A lesson in fairness from Papua New Guinea

As I've made it through the first week of fatherhood, the notion that is most striking about this brave new world is the sense that someone else comes first at every moment, which is incredibly tiring, but rewarding at the same time. This week, while battling to comfort the new arrival at 3am, I read on the internet about how neighbouring tribes in the south Wahgi district of Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea were managing to deal with their conflicts. A bit random, I know, but it was a long night.

The tribesmen in this news story had exchanged food at the weekend as they started negotiation to restore peace among themselves and end hostilities in their area. The Ngenika and Kisu tribes have realised that there was an increase in illegal activities in their communities and after much discussion, starting in 2007, the Kisu tribe gave 21 cows, red pandanus fruits, 200 cartons of coke, scone packets, sugarcane and bananas to the Ngenika tribe. They also slaughtered 100 pigs for their neighbours. Last year the Ngenika tribe gave 10 cows with the same amount of food to the Kisu.

The modern world is very strange - it's crazy to think that 200 Coke cartons is part of the tribal peace offering between tribes in Papua New Guinea, and furthermore that I can read about it on the internet. Not sure Coke would be the appropriate solution to a nocturnally inclined baby, but it was an interesting tale in dispute resolution. There seems to be a sense of fairness in the approach of these tribes; that the rights and aspirations of the other tribe were as valid as their own, and treating each other as such could be mutually beneficial.

Elsewhere, in the more mainstream media (I didn't spend long reading the Papua New Guinea Post-Courier online) I read about another relationship that is being tested to its limits - the relationship between the US government and the US workforce.

Americans began firing up their barbecues for the 4th of July weekend in the knowledge that another 467,000 non-farm payroll jobs had disappeared in June, bringing the total number of jobs lost in the Great Recession to 6.5 million and the number of workers in search of jobs to 14.7 million. The unemployment rate has risen to 9.5% - almost double the rate when the recession first hit. In addition to job losses, countless millions of workers have taken pay cuts and reductions in hours. The statistics are more graphic in certain towns - Detroit for example is running at close to 15% unemployment, and local government funds were diverted away from 4th of July fireworks and parade budgets to supplement food banks and other programs to ease situation of the unemployed.

The dispersion of misfortune is not universal, however. For the Wall Street bankers spending their 4th of July weekends in the Hamptons, things are beginning to look better than ever. Goldman Sachs, who received $12bn worth of taxpayers funds as part of the AIG bailout, is on course to pay bonuses of $20 billion, or averaged out, $700,000 per employee. A figure which is twice last year's payout. Morgan Stanley similarly is projected to top last year's average bonus of $262,000 per employee with cheques close to $340,000. Without taxpayer funds, and some regulatory hurdle jumping (the transition from broker dealers to bank holding companies for these two) both would likely have followed Lehman Brothers over the precipice - a fact that shareholders and employees of these firms should be quite humble about.

While it is invariably good news that banks both in the US and around the world appear to be on a better footing, the consequences of this rebound may not be all good news. As Henry Kissinger once said about dispute resolution: “Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.” In this case there seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the fact that the Wall Street Journal can post a headline saying "Big Pay Packages Return to Wall Street" when the blue and white collar workers of middle America feel such anguish, furthermore when that anguish is directly attributable to those same Wall Street bankers.

The give and take in the relationship - in this case between solving a financial crisis and ensuring that we don't foster the same context that created the situation in the first place - doesn't seem to possess the equality of approach of the Papua New Guinea tribesmen. The outlook for the US and global economy remains extremely weak - the recent rally in global equity markets, commodities and credit may soon fizzle out as an onslaught of corporate earnings and financial news takes its toll. In the context of a world of higher unemployment, bigger budget deficits and higher taxes (which must come at some point), the burden of responsibility should be spread across the system in a way that is fair.

When you read the headlines about the non-farm payroll figures next to headlines about big bonuses for Wall Street bankers, the sense of fairness doesn't seem to be there just yet.