Econ for Lit Majors Parte Dos

You may recall a few weeks back the nifty editorial collaboration between me and my mother. Well, I had one that required a quick turnaround and she was so disgusted by the one previous to that that she was quite happy to work on a sort of consultant basis. So I sent her three sentences which arrived just as she had staggered out of bed with a migraine and a really whopping case of indigestion all partly due a [walks to door, peeps up and down hall, closes door, lowers voice] h-a-n-g-o-v-e-r [resumes normal voice] that she picked up at a small family party celebrating the 90th birthday of her sister-in-law's (my aunt's) mother. Champagne was involved.

She read the three sentences, emailed me little more than a nauseated groan and retreated back to bed, but not before she took, in her words, "...some of that stuff they give third world children suffering from diarrhea." Then, feeling better, she wrote again:

Spare me the ghastly writing until I've recovered.
Such works should be buried in a tomb in Egypt and
sealed with a massive stone door with a curse on
whoever should open it and reveal them to humanity.

Steadily improving, a day or two later she directed me to this story, as an instance of how developing country finance gets done. it is a classic. There's so much more transparency now, and the real greedheads like Mobutu or the Duvalier outfit-- ah, we'll never see the likes of him for conspicuous rapacity -- this guy is an amateur. But it's evocative nonetheless. They just don't make Big Man like they used to.