Throwing its food on the floor

Having thrown its economic food on the floor, Saipan has busied itself bemoaning the intrigues of its alphabet-soup of local agencies. Not all of them at once, mind you, but just one or two agencies at a time. I’m thinking we could start a weekly betting pool for the next jumble of letters to hit the headlines. Hey, why not? I am, after all, a betting man.

I’m really supposed to be an explaining man today. In fact, based on a request from a professor, I worked on the unenviable task of laying out why the CNMI does what it does, or, more to the point, why it did what it did, but come to think of it those are the same things, since the impulses that steer the Commonwealth won’t change. What is past is prologue. Anyway, as regards the economy, I do have the answer on that note. It’s downright elegant. But I haven’t puzzled out when I want to run that piece. Maybe I’ll wait until a few more local alphabet-soup agencies enjoy their turn in the circus, since I don’t want to interrupt that show; it deserves its own unfettered glory.

And it sure is an emotional show. That’s a key thing for the managerial class to heed. Many a professional has met vocational grief in the CNMI by assuming that such-and-such local agency would eventually revert to some abstract notion of economic rationality.

The fly in that soup is that many economic venues are emotionally driven, not rationally driven. In fact, wherever you are in the world, or wherever you’re investing in the world, I think the most important thing to determine is if you’re dealing with an emotionally based, or a rationally based, place.

The emotionally based venues are far easier to predict than rational places are, since the economically relevant emotional urges are finite, simple, and immediate. Emotions don’t entertain intertemporal tradeoffs. There’s simply now, and there is not-now. Easy. And predictable. Which is why many places in the world aren’t much different than they were hundreds of years ago, at least if you can overlook the Britney Spears ring tones on the cell phones.

By contrast, a rationally-based venue will have the chaos of thousands, or millions, of players constantly shifting around assets and effort as they re-evaluate decades-long streams of expected payoffs, costs, and tradeoffs. Everything changes everything else, and it never rests.

Been to Hong Kong? It’s a productive chaos; rational, but not usually for the faint of heart, since the economy moves fast.

Saipan? A totally predictable and static situation; emotional, indeed, and the only important variable is how much money the feds will send out. So all the hand-wringing, politics, contention, and arguments are merely reflections of the very emotional structure to begin with, as well as the means of competition for entitlements. As for me, I don’t have any argument with anybody, I don’t have an agenda to promote, and I don’t want any entitlements, so I just want to keep away from that stuff. I’d rather bet on a football game, eat hot dogs, and enjoy the show than yell at the players.

For me, it would be a mistake in any venue to try to change its behavior. That’s never been my gig. I first worked on Saipan about 20 years ago, and I’ve always liked Saipan just the way it is, whenever that “is” was or, well, is. Saipan’s utter predictability has always appealed to me, serving as a solid constant within comfortable distance of the variable, fast-moving, zip-zap development of Asia’s advanced economies.

Anyway, back to the show at hand, as various intrigues and complaints swirl around the Commonwealth’s government agencies. Things are the way they are because the local electorate chose this structure. If the CNMI was given a chance to roll back the clock 20 years, and to make every decision all over again, I guarantee you that all the same decisions would be made, since these decisions are driven by preferences that would be no different the second time around than they were the first.

Indeed, never mistake a complaint for a change in character. I wish I didn’t have that second serving of pie yesterday, but if I was dropped back into yesterday, and I had the chance to re-make the decision, I’d succumb to the same impulse all over again and nothing would change. Hey, I like pie.

Ah, but at least I don’t throw it on the floor, since I know that I have to pay for it myself. However, that’s a constraint that does not affect the CNMI. So this is one little routine that will not change.