would speed on, there's not a technical issue, per se, in order to do that, you could have the people in and the processes in place.
Rasheed: The talent of the public sector really is the limiting factor as it always comes back to that idea the issue if you do not have a talented public sector, especially in a small economy, there is nothing you're going to get done. That has any chance of working concretely over long term.
Ben: And do you see this adjacent to, say, cultural capital? I remember reading one of your essays around the Nobel Prize winners, which has come from the Caribbean. And I think there were four in history, but less so in recent decades. And I was wondering whether you had any thoughts about why that might be and if it's a similar issue in terms of people capital, or is it just how the emphasis in terms of the cultural mindset of what the Caribbean wants to focus on in terms of its cultural arts?
Rasheed: So mindset is also a big part of it. I have a fairly, I guess negative view these days of Caribbean art, not in terms of the, It's concept of it, but the process of it, where a lot of Caribbean art these days is really focused on, broadly speaking, decolonial theory. I don't know if you're all familiar with that broad category thing.
And because of that, there's not much, in my view, there's not much you can do to have really inspired work when your mindset is very political. And because of that, I think art has taken a second place to activism in the Caribbean, more so than many places, because, you have the issue in the Caribbean, let's say, even in the US, England as well, that a lot of the young writers, essentially just people from Brooklyn that go to cafes and write about oppression, essentially.
You have a similar thing in the Caribbean, honestly. And it was not the case, 1950s, 1960s. It was a lot more vibrant into the world creation. Right now, it's not, it's no longer about world creation, that's how Caribbean culture was. It's now about like oppressive narratives. And that shift, I think, is very toxic into the benefit of Caribbean culture.
And you see it in music, you see it in writing, you see it in the actual art as well. So a lot of complex issues going on there that I think have been stalled stalled on Caribbean culture. In terms of other kind of talent aspects, Caribbean is way more educated today than it was 50 years ago.
But, no, no comparison. However, it does feel like the idea of the Caribbean has become weaker and weaker. Over time, we're even when you have people that go to London and Toronto and New York to study and live They have a less strong connection to the Caribbean as they did before and Many reasons why I think that could be the case But it is it definitely Caribbean cultures become a lot more weaker in last 50 years
Ben: And then thinking about some Caribbean writers I'm, I'd be interested what you would maybe get from VS Naipaul and what he would say today, and maybe whether you have a favorite Caribbean writer or artist you'd want to comment on.
Rasheed: Okay. VS Naipaul so VS Naipaul is, especially in the Caribbean also has a very like love, hate relationship with him. I would say, I would guess this is my favorite. Yes. On net, people who tend to teach literature, deep divs in Caribbean, on net, have a negative view of Naipaul. I think even when I was in school, not that long ago, like 15 years ago, it was still, I think, fairly negative towards Naipaul. Now, what would he say? Now, Naipaul, I think, would be very deeply troubled by the state of the Caribbean and the world, to be honest, especially the Anglosphere. He's, very big on the Anglosphere. I think he would assume by now you have a lot more Anglosphere power, a lot more Anglosphere coherence, and this idea of post coloniality.
would have essentially ended by now. At least the way how we see it as because his view is, the only way for the Caribbean to really thrive was to embrace the cosmopolitan nature of the atmosphere. That was the only possible way forward. But the current theory Especially in literature and even economics, for example, is you have to depart from the Anglosphere.
England was all bad. It was nothing to gain, nothing to benefit. You have to go away from it. Australia, Canada, America, these are all bad places. These are oppressors. You have to go away from it. So it's completely opposite to what Naipaul's theory of social change is. So I think he'd be even more grumpier.
Yes, if possible, I think
Ben: he would. I think he'd be, I think he'd be very grumpy. I think it would be surprised in the woke movement, surprised, but not post woke. And then he'd be extremely grumpy about it. That'd be quite interesting. Do you have a a favorite Caribbean writer or artist that you'd like to either read or look at their work?
Rasheed: I do really like Naipaul. I think all his books are, people have some, think so, some of his other books are a bit not as good. I'm like, okay, sure, it's not as good, a hundred to ninety is still pretty good to read. All his books are highly recommended. Especially his Caribbean focus books because he had the correct view of what postcolonial theory should look like.
And after the Caribbean, again, I thought I think postcolonial theory a lot more creative. It was a world creation methodology where now against a very, it's a kind of destructive methodology these days. But early 1980s reggae music from Jamaica is still, I think, some of the best the world has ever had, period.
And I think it's a bit harder to get into because it requires a lot more contextualization of what they're talking about, the terms they use. a lot of like terms like Babylon, for example, that you have to know the psychos, I say the psycho spiritual nature of those terms and really get what these people are saying.
So 80s, 70s, Reggae is, I think, one of the best human creations you have, and unfortunately, not that many people actually can consume it because they don't get what's happening. There are some books that try to get you into 1970s and 80s reggae, but I feel when I read them, I feel they're just missing something.
I guess it's me trying to put a bit too much intellectual nature into the music, but it is very intellectual. But if you can listen to the 1980s and 70s reggae like Peter Tosh, Gregory Isaacs, those, people love Bob Marley. I think Bob Marley is actually not that good in my opinion. So if you could do that, then you could get very far to understand like Caribbean like cultural issues which is a very complicated topic.
Ben: I think Tyler Cowen has one of his phrases that context that which is scarce. And I think for a lot of music that's often the case. I recall in one of our previous chats, you made me understand much more clearly that reggae has a huge undercurrent essentially of violence. I guess the popularity of Bob Marley makes you think that it's all about kind of love and hugs.
And actually a lot of his, he's got rise up. There is a lot of undercurrent of violence, even within that. But actually then when I went to go and listen to some more, it becomes very obvious of this, and that perhaps reflects some of what's happened in Caribbean culture. Do you still see that violence streak as much, and what's your explanation for where it's come from and where it's going.
Rasheed: Essentially I see Reggae now as being a lot more humble, which is not good. So it definitely used to be a lot more violent. So the reason why it was violent in some ways, that's not a fair term, but it's still accurate. It was a lot more about revolution. about world creation. And oftentimes, especially when you're thinking about like Caribbean or black power change in those time period, it was a very violent activity and just for very general obvious reasons.
Now, because of the world creation aspect of reggae, the sentiment underlying everything was this way we have things now, isn't good enough for ourselves. So the whole idea of Babylon, Babylon is in Rastafari culture, is this idea of essentially hell on earth. That's a kind of a Christian version of this thing.
And hell on earth is something we can actually move away from. It was the ability, it was actually the power of change. Which is not a lot of times, for example woke theory. The, there is no road to Damascus in road theory. There is no salvation and repentance. Now in Rastafari, you have the idea you can actually move away from Babylon to a better place.
And. Oftentimes, sometimes that might require like a violent activity, but not for the self and own sake. It's like something you have to go through, a really harsher mentality, harsher period to go to kind of salvation in that sense. So that's my safari culture. It's really intertwined with Rastafari philosophy so you can't again you can't really understand deep reggae artists if you don't understand Rastafari spirituality and philosophy.
Now because of this kind of world creation aspect of reggae. You have these themes like you need justice, you need more equal rights, you need essentially more political stability. Yes, of course, underlying many aspects of masafari was the idea you have to be anti imperialist. However the coherence of anti imperial thought in safari culture is not actually that solid.
For example, if you speak to Rastafari communities in Cuba, they're actually very pro capitalists because in their view, the socialist, communist nature of their society, it's what creates Babylon. So you, it very, a Mel, a meltable. As I word a meldable concept in that sense. When you look at Rastafari culture in Japan, we have different dynamics also.
But it is the idea that Babylon has to be broken down and oftentimes involve politics, involve work creation, involve justice, involve education, involve It is this like very techno optimist pro idea of reggae that people tend to not realize is there. In most of the music. That was where it stands from.
These days, however, the influence of Rastafari culture has substantially diminished on reggae. When something internationalizes, of course you're gonna have the different cultures, suck it up. You have Japanese people doing reggae, you have American white people doing reggae, you have Asian people doing reggae.
Of course. In Jamaica, however, the, many of the good artists, they left, went to England, they left, went to New York and many places because they realized because of globalization, you can actually make a living in a different country. So that you can actually drain out the very top talent of reggae from Jamaica, you're going to have, of course, a slowdown in the progress of the genre.
Thank you for that. So nowadays, to me, it's very self reflective. It's not about recreation, it's about reggae. And when it gets to that point, you realize it didn't really go anywhere.
Ben: Yeah, that's fair. That's a really interesting history of where we come from and where we're going. How important do you think food is to understanding the Caribbean or Caribbean culture?
And we had a podcast with Bhusha Dunlop and, there's a strong argument that you can understand a lot about China through it. thinking about its food. Is that so important to the Caribbean? And also, how do you think I should choose food out there in the Caribbean? You have a great post on looking at food in Panama but I'm interested in if the food culture overall is a very important way of trying to understand the Caribbean.
Rasheed: Yes, I think you can definitely learn a lot about Caribbean culture via food. It is just, you It requires some more work, to be fair, it's similar to China, but we think of China as a coherent place. We have like Chinese food, there is no Chinese cuisine. There are different cuisines in the place we call China.
Similar thing in the Caribbean. So for example, Trinidadian food, so a country Trinidad and Tobago, is heavily influenced by Indian culture, Indian cuisine, because after slavery, After emancipation, a lot of Indian laborers were brought to the Caribbean, particularly in Guyana and Trinidad, and of course that has a massive impact on society, right?
Like it's like almost half and half now, I believe, in Trinidad is Indian and Afro. Just not fully half, but also Syrian and other Chinese also there as well. I grew up eating roti and curry goat, for example, and if you, on the surface, say that, that is a very strange thing to grow up in the Caribbean eating.
But when you understand why you, in Barbados, eat curry goat and roti, of course that has a very big impact on how you think about your own history. Jerk chicken, is very famous in Jamaica. I think it's very difficult to get good jerk chicken outside of Jamaica. There are some spots in London that have some good jerk chicken, but usually, if you go to a place that has jerk chicken, it's likely not actually jerk chicken.
Any case, even jerk chicken, for example, if you understand how it works is very deeply into how Jamaican history operates. So it came from Mexico after the slaves, this plantation has this thing called Maroon, like free slave holdings in the mountains in Jamaica. And jerk chicken is one of the food products they actually created.
It's very, goes really far back. And one of the current ingredients of jerk chicken that we usually use in sauce is soy sauce. Now soy sauce, of course, it's not from Jamaica, it's from China. primarily speaking. So you see how the Chinese influence in Jamaica, for example, goes back to the food, like the core Jamaican food has this Chinese influence as well.
Actually, even like the studio that Balmali recorded in when he was younger, it was owned by a Chinese woman, actually. And that was the first really proper studio that really got him to be famous. And that became a very pivotal point in reggae history, owned by a Chinese family in Jamaica. When you peer back, you think those are all the ingredients that are sold across the Caribbean, yet everything has context.
If you understand why, it's almost like a, it's almost a very daunting task, but it's the same thing with Fusha and China. If you can embrace the context or, wanting to dig into the context, you can understand a lot of what societies find in the foods they eat. That's true everywhere.
Ben: I didn't realize the connection between soy sauce and true jerk chicken.
And that's actually a wonderful elliptical way of the fact that open economy trade, particularly for small nations is is so important maybe turning to ideas on talent. Essentially you assess talent through emerging ventures for the Caribbean. And generally, you're meeting talented people.
What is it you look for? Are there any particular questions you're asking now at the moment or qualities in responses that you look for in terms of assessing what high talented people might be?
Rasheed: Yeah, so I, I'm in charge of the program for Emergent Ventures for Africa and the Caribbean and I do a lot of very many interviews to assess talent.
A lot of my questions are not gotcha questions. That's not like a very thing I do that often. I'm very interested in how well you can talk about things that you don't directly work in. That kind of contextualization, that kind of cosmopolitan view of many things. I'm very curious what people their view on that.
If you're, if you are, for example, working on some synthetic biology topic, of course we will be able to discuss that, we'll get into it. But I'm also curious on how much art you think about, how much things that you think about, how much social issues you think about. Not saying that with underwear, overwear, something I'm generally very I think that people who have the ability to have this kind of multi contextual awareness generally have the ability to also have their own main aspect to be very highly productive in that way as well.
Of course, there are people who are very good at one thing that of course, sometimes it's worth funding, but it's a different kind of person in general.
Ben: And would that say the majority of the time you're assessing the person over the project? Obviously, they're a little bit intertwined, but at this early stage, a talented person with, Ideas and wanting to go for it is probably more important than the actual project they're working on.
Obviously it can vary, but usually I guess the projects are more high risk in their nature anyway, and it's assessing the person. Or do you think an assessment on a project is equally as important?
Rasheed: The project is often a reflection of the person. So you need to understand the person a bit better.
Sometimes you can have a person that has a bad project idea. I think that's actually a bad reflection, to be clear. But if you have a good project, And you have a good person, that's the combination. If you have a good person and a bad project, so bad. If you have a bad project and a good person, so bad.
But the problem is it probably brings you into the person. You don't see like a very long background when you see the application about people per se. You have more projects focused on information. So you have to be able to reflect. Your goodness in your project and that's what brings you into the conversation.
So they're both of them are important It's also if we're to like push me or say yes The person is more important at that early stage, but your project can't be a bad project
Ben: Yeah, I think I agree if I meet someone and they often say, oh, should I submit or things, and I think they're a good person, but I think that project is bad.
I say, wait until you have a better project. . This doesn't really reflect your how great your thinking is. One thing I haven't been able to sway between the weight of is how well someone's written communication is versus their spoken communication. And strangely, actually, in a time of.
Of zoom and everything. I do think in person is quite important, but I potentially Uprated the ability to express ideas Well on paper and those who can't do that. I feel are increasingly at a disadvantage, even though we have generative AI and things of that nature to help in certain ways. I think that clarity of thought is becoming more important to me, but I flip flopped on that.
So I'm interested to know how important sort of the written communication piece is over the oral. Some people obviously are better in one or the other. Or whether you want all of the above as you've indicated, it's nice to have a good project and a good person.
Rasheed: It's necessary, not nice.
So especially with EV, because our application is so short that if you don't put a bit more effort into it, it reflects out on you and the person into this conversation. So in our case, the original project. The written application is very important, but you have some that are like much longer, you have some that are very short, but something you can convey the core idea in a much more shorter way.
And once you can make it interesting, then fine. So I think if you cannot, clearly, if you cannot convince me that the project is worth thinking about on the application, there's no second step. So it's a, it's very important. But I think that if you, let's say the application isn't like perfect, again, like only three questions, you can't have a perfect application in three questions.
It has to be good enough. And very often, good EV people, they have the ability to answer three questions. We don't put trick, trick questions in the application. It's very simple. Who are you? What are you doing? Why, and obviously there's the question about what's this thing you agree with that everyone else agree with that kind of conform to non-conforming question.
If you can't have a good written part for those questions, there's something wrong. So it is in our case, because the application is not so long, you can think a lot about it, where it does reflect how someone thinks with their own project and their own talent.
Ben: Yeah, I think that's really clear.
Do you have a favorite kind of meta question at the moment? I guess Tyler still likes the what's on your browser tab at the moment or he'll sometimes ask, you know How do you think this interview is going? I get the impression you're more interested in the exact person and project So it's much more tailored to the person But I don't know if you feel like there's a gap in the interview and it's not going super have you got one of those questions that you like to throw in and say, okay Let's try and open this up
Rasheed: I would say in some ways we, I'm a bit lucky because our applications are quite high quality in terms of what they speak with. Again, the original part already gets to a point where you can think, Oh, you have a sense, by the way, by the original application, if you're already going to give some personal money, it's usually that kind of thing.
I'll be. The zoom interaction is often a confirmatory conversation.
Ben: It's that's to lose in the interview.
Rasheed: Yeah, exactly. There are a few times where it has there are a few times where the Zoom made me not want to give the grant. But that's a, those are more words than not.
So it's always a conversation that it's never too long in the first place. So it's not love that often times. Now, sometimes I would always, I would tend to ask people like, what's the last concert you've been to? Or what was the concert, why is this particular concert or just artists, don't like sometimes if someone say, Oh, I've never been to a concert, that's curious to ask why, and that kind of goes to conversation, do you like music and so on.
And I do ask them like what they read oftentimes. And sometimes people, it's you're very, you get some very surprising answers. Remember I had to introduce someone. And I asked, what's the last concert you went to? He said, I actually went to one last week. It was this like, very popular Ugandan folk singer.
And that had the whole conversation itself, going down the line. But I guess I don't tend to ask that many meta questions in that sense. Because I guess it depends on the stakes at play and how much really you're trying to ask this person about themselves, but oftentimes it's not necessary, in my view,
Ben: very clear.
So I'm thinking about your own creative processes. Do you have anything about your own writing process or reading or thinking process? process that you think is either unusual or not unusual. Do you have a routine? Do you like writing in the morning or the evening? Do you have a particular way of reading anything you like to share about your own creative or analytical processes?
Rasheed: I have no routine, which is a bad thing in many ways.
Ben: Routine in itself, having no routine.
Rasheed: I guess so. I tend to write at night, like very late. Like 10 o'clock to 1 a. m. That time period, and there's no good reason for that, like I think of, but I tend to write a lot at that time of the day, and I somehow think it's because of this my time zone changes I used to live in Asia, then live back in Eastern time, then live in Europe, then live back in Eastern time, and somehow it flipped in my head that's the correct time to write I consume a lot of information before I write usually anything, and sometimes I think I consume too much information because it makes it hard to actually get started.
And I have this issue where somehow, for some reason, I can't write anything unless I have a very good introduction already finished. And tend to think, oh, I can't write, like, where's it going to go? But when I get the introduction, Let's say in a way that I like it, then I essentially write the whole thing in two days afterwards and that is, I don't know why I do that, but I find that I've been doing that a lot and it's been tending to converge on that particular method of writing.
I do not like writing that much in I often make notes shorthand. I always make my notes shorthand. I tend to not make that many notes on like a phone unless I'm like in a plane or something or a train and I usually then read back the notes before the writing but I definitely don't have any tips that I've used for anyone else but that's very chaotic if I'm working on something I have a desk full of you Books and pages and handwritten notes.
I'm like, where's that note? Where's this note? I don't know. And that's how I usually do it. I guess I have a, I'm trying to do like a theme of things I'm working on. That was like Caribbean centric stuff that I think of right under It's under theorized for sure, but definitely under written about as well, and I'm trying to do that.
Now I have a bunch of posts coming out about Caribbean post loyal theory and so on. The next post I think I'm going to finish probably the next week is about, it's a, actually it's a book review. of the case for colonialism by Bruce Gilley. It's like a review of that book but in a Caribbean context.
And then a major project I want to do at some point before summer or in summer is this like a four part piece about the British West Indian Federation because it's a very pivotal point in Caribbean history. Four years, it lasted four years. I had a 10 year Lead up and you can't really find any good information online about it that isn't wrong.
I've seen, I've consumed a lot of YouTube videos and stuff that you know, people have really no idea what they're talking about and luckily I was able to go to London. I go to some rare book shops to find rare book shops to find some original books written by the people who were involved in Federation from the British side also to really piece together things.
So they have, how am I doing archival work for a blog post? But essentially that's what I came to.
Ben: That sounds great. I don't think any other, one person's writing process very rarely is helpful for another person's writing process. But I'm always fascinated because it's always different.
Do you write to music or no music or are you neutral?
Rasheed: Ah, good question. So I write, I will say for the majority of the time I write, it is to no music.
Ben: Yeah, I'm the same. I can't normally write to music. The one exception is when I'm writing things when I'm not quite sure what I'm writing, there is some classical music that I can listen to, particularly Bach's Goldberg Variations, which I've listened to so much that It's there, but when I'm writing actual words for something, particularly in dialogue, and I have songs which have other dialogue I get lost so I can't do that.
I guess my other one on the writing, go on.
Rasheed: I would say when I'm drafting things, let's say I'm like, going through the first draft or something, when I'm drafting the first time, I tend to listen to music. It's that part of the writing part but I tend to listen to a particular kind of music. I don't know if Louis Andriessen's Worker's Union piece.
Ben: No.
Rasheed: It's, let's just look it up. It's a very bombastic, like wild noise. It's 20th very bombastic, very wild. It's almost painful, it depends how you think about it. But it's very good, very calming for my anxiety and worrying. Things like that I do listen to in the early stages.
But then when it comes to a second draft or so on, it's dead silent.
Ben: Yeah, okay, definitely check that out. And do you, Edit as you go or edit at the end. It sounds like you edit at the end rather than edit as you go, except for maybe in your note phase. Yeah, correct. Correct. Great. Let's maybe in honor of Tyler do a small overrated underrated section, and then we can talk about other current projects and any advice you have.
Overrated, underrated, or you can make some comment The resource curse. Overrated. And that's because people use it too often to describe something where it's actually not as powerful a force as it might seem. That's right. Okay. That seems fair. GDP as an economic measure, overrated or underrated.
Rasheed: Underrated. I think it's definitely underrated. I think it's quite clear.
People tend to try to find all these superficial flaws with the methodology, with the conceptualization of what constitutes GDP and so on. But It is a tool that has utility and it still works well for that thing, which is, it actually does correlate the things that you want to happen.
So yes, it might not be a perfect conceptual tool, and that's fine. I think the problem is that people, economists, Our non economists, I probably should say, have this idea that, oh, if you say these are GDP, therefore that means it's important. That means, no, it's a tool to understand the world. It's not supposed to be the world.
But many political scientists and people like that want it to be the idea that this is the thing that needs to be reflecting how our value of the world should be. No, it's a tool. So as a tool, it works perfectly well.
Ben: Yeah, underrated by non economists. I can see that. I'm always surprised when I look at some of the other metrics, much I might be interested in, say life expectancy or education or even some of these happiness measures.
And the correlation of GDP is so high. It's actually I could have used GDP and I would broadly have got a lot of those. Social
Rasheed: progress index, all these kind of things. Yeah, okay, fine. GDP so it's equally as well.
Ben: Very good. Okay. Overrated, underrated, the idea of universal basic income, UBI.
Rasheed: The first ever paper I wrote was actually about UBI.
It was with a professor at college back in like 2013 or something. Overrated. It's very overrated. Which is, if you asked me 10 years ago, I would say underrated, but now I think it's overrated because the benefits you get from UBI. Are not actually very pronounced and the thing you want to optimize UBI, you can do by other methods and very often time people who are super supportive of UBI do so for very theoretically weak reasons and people who are very anti UBI, they tend to do it for political reasons.
But I think for basic, macro policy reasons you just don't need UBI and I am speaking about this from a small country perspective in particular. I don't think it's necessary. It's definitely not necessary and I would go as far and say that's not even useful for small countries.
Ben: Interesting. I'm really interested in people who've changed their minds over that. Yeah. At the margin I would definitely go for infrastructure, essentially public. Goods, good public goods and services, but that might be intangible infrastructure over the actual UBI as well, I think. It's
Rasheed: not, I'm not, for example, in small countries, welfare reform is still very needed, and it's still very important.
But the problem is that when people often talk about UBI, they want to, Not put in the work to do reform for the welfare state to make it actually very useful for people Yeah, let's just get rid of that. Do UBI. We're done. The problem is they're just too wasteful. It's too impractical Again for small countries in particular you do need a good welfare reform, but UBI isn't the way to do it
Ben: I've heard that actually, I think Tyler Cowen suggests that essentially in the U. S. The types of disability benefit, I don't know what they call it, is a pseudo UBI with a bureaucracy hurdle to get it because once you get it, and it's often, given to you in the community. It's very hard to come off it. So it acts as a kind of pseudo UBI stabilizer, but you wouldn't want to ever make it an explicit UBI policy for all of these other reasons that you've that you've alluded to.
Great. Okay last couple overrated, underrated carbon tax.
Rasheed: It's underrated sorry, it's overrated, my goodness, it's overrated,
Ben: For political economy reasons or standard macroeconomic reasons.
Rasheed: So okay. I would say in general, I think the, I personally don't think that a carbon tax has any real life utility to it. It's just a way to absolve yourself using capital markets about this like conceptual pollution concepts.
And it people who are. Going to pollute for whatever reason I'm going to do it. I don't think you can use capital mark. This is a very clear example of using capital markets for app solution or the attempt of app solution. There's always ESG type things. It doesn't really add anything really to me. To the utility of a market.
It just gives you that symbolism of doing something. So for that's the main reason why I think it's overrated. It's not, who actually benefits from a carbon tax? I guess the underwriters. But, it's not actually useful. I think, catamarkets truly can be useful.
Ben: Yeah, that's clear. I think it's easier to see in something where air pollution, where I think this is the case where actually direct regulation of the air pollution itself is going to be easier because a capital market fix for something like air quality is going to be super hard and like you say, it's not maybe the primary function of a market or a capital market in that sense.
Rasheed: We have many examples of air quality improvement long before carbocarb became a thing.
Ben: Exactly. Okay. And last one overrated, underrated, big technology, big tech.
Rasheed: Always underrated.
Ben: And so that would make big technology regulation overrated then as well.
Rasheed: I guess in general I don't think I can think of any particular examples of big tech regulation that I can see as productive.
Yeah, I can't think of any. So yes, so definitely less of that. Yes, always over it. It's one of the things where, you think about the Caribbean, just , you have Caribbean thing. One of the most important things for the Caribbean is the American airline industry. And a lot of times people, obviously people don't think of that.
They think of tourism, but tourism, you have to get people to the Caribbean. So the airline market. In the U S is probably the most transformative thing for Caribbean history in many ways. And if, for example, the airline market in the U S was actually way more regular as it was, before Caribbean tourism would not be a thing.
But Caribbean people don't realize these things are true. So they say, yes, you need more regulation on everything. And so while we're there, entire assistance is because they're regulated the. airline system in the U. S. in particular. So essentially, yes, usually regulations for big companies are, I would say, they're not even always well intended.
They're sometimes well intended, but oftentimes they don't really become productive.
Ben: Very fair. Okay, last couple of questions then. So one is, Do you have any current projects or future thoughts that you'd like to share? You talked about a couple of blog posts and readings that you're going to do, but any other large projects or ideas in the future for you?
Rasheed: I have this new think tank, so that's essentially a large project is a meta project. So a lot of things I think that I want to do a lot more of. And there are some themes, for example, I want to do a lot more, not only me, but want to influence people to do a lot more of, is Caribbean economic history.
Because there is two, two, there are two good books about Caribbean ecology, two good books about Caribbean ecological history, both written by a British professor, who is now retired Victor Thomas, who I actually, I've met him a few times in London very interesting guy. And he's very old now, and there are no people really working on this kind of topic.
And, I obviously have a personal interest in Caribbean econohistory, but I think as an academic subject, it's also quite good to study. Because in the Caribbean, you have at least four different empires interacting at the same time. As you have a cultural Let's say a cultural market that's very similar in many ways.
So it's one of the few places where you can hold culture as a constant and actually counterfactualize many other variables in economics from very different origin points and actually see the different outcomes in the counterfactuals. It's a very vibrant place for economic history research, but it's not actually a thing anymore.
So let's fund a lot more of that, try to find some ways to find the people to do the kind of research and fund it and create a community around that particular academic system. Discipline. That's a big kind of long term project. I also want to do a lot more of colonial theory, where I think we've got to a point, this is this line of all history is revisionist history, because at any point in time, sometimes we step back with fresh eyes, with new values, and take a look again at the past.
And we've got to a point where post colonial theory has been so dominant in our zeitgeist and our academia and so on, I always forget that the second half of the colonial period was a very entrepreneurial, very progressive, very productive time, especially for young countries. And if you don't understand what they did and how they did it and try to replicate it, you're not going to get anywhere into the progress.
End of British imperialism was a very bad thing for Caribbean progress. So I want to resurrect that idea again, push forward for more British imperial theory in the Caribbean context as well. So again, this is history, more history projects in some ways, but that's the kind of thing I want to push and fund in the very near future.
Ben: Yeah, that sounds excellent. I guess I don't have a super deep knowledge or experience of that but I can see that it's very cluttered with a kind of politics or political economy thing. The only time I ever really got super in trouble in Twitter was for suggesting only very loosely on other factors around Ireland.
When it was coming post industrial river revolution that weren't connected to colonialism because actually if you look at the a lot of papers on the economic history, there's a lot of other factors within industrialization, which weren't necessarily the blame. And then if you look at the economic historian debates over the role of slavery again, very hard to get to the actual data on it.
But again, it does seem that some of the politics around it are not necessarily supported by some of the data when people have reconstructed it back. But it's quite hard to get to closer to truth. The data isn't super great as well. And it has this whole layer of other politics around it, which makes it quite difficult, I think, for mainstream academics to tackle that.
Rasheed: Yeah, that's true. I guess another big project at Tilted Limit doing in the foreseeable future is anti reparations debates. So Caribbean governments total. The independent ones are very pro reparations from the UK. It's like bedrock policy in the Caribbean. It's not debate essentially. And they've been pushing it a lot in the UK, even a few months ago, the prime minister of Barbados gave a speech at LSE pro reparations.
University of Glasgow has the reparations center, is really heating up as a political movement. And a lot of what I am. I'm going to be writing, but mostly talking about a next like year, at least is anti reparation because it is a parasitic topic for the Caribbean. It really perverts any kind of real government policy conversation and it allows the governments in the Caribbean to involve themselves in the actual work they need to do to actually drive progress in the region.
So even later this year, I'm going to be in England at an event. About reparations, for example. So it's a thing that I'm going to be very big into because it's got to, okay. It's got to a point where facts are no longer required for arguments as we're going to point out in the Caribbean and I'll guess in the UK too, because it's two sides of the tangle, essentially.
So that's a big. project as well.
Ben: This is where it seems counterintuitive, but where you put the blame in the wrong places and you're too the lodestone of the past weighs on you too much, it actually is then in the is a hurdle to progress and solving your future which is quite a quite a complicated thing.
Okay, so the last question on that would be, do you have any life advice or career advice or maybe advice for people who are about to do interviews? Any thoughts on yeah, advice you'd like to give the listeners?
Rasheed: Advice? I don't know. I don't know, actually. I would say, generally speaking, that I think people should try to be a lot more public in their thoughts.
Writing things online for the public is a nice constrained device. And so it makes you, forces you to try to be more concrete. Thank you. Granted, we read a lot online, that's bullshit, but so be it. But it really pushes me a bit more concrete in your writing and your thinking, more importantly, and it gives a bit more confidence.
I'm very pro online activity. I couldn't, it would be impossible to be where I am right now, come from a small, tiny rock in the ocean to, things I've done without the internet. It's always underrated at all points in time, completely. And I think people should actually engage with it more. Don't just lurk on Twitter, actually put things out, write things, do videos, do blogs, whatever it is, just put more content there.
If you actually want to, if you have an idea. The, you want to change what you want to share, do actually share it. Don't keep it inside your head for that often. That's what I try to tell people all the time. For the interviews, I think in generally speaking, it's not really advice per se, cause it's always been hard to do.
So try to be more confident in the interview. It doesn't look good when people are so timid, unfortunately, that's the thing. You have to practice. Some people have it naturally. That's fine. I've done some. And these people, it's like very vibrant and so on. So it's a different personality issue, but do try to be more confident.
I think if you're not confident, pretend to be confident. I think that goes a long way as well.
Ben: What's the phrase for that? Fake it until you make it. But yeah, I think practice for sure. And I think that helps them. I guess a lot of people talk about a work in public and I had Hannah Richie on the Podcast not too long ago, it's written a book on sustainability and she wouldn't have got where she was today either without essentially blogging or others.
Some people do it by video and the like, and it's a good discipline, like you say, to get your thoughts out there. And it's a good piece of, I sent, social proof for other people to say, look, you're building something. And yes, we might've had mistaken ideas in the past. Don't worry about that. We will all do, and we'll have to change our minds, but you went to the effort of articulating that.
So I think that's a very good thing. On that note Rasheed, thank you very much.
