Category Archives: Globalization

Bill Gates on Zakaria GPS

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Fareed Zakaria continues his amazing series of interviews on his CNN GPS show with Bill Gates.

Like Warren Buffett, a close friend of Gates, Gates will give away almost all of his wealth over the next decades via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which focuses on global health and education initiatives.

Gates supports “some” inheritance taxes because we are all beneficiaries of the education and stability provided by the US infrastructure.

His preference for foreign development investment seems to be based on the idea that the need is much greater there, the return on the charity giving is much greater, reducing infant mortality wll *decrease* birth rates [this is a profoundly important observation that is well documented but poorly reported – many think helping the poor tends to increase births when this is false]. They talked about the book “The Bottom BIllion”.

On the future of computing and the Internet:

Shape of computers will change.  VIrtual wallpapers, tablet computing.

The whole economy is using software simulation, which makes development less expensive.

China as largest broadband market – probably for the rest of the century.  He seemed to think India was unlikely to catch up to China.

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He’s focusing more now on how to create visibility for issues like malaria prevention.

When asked how he’d be remembered – as a software pioneer or philanthropist – Gates didn’t answer but I think the answer is increasingly clear.  Gates more than any other person has brought a new era of Innovative huge scale development work that could turn back the tidal wave of poverty in our generation.  He’s helping to make it not only fashionable, but somewhat obligatory for the rich to pay a lot more attention to those in need.

Why are we failing?

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Can you have too much concern over safety and security?    Yes, and we do in this country.   Far too much though I don’t expect things to change any time soon.    Our irrational perceptions of risk are damaging our economy more severely than most people understand, mostly thanks to the two massive wasteful spending categories national defense/military and social services.    Ironically each party has its sacred cows for spending and despite the nonsensical bluster from both McCain and Obama we’ll see huge ongoing budget deficits regardless of who is elected.

Humans are designed to act in short term, which is why we should not trust ourselves to do effective long term planning.   This is one of the reasons the founders advocated a small and flexible government and economic structure with high levels of personal accountability.

On a more specific note along these lines Tim O’Reilly notes in a post called Why are we failing at math and science?

Because it isn’t fun any more. When you put safety on the highest altar, what do you give up? When fear of lawsuits — not to mention fear of technology — drives product design, marketing, and public policy, you eliminate science at its roots, in the natural experimentation of kids who want to know how the world works.

Tim’s point is narrower than my general contention that we must learn to accept much greater levels of *certain types of risk* in our daily lives to avoid the ongoing reckless spending.   However the general rule he’s talking about applies to almost all aspects of our lives – from our indefensible military budget of 550 billion (not including the ongoing wars) to obscenely expensive CO2 mitigation schemes.    When people perceive risk irrationally as they tend to do with respect to terrorism and global warming, they accept irrational resource allocations.

I’m actually only suggesting we increase the risk in our lives by a fairly small amount.  Contrary to what people perceive, the riskiest things in our lives are generally cheap fixes.    Auto accidents, for example, are mostly caused by drunk driving, and more seat belt use would save thousands of lives and avert tens of thousands of injuries every year at a tiny fraction of the cost of, say, saving lives with high tech medical interventions.

The military is where most of the waste is but the calculations are complicated by the fact that a “zero military” option would certainly lead to the overthrow of the US by hostile powers.   Clearly the US needs to have a powerful defensive capability, though the notion that this requires spending of over a trillion every two years is beyond the pale and no rational person can be both a fiscal conservative and a big spender on military.    In a similar vein liberal spending advocates absurdly suggest that massive spending on education and social services somehow “primes” the economy to greater heights of prosperity.

Solutions?     Reallocate taxation and spending along rational lines which means massive reductions in spending in most sectors which can fuel increases where spending will do the most good (inner city health care has a huge ROI compared to research hospital neonatal wards).   Third world health ROI dwarfs that in first world.  Why are those guys worth so much less than you or I?

Zakaria vs Hannity

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Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s excellent new show Global Public Square, is debating Sean Hannity today on Hannity’s America.   The topic appears to be Hannity’s insistence that “America is the greatest country on earth” and as far as I can tell he wants everybody, regardless of nationality, to agree.

I’m a huge fan of Zakaria’s broad, intelligent view of the role of the USA in our complex world and not a fan of Hannity’s sometimes spooky form of “shout down conservatism” where, unlike rounded folks like Zakaria, Hannity simply refuses to discuss or even acknowledge our many USA defects, choosing instead to personally malign many who he sees as standing in the way of his “my country right or wrong and my country is never wrong anyway” naivete.

Hannity correctly notes a lot of the things that make the USA a great country, but his blindness to our defects, especially our massive and irresponsible spending on unneeded military projects and our newfound enthusiasm for mixing fundamental religion and politics does a disservice to the wisdom of the founders who clearly understood how critical it was to think and debate the issues of governance and society far more broadly than most modern conservatives (or liberals) tend to do..

No VC for you! Zero IPOs in Q2 2008

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The New York Times is noting that there have been no VC funded IPOs in this second quarter of 2008, which appears to be the first time that has happened since 1978. I haven’t done enough research to suggest this is a huge anomaly but I think it is another mildly ominous happening in the world of US business economics. Last night on Charlie Rose a key guy a Llyods of London Insurance was suggesting that in his view the mortgage crisis here in the USA is not at all over, and also noted how business things are blooming and booming in Asia and India while they appear to be wilting here in the USA and Europe.

In my opinion the best we an hope for is a fairly soft landing as China, India, Vietnam, and other parts of the developing world take their (rightful) place as players in the global economy. We’ve had it pretty easy for the past 60 years after WWII reconstruction rescued many economies from post-war ruin. Unfortunately that beneficence has been long forgotten (and it helped our economy along anyway).

So tighten up that belt and start spending less, because business isn’t what it used to be and it’s not going to be back anytime soon – perhaps forever.

Lomborg on Zakaria GPS: Painfully Correct Thinking

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More kudos to Zakaria’s GPS on CNN for bringing key global thinkers to the news table.

Today GPS featured Bjorn Lomborg, a figure who is controversial for the very simple reason that he has challenged sacred cows with common sense. When the sacred cow includes global warming alarmism even many otherwise clear thinking scientists have attacked Lomborg, generally on personal grounds rather than on the statistical high ground squarely occupied by Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus.

Bjorn Lomborg’s economically optimal approaches to finding solutions for global development, poverty reduction, global health, and more are thoughtful and rational. So rational and thoughtful that it’s always painful to hear his critics disparage him as a “global warming denier” (he is NOT even a GW skeptic as Zakaria very unfairly branded him during the introduction).

Lomborg’s main point is simple: We should seek the most effective solutions to global problems, which means seeking the most effective spending approaches given our current understanding of the problems.

I am very confident that history will show that the approaches taken by the Copenhagen Consensus were a sort of early “best practices” for Global problem solving, one of the first efforts to powerfully integrate science and economics in a rational rather than political or emotional way towards the vision of a better world.

Disney and World Peace

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Millions of kids in America and around the world are big Disney fans.   So am I.

In fact I think that Disney may be doing more than *any other entity* to bring harmony and peace to the diverse and complex cultural landscape.   Although they avoid some of the complex and probably unsolvable problems like wahabism vs western culture, they really do a great job promoting racial understanding and cultural understanding via the diversity in the programming .  Simply *modelling cooperation and understanding* to a global audience is powerful,and when you add the huge appeal of Disney music and production values it works on more levels.  More powerful are shows like the upcoming special filmed in India where fun trumps conflict.

Is Disney’s a childish vision of global harmony?    Perhaps, but maybe that is the most effective path of all.

Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN

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There’s a new show on CNN called GPS for “Global Public Square” and despite the dumb name the show, hosted by Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, is brilliant – exactly the kind of dialog Americans need to hear as we face the complex challenges of the coming years.

Schedule

NOTE: This is NOT a blog by Mr. Zakaria: Go HERE For official CNN show site: http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/fareed.zakaria.gps/

Frankly I’ll be surprised if the show can last for long – the Larry King demographic is not going to tune this in, even if they jazz things up as Anderson Cooper has effectively done with AC360 in an effort to pull in younger viewers and a more mainstream news audience.    In fact the weakest part of the show was the clever but insulting “GW Bush as idiot” sketch to close, effectively undermining the show’s (correct) contention that it’s going to bring together insiders and ask them very good questions.   Note to Fareed – you’re a great example of a respectful but edgy correspondent.  Don’t allow others to violate the trust this inspires in your interview folks.   I noted that Doug Fieth, an excellent spokesperson for the neoconservative cause, hardly spoke or was severely edited.   This was unfortunate as he was the only person on the panel with complete insider knowledge of the situation in Iraq.    Don’t let your guests and their *opinions* undermine interviews with people who were the architects of the still-active Iraq policies.

Zakaria is one of the best observers of the global state of affairs.   He balances the open, democratic, globalized, and entrepreneurial sensibilities we enjoy in the USA with the fact that most of the rest of the world does not share those sensibilities and in many cases *does not want to share them*.  This simple realization separates his views from the more common, and naive, idea that everybody wants to be … just like us.

Freeman Dyson on Climate Change Hysteria

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Visonary physicist Freeman Dyson most certainly cannot be labelled a “global warming denialist” yet in this review of two new books he is expressing the growing reservation of clear thinkers that for some environmentalists, the gospel of catastrophic climate change is leading them to dismiss intelligent debate and allocate resources in very ineffective ways:

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

The lack of insight that Dyson notes in the article is expressed well by the sloppy response to Dyson over at RealClimate.org, which betrays the naivete many physical scientists bring to the table in terms of a quality grasp of economics and social policy.   The key issue with Climate Change is not that it’s happening or that humans play a significant role – the key issue is what we should do about this and how we should carry on the debate.

I wrote over at RealClimate.org:

The comments here about discounting strike me as very naive and begging the key question of what we should do.   DICE models aside, the basic issues are how much do we spend (or how much wealth do we forego) on mitigation, when do we spend it, and on what?   We will address these questions whether we do it haphazardly as suggested here, or more analytically as suggested by Dyson and others.  Dyson and most mainstream economists reasonably suggest that we should spend modestly on mitigating CO2 in favor of using those resources to mitigate current catastrophic conditions and saving them to use on more effective mitigation measures of the future.

<i>So, we are a lot richer now than when the last Moa was eaten. Can we use that wealth to bring back the Moa?</i>

No, we cannot, but what if we use those *extra* riches we would not have today to keep 10 species from extinction?  Without looking at both sides of these equations we lose our ability for reasoned analyses.

I’d be interested in hearing where people here would draw the line in spending to mitigate warming?   The number *must* be between 0% and 100% of global GDP.

9 killings over the weekend. In Iraq? No, Chicago.

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As somebody who believes that real math and reason should govern our perceptions about the world, it is difficult to reconcile how people become almost obsessively concerned with certain categories of death or destruction while ignoring others.

For example regardless of how you view the war in Iraq, the death toll appears to be comparable to …. shootings in the USA.    Obviously  there are caveats needed for this simplistic comparison – US is larger, civilian deaths in Iraq are not as well documented and down from the past, etc.   But my point is that if deaths are what bother you then you should familiarize yourself with key death statistics, and you should advocate US spend accordingly.   The most important stat is that *tens of thousands* of  people die around the world every day from easiily preventable illnesss such as Malaria, AIDS, Intestinal viruses, and more.  Unlike violent deaths, which often spring from irreconcilable ethnic, economic, religious, or cultural tensions, deaths from disease are almost universally considered to be “undesirable”.   Also, research has made it clear that lowering death rates generally lowers the birth rate.  The notion that saving people just creates more people to save is …  not supportable.   Yet we (yes, I mean YOU!) continue to pour *trillions* into military and low ROI social programs while a fraction of that amount would create massive infrastructure improvements and save tens of millions of lives.  

I don’t understand the aversion to sensible spending, but I think it stems from some key defects of our human species:

1) We are programmed and designed to respond more to single instances of things rather than massive instances, and to respond locally rather than globally.  Thus we will work harder to save a single child in need of a heart transplant than a whole village in India dying from lack of sanitation.   This focus was functional evolutionarily but now is breaking down in our big world where disaster can loom large for huge numbers of people.

2) We (yes, I mean YOU!)  suck at math.   Many people in power don’t even grasp the chasm of difference between a million and a billion dollars.  Contractors in the military exploit this fundamental math ignorance of people in congress and military decision makers on a daily basis.   The answer of course is to follow the advice of the founders (and even Gen Dwight Eisenhower!) and take this massive and inappropriate military spending out of the hands of bureaucrats and politicians.   In fact the answer is to massively curtail military spending immediately by 50% to 90%.   The security implications are minimal, but people refuse to do the analyses.  I’m absolutely *stunned* by how ignorant and sheepish most of my fellow fiscal conservatives are about the waste in the military.  It is glaring, massive, and preventable – even more than the massive levels of waste in the US social services sector.

That ends my rant for the day.  We now return you to our regularly scheduled blogging…

 

World Malaria Day is April 25th

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Malaria is one of the most persistent yet solvable problems on earth, and progress has been made as awareness increases.    Netting, cheap drugs, and anti-mosquito programs all have a role to play and the cost of these measures pales in comparison to what we spend to save a few lives here in the developed world.  

One of the issues I can’t emphasize enough to my fellow fiscal conservatives is that saving lives *DOES NOT* result in increased populations.    This is a faulty but common notion that leads the developed world to spend far too little on poverty reduction which has an extremely high return on the investment by any practical measures and certainly a high return by moral measures.

Can you, personally, save a human life by giving a few bucks to a malaria program?  Yes, you can and I am willing to give anybody a money-back guarantee you will feel good about it:
http://www.malariaconsortium.org/pages/world_malaria_day_2008.html