Foxes and field mice

(obligatory picture)

The soundtrack to this blogpost is this song

I read a book recently, it's called The Most Good You Can Do, by Peter Singer, and it inspired me to do (and write) this.

Reading this book didn't so much change my mind as it showed me the way further down a path I am walking. My views on personal relationships (<< future linked post coming) are, one could suggest, somewhat radical. I want to extend this so as to make everything personal. Allow me to explain.

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I recently read another book (bear with me here) called Thing Explainer, by Randall Munroe, which I also very highly recommend. It's all about how to talk about complicated things with simple words (I'll complete this part in this style). But the small piece of smart thinking that I saw that made me go, "ah", was a little thing in this books about the "shape checker" (a padlock).

Bear with me for this part, and if you find it boring or stupid, just skip to the next "--". I will try to say what Randall said with different words, since I don't have his book with me now: The thing that's most interesting about shape checkers is not how they work, but what they mean.

This kind of machine, which include number checkers, other kinds of shape checkers, body-part checkers and talking checkers, try to tell whether a person is part of a group or not. These might be groups like group-that-has-the-right-metal-shape, group-that-knows-the-number, group-whose-body-part-or-talking-sound-the-checker-knows, and so on, and then it allows the person to open it depending on whether they are in the right group. This is something that is very normal for us everyday, but it's only because we got comfortable to the deeper idea of what it means to use a shape checker: if you are not in the group, we don't trust you. Of course, if we did, there would be no reason to have any kind of checker at all. And I don't like this.

As difficult as it sounds (and probably is) I would like to live in a world where there was no need for shape checkers. Where nobody would steal your hand computer or car or food-heating-radio-box, and where there would be no things that are so (valuable) or so (dangerous) that they must be kept away from people by using checkers.

I think the biggest problem that stops this from happening is that some people have a lot of stuff and some people have very little stuff, and they got into groups where the first (small) group is trying to get more stuff while keeping all their stuff, and the other (really big) group is saying "help! we don't have enough stuff." As if that weren't enough injustice, at the same time, all this getting of stuff is making a kind of air that makes our world very hot, which is very bad if we want to live here for a long time, and it's also making a lot of heavy metal and other bad things go to places they are not from (usually where the people that don't have enough stuff live), and making things get sick and die. This happens because we are either: only thinking of a our own small groups, so we can't or don't want to see big problems, or don't think it's our job to fix them, OR (in the case of people with no stuff) we have too many "now" problems to think about the problems of the world.

Sometimes, people teach wrong things to people in their group or the other group to try to make things stay the way they are (which is not good).

I am very lucky that I was born into the group of people with stuff. I have more stuff than I will ever need, and I went to good schools and met good people and did a lot of things that taught me how to be smart, and I will probably continue to make and have more stuff than I can use. So I want to spread the love around a little bit, to make things better for the other group, and also to try to make the world we live on not get very hot and kill us. What I really mean, is that I don't want to think or act like I am in another group. Until the group I am in looks like the group I am not in, I want how I treat people to be the same no matter what group they are or are not in.

It will mean I have less stuff, but I do really believe that I, and most people, can be just as happy with much less stuff than they have now. Peter Singer says something like this in his book, but he says it much better than I do. I found out that it's possible and even easy for me to do this because I know to be happy and in my situation, it's not that hard, at the heart of it. It's not always easy for a lot of people to be happy, but if they learn how, they can do more good and feel more good at the same time.

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To get back to the doing good part, I won't try to explain or summarise the contents of The Most Good, since Peter Singer is a far better writer than I am, but I will refer to it as necessary while I talk about the steps that I will plan and take. If you disagree with or are confused by anything, good job, your brain is working! This should probably happen since I am trying to condense 211 pages of occasionally complicated and unintuitive reasoning into a single blog post. Feel free to write me, or I also encourage you to get the book and read it yourself!

The first thing I want to do is a declaration. After that, I will write a more detailed specification.

I am going to:

1. Tell you how much money people pay or give me
2. Say how much of it I am going to spend on people-that-are-not-me
3. Talk about who is going to get this money (and what they will do with it)
4. Describe how I will implement everything, and,
5. what is my plan for the future

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1. Here is all the money flows that point towards me. I have to focus on the recent times, since I don't have all the data from the past and I also have not been completely financially self-sufficient for very long.

- At my last job, I made €3200 before, equal to €2012.59 after tax, health insurance and social security contributions. This happened for a few months, before immigration issues dictated I stop work. I will probably have another job soon that will pay me a similar amount of money. While it may not seem like a lot, to put this in perspective, that's a few euros ahead of the yearly per-person average (PPP-adjusted) economic productivity of Cambodia.
- I used to make €800 before, equal to €642.38 after, and I will also make donations for this time period
- Every year, there's a little money-swapping ritual in my culture around Chinese New Year. I think I pocket about €1500 each time this happens but I will count it properly next time
- Every time I get a new income stream, I will add it to this list. For example, one day someone might pay me to play my wooden box with six metal lines and make sounds out of my mouth that make people move their body and feel happy (or sad) (or both).

Why did I just do this, since normally people do everything they can not to talk about these sorts of things? Well, simply put, I this we keep this more secret than we have to-- I don't really care or think it should be important, and if it makes someone uncomfortable to talk about it, they're probably doing something of no merit (or even unethical) and getting paid unreasonably much to do it, OR they're a a victim of such people, and doing something really difficult and getting paid unreasonably little to do it.

Also, the reason I am writing this at all is that I want to make it public knowledge, and maybe make you think about considering doing something like this too. Telling you stuff like this lets you know I'm serious.



2. I'm starting small, but plan to increase in the future. I think it's easier to go forward than backward with things like these, and keeping the momentum in one direction is important.

- I am going to donate enough money to get down to 90% of my after-tax income.

Because I might not stay forever in Germany (where I currently am), I am going to write off the health insurance and social security contributions-- that is, not to consider I will ever get any of them back. In the unlikely even that I stay long enough to, I will readjust my numbers to reflect this. In any case, I expect my donation fraction to increase in the future, so this is not a big issue to me.

This means I will keep €578.14 of my low income times and €1811.33 of my higher income times, and give the rest away. While it may not seem like a lot, to put this in perspective, my monthly keep is just a few euros behind the yearly per-person average (PPP-adjusted) economic productivity of Nepal. That's just bananas (bad!). Anyway, what I will implement is effectively a 10% gift, but with a few details:

I'm going to make as much tax-deductible donation (so long as the tax-deductibility does not affect the effectiveness of the donation) as possible to get my after-tax income to the desired level.
Tax systems are basically black boxes, and I am many-parts untrusting of the German government to spend enough on the right or important things, and I am some-parts disapproving of the spending distribution of my taxes paid.

At first, I wrote a very lengthy paragraph here, but let me just cut it down to spending I don't approve of. In principle, I don't believe in regressive spending. This includes infrastructure that disproportionately benefits  higher income people or special interests. Munich, for example, spends a lot on roads and allocates a lot of on-street parking, which are mostly used by car-owners. Public transportation is also too expensive, and does not, I believe, have the social benefits of energy efficiency, air quality, and traffic easing build into the price. I approve of none of this. Also, I don't support any military spending.

I'm basically saying I don't want to give the Germany government more of tax euros than I have to. I want to decide to the furthest extent possible where my tax dollars go. I do use infrastructure, and I think if I work within the tax-deductibility structure, my cost on society will not go unpaid, but really, I don't trust The Man any more with my first single euro cent as I do with my last.

- I am going to donate half of the Chinese New Year money, probably all of it in the near future.



3. The Most Good You Can Do talks a lot about what makes an effective donation. This can be a very difficult question. Let's start with what is good?. I'll go a little fast here if you don't mind.

I think a pretty good answer is, "what increases happiness and what decreases suffering" can be considered to be good. Quite often, these things go together, which I think is very fortunate. The next question is, where can we make the most happiness and get rid of the most suffering? The surprising (or unsurprising) answer is, "it's probably not in a developed country." This begs the clarification, how do I know how much good I'm doing? and the answer to that is that's very difficult to know.

How much happiness to I get from going to a concert? How about to a museum? What if the museum was nicer? How does that compare to how much happiness I get from eating? What if the food is better? What if I'm hungrier? What if the food was really cheap? What if I was blind or had malaria every year?

There are two things at work here. One is that high up the list of needs (where I am) that it becomes very difficult to measure marginal utility. Our options are also much more expensive and complex in their use cases. On the other hand, when we deal with things like life expectancy or health, it's often much more (but not completely) straightforward to measure efficiency. Unfortunately, the problems that you usually fix in these cases exist where healthcare is really, really bad. It is also, as a feature, really really cheap.

Here's a couple of examples:

Aravind
Against Malaria Foundation

The staple of calculating the efficiency of a donation is the Quality-Adjusted-Life-Year (QALY). This is the monetary value of the burden of some kind of condition that affects both quality and length of life, and by that definition also the cost of an intervention that solves the problem. One QALY is equivalent to one year of healthy life.

Now, it starts to get fuzzy when we talk about non-health interventions, since we'll be stabbing at vague and small numbers (how much would I benefit from a free subscription to a magazine? 0.01 QALY per year? you see how it gets weird). But what about education? That's a legitimately effectual but also very difficult to calculate intervention.

I think it's best to start with health and life expectancy. The most efficient work produces 34 QALYs (about the length of healthy adult life in most developing countries-- it should shock you how little that is), for about $3000. If your impact is important to you, and you're looking at less than this, it's probably worth a good long think about.

Now you are probably thinking, but what about the arts? but who will pay for the museums?. Here's what I think.

While there are people suffering in the world, the least fortunate are always the most deserving of help, and I will not donate to any cause that does not help the most of them the most efficiently. I have my after-donation income that completely belongs to me, and I will go to museums and concerts, but I fix my priorities for the amount that I have set aside for the purpose of creating positive change for those who are unable to effect it themselves.

But what about the environment? I think most climate initiatives are fundamentally broken. I like a few of them, but I think the biggest thing they miss is that to fix the atmosphere, the cost of everything MUST INCREASE. Energy is way too cheap and this is the single reason why we use so much of it. Renewables cost more for the moment, and it doesn't work to force divestment from coal and oil while keeping electricity and gasoline prices the same, driving the same amount, traveling as far, etc. Everybody wants the world to be saved but very few people are willing to change their behaviour for it.

I think that by improving life outcomes for the lowest income, least educated, most fertile part of the world, hopefully, we'll have fewer people around and more people making more sensible demands for fixing the planet. Because we'll all be in the same group (see group theory above). For the moment, I'll try to fly as little as I can (I'm already a car-sharing, bike riding hippie so I don't know how much further I can push this other edge of the envelope)


Why isn't this my job? Well it used to be! But here's the rub:

I wasn't very effective. I could have been-- if I'd studied more relevant things, got more relevant degrees, and so on. Coming in inexperienced and unqualified meant that I was kept to the shallow end of tasks I could take on. While I could be quite effective in the right job, the overhead to reach it was big, my chances slim, and I also burned out living in Ghana.

On the other hand, I am reasonably financially productive where I am now, and for the present arrangement of things, I produce much greater impact donating a fraction of my earnings than working in the industry of making impact.



4. I have decided to use Givewell to help me find the most effective initiative to donate to. I really want to get the most good for my euro, so I am going to give to the Against Malaria Foundation. I believe this represents as good as the highest efficiency for lives saved per $/€/£/¢, worldwide.



Each year, I will tally my donation amounts and send them off in the 1st week of January. Taxes happen in April, so I'll have all my receipts by then. After that, I will write a report to this blog.



5. I realise that 10% doesn't sound like a lot, and it's not my final goal. There are of course people who donate much more than that. My number will go up, and here are some considerations:

- I need to know how much I can stably handle. I've been a little bit iterant for the last years of my life, and it's nice to have a little bit of a safety net when moving jobs and countries.
- It's just as important to give as to enjoy it. Making a sacrifice is not the point, and suffering to give is unsustainable and an unrealistic plan to do any kind of good. I'll probe this boundary slowly.

I used 10% as a suggestion from the book, which does a few little income-breakdown exercises. I chose to use the model for someone earning roughly the same amount of money living in the Boston area, and adjust it a little bit, considering that my expenditures and tax rate and welfare allocation are a little different. I will reevaluate this on a regular basis, perhaps at each donation period, and with luck get to a higher number soon.

I realise that 10% doesn't sound like a lot, but so few people in this world are doing even close to this, and so little of this money is actually going to somewhere it will make a difference. Hopefully, by doing what I reason to be effective, and talking about it, I can both do something and convince some people to do something to.


(talk to me, talk to people about this!)
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Well, that's all for now, gentle readers! I'll see you again in the future!

all photos: Laura Stupin

Now we're cooking with sauce

...or is it fire? I can't figure it out. A couple of friends of mine introduced me to the saying when I was cooking dinner with them once, but they didn't know the full thing either.

As promised (a long while back), this is me cooking in my super amazing kitchen.

It's hot, messy, and more cramped than a submarine, but I'm endlessly thankful for it. It saves me a lot of money from eating out, and I get to manage my own nutrition, which is amazing. I feel even better about my situation right now than my last long term eating arrangement, which was co-op dinners and food shared between thirty people (which I really enjoyed).

These days I eat lots more vegetables than otherwise possible, and the said vegetables aren't cooked by boiling them in oil for three hours, which is the only way people seem to cook them around here.

I buy lots of stuff at local shops and market, so everybody wins. It's actually quite amazing what is locally available here. I don't think any of my food travels more than ten miles to reach me. Except sugar, which is from Burkina (which is remarkably close if you think about it)

A typical scene on market day in Navrongo. Just look at those heaps of beautiful cabbages!

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I was talking to a very smart person the other day, who told me he didn't believe in the local food movement. At first, I was a little bit surprised, but realised that the real problem lay with the words "local food movement".

He was simply telling me that it didn't make sense to always buy everything as locally as possible-- and what does "local food movement" mean anyway? To illustrate the point, there is local production that doesn't make sense (if you tried to grow olives in Boston) and national-or-further production can be much more efficient (growing olives in California).

Now, I hope you're ready for an economics lesson in disguise.

As much as it's a good thing to buy as locally as possible, it's also good to eat what's in season and what makes sense, and also to accept that local might not always be the best option. In competitive industries, price is a pretty good indicator of the inputs to, and thus the efficiency of production of a good. Usually, price also includes all the carbon cost of transporting the food as well, and in a perfect "market scenario", should be taken at face value, and people "should" always buy the cheapest food.

For example, rice from Thailand is price-competitive with rice from Ghana. Depending on seasonal changes, it can even be cheaper. This is true because not only is Thailand a high volume exporter and established, experienced and efficient producer of rice, but the rice industry in Ghana hasn't yet reached a scale where it is very efficient or competitive. Therefore, grain for grain on your plate, Thai rice is probably on par with Ghanaian rice for inputs and environmental impact, etc.

(Unless Thailand has some kind of crazy subsidy for rice production)

Somewhere this rule doesn't work (for reason just mentioned) is in the US, where huge and irrational subsidies skew the price of corn and everything that it is an input to: pretty much everything except for vegetables, and staples that are not corn. The effect is particularly strong for meat.

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Getting back to my locale, it's not a bad thing to buy non-local rice when in Ghana. It could help you keep your teeth longer (most Ghana rice comes with rocks in it).

People still buy and eat local rice here (myself included, I like it because it's unpolished = more nutritious) but as people get richer and generally develop a taste for whiter rice, it might not last against the competition. Then again, the industry might evolve too.

I don't think it'll be a terrible thing either if the rice business in Ghana goes. The market for food here is so huge that farmers could easily grow maize instead (where they have a much greater advantage over other producers than with rice) or vegetables, both of which there is a huge demand for.

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The other thing I've been thinking about lately is how TV gives everyone the wrong idea about cooking. I had a strange mental block and could only think of how a popular show like Iron Chef convinces people to aspire to make, eat, and enjoy impractical, unsustainable, extravagant and unnecessary food. I think this is probably true for the average cookbook too.

It's not that I don't appreciate the artistry on a show like that, it's definitely entertained me before.

What I'm saying is that we need a super supa fly bachelor-cooking TV show, where the competitors are scored on how well they cook but also on how little effort they put in. Also, they're not allowed to use anything that you couldn't find in the average home.

I think it's totally possible to cook awesomely within these bounds, and the common person really needs a show that resonates with them, a show they can dig. To this end, my super supa fly bachelor cooking TV show is designed to reward efficiency and convenience (and accessibility) as well as innovation, striving to produce cutting edge recipes with minimal time, effort, and resources.

I also have a theory on how it will save the world.

Mystère et boule de gomme

Timor is one of a surprising number of countries that use the US dollar as their currency. I've always found this idea fascinating, and puzzled over the idea quite a bit.

Where do they get their US dollars from? (They obviously don't print it, but they don't get bills by simply pulling paper money out of the US economy either: that would affect the US monetary system, actually causing disinflation)

How does the US feel about this?

Is it safe for (someone like you or me) to use a currency not guaranteed by the government of the country we are in?

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I did some homework on this, and it turns out that it's much less wild and crazy than I thought.

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First of all, the US actually encourages other countries to use its dollar. It helps supply their paper currency. This actually helps stabilise volatile emerging economies by fixing their interest rates and inflation to the (presumably) more stable and conservative US economy and monetary policy.*

*(although it's also criticised for contributing to the attitudes and sentiments that brought about the last economic crisis)

Having other people use their dollars is actually in the US's interest: it makes countries like Ecuador and Panama much more reliable trading partners.

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You don't have to read on:

If you haven't already figured out, I'm a pretty nerdy guy. Secretly, I read four or five different economics blogs. On one of them, I found an interesting bit of theory and speculation:

Gregory Mankiw, a high-profile and extremely influential US economics advisor (whose book on macroeconomics I used in college) famously wants to abolish the penny.

What does this spell for a country like El Salvador, which uses US currency, and which also has such a low price index that many common transactions happen in cents, and where people often need to break dollar bills to get change?

Could a country like that cope with adhering to US policy or would transaction volumes become impractical? What if they kept the penny legal tender and all the pennies from the US flowed there? How much would that be? (Billions?) (Is the size of their economy such that) it would cause catastrophic hyperinflation?

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I find currencies with "outrageous" units endearing, like Indonesian Rupiah, where it's about 10000 to the dollar, and 1 rupiah is meaningless. Ghana used to have a similar currency but they have since issued new currency with 1/10000 of the value.

I know, isn't it a shame?

Some charm remains: people in Ghana still talk in old currency even though they use new paper: they say "thousand" to mean ten cents" and "ten thousand" or sometimes "ten" to mean a dollar.

I smell a jinx

Perhaps there is absolutely no connection to the blog post, but the price of petrol in Oecusse has recently tripled, almost overnight.

I kid you not. It's because of sudden problems with petrol crossing the border from Indonesia into Timor.

Petrol stands that used to stock barrels and have hundreds of litre-bottles out for motorcycles stood empty and derelict. I think the problem has eased as prices are coming down slowly.

The post-apocalypse of oil starved Mad Max wasteland didn't come, and my petrol tank is still full from before.

Anyway, cheerios.

Banking on a fact

On an uncharacteristically lavish saturday afternoon, I found myself on a boat eating nice food (I ate an oyster, which I found isn't my favourite food: they had loads of extras and I wanted to see if I liked them or not. I hear they are really nutritious), drinking so-so bottle wine (I've always been more of a box person) and Australian (south of the beer line*) beer, diving in the sea and hanging out with some Dili expats.

*It is not certain where the beer line is exactly is, but some facts about it cannot be disputed: Germany is north of the beer line, Spain is south of the beer line.

I'll spare you the details of the afternoon, but here is an interesting story I picked up. Quinn is English descended, I believe, and grew up in Zimbabwe, doing Safaris first and later becoming a contract pilot (flying in Brazil, South Africa, and Timor among other places). He was adamant that the quality of life and value for money are unparalleled in Zimbabwe and really enjoyed living and growing up there.

This challenges my dystopian picture of the country, and he's not the first person to tell me this. I met another Zimbabwean on a flight to Ghana once who told me the same. Anyway, White Africans are another story for another time and something I don't know much about anyway. On to the story:

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Blown somewhat out of proportion by international news, hyperinflation only lasted a few years in Zimbabwe. Certainly, the inflation was terrible (being able to watch shop employees change the prices of goods in real time) but it isn't as much a key part of history as we might perceive.

An interesting feature of those time was an economy that developed organically in Zimbabwe that is (a little) reminiscent of a movie that some of you might have seen: the gasoline economy.

Because Zim dollars had such an unstable value and were worth less and less every second you held them in your hand, Zimbabweans settled on a different currency. They would buy petrol as quickly as they could spend their money, sometimes storing up hundreds of thousands of litres. Because petrol is relatively durable, held its value (and often appreciated) it was a safe way to store . People would trade a few litres of petrol for services rendered and thousands of litres for big jobs.

I think it's absolutely brilliant that this system evolved on its own without planning or agreement, or government approval. It seems to have spread virally, if you will.

The neatest thing about this is that it is an (possible the one) instance in history that a currency had great practical value. Paper money, other than the numbers printed on them, aren't good for much other than scribbling notes on, wiping up messes or snorting...stuff through. Petrol, on the other hand, is used everyday. Compared to the utility of petrol, coins and bars of gold and silver are but shiny paperweights.

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I'm trained in economics and also an instinctively practical person: I often have a hard time reconciling the need for a quickly, easily portable and tradable currency with the fact that we (today) are, in fact, exchanging bits of paper with ink on them (or worse yet, electronic records of them). That governments "guarantee" their dollars isn't the most reassuring thing for people (such as myself).

Needless to say, I was terribly excited to hear this story. It made the whole day on the boat worthwhile.

Is you is or is you ain't?

I had a little blink of insight while thinking about this article:

If a person's socio-economic situation is the biggest determinant of political views, are political outcomes (who gets elected, what laws get passed) due mostly to the social make-up of a country?

rephrased:

If a person's socio-economic considerations dominate their ideals, outlook and perspective with regard to politics, do countries pass laws and elect leaders with people making decisions based more on their situations and less on what actually makes good leaders and good policies?

The answer is likely not "yes" or "no", but it could well be "more than we would like to believe".

Does this also mean that we have less choice than we think we do, about our principles, beliefs and ideologies?






(PS, watch the video, it's good)

A side question: if all this is so, why are Americans not more resistant to irrational rubbish spouted by people like Glenn Beck? Perhaps there needs to be a variable in this equation for gullibility and propaganda.

Being politically conservative is one thing-- the simple opposite of liberalism and no bad thing itself, but conservatives in America (the speakers and their massed followers) are simply ridiculous, and have managed to be offensive, subversive and regressive.

when i saw this.. i f4pp3d*

*homage to the greatest torrent of econometrics books ever assembled
Trivia point: "econometrics f4pp3d" is a googlewhack


Oh, the things that get me excited these days. I just learned about Village Telco, which is a super neat initiative to develop an extremely flexible and extremely low cost telephone network toolkit, which is both open-software and open-hardware.

To start at the head, we all really take our telecom network for granted. It can be a little painful sometimes, but we afford our x9.99 (sometimes y9.99 with a data plan, where y >> x), and we get to talk to our friends, figure out when to hang out, and also call in emergencies, like a flat tire, or being locked out of the house. Telecommunication is really useful, wherever and whoever you are in the world.

Now, people in developing countries face the same monopolistic telecom markets as in America (what is it, like two companies?). In fact, it's worse: telecom companies in developing countries are even more bent on getting a high rate of return and invest in the most rural areas last, leaving the poorest people with lack of infrastructure and options that are too expensive for them. With their much tighter incomes, the poor spend a much larger portion of their money on communication. They make much harder choices on a much more frequent basis about whether to use telecom services or not.

Now, this is the case for poor people and energy as well, but the situation differs by a few details. The electrical grid is much more expensive and difficult to afford than telecom services, this is true, but it is much harder to get communication without telecom services than light without the grid. This is not to say that the options are good: the most common alternative to the lightbulb is the kerosene lantern (and kerosene is expensive), which is a terrible thing to sit next to -it's like smoking a pack of cigarettes every night- and there are many other important amenities the electrical grid provides, but let's get back to communication.


Here's where we arrive at Village Telco, who have designed a most innovative piece of technology, allowing communities anywhere in the world to implement and operate their own communications networks (you could do it too!).

What they've designed fits in the palm of the hand, runs on just 2.5 watts of power, is resistant to rough handling, the weather, five different natural disasters, and civil war (and is also flexible to a range of power sources). It works out of the box with existing technology, like ordinary landline and WiFi phones (it's a WiFi based system), and automatically connects to multiple other units like itself to form a linked network or relay for communication. It does all of this for just $120. They call this little marvel a "Mesh Potato", and it's cheaper than most cell phones-- it's probably cheaper than some landline phones.

This means that an entrepreneur could set up a local telecom network on a very small budget (the system is designed to break even in 6 months -- where traditional telecom infrastructure can take decades to pay back), without the need for cell antennae or land lines, and can grow the meshed network Potato by Potato as subscription and demand increases.

This is the 2.0 of telecommunications, where users can take control of their own communication infrastructure. Yee haw!

This is easily the coolest piece of technology I've seen all year.


On the topic of communities taking control of their own infrastructure, Husk Power Systems is a homegrown company in the Indian "rice belt" installing powerplants that supply electricity to rural villages that don't get the national grid. These plants are powered by rice husks, an agricultural byproduct. It's beautiful, a perfect re-use of outputs from the food system, that produces an invaluable commodity and creates no food/fuel conflict. If anything, there is a certain peace, and a mutual encouragement on both sides of the equation.

Blasts from the pasts

The fun theory: how doing "right" things can be made into enjoyable activities /or/ how to incentivise socially positive behaviours.

Ages ago, I blogged about the fun theory (or rolighetsteorin for the swedishly inclined): this was in their beta days when they had two projects and were just getting off the ground. Now they are (relatively) huge and have a growing community great deal of momentum behind them: they're crowd sourcing to come up with new ideas and are implementing a whole host of fun projects.

They're also taking on increasingly important topics. In the past they played with convincing people to take the stairs over the escalator and throwing trash in the bin, but these days it's about encouraging people to recycle and not to speed, all with novel ideas of how to incentivise these good behaviours.

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I used to talk about the Happy Planet Index a lot, back when it was the Happy Planet Index 1.0, and I was still in college studying economics ):

The Happy Planet Index is based on the idea that we humans live for something that is not captured by measures we often get hung up on, like our personal income, and Gross Domestic Product. Indeed, humans live in the pursuit of things like happiness, health, love, whatever have you, but our often limited and sometimes misguided understanding of how to achieve them leads us to focus on our work and on measures of economic progress rather than how these means (not ends!) actually contribute to making us happy.

The greatest problem that this quite simple misunderstanding creates is our impact on the planet: humanity as a whole is producing too much stuff and pursuing much too aggressive economic growth at the expense of natural resources and the environment. And if we carry on at this rate, (quoting Sebastian) life is gonna be de bubbles under de sea.
HPI gives a way to link a country's consumption of natural resources and damage to the environment (which is pretty well correlated with GDP) to how happy, and how long its citizens live.
Translated: HPI gives a way to show how efficiently a country uses its available resources to build long and happy lives for its citizens.



This might be a good time to bring up Gross National Happiness (an oldie but a goodie), possibly the first concerted effort to base a country's (Bhutan's) economy not on production and growth, but the happiness of its citizens. I wonder how they're doing.

Hippy hoppy

After visiting IDDS, I had a great week-and-a-half in Santa Fe and other places, NM. I stopped on the way back for claw fights atop Mesa Mentosa and camping at Ghost Ranch (one of the most beautiful places I've ever been), and happy fun times camping with the Stupin family in Colorado (on the way to and from IDDS). New Mexico is one of the most beautiful places on earth*.















I danced some tango in Santa Fe, which turned out to be really nice. Santa Fe (and surrounding area) has some great dancers, who are super friendly and sweet. I haven't been dancing so much lately, and I forgot how having awesome dances with just a few people can make my evening.


I drove up to Taos, NM with Laura Stup, Papa Stup, and Carla Tennenbaum (artist extraordinaire from Brazil, who was at the last two IDDSes) to see the Earthship office/visitor center.



















Earthships are SUPER AMAZING!

There are a few basic principles of Earthships (Earthships are houses people live in). They (quoting Earthship Biotecture):

-Heat and cool themselves naturally via solar/thermal dynamics
-Collect their own power from the sun and wind
-Harvest their own water from rain and snow melt
-Contain and treat their own sewage on site
-Produce a significant amount of food
-Are constructed using the byproducts of modern society like cans, bottles and tyres

Whilst most of these principles are really quite common-sensical (from just a simple efficiency viewpoint), what is really impressive is how well the Earthship folks design and build an integrated system that efficiently and effectively accomplishes the design goals, and continue to improve and optimise their system as they gain knowledge and experience.

The best part? They claim to be pretty much on par with the cost of conventional construction, per square foot. This is a really powerful thing: people no longer need to make an economic sacrifice to achieve an ideal or principle goal.






(Photo by Carla)







This feels like the future to me: it's low impact, it's beautiful, it makes economic sense (of course, don't get me started on how I think that the true costs of producing goods and electricity and disposing of waste are not presented accurately to the consumer, encouraging people to live unsustainably), and, to use the words of the Earthship folks, if your pocket is deep enough [they] can design and build anything you want.


Still, I'm not one hundred percent satisfied with where Earthships are, just yet. There are two things that I'm just a little unsettled by:

The simpler of the two to explain is that many of their buildings use aluminium cans and glass bottles as "bricks"/filler material for concrete or adobe, to make walls. This is in line with their principles of using recycled materials, and also allows neat designs (in the case of bottles, it lets light pass through walls). I have a problem with them using cans in construction because aluminium is such a high value recyclable material. (glass does not have this feature) It takes a fraction of the energy to smelt new aluminium to melt down old aluminium and re-use it. And it takes a ton of energy to smelt new aluminium.

It just struck me as a little bit careless.

The second thing that unsettled me was a conversation between a visitor and a staff member. It wasn't quite a conflict as a clash of ideals: the visitor had a house that was hooked up to the electrical grid, had an array of solar panels and was able to sell electricity back to the grid (produce a surplus of energy) despite using electric stoves and electric heat. The staff didn't seem to approve of being connected to the grid, as if it might undermine the house's energy independence -- even though the house was actually energy positive, and Earthships rely on propane, a fossil fuel, for cooking and heating.

I didn't have a problem with the ideas put forth per se, but was surprised by the defensiveness and disapproval.















Still, final verdict: Earthships are super awesome! One day I'll live in a house that works just like that, harvests water and solar power and grows crops and has chickens (for eggs) and fish (for fish) which eat micro organisms that feed on the sewage stream of the house. Maybe goats?


*















All photo credits: Laura Stupin

Mastershoes

Almost exactly a month after leaving Cambridge for Arusha, I find myself back in Cambridge again. It's funny how different life is in different parts of the world. In some places, people walk, in others the cycle or ride or drive. In Arusha, people smile and call out to you and jest about your haircut, and in Boston and Singapore, you move too fast or are too far away from people to have almost any interaction at all.

Today, I sit here on my bed and feel like I have all the things I'll ever need in my life around me, tucked away in the attic of a Cambridgeport house and built into a quiet little Cambridge life I'm really getting used to. But! Is it so? Let's examine this issue.

A good friend of mine Chris told me as we cut across Jamaica Plain on our bikes about some thinking that was solidifying in his head. This theory isn't universal, but rings eerily close to my experience.

So, imagine you had my parents, and think for a moment about what it's like to be home. Life has a sort of fundamental certainty to it. Your parents (might) have lived in the place for a long time, decades perhaps. Their social network is huge. With a roguish sort of economist grin, I'd pin a name on this that sounds something like "personable capital".

Life is easy when you're home and you can hop on this network, and use this capital built up over years. There is no uncertainty about who to look for if you need something, and there is great certainty that if you need something, you can find it. You have the same family doctor and dentist you've had for years, maybe generations, and a dozen different cousins and aunts and uncles, and then friends, who are accountants, travel agents, stock brokers and everything in between.

Chris describes it as being "failure proof", how options abound. Even if you were completely out of luck striking into the world on your own, you could always find something to fall back onto. The network is powerful. Indeed, we build networks of our own everyday, and Chris is absolutely sure (and I quite convinced) that the world doesn't work through the "normal channels" but rather through the tapping -nay, milking- of networks.

But networks today are different, just as people are. One might think, I haven't stayed in the same place for two years- sure, my parents have, but I haven't had time (and perhaps physical constraints in space and travel) to build the same things they had. Now moving is cheap, and people move around a lot. We keep in touch with cell phones and emails and spread networks across the world. Chances are, if I drop into some city tomorrow, I might find someone I know nearby in the same province or state. We still hang on to people, just in different ways. Eh?

Where there is no government

Alright, so India does have a government. The problem that India faces is one of too much politics and too little government.

(I reserve judgment on two party politics, and billion-dollar campaigns)

India has eight national parties, forty five state parties and literally hundreds of small registered parties, all vying for votes. I believe in diversity, and in the difference of ideas that such a system would encourage. Free thought and speech and freedom to form and elect leadership sound like a good way forward for effective government. It sounds like perfect logic but-

I attended a talk by a prominent economist Paul Romer in May, during the (awesome) Millennium Campus Conference. In a style he acknowledged as uncharacteristic of economists, he introduced a differential equation – stunningly simple and cutting – which I’ll explain without algebra. Paul Romer asserts that:

1. When human capital is high, increasing democracy brings increasing social good

2. When human capital is low, increasing democracy does not bring increasing social good.

This is precisely India’s problem.

This area is at a cusp of development. The village that I live in is not wrestling with poverty, and neither is it surviving hand-to-mouth. There are problems with finances, but those are caused by another equally insidious breed of social problems. Public works and services are a little shaky, and living conditions are not five-star, but there is enough to eat and drink and most people sleep with roofs over their heads.

Families and communities are looking for the next step. Village folk are putting their children on buses and bicycles to send them to school. Sometimes, I’m filled with optimism when I think about the potential for development, and filled with joy when I take the five thirty bus from the lab, half full of children in their tan-and-brown school uniforms, or walk past the bus stop by the temple, a sea of students.

And then, I heard that some minister was visiting a neighbouring village to distribute free televisions and my gall bladder jumped into my throat. First, these people do not need televisions as much as they need more schools with reliable teachers, drains that are not filled with waste water so foul mosquitoes refuse to breed in them. They need shoes on their feet. They need clean streets and the information and interest not to litter, or let their children and cows use the street as their toilet. They need electricity that does not come and go as it damn well pleases.

Fat lot of good a TV does if you can’t watch it.

Every day I walk past a house and watch a very young girl help her family collect water in the morning, wearing her school uniform and solemn face, and do housework in the evening (the only one I never see with an open book). She does not need a television. She needs time to do her homework.

Of course, (and absolutely to no fault of theirs) if these village folk were better educated, more aware and certain about the roles and responsibilities of government – if human capital was higher – they would have saw straight though this blatant appeasement and purchase of favour by distribution of a crack-good like television.

Yes, I’m biased against television, and I won’t argue that each household deserves to watch if they want to, but there are more pressing problems that TV only serves to distract them from, that can be identified without embarking on a philosophical debate about quality of life, and television.

--- Begin ramble proper:

I do believe that diversity in politics is a good thing because choice is important in government, but the way they are ruthlessly vying for popularity with a public that is not well equipped to choose will not lead this country anywhere. Not to mention plain bad policy: the glut of public ministries - sixty three of them. And the bloated civil service - 21 million out of 35 in the formal economy in the 450 million strong work force - (practically) none of which can be demoted or sacked under the constitution.

The methods these parties choose tend not to weed out weak and unsuitable ones but breed unproductive competition. In the cities, where people beg, and people do sleep in the streets, do live from hand to mouth, trying anything at all to make a rupee, every wall is plastered with political campaign propaganda.

What I'm trying to say is,

Take your TV back and s-