The Economy

I've never been very good at economics. When I would play Monopoly Jr. my sister would refuse to own the space dedicated to horses. In the grand scheme of the game, that really crippled her ability to establish devastating fiscal power through a conglomerate of colored spaces. When you add in governing bodies that regulate, stock markets that fluctuate, and people who speculate, I'm usually left in the dust of a philosophical pondering of how the money I'm holding is intertwined in an entire system based on gold and rules but not the golden rule. Since being in Jordan, I have realized one very important fact, the economy is important in our everyday lives. Coming from the country that dominates the global financial realm, it's been jarring to see how the economy is played out in our everyday lives.

Jordan was estimated to have a GDP of $40 billion in 2013, which ranked 105th in the world. The GDP per capita hovered around the $6,000 mark, which ranked 151st in the world. The GDP as a measurement is known to have its weakness. It doesn't measure the distribution of wealth, and it doesn’t recognize non-market activity, like those billions of horse stables that exist with the funding of monopoly money. In Jordan, like anywhere else, there is a gap between the rich and the poor. A reported 11% of the population lives below the international poverty line. The honest truth about the program I'm a part of is that I'm pretty sheltered from the "have nots" in Jordan. The West side of Amman, where I live, is known to be slightly more affluent than the East side of Amman, where I have not visited. On top of that, Princess Sumaya University of Technology (PSUT), where I have my classes, is attended by predominately well-off students whose parents can afford the price of the University. Like America, there are also public Universities where the tuition is a bit less, but they are competitive and you have to have incredibly good marks to get admitted. One day we asked our professor how much tuition was at PSUT was, she didn't have exact figures, but she placed it at around 4,000 JD per semester (at an exchange rate of 1.4, it'd put you at about $5,600).

The price tag of tuition indicates part of the reason that I call my experience with the economy here jarring. Things are generally cheaper here. At the cafeteria on campus I can buy a sandwich for sixty piaster, which is less then ninety cents in America. If you go to a nice restaurant here, you can get a hearty meal for around four Dinars, so less than six dollars. As a known tightwad with my money, it feels pretty good to save all my dough by eating cheap meals and taking cheap transportation. Cheap is all a matter of perspective though. The cost of living here is usually less than it is in America, and the reason for this circles back to the GDP per capita statistic. It's all about scale, if you keep the cost of food lower, people have to spend less on the basic necessities, and if you spend less on the basic necessities, you can pay people less. The system isn't quite that simple though. While driving through Jordan I see a lot of banks, insurances companies, and financial firms. There is also construction of skyscrapers and massive buildings downtown, and I know at least one of these impressive modern marvels is going to be a bank. All of this is a conscious effort to build the economy in Jordan. At the same time, Jordan has a high import tax to try to encourage people to buy local, especially tourist, in an attempt to ensure that the local economy doesn't collapse. This arrangement of trying to ensure the local economy stays strong, while also building international power, makes sense, but the nuts and bolts of the operation are a bit beyond my realm of knowledge.

There are some things that aren't beyond my realm of knowledge though. When we got here we signed a paper saying that we wouldn't attend any political protests or rallies while in Jordan. We were told that these protests could spring up anywhere in the city. It is just a part of the political culture, but it probably isn't safe for us to get into the mix of things we don't completely understand. Of course curiosity about what the protests were about lead to a string of questions, and we were told that protests could occur for many reasons, but one of the concrete reasons they gave us was inflation. The fact of the matter is the economy is linked to freedom for many people in the Middle East. In the late 19th and early 20th century, many countries in the Middle East defaulted on loans they had gotten from European and had to forfeit their economic autonomy and become ruled by foreign countries. Whether true or false, a lot of people in the Middle East link violence and intervention from foreign forces to the presence of oil and other natural resources. A tour guide we had during our city tour the first week described Jordan as "the Swiss of the Middle East". He made this comment because of Jordan's ability to avoid conflict, but he also added that it was largely in part because Jordan doesn't have any oil reserves. This is all to say that a typical Jordanian seems to understand how the economy is linked to their independence, which I only began to recognize while I started living in a country that is not the economic superpower of the world. You don't have to think about where you'll land when you roll the dice in Monopoly if you have all the houses on the board.