Category Archives: Poverty and Development

Somalia starves, nobody cares. Why?

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Jan Egeland of Norway is the key person for the UN’s humanitarian affairs. He noted last year that Tsunami areas got plenty of international aid (almost 100% of that needed to rebuild) while Pakistan earthquake victims languished (I think it was 25% of the needed relief).

In Africa starvation now stalks millions. Egeland was recently quoted suggesting urgent need could rise to 15 million, momstly in Somalia, and correctly noted that if, for example, Scandinavia faced hunger on this scale the world would be scandalised:

“It would be evident if, say, all of Scandinavia faced collective starvation, the world would really respond. “If all of northern Iraq was facing massive starvation, I think the world would really respond. If Kosovo and Bosnia again faced starvation, I think the world would massively respond.”

Some suggest foolishly that starvation is a natural limit on population, yet it’s clear that over long periods development leads to LOWER birth rates. Thus funding development in third world can *theoretically* lead to a positive feedback, creating less suffering in the long term.

Political impediments caused by instability and despotic leaders and persistent ignorance about basic health issues stand in the way of optimal distribution of aid. Yet there are always better ways and collectively we should be able to find them.

I think many who oppose higher levels of aid to Africa would support much higher levels of international aid if there were better mechanisms to make sure the funding was working and demonstrate the benefits to the skeptics.

As the cost of the Iraq war approaches $400,000,000,000 I’m reminded that 20% of that number, or $80 billion, was cited a few years back as the cost to eliminate world hunger. Where are all those conservative economists when you need them for this cost/benefit analysis?

$100 Laptops Rock. Bill’s wrong. But the Gates Foundation still rules.

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I was sorry to see Bill Gates bashing MIT’s $100 Laptop project

Gates’ credentials as an advocate for the developing world are unsurpassed, but I’d guess he’s reacting more to the fact this is a Google sponsored project than legitimate concerns about it’s viability.

I love the $100 Laptop Project not so much because it will bring tech to the poor, especially children (though it will do that), but because it will help to rapidly and aggressively break down what I see as the key barrier to development which is the lack of communication and exchange between “them” and “us”.

A dictator’s tyranny or a famine in Nigeria will take on a whole new relevance when THEIR kids are all playing video games and instant messaging with OUR kids.

Bill, you got this one wrong, dawg. But the Gates Foundation remains the world’s most heroic development effort.

Crash beats Brokeback, author’s rant rings hollow, kids still go hungry

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Not a fan of the predictable unrealism of the Best Picture Oscar winner “Crash”, I certainly agree with most of what Annie Proulx says about Crash and its admirers. She wrote the story on which Brokeback Mountain is based and I think she’s suggesting that police racism directed against rich hollywood folks is low on the social priority list of all but the out of touch.

But somehow Proulx’s rant rings hollow as well, failing to note the obvious.  The success of Brokeback also owes much to that same crowd who are so very out of touch with mainstream sensibilities, let alone global sensibilities.

The world is struggling with an overwhelming number of social challenges now. Neither Crash nor Brokeback addressed any of them, as Hollywood only very rarely does. More than 99.9% of the world’s population would place the challenges faced by the sexually conflicted, let along sexually conflicted american cowboys, somewhat lower on their priority list than Annie does.

So, why can’t hollywood produce more REAL films about REAL people facing REAL global challenges? Sometimes they do it but it’s rare. Beyond Borders very nobly tried to tackle hunger and development issues but could not rise above critics and perhaps Angelina Jolie’s screen persona which overshadowed the story. The Killing Fields and Hotel Rwanda brilliantly brought unspeakable tragedies to the big screen. But these films are the total exceptions in a sea of gratuitous sex, violence, and unrealistic stereotypes.

Why can’t all that cleverness, marketing hype, and technology be used in a concerted effort to address the key global challenges of our time – the lack of basic food, water, shelter, health care, and infrastructure in the developing world?

For every Brokeback cowboy there are millions of hungry kids – when are you going to write their story, Annie Proulx?

We should fear diarrhea more than we fear Osama, but we don’t.

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The Agriculture Department is investigating a possible case of mad cow disease, the agency’s chief veterinarian said Saturday….

Worried?   You shouldn’t be.   Not at ALL.   Very close to ZERO.  Why?   Only ONE American has died from Mad Cow and he got it in Britain.  Only about 150 died in Britain years ago from a major outbreak.   DO THE MATH and fire up the BBQ.
I’m now convinced to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that humans are extremely crappy at mathematics, and even worse at digesting the *implications* of mathematics.    These are not skills evolution selected for aggressively and therefore it’s a daily dose of “Houston, we have a problem!”
We routinely allocate risk improperly, especially as it related to dangerous activities.   For most people the big dangers – and they are fairly substantial – are things like getting into a car (about a hundred people die each day from car accidents), Handling guns (if you include suicide gun deaths this is also close to 100 deaths per day in the USA.

Are You a smoker?   DANGER!  Obese or just Overweight with a BMI over 24.9?  Your DANGER of heart disease and earlier-than-otherwise death is very real.

YET…. I know of few people who worry much, if any, about these real dangers, preferring nonsensical concerns about things like getting struck by lightning, earthquakes, or terrorism.

Terror stats have a tricky caveat in that baselines are very hard to establish. HOWEVER, even if we assumed that the awful toll of 9/11 was to happen globally on a DAILY BASIS, our current terror related expenditures would be better spent on global healthcare if return on our investment was the key metric.  Why?   Because many more people die daily from preventable disease than died on 9/11 from terror.    Diarrhea and Malaria alone kill over 10,000 humans per day – mostly children.  PER DAY!

Mad Cow worries?   Silly – you are more likely to be killed by a perfectly normal cheeseburger’s tendency to raise your chances of heart disease.

Bill, Warren, Carlos, Ingvar, and Lakshmi

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It’s interesting that only the top two of the world’s richest people are household names.
I’d never even heard of the other 3 dudes. From CNN Money

“Hey Slim, can I borrow your truck? Oh, and 157 million dollars for gas?

1 William Gates III United States Washington 50.0 Microsoft 50
2 Warren Buffett United States Nebraska 42.0 Berkshire Hathaway 75
3 Carlos Slim Helu Mexico 30.0 telecom 66
4 Ingvar Kamprad Sweden 28.0 Ikea 79
5 Lakshmi Mittal India 23.5 steel 55

Self Help or Self Ish?

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I’m sure there is some virtuous stuff amidst the current swirl of motivationally spoken self-helping new ageified banter, but I can’t [self] help but think “hey, this is mostly just a license for people to feel comfortable about doing whatever they darn well please”.

At least with much of the bible thumping old time religion there is an undercurrent of helpfulness and broad social responsibility. Also the new and improved and globilized business models are paying more than lip service to the idea that business responsibility goes far beyond profits for shareholders. This includes the big beneficiaries of big biz. One needs look no farther than the Gates Foundation or Google.org or the Omidyar (Ebay founder) efforts with Microloans to see how powerful this new business ethic has become in solving real world problems.

Many new age folks would suggest that there is some form of collective consciousness and that participating at that level does much good for the world. I’m very skeptical. Tell that to the kid in Africa with AIDs or Malaria or no clean water. They’ll (correctly) choose water purification to soul purification, and we should all get that set of priorities straight.

Concern as a function of distance

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Fascinating and very relevant to “problem solving” is how we prioritize our charitable acts.    Seems theat he closer you get to your own location – geographically or psychologically – the more likely you are to “chip in”.    Thus an American is more comfortable giving to the local school than to one in another state and to schools in the USA more than in India.

This is probably logical from a “survival” and evolutionary perspective, especially when you are helping a family member and therefore increasing the  chances of reciprocal behavior and passing along of your own genetics to future generation.

However I think I prefer the approach where you look at the return on investment.  For example I could give 1000 to a local university and help a student for … a month.   Or I could give that thousand to an India school and help 5+ students for a whole year (I guesstimate).

Moderation in all things

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Provocative thought for the day:

Change is coming from the WRONG set of ideas. It’s coming from both the positive and negative “exciting” stuff like wars and conflict, concerts and rich people. Change SHOULD be coming from a careful examination of what is working the middle class mundane lives that most people in the developed world lead – the tried and true stuff. How do we bring this boring but workable stuff to the rest of the world?

*Bringing mediocrity to the world* is going to require great thinking and great innovation – wild and speculative innovation included. I sure like projects like Dean Kamen’s power/water devices which are a great way to make boring mundane but ESSENTIAL change happen in the 3rd world.

…. jeez, he introduced it at the TED conference a few years back… maybe I’m WRONG about TED. If it’s spreading this kind of innovation I’m….WRONG.

FOCUS defines a LOT of the world. What we as people, nations, groups, businesses choose to focus on defines a lot about us.

It’s much easier to focus on big controversies or big positive events than it is to focus on the mundane, daily grind events. YET, it’s our own mundane daily grinds where the stuff is happening that we need to pass along to those for whom the daily grind is …. life threatening.

Too hard on TED?

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Have I been *a bit* too hard on the TED Conference? I’ve been reading more. It’s certainly great to see discussion of the project to document human rights abuses with digital cameras (Peter Gabriel), see the history of TED includes awards to luminaries in smart, scalable development like Bono, and much much more. TED conference blog

But there’s still a HUGE problem with such events which provide economic barriers to entry that are so great they insulate the TED community from….the real community. Sure these guys have mechanisms to hear from and about AIDS children in the Congo, poor Chinese factory workers and Indian farmers, but the voices of these folks are absent as conferences like TED set the agenda for what some would call progressive change. (yes they have some free spots but they appear to be tightly controlled and very limited. This is a choir who likes to hear themselves preach).

I’m always amazed how well intentioned wealthly people often create microclimates of compassion that miss the big picture. TED is better than that, but certainly we need to find ways to have the most influential discussions about critical global issues take place on the global stage, not the 1000- at-$4400-per-person-half-caf-cappucino crowd.
(no offense to the full caf cappucino folks)

Gates hasn’t gone soft, he’s gone heroic!

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What a disappointment to read New York Magazine’s John Heilemann on Bill Gates and what he sees as a softening of Gates that has led to a weakening of Microsoft.

Like most tech oriented folks I’ve never been a big MS fan, but ever since hearing Gates on Charlie Rose discuss development with a passion he used to reserve for monopolizing the PC industry I’ve been a huge fan of his and was thrilled to see the media attention, albeit very BRIEF media attention, following the Time award.

Rather than laud him for shifting his generally brilliant focus from software to world health, Heilemann focuses very narrowly on what he sees as the demise of Microsoft.

It’s a dubious premise at best (watch their unique Neural Network search triumph in about 1- 2 years as a fantastic tool), but even if it’s true that Microsoft is dying the challenges are not related to Gates philanthropy or even Gates himself as much as they are the result of the tidal waves of online innovation and change sweeping away old business structures and new and old companies alike.

I expect more from elite magazines, but like most in our sad and superficial corporate media New York Magazine fiddles while the developed world burns, and like mainstream TV media focuses more on a notable’s celebrity while the celebrity, in this case Gates, heroically tackles real and pressing global problems with unprecedented success.

Shame on Heilemann, shame on New York Magazine, and Bravo to Bill Gates.
—————-

UPDATE: John Heilemann very courteously replied to my rant at length in the following email in which he also had to correct my mistake calling NEW YORK MAGAZINE the “NEW YORKER”.

> On 1/10/06, John Heilemann wrote:

joe —

sorry you were disappointed, but at least you can let the New Yorker off the hook — i’m a columnist for New York Magazine, an entirely different publication.

i wrote a book about the microsoft antitrust trial, so i have some views about the company, its past behavior, and future prospects.
maybe we can just agree to disagree on some points there.

but while it’s true that i didn’t devote the bulk of my column to
praising gates for his philanthropic work — a point of view i
considered pretty fully covered by Time’s Person of the Year cover
story — it’s not like i didn’t acknowledge the point:

“By all accounts, Gates has emerged as the most influential philanthropist on the planet; with a $29 billion endowment this foundation is setting new standards for both generosity and rigor in tackling an assortment of the world’s most dire maladies, from malaria to HIV.”

“Gates’s consolation is that his opportunity to be a transformational figure isn’t lost with Microsoft’s abeyance. This is not a trivial thing. Gates has already changed the world once; now, through his foundation—which is not only disgorging a gusher of funds but inventing a new model for philanthropy, driven by statistics, leverage, and an insistence on accountability—he has a chance to do it again. And as Bono told Time, “The second act for Bill Gates may be the one that history regards more.”

sorry if this is insufficient — but please don’t accuse me of
ignoring the good that gates is doing with his charitable endeavors.

jh