“in the near future,” says the Ministry of Finance.) There’s a sad little econometric debate about Tanzania’s per-capita gross domestic product. Tanzanian government figures (given foggy population projections and a Tanzanian shilling with an exchange rate that varies between worth-little and worthless) work out to approximately $128 a person a year. The World Bank believes it’s about $117. The CIA, in its 1997 World Factbook, estimates Tanzanian per-capita GDP at $650. But this is from the organization that—as late as 1989—thought the Soviet Union’s per-capita GDP was nearly as high as Britain’s. The CIA uses something called the purchasing-power-parity (PPP) method to measure gross domestic product. PPP is supposed to compensate for the lower living costs found in poorer countries. It’s like having your boss tell you, “Instead of a raise, why don’t you move to a worse neighborhood—your rent will be lower and so will your car payments, as soon as someone steals your Acura.” Let’s take the Tanzanians’ own figures—it’s their country after all: $128 per- capita GDP. And here we see the fallacy on the bottom line of utopian economic ideas. If theoretic social justice were enacted—if all the income in this nation were divided with complete fairness and perfect equity—everybody would get thirty-five cents a day. This (using the PPP method, by the way) is half a pack of Sportsman cigarettes and nine ounces of dried beans. I mentioned the thirty-five-cents figure to an American friend, who said, “Christ! You can find that much lying in the road.” Not in Tanzania you can’t. There’s nothing on or near the roads. The things we throw away—broken scraps of plastic, bits of tin sheeting, snips of copper wire—are collected by the Maasai and made into the centerpieces of beadwork necklaces and bracelets. These are sold by old women at the tourist spots for about a dollar apiece. Sell one and that’s three days of per-capita gross domestic product. There are probably better ways to measure extreme poverty than GDP. Tanzania has a population slightly less than California’s and is slightly more than twice California’s size, and Tanzania has 1,403 miles of paved roads. The District of Columbia has 1,104 miles (although, to be fair, our capital has worse potholes than their capital does). Telephone lines for Tanzania’s approximately 29 million people number 85,756. Cell-phone service, I was told, was coming “next month,” which is when you usually get a dial tone. Outside the cities, there are no phones, just three shortwave-radio call stations. I sat in a hotel bar one night, listening to the howling, shrieking distortions of
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