Friday I promised I would draw up a sample of a blog entry so you could see what the work you’ll be doing each week should look like. Note the adjustments to due dates on the rubrics I circulate, so that each week ends at midnight on Sunday night and the first official deadline for Diigo and blogging is this coming Sunday. (The Geo-Tagging rubric is unaffected by this change.) We’re still totaling 10 weeks of Diigo and blogging for the semester when we count the Thanksgiving week.
So, here is my sample blog entry.
Two things I posted on Diigo this week share a common theme of poverty and economic growth. I selected them because they relate to the topic we’re studying this week: global views on poverty and the outbreak of the Libyan revolution. The first article from my Diigo library is an Economist article from Dec. 3, 2011, which is right as the Arab Uprisings are beginning in Tunisia. It prominently features a map of Africa with GDP growth numbers. Here is it. Some noteworthy things that I see connected to our reading is the irony that the nations that see these outbreaks of revolution are actually not doing poorly economically. You see that Tunisia’s growth rate is almost on par with the United States’. Evidently the problem is not the “wealth of nations” but the separation between the wealthy and their nation. This is the second article, on Libya’s Sovereign Investment Fund. I am going to speculate that there are a lot of perspectives on globalization tied up in these two articles. First of all, I see strains of radicalism in particularly George Ayittey’s admonishment against seeking outside aid to restore prosperity to Africa. This isolationist approach posits that foreign aid is too often politicized and structured in a way that supports anti-democratic governments and creates perpetual outflows of labor and capital. The story of Libya’s Sovereign Investment Fund echoes that. Libya begin to enjoy rapid GDP growth rates after normalizing relations with the Western states after 2001, particularly by 2003 and the allied invasion of Iraq. Libya sought to invest its new wealth outside of Libya and trusted Goldman Sachs to manage those investments. It seems they made some poor decisions and left Libya in the lurch. Not long after, the revolution breaks out. Libya had a decidedly radicalist outlook until 2003, at which point it transformed itself into something like a political idealist state, at least on the surface.
