You know, there are days when the freelancing isn’t going as well as it could, when I think back to my undergrad days as a Political Economy major, and I wonder what my life would have been like had I actually followed through on my college essays. Most of those were about how I wanted to be Secretary-General of the UN, or to work for some big international GO/NGO. I was accepted to the London School of Economics to do graduate work. It’s a path I did consider.
Today I was reminded of that as I was reading the Washington Post, which had this neat profile of World Bankers.
The World Bank looms over Pennsylvania Avenue at 18th Street NW. Its facade of glass pulls the eye skyward, past 13 stories of white and silver and gray, to the dramatic curved roof. At ground level, squat Jersey barriers barricade the complex, an ugliness mandated by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and a specific report, three years later, that al Qaeda had found the bank suitable for attack, a seemingly spectacular symbol of capitalistic arrogance.
The building, like the institution itself, strives to be transparent and often feels impenetrable. Nearly 7,000 people work in the building and three adjacent annexes, making this huge bureaucracy, after the federal and D.C. government, the largest employer in the city. Each year it moves about $20 billion out the doors, money funding programs intended to lift the Third World out of poverty.
Developmental economics, it’s called, and hundreds of World Bankers have PhDs in it. The idea is simple and noble: The world is very rich and very poor, and this disparity is both morally wrong and, in practical terms, dangerously destabilizing. But how to lift up 1.2 billion people living on a dollar a day?
This is what World Bankers think about. In a city obsessed with political maneuvering, real estate values, traffic congestion, baseball, summer humidity, maybe all in the same hour, the World Bankers are a tribe apart.
They are seriously cerebral. History Magazine is what is lined up on the top row of the bank’s newsstand, not Jessica Simpson on the Us Weekly cover. The in-house film festival shows “Chernobyl.” An upcoming presentation — open to any employee! — is “Political Economy of Regional Power Markets: Testing Times in the Nordic Power Market.”
They are fervently earnest. They believe in the importance of their work, even when they are drowning in the 14th-draft revision of a health sector project as insisted on by the bank’s executive board, which meets at least twice a week to talk about loans and grants and ask clever questions and get clever answers and then talk some more.
There definitely something exciting about helping lift people out of poverty, and seeking to understand why the world ticks the way it does and why its people tick the way they do. But man oh man is the literature boring. “Political Economy of Regional Power Markets: Testing Times in the Nordic Power Market.” is just the beginning.
Pros: Excellent salary, from the low 80s upward past $200K, with little chance of termination; six weeks’ vacation; “Rule of 80,” which offers the chance to retire at age 55, with 25 years of service, at two-thirds salary, with follow-up consulting. Rewarding work. For some foreign staff, tuition help for the kids; job placement help for your spouse. No U.S. income taxes for foreigners. (For Americans, the bank reimburses some of that tax bill to equalize salaries.)
Beer and wine in the company cafeteria, DVD rental machine and dry cleaner on premises, lovely gift shop in case you forgot the wife’s birthday while “on mission” in some client country.
Cons: Travel a third of the year, for 40 percent of professional staff; videoconference meetings at 3 a.m. with Jakarta; long days; losing that generous vacation time at the end of the year if you haven’t used it; malaria; missing years of school plays and teacher conferences; no local roots; glass ceiling for program assistants; “all the damn paperwork,” says Coll.
Hmmm . . .
