wednesday, october 04, 2006
Keeping Track of Time
In 1950, Dimas de Melo Pimenta, a businessman in Sao Paulo, Brazil, bought a pocket watch. From that humble purchase he began an obsession with time.He became a specialist in watches, clocks and timepieces and later founded Dimep, a company that today specializes in clocks and timekeeping services.
And he started collecting.
Today there are more than 700 timepieces in the late-inventor’s collection on display at the Dimep offices in Sao Paulo. The oldest being a silver clock from Germany made in 1535 that consists of just an hour hand – minute hands wouldn’t arrive for another century and a half.
The existence of a museum in Brazil might strike some as incongruous in a region of the world where the perception of time is often a bit less. . . restrictive than in most English-speaking countries.
Robert Levine, a professor of Psychology at California State University, Fresno, spent a year in the mid-1970s teaching in Brazil and his experience with the different perceptions of time sparked a lifelong inquiry into the subject.
"During my year in Brazil I was repeatedly bewildered, frustrated, fascinated, and obsessed by the customs and ideas of social time Brazilians sent my way," he wrote in this book The Geography of Time.
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For US businesses interested in becoming involved in Latin America this divide can be a formidable obstacle. Moreover, many in the region are starting to understand how much it can dampen their ability to catch up with more developed countries.
Last year, Ecuador kicked off Campaña Contra la Impuntualidad, a nationwide effort to be on time. According to a New Yorker article on the event, chronic lateness costs the country $2.5 billion a year
"The fundamental challenge for a modern economy is to coördinate the actions of millions of independent people so that goods may be produced and services delivered as efficiently as possible," wrote James Surowiecki. "It’s a lot easier to do this when people are where they’re supposed to be when they’re supposed to be there."
And in a society that accepts lateness as a part of the way things are, it tends to become assumed. Why be on time when you know everyone else is always going to be late?
The problem is that this perception can become ingrained enough that it becomes part of the framework of the society. The final step is to institutionalized the practice with the creation of a bureaucracy.
Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto, the director of Peru's Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, has argued that formal property system where ownership and transactions are clearly recorded is vital for an economy. It provides a way for poor, forced into an informal economy due to their impoverishment, a means of accessing the capital and strengthening the overall economy.
And what is the key impediment to this process in developing countries? The bureaucracy. Particularly the amount of time and effort it requires to traverse.
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"We discovered to become legal it took more than three hundred days working six hours a day," he wrote in his most recent book The Mystery of Capital. "The cost: Thirty-two times the monthly minimum wage."
Receiving approval from the Municipality of Lima, one of 11 agencies they were required to deal with, took more than 700 bureaucratic steps.
This situation, common in most developing nations, makes it impossible for the poor to leverage their informal ownerships into capital, leaving them outside the system. Moreover, cutting through the bureaucracy, thereby saving time, is a key point where corruption begins to sink in.
And, as Levine points out in his book, there is a social aspect to the value of time. The more affluent you are, the more valuable your time is.
"The least accessible people are often elevated to savoir like dimensions," Levine notes. "For the people doing the waiting, there is nothing like a long delay to put them in their place."
Perhaps there is no better example of this precept than Vladimir Montesinos, the spymaster and dealmaker for former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori for 10 years until their ouster in 2001.
As journalist Michael Smith described Montesino's unique role: "When anyone needed a solution in Peru, the most efficient choice was to turn to Montesinos. He could cut through red tape and across bureaucratic barriers. He was also able to call on technological resources that no other government institution could obtain."
He also was almost completely impossible to meet. According to the book The Imperfect Spy, by Sally Bowen and Jane Holligan, Montisenos was almost impossible to obtain an audience with and those who did were often forced to wait hours, or even days, before he would assent to appear.
Reforming the system is a constant refrain of politicians throughout Latin America but the problem has proven remarkably difficult to achieve. And, for the foreigner looking to do business in this strange new world, it is best done with some caution and preparation.
"The rules of punctuality are inseparably intertwined with cultural values," Levine writes. "And when we enter the web of culture, answers come neither simply or cleanly."
This essay also appears on my Engineering News-Record blog, Points South.
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