Stop the press. I have found out the source of all that is going wrong with the Dominican Republic. The poverty, illiteracy, general malaise. Never mind the IMF aiming to radically restructure the economy, wacking up sales tax that will hit the poorest. Never mind all the people who try to blame everything on Haiti and Haitian immigrants. Never mind all the rampant corruption and the stagnating effect of a strongly partisan political culture. The cause of the Dominican Republics ills is simple:



There is only one person in the country with a PhD in Geography.

Simple.
And he got it from a Spanish university. The president should stop pouring money into the hole in the ground that is the Santo Domingo metro system and invest in postgraduate geographers. I know of at least two Dominicans with Anthopology PhDs, so this begs the question of how a country is to move forward where not only there are virtually no geographers, but also where they are outnumbered by anthropologists. And that is before I even get started on the number of economists.

Mr President, if you are wondering why the country has all of its problems, despite the intense analysis by economists, then it is precisely because you are asking economists and not geographers. If the answer is not 'geography' then you are asking the wrong question. You should do a regression analysis with extreme prejudice on the economists (i.e. throw them to the crocodiles, just as one of your predecessors did with his political opponents), and replace them with geographers. Soon life will be better, everything will work, and little children will run in the sunshine skipping and singing about space and place.

Rant over.
At least this explains why I get looked at funny when I tell people I am a geographer