What Happened when Mormons Came to Mine and Build Peru?

Daffodils and forsythia bloomed with abandon as April conference ended. Soon will come lilacs and high spring, and the Church just released its membership statistics. Growth and eternal progress are the stories people love, but in Mormonism there are many others, like the gaps in the garden of bulbs planted that did not come up, the missing blooms in a field of sunshine yellow. 

As the Brethren spoke in their dry, yet captivating, voices retelling their versions of the gospel one more time, always old and yet ever new, I was poking around documents from more than 100 years ago and stumbled on one of those fields with missing blooms. 

Surplus Yo Momma, an Argument with Krugman on Economic Development

New York Times columnist and Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman made an observation today about China that has resonance far beyond China. If taken as a guide for planning--which it is--then it upsets people around the world and has serious consequences for global development. 

While discussing the economic crisis China faces that, he argues, will be disastrous for the world, Krugman mentions the development model China has followed and quotes “an old insight by the economist W. Arthur Lewis, who argued that countries in the early stages of economic development typically have a small modern sector alongside a large traditional sector containing huge amounts of ‘surplus labor’ — underemployed peasants making at best a marginal contribution to overall economic output.”