A Small Strangeness From Iran

Not a lot of people know this

Some years back I did a weekly column for an Iranian newspaper. Neoliberalism is great, etc, you can imagine the content. All rather fun for it required reading some portion of the Iranian - English language of course - press to find a story to write about. The point wasn’t, at all, to try to tell everyone what to do. Rather, here’s something that could be done and if it were the effect would likely be. You can’t just shout that sort of thing out, it requires a current story to hang it upon. Thus, read the press, see what was being talked about, then use that as the hook for some propaganda about neoliberalism.

All rather fun and it did lead to one of my books being translated into Farsi. Yes, went through censorship and so on (and given that it passed, obviously not all that revolutionary) and the first edition sold out so there was a reprint. Which really is fun for that’s the only one of my books that ever has been reprinted. You know, the one I don’t get royalties - nor even a fee - upon and don’t have a copy of for the vanity shelf*.

Anyway, so the translator and editor of those pieces left Iran and is now working as a journo in the US. Mo’s moved up in the world of course, he now does TV. Mere words and newspapers are so old, eh?

Also, we were going to do an inflation index for Iran. We’d worked out how to do it, got a laddie lined up locally to do the number crunching, found the weightings for the official indices and all that. Even been given a budget etc. Happy days. Before we got final sign off the current furore started and the Iranian internet closed down. We could, about, get info out but piecemeal. But the biggest problem is that we’d not got final sign off and so no money flow - Boo!

Which made this piece interesting:

Mohsen spent half of his daily salary on a carton of eggs.

The 38-year-old factory worker in northern Iran earns one million tomans per day, the average daily salary nationwide, which is about £5.60 at current falling market rates.

He spent the other half buying enough international internet data to check messages and news for 24 hours.

The father of two told The Telegraph: “We are facing hunger. People can’t afford to buy anything. Shops are open, but few people walk in and out of them because they don’t have money and are losing their jobs.”

Eggs that cost 250,000 tomans (£1.40) two weeks ago now sell for 520,000 (£2.93). A 10kg bag of Basmati rice jumped from 2.5 million tomans (£14.08) to 3.2 million (£18.03). Chicken went from 220,000 tomans per kg (£1.24/kg) to 360,000 (£2.03/kg)

At current wages, Mohsen and millions of Iranians must work an entire day to afford one chicken.

The point of what we would have been doing is - in effect - replicating the official inflation calculation but honestly. Or, perhaps, publicly. Monitor prices, feed them through the usual weightings, inflation rate!

If we’d started, say, 6 weeks to 2 months earlier then we’d have had a fabulous set of stats to tour around which was the whole point of the exercise - these froods really know where their towel is etc. Ah well.

But, erm, if the internet’s down then what’s this?

He spent the other half buying enough international internet data to check messages and news for 24 hours.

Eh, but, erm, how?

Ah, you see, there’s a special internet now.

….the trouble is, the internet’s been down for the past 65 days. By the regime that is. Last week, they opened the new system mentioned in the piece. (Huawei solution bartered for crude) So, people can pay a high premium for limited access. (Can’t check X or Instagram but Telegram works, etc.) The rest of the internet, especially from outside remains shut down.

People are paying 50% of their daily wage for this.

And, well, there is a point to this other than just reminiscence. There’s a laddie out there called Erik Brynjolfsson who, in many things, is much too lefty for you or I to be interested. Except he’s gone off and done some rather interesting stuff - what’s the value of this free stuff we get on the internet? He comes back with numbers like $600 a year for Facebook, $18,000 a year for free email and search. Yes, obviously, those are what Americans are willing to pay to retain those things, not what some Persian peasant is.

The point being that if we’re getting these things for free then inequality is much less than standard estimations of incomes would conclude. Because we all get these things for free and $18k a year to a poor person is worth much more than to a rich one.

The obvious retort is that no way is that sort of stuff worth $18k a year, don’t be stupid. No one would pay that. Pfft.

Except, well. We’ve got data here - OK, it’s anecdata but data is, despite that rubric, just the accumulation of anecdata - that people are, in fact, willing to pay 50% of their daily income for a day’s access to the internet, even in limited form.

Hmm. Maybe our laddie Erik has something here then, eh? And if he does then the grandest technological change of our lifetimes - this digitalisation, this internet thing - has equalised incomes across the world hugely then, hasn’t it?

Eat my shorts, Gazza, Gabriel, Zack, eat my shorts.

*If you think people who’ve gone to all the trouble of writing a whole book don’t have a vanity shelf then you really do not understand much about human beings