Watch everyone and learn everything, Economically!

My cousin, Boo, is a “parro". At least that is what I would hear growing up. However, eventually I came to know that he was mentally unstable and not a drug addict like how many of us would describe “parros” to be. As a note, I actually prefer not to use the term vagrant to describe him nor the others I grew up with. My foray into economics began not in the hallowed halls of UWI Cave Hill. It came through sitting by Pug’s Bar and the Shell Gas Station in Charnocks, situated north of Grantley Adams International Airport. On countless occasions, I would look on as Boo, Fella, and Garfield would go about their lives, at the most basic level in an effort to just survive. It is for that reason that observing and helping Boo and, at times, with his brother Garfield, became a decent way to learn my lessons.

I do not recall much about how my parents, two former police officers, suffered through the near economic collapse in Barbados back in 1992. They hid as much as they could, like most proud Bajan parents of meagre means did at the time. However, I became somewhat enlightened while being in the back of my father’s Mitsubishi Tredia one day as he put in gas at the aforementioned station. Garfield had just appeared out of nowhere, dug into the skip and started drinking out of the disposed engine oil containers. It could have been oil; it could have been some mixture of that and water. My eight year old mind could not make out what it was. What I did know was that Garfield’s direct family took care of him whenever he was out of “Jenkins” and that they would not send him on the road without a meal. Or so I thought was the case. Since I hadn’t seen him do this over the years it certainly was strange. I knew him to “beg” when hungry. He seemed fairly coherent while he was drinking. At an instant, my young brain could just figure that no one had enough scraps to share and it was not an psychotic episode or so to speak . Ironically, that was the case for many in Charnocks at the time and it was that experience with Garfield that began my awareness of it. Since then, I always look for the strange things in the littlest of happenings.

I can point to more stories like this from different times in my life since. But as the years wore on, I found there to be further lessons to be taken from each interaction. There is a fairly recent but quite telling one I had with Boo that comes to mind. It provided a decent reminder on how important it is for government policy to have an effective feedback loop. In other words, the government has to set up a mechanism to allow them to know how well their policies are actually doing. This could be achieved with simple surveys or just by talking to people while incentivising them to do so. There are too many cellphones around for this not to be the norm.

Boo prefers to walk around barefooted regardless of where and when during the day. It could be boiling hot outside or it could be on “a bed of nails”, Boo will walk without shoes. That’s just him and it’s a sight that I had grown accustomed to for well over 35 years. During the pandemic, I put into my childhood friends’ WhatsApp Group that we needed to buy some durable yet comfortable shoes for him. My brother suggested that we purchase Crocs as, at the time they were “distastefully” popular but appropriate for the hours on end which he normally stood while working.

We all agreed and within a few days, Boo was gifted the most expensive Crocs we could find. I can almost guarantee that I have never seen him wear them except when I would force him to go home to put them on whenever I made the odd purchase from his job. I stopped after I realised that, truthfully, we had solved the wrong problem. At no point was being barefooted a pain point for Boo. There was never demand for those shoes to begin with. Yet in an effort to “develop” him, we prescribed the wrong “medicine”. I should have taken every single time I saw him barefooted as a form of feedback. I never did until too late.

The public sector has a number of extremely complex issues that makes it very difficult to consistently prescribe correct fiscal interventions. Complexity ensures that these projects are very difficult to monitor and the outcomes almost impossible to effectively evaluate. However, these things must happen as so as to avoid the very crippling issue of fiscal waste. We have seen and continue to see right now in the run up to the ICC T20 World Cup Finals with respect to some preparations and also in the estimates of the economic benefits of the tournament itself.

Many have also accused our government of failing to prioritise the digitisation of all of its records since its campaign promise to do so since 2018. This sentiment unfortunately fed a recent severe public outcry when a block at the Archives was burnt to the ground. To be fair, complete digitisation is a timely and costly endeavour. It even led to the first time a minister of government cried on camera. As I watched the widely-circulated video on the fire, the Minister somewhat reminded me, in a roundabout way, of that time I saw Garfield drinking the “oil” years before. It came to mind that government making possibly imprudent choices will certainly lead to pain. And, like the minister’s tears, will be displayed at the most inopportune of times and, certainly, in the most surprising of ways.

My grandmother was not a “parro”. Having never completed primary school, she survived in a way that I wish I could. She made do as a maid and she was the most economical person I grew to knoiw. I learned how to budget, make change, and also how to predict our oncoming social security crisis through my interactions with her. My father is not a “parro”. From him, I learned the importance of why economic reports should ALWAYS have a link to the reality of the reader. He would easily tell you of our long chat one evening after I returned home from work to meet him reading through one of my published projects with the Central Bank. He accused me of being removed from the reality of everybody. Former Deputy Governor Carlos Holder, now comes to mind. During my internship at the Central Bank of Barbados, he preached constantly the importance of economists actually getting out of our offices and being amongst everyone. This would allow us to make more meaningful analyses, bound in some sense of the Bajan reality. You do not have to be an economist to see what is going on around you. You’d be for the better if you accept and act on what you observe.