Foreign Affairs

(Published by Council on Foreign Relations)

November-December 2011

Africa Unleashed: Explaining the Secret of a Belated Boom

Edward Miguel, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center of Evaluation for Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley

Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries Are Leading the Way. By Steven Radelet. Center for Global Development, 2010. It is well known that the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were a disaster for the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. In a period when other underdeveloped regions, especially Asia, were experiencing steady economic growth, Africa as a whole saw its living standards plummet...

What is less well known is that Africa's prospects have changed radically over the past decade or so. Across the continent, economic growth rates (in per capita terms) have been positive since the late 1990s. And it is not just the economy that has seen rapid improvement: in the 1990s, the majority of African countries held multiparty elections for the first time since the heady postindependence 1960s, and the extent of civic and media freedom on the continent today is unprecedented...

Radelet also looks beyond government decisions, describing how individual Africans have accelerated these transformations, often at great personal risk. He profiles such visionaries as John Githongo, Kenya's fearless anticorruption crusader, and Patrick Awuah, a Swarthmore College graduate who left a lucrative career at Microsoft to return to his native Ghana, where he founded Ashesi University, a liberal arts college that aspires to educate a new generation of ethical and entrepreneurial African leaders...

Looking Up: Increasingly educated populations, democratic politics, spreading technologies, and improved economic policymaking have combined to create a new Africa that bears little resemblance to the caricature of a "dark continent" that still rears its head in the media...

Seattle Times

They saw potential; he fed it

Jerry Large, staff columnist

November 17, 2011

...Philmon Haile will be entering the University of Washington in January with a lot of education behind him already, some of it in China.

OneWorld Now! (OWN) provided a big part of the boost he needed to get started. Monday, I wrote about the Seattle-based organization becoming a key player in the Obama  administration's initiative to send 100,000 American students to study in China.

...Haile came to the United States from Eritrea with his family when he was 4 years old. He signed up with OWN while a sophomore at Garfield High School, which he said looked like a version of the United Nations.

Instructors worked with him after school, and he learned Mandarin Chinese, one of two languages OWN is built around. The other is Arabic...

Haile attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania for a year. His language skills were ahead of the courses offered, so he crafted an independent-study program for Chinese, and he also got a grant to work in a Chinese village with people who had Hansen's disease (also known as leprosy).

After his freshman year, Haile was awarded a Confucius Institute scholarship to study at a university in Harbin, China, for a year. ...

Canwest News Service

Anarchy, it seems, is overrated; Montreal occupation has become dysfunctional village of homeless, bohemians and frustrated idealists

By Peggy Curran, The Montreal Gazette

November 15, 2011

Don't look now, but the zeitgeist is shifting. Maybe it was the Occupy camp that elected a border collie as its leader, or the death of a 23-year-old woman in Vancouver of a drug overdose, or reports of an alleged sexual assault in Philadelphia, but the occupation has been steadily losing its cool.

A month after tent cities sprung up throughout the Western world as sympathetic satellites of the Occupy Wall Street movement, authorities are impatient and calling the cops.

...Anarchy, it seems, is overrated. Even with the shelter of Mountain Equipment Coop tents, hot meals and the blessing of an improbably dry and balmy November, the Montreal occupation has become a dysfunctional village of the homeless and mentally ill, born-again bohemians and frustrated idealists.

...Those aspirations for a fairer, kinder, more environmentally friendly world, where everyone has access to health care and education is affordable, are still beautiful.

It's simply not clear how any of that will be achieved by a movement with such blurry objectives, where no one wants to take the helm in the battle to make change happen.

Writing in The Atlantic, Dominic Tierney said the U.S. Occupy movement has an image problem.

"Occupy Wall Street is at a fork in the road," said Tierney, who teaches political science at Swarthmore College. "One path leads to political change, as the movement pushes the centre of gravity in American politics to the left. The other path leads to irrelevance or even harm for the progressive project."

He suggested American protesters begin by waving the flag to demonstrate their left-wing demands are as red-white-and-blue as anything the right-wing Tea Party has to offer.

"Unless OWS understands the power of symbols, the American Autumn will be followed by a winter of discontent."...

NPR: Weekend All Things Considered

Educated and Jobless: What's Next for Millenials?

November 12, 2012

...
Lyden: TEDTalks. Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore , calls this the paradox of choice. He's actually given a TED talk about this. It's something he became interested in while shopping. Tell me your blue jeans story.

Barry Schwartz: So, my blue jeans story is I went in to buy blue jeans at the Gap, as I do as infrequently as possible. And I told them my size. And they said to me, do you want slim fit, easy fit, relax fit? So, I spent an hour trying on all the different kinds of jeans - button fly, zipper fly - that were available - stone-washed, distressed. And I walked out with the best fitting jeans I had ever bought, and I felt worse.

Lyden: And this demonstrates to you what principle?

Schwartz: What it demonstrates to me is that when we live in a world of essentially limitless options, our expectations about how good the option we end up with should be go through the ceiling. When there are only Levi's and Wranglers, no one expects jeans to fit perfectly. But when there are thousands of different manufacturers and 10,000 different styles, well, damn it, one of them is going to be perfect.

Lyden: Right.

Schwartz: So you get something that's great, but it's not perfect, then you feel like you've failed.

Lyden: So, a lot of what young people are dealing with is about shattered expectations. They expected to have jobs in their fields, paid a living wage. And these expectations, if they were - if they were indeed implanted, by whom?

Schwartz: Ah, yes. Well, their parents do a wonderful job of convincing them that they are the sun, the moon and the stars. And for them, the world will open. Then they go to colleges, like the one I teach at, and their teachers and the deans do exactly the same thing. Everything around them tells them that they are capable of achieving and experiencing whatever they want.

Not that long ago, especially if you went to a selective institution, it was reasonable for you to think that no matter what you studied, because you were smart and you had a degree from a good place, the world would open up for you. Those days are gone. What we have is expectations not quite catching up to reality.

Lyden: Just one last thing, you're a college professor, what do you tell your classes, especially your seniors?

Schwartz: Well, I try to tell them, a good job is good enough. They don't need the best job. And if they can go through their lives looking for and appreciating what's good in their friendships, in their romantic relationships and in their work - even if their work is more modest than it would have been 10 years ago - they can live an incredibly satisfying life that way. But nobody listens to me.

(Soundbite of Laughter) ...

SPORTS

The Delaware County Daily Times (PA)

Colleges: Swarthmore stages comeback to edge Widener

November 15, 2011

Daily Times Staff Reports

The Swarthmore's women's basketball team sure knows how to start things off with a bang.

The Garnet's suffocating defense forced three turnovers in the final minute of play and Katie Lytle scored 16 second-half points as the Garnet stunned Widener, 66-64, in women's college basketball action Tuesday.

Swarthmore faced a 16-point deficit with 10:59 to go in the first half and didn't get its first lead until there were 23 seconds left thanks to a pair of clutch free throws from senior Nicole Rizzo.

Lytle finished the game with 22 points and tacked on 12 rebounds, while Elle Larsen and Kayla Moritzky chipped in 12 points.

Vanessa Hejnas poured in 21 points for Widener and Joanna Persiano added 20.

The Delaware County Daily Times (PA)

Colleges: Lessing's goal gives Neumann upset of Messiah

Times Staff

November 13, 2011

...Swarthmore 1, Medaille 0

Senior captain Micah Rose needed an assist to lift Swarthmore to the championship in the ECAC Division III South Tournament.

The aid did not come from a teammate, but from the post.

Rose blasted a shot off the post in the 104th minute to give the Garnet the title with a double- overtime victory.

It is the second ECAC South title for the Garnet (13-6-1). Swarthmore also won the championship in 2007.

Goalie David D'Annunzio made five saves for the 29th shutout of his career. However, the most important save came in the 102nd minute to keep the game scoreless.

Rose ended the matter two minutes later when he blasted a shot past the outstretched arms of Medaille goalie Jimmy Frascati. The shot ricocheted off the far post for the winner.

Rose was named the Most Outstanding Player in the tournament.  ...

Cumberland Times-News (MD)

Frostburg falls in shootout to Swarthmore

Nov. 10--SWARTHMORE, Pa. -- The Frostburg State University men's soccer team had its season come to an end with a shootout loss to Swarthmore in the first round of the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) Tournament, Wednesday evening.

The two teams battled through regulation and both overtimes and could not break a 1-1 tie. The game was then settled on a shootout. Swarthmore (11-6-1) converted on all four of its attempts while FSU (11-3-5) made just two of its four chances.

In regulation, the Garnet scored first as David Sterngold headed home a pass from Michael Superdock in the 25th minute.

The game remained tied until 30 minutes had ticked off the clock in the second half. Bobcat senior Jamie Flewellyn notched his third goal of the season at 75:15 to even the contest at 1-1.

...Swarthmore tried to retake the lead over the remainder of regulation, but FSU keeper Abiye Jack turned away two shots to send it to overtime.

In the extra frames, the Garnet held a 3-2 edge in shots and Jack added two more saves to keep the contest tied prior to the shootout.

Swarthmore finished the contest with an 18-14 lead in shots.

"The team gave it their all and left everything on the field tonight, so we have no regrets," added Byrnes. "We give Swarthmore all the credit for being a good team."