Category Archives: Poverty and Development

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

 

    

Risk saves lives

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Just another in my ongoing rants about something I feel strongly about.  We need to accept a lot more risk in our lives so we can stop spending gazillions foolishly, and start allocating the spending to things that will actually do a lot of good and save a lot of lives here and elsewhere:

 Re: Lead in toys imported from China:

The whole anti china toy thing seems to me to be largely an overreaction and/or  an anti-China political scam.   Our standards are far, far too high here in the USA.    I’d like to see how you can make a case that standards that add billions in costs and save at most a handful of people are appropriate when we could reallocate that risk in such a way that the costs would save thousands of *the very same* people,let alone *millions* in developing world.    Did anybody bother to compare the (trivial) lead and toxics risks from those China toys with risks from wearing street shoes in the home (also probably trivial but not a costly approach to the problem.  And then compare those with the risks most families take by not containing the almost ubiquitous leaded paint on old American homes and by using leaded fuels?   THAT’s a lead risk folks, and it’s big enough to worry about.    Am I saying we should allow leaded toys in from China?   No, but we should not worry so much about these small risks and we should reduce the regulations such that the risks match up logically.    Mad Cow disease posed almost *zero* health risks given the existing inspection regimens, yet many called for *higher* standars to fight that almost immeasurably small risk of human problems from mad cow.  (Pop quiz – how many US people have died from the human complications that come from mad cow disease?)  Answer:  1 or less.   In fact there were only 3 cases of this in US cows! 

Would I vote to put myself and others at slightly greater risk – trivial greater risk – so hundreds of others could collectively live thousands more years?   Of course, it is a moral imperative to work for this.  

Silly people say it’s not a tradeoff.   They suggest we always need to fight for the highest safety standard, and the costs be damned.    That appeals to emotion but is downright stupid in terms of economics.  You *must* allocate resources because they are limited.   You can let whimsy guide you, or emotion, or evil, or logic, but you cannot escape the allocation of resources.   All I’m saying is, to rework and paraphrase John Lennon:

“Let’s give Peace REASON and ROI calculations a chance” 

 We desparately need to better match risk and cost, but political spending and emotion forces us to, for example, recall perfectly good beef and spinach when statistics suggest these were of sufficient quality.    The spinach thing probably led to a few more deaths from lowering dietary standards by stopping eating spinach than the 1? death from the bad spinach.

You call the $13 billion in pork barrel projects wasteful spending? It’s a whimper to the Military’s Bang Mega-Budget!

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Taxpayers, many in Congress, and all three presidential hopefuls are all ranting against the stupidity of earmarking in congress – the process AKA porkbarrelling where congress people insert unnecessary projects into spending bills and/or other legislation such that we taxpayers pay for projects that are usually wasteful and sometimes scandalous.    Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” is the current poster child, which was allocating tens of millions to build a bridge that would service a tiny Alaska village of something like a few dozen people.

Yes, of course these projects are stupid, but to focus on them to the exclusion of the _real_ waste in Government spending is nonsense.    It’s like complaining that the president makes $400,000 a year when he would work for less.    This earmark money is *chump change* in a federal budget of trillions, where the things we should focus on are how to reduce the insanity of spending too much on wasteful social services projects (insert pretty much any one here) and most importantly our military budget, which is incomprehensibly large and incomprehensibly foolhardy:

Military $550,000,000,000.     Over half the world’s military spending is ours, and much of it is unnecessary.   Note the current Air Force tanker fleet fiasco where on the one hand Democrats argue this staggering contract should go to more expensive Boeing which as a US company would preserve more jobs, while Republicans argue who knows what about this.    The right answer is scale this back – significantly – because US security no longer depends on massive capitalized military juggernaut.    If there is a *single* lesson we should learn from Iraq it is that the USA cannot use massive military superiority to keep the peace.   In fact Iraq may demonstrate the opposite – our massive superiority is one of the factors that insurgents use against us, and is a major reason that the Iraq government has little incentive to get their own military providing better security for the people of Iraq.    

But even if our trillions bring security to Iraq it has been a fools bargain.    The same spending for infrastructure improvements in USA and around the world would have changed the global landscape in a significant way – certainly more than even the most optimistic scenario for Iraq independence.

Contrary to some of the nonsense spouted by modern “conservatives” and many hawkish Democrats as well, the founders of the USA believed in low military spending, very weak federal control, and in very cautious global dealings.    Until we return to those sensibilities we risk everything with the continued reckless military (and social service) spending spree.     

Countrywide v. Congress and the China Connection

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Today CSPAN had the congressional hearings with Mozilo, who has a 40 year tenure with Countrywide as founder and CEO.  He presided over Countrywide’s meteoric rise and much of the meteoric fall.    I hope people hurry up and wake up to the significance of the events underway in housing right now.    The mortgage meltdown is likely to become the greatest loss of wealth in human history.    CEO pay is a mostly trivial aspect of this situation.I think we’ll see another 10-20% loss from current values and I think we are already down some 4 *trillion*  2+ trillion  in housing value (need to check this, but the number is staggering).    A discussion of the amount is HERE.   Housing is a major depository of American wealth and prosperity, and the recent boom in values has led to various forms of reckless spending by individuals as well as the usual wild, stupid, and reckless spending suspect: the Government.   This is especially true of our unconscionable  and totally indefensible levels of mililtary spending.  Note that you *cannot* be a fiscal conservative and support the current military budget.     $550,000,000,000 to the military and fiscal conservatism are mutually exclusive positions.The impact of the meltdown and the reckless spending will be felt forever because in addition to direct housing problems that we are only starting to feel, I think all this will to depress our economy for several years and thus accelerate the shift of business to China.     This last notion is speculative, but I think it is now pretty clear that the Fed will keep rates low for many years in an effort to fend off an even more disastrous housing and credit situation.    This means China will be buying less of our debt, but I think will switch to investing more*directly* in US companies, and thus owning more and more of the American empire.      Russia’s leader and architect of communism Vladimir Lenin is famous for saying  “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”  But he was dead wrong.     The “Communists”, to the extent that term has meaning anymore, have no intention of destroying the USA.   In fact they want to keep us in good shape for as long as needed.  Now it is China who is making the rope, buying the rope, and learning the capitalistic ropes so they can slowly and gradually replace us as the empire of choice on the global landscape. A few things I noted during the Countrywide questions and testimony:

 * Probably Mozilo was just a high powered opportunistic guy and probably was pretty much within the law with his trades and pay, however he must have known things were poised to melt down to some degree.      

* Our congressional system is failing to produce people who are worthy of ruling the amazing American empire.      I don’t think there is much corruption but these guys sure are uninspired.  The congress-as-corrupt view is a “naivety of the skeptic” idea that is not based on a study of the money flow, personalities, and history of public servants who for the most part are bright, helpful people.   However they are mostly lacking in the key skill sets required for innovation and smart reform.   In short:  American politics selects for the wrong skill sets. To wit:  

* Republicans can’t see past Ayn Rand’s ass.   They understand the virtues of capitalism, but simply refuse to focus any attention on the key topic of how our brilliant capitalisic experiment has *failed* in many ways to deliver enough products to the neediest folks and how many capitalists are mostly focused on the creation of opportunistic business structures that are exploitable by the clever and the wealthy to the detriment of the greater society. .

* Democratic congresspeople are overwhelmed by math and economics.  They concentrate on people, “good vs bad”, “rich vs poor”.  * People want to find bad guys rather than find the obvious.   In the case of mortgages  the system as a whole incentified unwise practicies.     Reminds one of the savings and loan debacle although I think government regulations (loan guarantees) were clearly at fault with S&Ls were the mortgage crisis cannot be blamed mostly on the government.

* Is there a simple legal remedy for all the CEO pay and stock manipulation issues?    I propose a  “Captains go down with the ship” law.    If a company you founded fails you lose everything you made from that company except some modest monthly stipend.    This would incentify stability over pump and dump strategies.   I don’t think it would inhibit founding quality companies.   What unintended consequences would this law bring to the business landscape? 

TED Conference non-attendee list publication proposal.

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More important than Valleywag‘s mildly controversial publication of TED Conference attendees is my proposed publication of TED non-attendees, which would take a forest of paper and list some 6,499,999,000 of the world’s 6.5 billion people.    The non-TED list would have more dumb people than the TED list, but arguably would be on the order of 6.5 million times more representative.

Ted Conference

Matt Ingram is *right again* (!) about why the TED conference is, at the same time, an exciting and provocative event and a bunch of elitist nonsense.    As an invitation only, $6000 per person conference the idea was to bring together many great innovative minds in the spirit of innovation and understanding, and this is a good idea.   However good ideas are not immune to criticism and TED deserves at least a dose of that as well, especially given the fact that almost by design TED insulates the attendees from almost all the real people in the real world.  

Matt has spoken for an enormous number of us who are conflicted about how TED is both a showcase and watering hole for some of the sharpest people and ideas on earth and also a den of elitist nonsense.

His criticism is nuanced enough that he won’t be crossed off the prospective list.    My concerns are deeper about TED.  I think the sensibilities of the TED crowd are not even remotely representative of those of most of the world, and therefore many great minds wind up innovating in the wrong direction or sideways.    My view on innovation is that it’s rare for a good evolutionary reason – too much innovation will often undermine stability, which is the hallmark of long term societal viability.    Innovation is the cornerstone of positive change for the human species, but we also need people to do more mundane stuff like … producing goods and services in the same old boring ways … at least until an innovator figures out a better way to build the production mousetraps.     As a wellspring of innovation TED doesn’t need to focus on producing things, but I’d like them to find a way to better integrate the beneficiaries of the innovation into the process.    The developed world has gone to enormous lengths to distance ourselves in mind, body, and spirit from the sensibilities of most people in the world – people for whom a decent meal, warm clothes, and a safe place to sleep are considered a luxury.     To it’s credit TED has historically done an excellent job profiling some of the innovations that will help with these problems, but I’m not convinced that the conference lends itself to really understanding the plight of the “rest” of the world.

Bil UNconference organizer Tyler Emerson over at the Singularity Institute reasonably challenged my criticism of TED, but I think I’m standing by it.    Until we find ways to fully integrate innovators, movers and shakers with a deeper level of understanding of their fellow travellers in our human journey I see efforts like TED leading us down too many garden paths of “appealing, sexy, exciting” innovations where what we need the most are simple and mundane solutions to problems of food, health, energy, and human conflict.   [Yes, TED showcases some of those solutions as well and helps spread the word, which is why I’m conflicted about TED]

I do want to applaud TED for opening up a lot over the past few years via videos and blogging.   At least “the rest of us” can now see part of what’s going on behind the curtain.   Also, any conference with Marissa Mayer in attendance has GOT to be worthwhile.

Wal-Mart for Nobel Peace Prize!

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Wow, this clever article by John Tierny  in New York Times Op-Ed (what a great news source now that the paywall is down!) suggests maybe the Nobel Peace Prize should go to Wal-Mart for lifting more people out of poverty than pretty much any other organization on earth.  He notes a notion that the best route out of poverty for the developing world is to make stuff for Wal-Mart to sell to … those of us who live in the developed world.

This is a provocative piece but it cleverly *should* get people to realize the complexity of economics, and the fallacy of ideas that prosperity in the developed world comes from exploitation in the developing world.  This last notion is one of my pet peeves because it is a very naive and inaccurate view of the way international economics works.   Systems that avoid capitalism and avoid interacting with capitalism don’t thrive.   In fact they perform abysmally as indicated by the experiences of early communism, and present conditions in North Korean and Cuba.    Prosperity comes from becoming part of the developing world through economic interactions.    This is not the whole solution to poverty, but it is an important part of that solution.   If well intentioned people would work to understand the importance of getting poor folks *involved* with the globalized economic experience  it would be easier to bring the billion+ in extreme poverty to a higher standard of living.     It does NOT end there of course.   I’m happy to see organizations try to force corporations to greater levels of worker responsibilities.  But that needs to happen *after* workers and countries show that they want to play the big game.   

As Tierney suggests, making stuff for Wal-Mart is probably one of the fastest ways an Indian or Chinese guy can feed their family.  What’s wrong with that?  (I’m serious – there are some problems with that approach, but I’ve gone on long enough here for now ….)

The proposed US Defense Budget is an outrage

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As a fiscally responsible guy I had to chime in on the proposed US Defense budget which is, in a word, indefensible.     

At $515,000,000,000  this amount is conspicuous for several reasons, and I find it incomprehensible that people who call themselves fiscal conservatives continue to support the insane levels of inappropriate military spending.

One of the biggest reasons the proposed budget is irrational is the very low ROI on military spending.    Unlike infrastructure spending, the military spend does not leave you with more bridges, roads, and buildings.   It’s only justifiable to the extent it *protects value* and protects the national interests.     One need look no further than the Iraq war to see how questionable it is to suggest that spending 500 billion plus there has “protected” much of anything.   

One could probably make a strong case for the WWII military effort as it clearly rescued much of the world from the tyrannical grip of Nazi domination, but note that this spending came *after* the hostile actions.    I think GW would argue that spending now is a preventative measure for much greater spending later if regions like the middle east explode into much greater instability than now.   This is an arguable point, but I’d like to see his ROI calculations on this.     When you are talking about spending hundreds of billions annually you can reshape the entire planet with infrastructure improvements, and it is very hard to see how the military protection advantages would trump the tax, infrastructure, and good will advantages of redirecting military spending to other things or – probably more appropriately – lowering taxes and letting that help the economy and individuals.

I’d sure like to see the type of cost benefit analysis you’d do if the US was run more like a business than a bureaucratic empire, but one of the defects of our two party democracy is that neither party is interested in fiscal responsibility – they both want to spend irresponsibly and recklessly but on different things.    

This amount is more than all other nations combined, and more than half the entire global military budget.   It is true the US has historically born much of the expense of trying to maintain global stability  (for complex reasons), so simply noting this is half all defense spending does not explain enough.  However this amount still is highly questionable because many nations like Japan should be footing their own defense bills.

Note that this budget does not include funding for Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  Much will go for bloated, advanced weapons systems that have little place in a world where most of the threats are from asymetric warfare practiced by fundamentalists with 12th century sensibilities.

It is about time for people who call themselves fiscal conservatives to stop their sheep-like, bleeting support of these huge military budgets and start applying the same (correct) standards they apply to other government spending to the defense budget.  

New Year’s Resolution: DON’T PANIC!

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OK, after struggling for, literally, many moments to come up with a good new year’s resolution I’ve found the right one for me to follow during our year of 2008 10,000+ MPH ride through the cosmos. 

Don’t Panic!

I don’t just think this is good advice for me, it’s good advice for everybody.   The world is a very complex, interconnected place and I’m increasingly inclined to think that over-reaction  has fueled more problems than more passive responses.  

I’m not advocating for total passiveness of course – more I’m suggesting that we should “shelve” the complicated and expensive problems we probably cannot solve, instead devoting the blood and treasure to those we can solve.   We should be proactive tackling the low-hanging-fruit problems that are cheap and easy – these are third world infrastructure, global health, some aspects of global poverty, and increasingly our tolerance to risk here in the developing world.    This last one is very much part of the don’t panic mantra.   Most people worry *so much* about very unlikely scenarios that they allocate our collective resources very ineffectively (by supporting overregulation, higher taxes, lawsuits, etc).    For example we should tolerate much greater risk in terms of air travel (where only a handful of people die each year) in order to get better seatbelt use, which would save thousands every year.    Concerns over pesticides in our vegetables are absurdly overblown by people who don’t understand science, while we largely ignore very significant health issues like Malaria and Rotoviral disease that kill millions each year.  Even if you only consider US risks, we worry about the wrong things (preventable hurricane deaths caused by global warming = 0.0 annually)  rather than the truly dangerous yet partly preventable things (automobiles and gun deaths = 50,000+ annually )    

More about this later, but I say Happy New Year and ….

DON’T PANIC!

Make Ads, Not War

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As I’ve noted many times here I believe that our massive US defense spend is unwise, returning a fraction of the return we’d get by putting most of the annual approximately $500.000.000.000 spend into high ROI global and national development projects, pro USA marketing campaigns, and other infrastructure improvements.

Interesting to me was the number just cited for the 2008 global advertising spend –
486 billion, just shy of what we’ll probably spend on US military.   Global military is about 2x the US number, or approximately one … trillion … annually.   

For you  bogus-fiscal-conservatives-who-call-themselves-conservatives-but-believe-in-huge-military-spending you owe the world at least a 250 billion per year apology, because this military spend is so ineffective at obtaining the desired objectives that no business would ever tolerate it going into the future.  It’s tolerated out of ignorance and mathematical stupidity – the same foolishness that drives huge social spending.  I think the flawed logic generally spawns from the assumption that projects that *might* work to bring stability (e.g. war) actually will work.    Since many such projects often bring a negative or low return rather than the desired one, the ROI on our military spend is spectacularly low.   Vietnam, for example, was left in worse shape than if we had spent zero on that war, and it now appears that Iraq may wind up suffering the same fate.

So, I propose this:   Let’s try to corner the advertising market for a year with out half-trillion.   Instead of weapons, lets see how effectively a global advertising campaign  would sway global public opinion in our favor.    Think about it.   Every TV, every billboard, every radio, and all online ads are featuring themes favorable to the USA.   For every propaganda piece against us, our almost Orwellian media dominance would counter with wine and roses and happiness in the USA.   Maybe we could just corner half the global ad market but reserve a hundred billion to include lots of giveaways and promotions to butter folks up.   Free turkies, cheeseburgers, and flat screen TVs …

Oh, and then that last hundred billion would come close to solving all the major pressing infrastructure problems on earth.

A disclaimer –  I guess I’m only partly serious here.  We need to maintain an adequate defense, but current pork barrelling, inefficiency, and bad strategy have bloated the defense budget out of proportion with its return on the huge investment.   I’d guess we could cut it by at least 60% with no appreciable dilution of our US security, and we could *certainly* do this for a limited time with very little dilution in security but a huge benefit to infrastructure projects all over the world, which would create incalculable good will.   No, this would not solve all our problems.   My point is that it would solve more problems than our current use of the funds.