Category Archives: Poverty and Development

Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and IPCC

Posted on by

Congratulations – sort of – to Al Gore and the IPCC for the Nobel Peace Prize.   I’m somewhat confused because it seems to me their efforts would not fall under the general category of promoting “Peace”.    AP story about Al Gore and IPCC Peace Prize is here.  More importantly people should be concerned that our new global focus on very expensive and problematic climate change science will distract us from more pressing problems.   Here’s what I just wrote to the Nobel Prize Committee – their website even promises I’ll get a response. 

As much as I respect Al Gore and the IPCC I worry that our new global focus on Climate Change will distract us from the more pressing problems of poverty, health, and violent conflict.   Was this possibility considered by the awards committee?

Climate change is the best current example of how humans process information, problems, and solutions in irrational ways.    Generally people note that global warming is happening (true) and that warming is likely the result of human activity (probably true – IPCC concludes over 90% likely).    It’s also reasonable to assume that warming will lead to mostly undesirable changes.   HOWEVER, it does not follow from these truths that we should make Global Warming the top priority.  In fact due to the expense and difficulties involved a clear mind will conclude that we should implement cheap changes but forego the expensive changes in favor of devoting those resources to *current* catastrophic global conditions – generally these relate to poverty and health conditions in the developing world, but would also probably include work to alleviate the appalling conditions found in many American and European big city neighborhoods.

Below is a link to a video of Bjorn Lomborg at TED Conference on Global Solution Priorities.   In my opinion he’s the clearest thinker out there – a contrast to people who are so poisoned by “political thinking” and “advocacy thinking” that they can’t see the facts from their causes.    I think a good test of whether you are clear thinking about a topic is to make the opposition case effectively enough that people can’t tell your bias.    Most topics have complex sets of facts and no easy answers – everybody should keep that in mind.   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dtbn9zBfJSs

Hey – Al Gore’s office looks a lot like mine, but with bigger monitors.    I like him, but don’t agree with him that GW is the big problem facing us.

There’s a LOT MORE about this over at Max’s blog.

LitLiberation

Posted on by
19

LitLiberation is a new idea about raising money for charity.   Because of the “prizes” for top fundraisers I was thrown off a bit but when I saw the list of donation folks, which includes Matt Mullenweg and Marc Andressen, and saw the neat way they are having people help build schools in developing countries I thought I’d help point people to this great cause. 

A bit later…. I’m really warming up to this great idea because it is connecting donors to the recipients and I think that is a key thing that has been somewhat lacking in aid, and is one of the reasons it’s hard for people to support US aid projects and other charities where you don’t generally see the results of your contributions.   There is a practical reason for this – my understanding is that NGOs have to spend valuable resources arranging for visits and such.   However I think connecting donors to recipients is a key part of expanding the global reach of charities.

 I have not set up my own donation page but I just gave to this Vietnam “build a school” project  by the founder of the LitLiberation idea, Tim Ferriss:  http://www.firstgiving.com/timferriss

 From LitLiberation: 
…. 30-percent of rural children in developing countries aren’t enrolled in school. As one project, a group of people can choose to build a school for $17,000. When split among 10 friends, it breaks down to $1,700 each or $850 if 20 people contribute.  Those involved will provide education to tens of thousands of children, have their names forever associated with the school, and also enjoy the opportunity to visit it in the future.  

In conjunction with DonorsChoose.org and RoomToRead, Tim Ferriss formed LitLiberation to raise $1 million in 30 days, and in the process, help educate children around the world.

Described as a scalable education revolution, LitLiberation makes it incredibly simple for anyone to fund a specific project in developing countries or support U.S. public schools. It is the first time that anyone can, in five minutes, sign-up as a fundraiser and compete to raise money, winning world-class prizes in the process

Charity return on investment is important. Thanks World Vision!

Posted on by
6

There are a great number of groups doing a lot of good in the world, and I’m concerned that *something* in the way we process information about poverty and health needs in the developing world has made us far too skeptical of how easy it can be to save lives, and far too skeptical of the groups that are doing a good job.

This in part leads to what I’d argue is an immoral state of affairs in the charity world. Most people in the USA give far more to University, Hospital, and Museum endowments than they give to organizations serving the third world that are saving lives for a few bucks rather than simply making our already very comfortable middle class lives a *bit* better. I guess that’s OK but I’ll take the big ROI on my charity investments, thank you.

It feels very good knowing your money is actually saving lives, living because I chose to give to high ROI charities.

The simple story is that it costs very little to save lives in the developing world. Although it’s a little counterintuitive it’s also clear that reduced death rates lead to reduced birth rates and lower population. I’m floored by how poorly this is understood by otherwise intelligent people, and it seems to be the top reason people say they don’t want to give money to extremely poor people. Graft and corruption are major problems in the third world which is why you want to give to “NGOs” or “non-governmental organizations” which tend to be far more effective at making sure the money finds its way to the right people.

So, let’s apply this ROI in real life and give some money in honor of my Mother’s birthday today. I think charities like World Vision do a lot of good but also suffer from the kind of fatigue people show when presented with a lot of “dying children” information. This is unfortunate because World Vision leverages cheap and free expertise to deliver a lot per donated dollar. Here is the campaign mom likes:

Major pharmaceutical companies have recently donated over $174 million in medicines and supplies to World Vision.
But we need your help to distribute them where they’re needed most.

The medicine is Mebendazole and some others that fight worms and intestinal viruses – one of the leading killers in the developing world. World Vision has the meds but needs money to ship them. The “multiplier” in this case is 13x – ie a donation of a mere 7.7 cents delivers – literally – a dollar of medicines.

So, time to stop writing and do some good and give $770 dollars to this campaign for a health impact of just over $10,000!

Donor Name: Joseph Hunkins
Donation Total: $770.00
Donation Date: 27-Sep-2007
Completed Date: 27-Sep-2007
Payment Type: 
Credit Card Type:

Happy Birthday Mom!

World Vision
KIVA
Unicef


Save the Children

Posted on by
Reply

Charlie Rose is hosting Cokie Roberts of ABC news and former Senator Bill First who both are working for children around the world as part of the superb efforts of “Save the Children” which is working for global health, poverty, and education for all children.  Roberts is pointing out the fact that is routinely and tragically overlooked – helping reduce poverty in the developing world will *decrease* births and is thus likely to *increase* standards of living for everybody.     Many fiscal conservatives fail to “do the math” on global development – an excersize that leads you to fund development efforts at very high levels rather than funding military efforts which generally have very dubious returns on the investment.

Frist, when asked why he wasn’t running for President, said he wanted to focus on his work to save children for the next few years.  Bravo to him and to Save the Children for this excellent work.

Transhumans of the world … unite!

Posted on by
2

The Transhumanist Association gathered last month in Chicago to discuss issues relating to the idea that humans are in the process of evolving from organic beings to a sort of machine/organic hybridized animal that will have spectacular mental abilities and will effectively attain immortality when Artificial Intelligence routines are sufficiently developed.

Sound a bit crazy to you? In my opinion this techno-hybridization of our species is already happening, and the process of integrating biology and technology has been going on pretty much since the beginning of tool use by primates. Corneal transplants and lasik surgery, for example, are fairly significant modifications and enhancements to our “natural”capabilities. Artificial organs even more so. Use a computer lately? This is just another of many ways we use technology as an interface between our human intellect and non-human helping devices.

Sure it’s another step forward to have our brains getting downloaded or to have neurons integrated with chips (lots of neat experiments are going on with this organic / silicon stuff now), but it’s not to be feared. Rather we should embrace the potential here to solve many of the most pressing problems of the world – problems like global poverty, warfare, and health that we often fail to adequately address, let alone solve.

Here’s a nice article about the Transhumanist conference

Kurzweil’s newsletter noted that one of the provocative notions at the conference, from Sirius Satellite founder Martine Rothblatt

… The idea is that people should be creating digital mindfiles throughout their
lives that could be used to revive them by means of mindware when
sufficiently strong artificial intelligence is developed …

Wow, how’s THAT for an Attention based economy? More like an Attention based Jean Paul Sartre “Being and Nothingness” philosophizing extravaganza. Cool. Count me in.

Bravo to Intel for joining the One Laptop Project

Posted on by
Reply

Good for Intel, and good for the One Laptop project. Intel will cooperate rather than compete to bring laptops to kids all over the world. It was never clear to me that Intel did anything wrong in the first place because the goal is to get the computers to kids, not get *certain types* of computers to kids, but the One Laptop folks seemed to think the Intel “Classmate” computer would impede their progress in spreading the silicon gospel to poor kids all over the globe, so all is swell now.

Bill Gates finally graduates from college

Posted on by
1

Harvard has awarded Bill Gates his degree – just a few decades since he dropped out – and he even got to deliver the commencement address this year.   An address that was brilliant and timely.

Gates called on the historic challenge to Harvard students of General Marshall who inspired students to help rebuild Europe after WWII.   Gates ambitions are even bigger – getting the best and brightest to take on the world’s most pressing challenges of poverty and health.

There is no more important message in the world today, especially as the deadly combination (literally deadly for millions of the world’s poor)  of commercial media and human superficial interests have effectively made intelligent and provocative discussion of these broad global issues rare and difficult.    Gates correctly points to the key challenge in solving global poverty – how to make fighting poverty and disease in the third world as interesting to people as innovations in technology or new provocative content in the entertainment industry.

American Express Members Project – finding and funding a good idea

Posted on by
16

IMPORTANT:  This blog is NOT  The Members Project Website.   Go HERE for the official site.

The American Express Members Project is a really neat idea – members will submit and review “good deed” types of projects and American Express will fund the winning project up to 5 million. It’s so great to see that the new corporate standard is to step UP to the plate and do really good, really big things. It’s also (finally) considered very hip and cool to do good things, and that’s …. cool.

Global Warming – less hype, more science please.

Posted on by
2

Yahoo’s got a noble initiative going to “fight” climate change but as with most of these efforts I’m very skeptical this is where so much of the smart thinking, time, and money should go.

I wrote them:   With all due respect to the noble intentions I think I’d rather see Yahoo work on … profitability and web innovations. Warming is so *incredibly* expensive to try to fix it’s better to spend our treasure and time on the low hanging fruit problems of the world: microloans, malaria, aids prevention, etc, and focus on conservation and alternative energy. With China as the leading producing of CO2 I can’t help but think our many noble high tech solutions are just jousting at the energy windmill.

I’m not nearly as skeptical about human induced climate change as my friend Glenn,  but I share his concern about the alarmism and “groupthink” that is now pervasive in the Climate Change community.     Recent IPCC reports have been

My big concern remains that we can’t do much about this and therefore we should tackle the catastophic things we *can* easily fix.  Those are disease and poverty, water, etc.    Incredibly people seem to ignore these basic human health and poverty problems as “insurmountable” when in fact  they are relatively easy to solve with modest allocations of time and money, while people focus on problems like Global Warming and longstanding religious conflicts that likely have *no* realistic solutions for decades, centuries, or even millenia.   Also important is that feeding people and raising standards of health and living leads to much, much smaller populations (this “prosperity leads to lower population” effect is very well documented but I can’t believe how many people think that helping the poor leads to more poor people (the “feed and breed” ideas of Malthus).  This is a very dangerous and wrong assumption and not backed by any research with which I’m familiar).

I propose that well intentioned, rational folks should use a ‘triage’ system where we take major global problems and the cost of their proposed solutions and prioritize these actions on the basis of where we can do the most good for the least money.

But as my friend Linda pointed out wisely last year during our hike in the incomparable Trinity Alps, it’s possible that at least with warming people are inspired to act, and in general these actions are leading to more energy conservation and innovations.    Better *something* good than nothing good, but I’m still going to advocate for a rational, not emotional, approach to all this.

Make that TWO laptops per child?

Posted on by
2

I’m not sure what to make of Intel’s decision to enter the “market” for laptops to the developing world, though I am frustrated by Negroponte’s quick dismissal of this as Intel being evil rather than noting that this could be a fantastic opportunity to realize his (wonderful) vision of internet computers for all.

Intel’s machines now cost $200 and the One Laptop machines are now $175. Both think pricing should fall as production ramps up.

This reminds me a bit of our local internet broadband fiber network conflict between the city of Ashland, Oregon and Charter Communications.

Several years ago Ashland developed a great fiber network concept that would be run by the city via the public electrical utility. Charter initially tried to get Ashland to work on a project together, partly using strongarm and legal challenge tactics. When that failed and Ashland started competing with Charter for cable and broadband services, Charter countered the city by offering lower rates for cable and internet to their Ashland subscribers. This split up the customer base and created revenue shortfalls for the city project (and probably for Charter as well – my theory is that they wanted to fight this trend in other cities and were willing to take a loss in Ashland to make that happen) . So, the end result now appears to be a lose-lose deal where taxpayers in Ashland have to make up shortfalls, and Charter also probably lost money.

Perspectives vary on motivations and such, but for me the moral of the story (then and now) was that it’s better for non-profit entities to cooperate than to compete. There was a win-win in Ashland when the city could hold out the *threat* of doing their own thing, forcing Charter to lower rates and offer great services. But they foolishly chose to fight, leading to the predictable lose-lose situation.

Extending this to the One Laptop project I’d sure like to see Negroponte at least *carefully examine* all the possibilities of working with or next to Intel. If profit-hungry Intel can produce these for $200 where heavily subsidized One Laptop is at $175 there may be some room here to cooperate in an effort to get the job done.

Negroponte’s motivations in my opinion are virtuous and his integrity in this is almost unimpeachable, but that does not mean he’ll make the best decisions under the changing sets of circumstances. I’d like to see more of an open mind about this one.