Over at Teekay’s

This is re: the comment Eric left to my post about capacity-building and capacity confiscation.

I don’t blame anyone for taking jobs that overpay — it makes perfect economic sense and, hey, I do it all the time (for any clients who may read this — I’m just kidding). But what makes sense individually may not make sense collectively. (I read this beautiful book about Hobbes by the late Jean Hampton ten years ago and I vaguely remember some pretty neat game-theoretical explanations why that is so. Of course, I read it for an exam and forgot most of it right after I had passed.) In fact, the income gap between locals and internationals is replicated right within the group of locals, between those who have international jobs and those who have local (or no) jobs.

I guess it depends whether you operate in the local or in the international economy, and mind you, that has nothing to do with your physical location.

Interpreters, for example, or management consultants (two random examples) operate in an international marketplace. Their skills are highly portable (though in the first case restricted by the language pairs) and in high demand. Drivers may operate in an international marketplace if they speak English or another “useful” language, but their skills are less portable since nobody needs to import their labor — it’s usually available locally.

Of course, there are now Bosnian drivers and security guards with the UN mission in Georgia (just one example I happen to know), and the last time my wife and I went to the UN secretariat in New York we were checked by a Bosnian guard. I guess the UN is not precisely what reasonable people would call a marketplace.

(I should mention that there’s lots of Bosnian professionals working in other countries with NGOs and the UN and OSCE as well. A friend of mine recently visited Sierra Leone and said it was teeming with Serbs/Croats/Bosnians/Macedonians.)

What I’m more interested in is what this division does to the “recipient” societies, but that’s really for some other time — like tomorrow. Now it’s to bed with Philipp Bobbitt, which sounds much worse than it really is — in fact, it’s a pleasure.