Human Ingenuity

The Dubai Museum had an example of a traditional summer house, a wood frame construction covered with palm leaves. It looked very cozy--a nice place to spend a hot summer (and I think the hot days are the reason people come out in such numbers in the evening).

But what intrigued me most was the windtower. Built above the main room, or sometimes a bedroom, it was a four-sided tower that was open on each side, but had burlap stretched diagonally across. This created a little triangle on each side that directed any wind there was down into the room below, and allowed them to catch any wind that came, from whichever direction.

A simple but brilliant idea, the kind that always makes me marvel at human ingenuity.

My Inner Economist Screams

This morning at the Dubai airport I was at first delighted to see that they had free internet...for about 2 seconds, before my inner economist hollered at me. And then I thought, there will be an undersupply/overdemand. And sure enough, I had to wait in line. But it's not just that the free-ness created more demand; it also caused people to linger longer, further delaying other would-be users.

That was the overdemand side. The undersupply came in the form of non-working terminals--the first three I tried to access! (Of course I got to them first, they were the first to open up because no one lingered at them.) The grubby little storefront internet cafes near the Gold Souk in Dubai, which were not free (although at 85 cents an hour it was almost like free to an American) were in better operating condition--all their terminals worked. Of course they were doing a booming business, and a down terminal meant a loss of revenue.

The only surprising thing about the event was that I actually bought in to the idea of free internet service for a moment. I guess my inner economist was still drowsy.

And now I sit in an internet cafe that is right beside my nicely old-fashioned hotel in the old city district of Damascus, again blogging effortlessly at a pittance per hour. The concept of government providing for the public good is so compelling, but it just turns out so often that greedy individuals just manage to provide it so much better. "Invisible hand" indeed.

The Territorial Corporation

A friend of mine questions whether Dubai is properly a state. He thinks it's more like a corporation with territory. I think he's right.

Dubai is essentially owned by a single family, and they don't quite seem to run it as a traditional principality is run. They do run it like a corporation in some respects, investing heavily in an effort to draw in more and more business.

Typically, governments don't invest well. They lack the pricing incentive, not being able to know what the real value--market demand--is for their investments. And they're careless about balancing costs and benefits, as well as balancing the books, because it's not their own money they're spending, but the public's money. But if you do run your government as a privately held corporation are you able to read the bottom line better? Does the Dubai government have a better ability than most to analyze the costs of their "public" spending, since most of it is coming from their own coffers, i.e., their oil revenues?

Essentially I'm over here looking for a research question that will justify returning several times over the next few years. I'm not sure political scientists have written much on Dubai yet--few of them are economically minded, and hyper-capitalist places like Dubai, particularly with it's huge environment-altering island projects, is most political scientists' worst nightmare. But moral outrage doesn't lead to understanding, and I think it's an interesting question.

I would hope that the answer is "no, they don't invest more wisely than democratic governments," because I'm libertarian enough to not want to find anything good about a non-democratic government. But, again, it's about understanding, not my own moral values.

Side note: At the Dubai airport I noticed there were two Air Emirates planes leaving for Auckland, NZ only 5 minutes apart. Does that signify a lot of Kiwi businessmen in Dubai?

The Cost of Blogging in Dubai

The neighborhood around the Gold Souk in Dubai is one big souk (market) itself, with the ground floor of nearly all buildings given over to shops. There are probably thousands of shops, with attendant workers and others providing services to them, and a lot of these people living in the apartments above the shops. It's the kind of place "nice" tourists come for a couple hours to shop, then run away to the Hilton Hotel. But I'm staying here, and my little hotel (which seems to cater mostly to Africans) doesn't have internet for guests. But in a neighborhood like this, where so many of the workers are immigrants, an internet cafe is a certainty, and sure enough there are at least three I've found within a few blocks of my hotel.

The cost is 3 Dirhams an hour--about 83 cents. That's affordable blogging indeed.

Countdown to Syria

I leave for Syria in a week. It's a typical American disease to be an adult who's never traveled abroad, but I'm glad I'm finally getting the cure. If I can find an internet cafe in Damascus--and surely there is one--I'll post a couple comments while I'm there. Otherwise, this blog will be pretty silent until mid-June. I'm going to do the indoor skiing in Dubai, and visit the monasteries of Mar Mousa and Maalula in Syria, and if I can work it out I'll visit Petra in Jordan.

And from now on when I encourage students to study abroad, I can do so with a little more integrity. And of course I'll be able to say such pretentious things as, "When I was sipping kahua arabea in the Souk Al-Hamidieh in Damascus..."