Skinny jeans and GDP

CAIRO, Egypt – Bottled water. Embassy registrations. Hepatitis vaccines. Skinny jeans?\nPacking for Egypt involved a week of angst-ridden foraging through my closet in search of anything that would be appropriate in a new social framework where my knee-length Old Navy cotton skirt is considered risqué. \nWe all knew the conventional wisdom going in – it’s a Middle Eastern country. Everything is more conservative than America. They don’t have the economy that we do. All true statements.\nSo imagine my surprise when I saw my first pack of Dolce & Gabbana-clad Egyptian girls flouncing through downtown Cairo, iPod nanos in tow, reeling off flawless British English on their pink Motorola Razrs – not exactly what I had in mind going into this. \nIt’s no secret that capitalism creates increasingly divided social structures – the nature of the system inevitably leads to a widening gap between rich and poor, trading off equity and efficiency – that’s nothing new or surprising.\nBut to see the real-world translation of all those familiar graphs – the result being one pair of designer jeans strutting by an entire street of people in abject poverty – is a fairly impacting visual.\nAnd here I am not even packing my ballet flats and skinny jeans.\nBut seriously – Egypt’s per-capita GDP, a quick benchmark of a country’s standard of living, is about one-tenth of that of the United States. And now, consider that when the price of those jeans is adjusted to American prices, we’re looking at as much as $200, maybe more.\nThe Americans can’t afford to shop in Egypt? What’s going on here?\nIf wealth disparity seems bad back home, think again: Social stratification in Egypt makes the U.S. look like one big middle class. Egyptian economists are elated – the country has enjoyed fantastic growth rates the past few years, and it has recently been named one of the International Monetary Fund’s top countries in the world undertaking economic reforms. On the whole, things are undoubtedly looking up for the future.\nWhich is great – for the privileged few in my classes chomping gum and wearing Gucci sunglasses. Of course, that top tier can survive the inflation that is likely to show up next to soaring growth rates. The rest of the country, on the other hand, watches helplessly as prices double, triple, in only a few years, while their “unskilled labor” salaries fail to keep pace.\nI’m witnessing here a first-hand instantiation of the sad truth of any theory on global political economy: even in the core (US, Western Europe, Japan), there is a left-behind periphery; and within the global periphery (e.g., Egypt, other mid-level developing countries), there’s an inset “core” enjoying lifestyles ostentatious even relative to any American standard. \nIf this is the trend – the less-developed the country, the more pronounced the wealth gap – one wonders what it’d be like to witness first-hand some of the kleptocratic regimes of, say, sub-Saharan Africa, where foreign aid mysteriously disappears and millions of people endure negative net growth rates year after year.\nSave Darfur, indeed.