Matt Lakeman writes long travel and research essays on the history, politics, and culture of countries like El Salvador, Afghanistan, and Nigeria.
Commenters strongly recommend his long-form country notes, praising how he explains why places are the way they are, with El Salvador and the Incas singled out.
Is this because doing nothing is "popular", or because non-industrial societies don't produce enough calories to do more? There's an interesting blogpost[0] about extreme poverty in 20th-century Africa:
> He describes the narrow alleys of his neighborhood being packed with bayayes who just sit and stand around all day. Like, for the entire day. They have no jobs, no money, no goals, and they eat so little that they have no energy for leisure activities. The closest thing to an objective they have is keeping out of the sun, so they slowly move around the alleys to stay in the shade. Their highlight in a day might be some sort of public commotion, like a thief being caught, which will cause an enormous crowd to swell and watch the proceedings. [...]
> Kapuscinski constantly describes much of Africa’s baseline climate as so hot, humid/dry, bug-filled, and generally insufferable that even passive existence is too taxing to be productive. Ie. the people of Abdallah Wallo can’t work hard because it is literally dangerous to do so.
Doing nothing is the most common activity, but not exactly by choice.
[0]https://mattlakeman.org/2021/07/27/shadow-of-the-sun/
Matt Lakeman's recent "Notes on Afghanistan" actually covers this as he first-hand experienced a similar situation in Afghanistan where the Taliban had shut off the internet:
"The internet was out. Everywhere. Across the entire country. No cell data, no wifi, no phone service, and as far as I could tell, there are no landlines in Afghanistan [...] But now the blackout was total. Our waiter was complaining to my guide that he couldn’t contact his mother in a western province. I saw other people in the crowded restaurant fiddling with their phones and looking annoyed. I asked my guide what he thought was going on. He shrugged."
"Without internet and phones, people can’t talk to loved ones, businesses can’t function, trade can’t function, and even government offices can’t function. Only the Taliban with their well-established network of short-wave radios can function. But still, if the internet remains off long enough in Afghanistan, the country’s economy and society may very well collapse. Afghans couldn’t get money from banks. Soon enough, would food stop being delivered to cities?"
https://mattlakeman.org/2026/01/05/notes-on-afghanistan/#
You seem to be implying that the El Salvador project of brutal mass incarceration without spending too much effort checking that the incarcerated really are guilty could solve this problem too.
Firstly, it probably wouldn't because that program only began a long time after the majority of the improvement had already happened: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_848,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc23c4cb3-3328-48cc-aa6d-c104b44bd727_1456x1456.png Bukele only began the mass incarceration after El Salvador had roughly the same number of homicides per person as the USA.
Secondly even if it really had been that program that produced the improvements, the gangs in El Salvador were very different to the gangs in Mexico. I found https://mattlakeman.org/2024/03/30/notes-on-el-salvador/ interesting for background on the gangs.
If this was your first contact with Lakeman's writing, you're in for a treat because there's a lot there. This one on the Incas was too good not to share, but his essay on the Aztecs[1] is equally as good, and my personal favorite is probably the deep dive you never knew you needed[2] on whaling. Agree on style, his travel blogs are like this too and it's really refreshing that he starts out by saying "these are my sources, I'm doing my best to either summarize on interpret them," so I have the opportunity to read them myself if I feel the need.
[1] https://mattlakeman.org/2020/06/25/polygamy-human-sacrifices-and-steel-why-the-aztecs-were-awesome/
[2] https://mattlakeman.org/2021/06/01/everything-you-might-want-to-know-about-whaling/
I've read most of Matt's "Notes on [X]" In general they are well written and interesting. In some cases though it's too simplified and at times insensitive. In particular, I've talked to people who are from Nigeria/Ghana or have visited there and they pointed out issues with his narrative. But most people who read Matt's blog have never been to these places, so they take everything as 100% accurate.
That being said, if you treat it as literally just his experiences, then they're fantastic reads.
P.S. His notes on Mauritania [https://mattlakeman.org/2023/08/16/notes-on-mauritania/] is really interesting for the train story. I had never heard of such a thing before.
This reminds me of Matt Lakeman's "An Attempt at Explaining, Blaming, and Being Very Slightly Sympathetic Toward Enron"
https://mattlakeman.org/2020/04/27/explaining-blaming-and-being-very-slightly-sympathetic-toward-enron/
He makes the point that although Enron was clearly doing shady things, it's possible for a legitimate business to do many of the same stuff ("mark-to-market" accounting, tricky SPEs, and so on). Try to categorically eliminate Enron-style fraud and you might take down the next Google in the crossfire.