Slander without Borders

If you don't know what Cockney rhyming slang is, you best educate yourself by clicking on the link. It might just be the most fun you had since the last time you got lemonade.

Basically, it's when you rhyme a thing with something else and then use it to make subtle jokes, wise cracks and often offensive comments. For an extra level of obtuse, drop the rhyming part of a two-part reference. Of course, names are great for this.


Since it's election season, I thought I'd do a little set on American politicians. Who else are such great caricatures of themselves, such easy fun to poke? Also, by belittling and insulting a select set of these I can further the liberal agenda of my little soapbox here.

Call it poetic justice or dumb luck, but one side just has such better rhymes than the other.


So, without further ado:

Donkeys and affiliated
Al Gore -- "Shut the front Al will you?"
Barack Obama -- "I'm gonna go put me Baracks on and get into bed"
Bernie Sanders -- "Protect the forests! Save the Bernies!"

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Elephants and affiliated
Colin Powell -- "I'm done with this, time to throw in the Colin"
                     -- "Wonder what I ate wrong, got me an aching in my Colins"
(super neat homonym+rhyme!)

Condoleezza Rice -- "Craps is my game, I roll the Condoleezzas"
                              -- "Those damn Condoleezzas been getting to my cheese again, time to put out the traps"
                              -- "My scalp's been itching badly, I wonder if I might have Condoleezzas"

Donald Trump -- "Lookin a bit Donald these days, mate! You been eating well or what?"
                         -- "Had the best Donald of my life this morning after starting my high fibre diet"
(Unfortunately, Mr Trump shares his first name with Mr Duck, so you have to be quite careful about being clear who you mean...though it's mostly just as funny both ways)

George W Bush -- "A bird in the hand is worth two in the George W"
                           -- "If you trim the ol George W, it'll make the tree look bigger and the flowers smell sweeter"
(yeah, I know, but Bush is such a good name. Jeb, of course, is from the same family, and has a slightly different ring if you're so inclined)
                           -- "The ol Jeb's getting a little out of hand"

Rand Paul -- "Way to drop the Rand there"
                  -- "Don't scratch your Rands in public, that's just rude!"
Ted Cruz -- "Fell down today and got the biggest Ted on my arse"
                -- "He's got a few Teds loose somewhere"




Please feel free to use these in your everyday conversation, and please tell me if you think up any good ones!

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.

--

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.

--

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

gado gado

This week, with the workload ebbing slightly, I got up to these adventures:



1. climbing
After a terribly difficult time tracking down their contact information (I think I'm spoiled by how easy the internet makes everything), I finally got in touch with the Gibbon climbing club.

I rode my motorbike from Ubud to Kuta to climb on Monday evening. This took an hour, and the traffic was crazy. The roads were swarming with motorbikes weaving all over the place. I eventually figured out a strategy: ride slow, drift to the back of the pack of bikes, where the families with five people on a bike are, and ride just close enough to the person in front that nobody tries to cut in, but far enough away that there's some stopping distance.

I made it to Kuta alright, and met Dani and Ika at a climbing wall in Kuta after only an hour of getting lost in the city. Ika is a tiny woman who is a deceptively good climber. Dani used to be a forest ranger (?) or something like that and now teaches climbing full time. I climbed a bit, and talked to them a lot.

The neatest thing I learnt was that the Indonesian government created a national climbing federation, and sponsors a climbing team from each district in the country. It also built facilities in quite a few of the regions. I met Dani and Ika behind a firehouse, where the government had built a 20 metre (60 foot) wall, a 15 metre wall, and a bunch of smaller boulder-walls. Pretty awesome and pretty out of character that the Indonesian government would do this.

We got along really well, I'm going to try to go climbing on some real rocks with them this weekend.



2. green school
Ewa and I visited green school, an alternative / startup school (grades K-12 (!!)) in Bali, that is built almost entirely from bamboo, and emphasises experiential-over-theoretical learning. They are currently working towards IB accredition. Central to their mission are a set of scholarships: one fifth of their student body is Balinese children on full rides.

The school is also designed to have a low impact and great environmental awareness -- kids learn about cultivation, planting fields of rice and vegetables, and study the ecosystem that is all around them and often walks or flies right into their classroom. The school is also design to be a redistribution system, charging full tuition for most, to subsidise Balinese students and programs for local schools and kids, and raising money for similar ends by selling incredibly beautiful bamboo furniture and bamboo houses, to rich expats, for designer-brand prices. That's fine by me!

John Hardy, founder, says his idea is for these Balinese kids to completely skip out on the traditional streams of education, come out green, go to the best schools for environment and public policy and urban planning, and come back to fix Bali and Indonesia. It's an interesting idea that will be proven with time. The architecture here is just stunning.



















The cafe there also bakes the best brownie I have ever tasted. From someone whose sweet tooth fell out early in life, this is very high praise.






















3. mepantigan
I've started doing Mepantigan, a very young martial art (7 years) founded by a gentleman named Putu Witsen. He also teaches other martial arts and outdoorsy stuff at green school.

Mepantigan is great. It's got elements of other fighting styles in it, but focuses on throws and prohibits striking. Fighters wrestle in muddy mud pits or rice fields (where landings are soft), and are applauded for aggression, politeness and friendliness (!!). The folks who do it are all swell.

Mepantigan as a dramatic art incorporates painting, music, firebreathing, acrobatics, comedy, you name it. People love this stuff. Someone once sponsored Putu to go to Denmark once to teach and perform.













This is what it looks like. I'm not in that photo nor did I take it, but I'll do my best to do either of those things soon.

So far, it's great. I've done Mepantigan twice and am getting the hang of being safely thrown (quite fun actually), and safely throwing a person to the ground (Putu says I need to be more aggressive. That figures. The other thing I'm really terrible at is making warcries of effort when throwing someone, which is encouraged, which everyone else does really well).

Rolling in mud is the perfect thing to do on a hot day. I feel like a water buffalo: content.

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.

Drawn onward to new era

This is (part of) the view from my office, and it doesn't really do justice to how amazing the view is. It's stunningly green, and the volcanoes are, in reality, huge.












After working for and talking to Ewa and Toshi at Kopernik here in Ubud, I'm getting a clearer picture of what exactly they're trying to do. There isn't really a simple explanation for what it is.

Kopernik works to address a couple of issues. In the first domain that they work in, they connect communities in developing countries in need certain types of technologies with companies or organisations which develop and produce innovative technologies, and finally with corporate donors and crowd-funding opportunities (where many donors each contribute a little to a specific project).

This gives poor people access to progressive, innovative and necessary technologies and products (which are often inaccessible because of cost) such as solar electric systems and water purification devices. Kopernik also provides support and advice to communities implementing projects. This spreads knowledge about technologies through the developing world and also connects companies to potential markets.

A key aspect of this is documenting the projects, and gathering comprehensive information on the outcomes and effects of introducing technology and projects. This allows experience to advise the design of future projects. Comprehensively reporting the impact of the projects that donors and supporters made possible is very important, and it helps to inform and engage people outside the field to support projects and learn about the impact of technology on the lives of the poor.


Kopernik not only connects companies to markets and communities with solutions, but also fosters communication between the organisations, businesses and people working on development challenges in low income countries. A big problem, I hear, is that "development" (a word and name I'm not terribly comfortable with), is a very closed industry, where there is little participation from people or other industries outside it, and where even some organisations within it don't talk to each other.

Kopernik wants to change this by being a marketplace and a hub for technology as well as for people, and by involving and engaging people outside the field to learn about and support initiatives in developing countries. Ewa and Toshi are both veterans of the UN, and another reason they are going this route of connections-en-masse and decentralised operation is because it is much faster and more responsive than the bureaucratic and sluggish UN.

We're making plans now for me to spend a couple of months, maybe? in East Timor, working directly with projects and communities Kopernik already works with, and introducing a whole bunch of new technology and programs. Yikes!


I wake up early everyday and ride a scooter (unfortunately, it's too far and the roads are too dangerous for bicycles) to Ewa and Toshi's house (aka Kopernik head office), where we type furiously at computers, sitting on a deck that hangs off the side of a hill facing a river and a countryside dotted with loads of coconut trees, hills (volcanoes?) in the distance. Simply amazing.












I've never owned or rented any kind of motor vehicle before, so it's here in Ubud that I'm buying gas for the first time in my life, a surreal experience. Gas must be really really well subsidised by the government here or something, it's about half the price of gas in the US. Probably in no small part because my scooter gets something like a hundred miles to the gallon, I pay about a dollar (no joke), a week right now for gas.

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.

Open for business

I never wrote about IDDS, did I?

In 2009, I went to Ghana for the 3rd International Development Design Summit, which is all about designing for people in developing countries, who are traditionally overlooked by companies and industries that design and manufacture products and services.

It's estimated that 90% of all design work today serves 10% of the world's wealthiest people.

IDDS combines a few key principles, such as collaborative and participatory design, where the designers work with their end users to find the best specifications to suit them, and exchange of ideas: IDDS brings together people from many fields (doctors, farmers, mechanics, students, social workers...), countries, and all ages to work on the same problems.

That year, about ten (if I remember correctly) teams came up with ten prototypes of different technologies or products that were appropriate for different people in developing countries. The problem is, we had ten prototypes and very few plans for what we would do with them next. In fact, this happened with the first and second IDDSes as well.

This year, IDDS took place in Fort Collins, Colorado, and focused on developing (business) strategies for the distribution and dissemination of technologies. About ten (ish) teams took ten already-developed or prototype technologies and worked on strategies that would turn them into effective businesses that were financially viable and spread important and useful technologies to people who needed them most.

I was extremely impressed by the final presentations (check them out if you can!) at this IDDS; It was great to see that teams were very sure of themselves and knew exactly what they were going to do over the next five years.

I also got to talk (again) to Paul Polak (founder of IDE), a brilliant and visionary old man with a wicked sense of humour and no respect for anyone at all, who was delighted to hear I would be working with his old friend Bob Nanes at IDE Ghana come January 2011.

Wowee!

The future is mediocre

Are you dissatisfied with the progress of technology?

Well, it turns out that you're a minority.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough

Wired magazine talks about how the need/want for convenience in the digital age has encouraged "just good enough" gadgets, information formats, you name it.

Ben Hescott, computer scientist extraordinaire (who I heard about this article from) says, with a snicker, that the RSA system that protects so much of our commercial and personal communication today is also "just good enough". It relies on an unproven assumption about the hardness of certain problems involving large prime numbers. This means that everytime you go on the internet, you are "just secure enough".


But there's more. This is the flip side of just-good-enough:

The last page of the article touches on Kaiser Permanente, an integrated healthcare organisation made up of for- and non- profit groups of entities, the largest of its kind in the country. I'm not really a fan of large corporations, and they have got some negative press in the past, but as of late August 2010, I have it on reliable account that they're trying to reinvent themselves not as the-cost-concerned-HMO but the-HMO-that-cares.

Here they are, at the cutting edge:

"In 2007, Flanagin and her colleagues wondered what would happen if, instead of building a hospital in a new area, Kaiser just leased space in a strip mall, set up a high tech office, and hired two doctors to staff it. Thanks to the digitization of records, patients could go to this "microclinic" for most of their needs and seamlessly transition to a hospital farther away when necessary...

What they found is that the system performed very well. Two doctors working out of a microclinic could meet 80 percent of a typical patient's needs. With a hi-def video conferencing add-on, members could even link to a nearby hospital for a quick consult with a specialist..."

This might have a developing world ring for some of you folks out there...

To me, What Kaiser is doing sounds great, especially in the world's-least-efficient healthcare system, where incredibly high costs, extreme bureaucracy, and poor incentives for doctors and healthcare providers trap people in inefficient and non-optimal plans and systems. Don't even get me started on the whole health insurance thing.

Fun has you

The problem (I'll admit I took some liberties in defining it):

People don't care enough about their communities, cities, environment, world.

The theory:

If you want people change their behaviour, to do something, make that thing fun:

watch:

How to make throwing rubbish away fun

visit:

http://www.rolighetsteorin.se/en/ -- This word means "funny safety theory" in Swedish. Google told me so.

From using the stairs to recycling, Volkswagen of all people are devising innovative solutions to make people act more positively, and have more fun, at the same time. I hope that in the future fun will be a reliable way to make people be better people.

I think the trick is finding lowest-common-denominators (or greatest? I don't quite know) of fun. For example, I enjoy riding my bike as my primary (only) means of transportation (which makes my carbon footprint smaller), but this is rare among people. The greatest successes will come from increasing the incentives to cultivate high value-to-action behaviours like recycling and using public transport.

"Cheaper" actions like recycling will of course be easier than taking the bus. I don't like buses or trains that much, they're all plastic, often dirty, never on time, people are cold, but imagine if each bus and train car were somehow unique and interesting.

The Fun Theory is a fascinating approach, and if it's been done before, I haven't seen it as well publicised, and compellingly presented as this.

Go Sweden!

Eyeh small

Koforidua is a city with a small, dense bustling centre, and large lush green suburbs spread out at the foot of some hills in Ghana's Eastern region. The surface of this country is like the palm of the hand, with small, even (but steep) undulations.

I woke up in Koforidua this morning to roosters crowing and Muslim prayers from nearby mosques. After a quick breakfast of bananas, peanut butter and brown bread, we jumped on bicycles while the day was still cool and set out for Suhum, 25km away. Creeping upslope in low gear and then speeding down, we wound our way on a wide road through the Ghanaian countryside: hills covered with small trees and tall grasses, fields bursting with bananas and maize. It was green and so gorgeous.

At Suhum, we chopped (ate) koko and kosi: thick homogeneous porridge made from millet flour spiced with ginger and nutmeg, and (which goes together with) fried bean cakes. Holy fried bean cakes it was good.

Back in Koforidua, after a quick shower, we chopped a quick banku (fermented maize meal) with beans, okro (okra), palmnut and groundnut soup, and spent the day at Ability Bikes. It is perhaps the first worker owned cooperative bike store and workshop in Ghana, and is run by six disabled people. How culturally cutting edge is that? Most of them have had polio. One of them is a strong rider, who came out to Suhum with us, and all of them are on the Koforidua wheelchair basketball team, which recently defeated teams from Accra and Kumasi, the two largest cities in Ghana.

David, an ex peacecorps volunteer is the Bikes Not Bombs man in the country, mentoring Ability Bikes in mechanics and co-op management. Read about their story here! This is where, after leaving the IPA project unanticipatedly early, I will spend a week before moving on to Kumasi.

As we sweated over the wheels we build and bikes we overhaul, the sky grew dark. "Let's move the table in," David said as rolled in over the hills, "There will be a strong wind."

Sure enough, minutes later, a fierce wind whipped across the front of the workshop, ahead of a thick grey curtain that obscured everything behind it. We sprinted to the roof of the three-storey building, uniformly punctuated by rusted steel rebars poking up, ready to build the next floor.

I was speechless as I climbed the last flight of stairs and beheld the awesome panorama that rose up over me as I stood level with Koforidua's rooftops. Below the wide open sky, we watched the city scatter and scramble as the nearby hills were almost completely hidden by the storm pulling in. It was so beautiful that if the lightening had struck me down right there I would have went happily.

(where did that photo go!??)

In a matter of seconds, the storm was on top of us, and we were soaked.

Obruni, part 1

Accra is awesome despite itself. It wasn't designed to be particularly pedestrian friendly but it can be walked, it isn't particularly well organised, and the roads and sidewalks are beginning to crumble. Heat boils up from the concrete baking under the sun in the middle of the day.

What make Accra a surprisingly comfortable, liveable city are the people. Ghanaians seem friendly by definition, sometimes hospitable to a fault. The first night I arrived, two Ghanaian boys insisted on helping me find my way to the sketchiest hostel in Ghana. The first thing I did the next day was to check out and walk into the city.

Since then, I've assimilated well, eating at food stands, talking to the nice ladies who run them, and grinning at their children as they play. One little girl actually asked me to buy her chocolate and started to cry when her mother tried to take her away. I've given my number to too many people -- it's one of the first things kids ask for. Next is usually "where do you live?"

Communication culture here is to "flash" the other party on mobile: to call them but cancel before they pick up, as a way to say hi or to ask to be called back. So, rather than give out fake numbers, I've saved a bunch of numbers in my phone as "Don't pick up 1", "Don't pick up 2", "Ok kid 1", and so on.

Accra isn't a particularly tourist friendly place, and doesn't have a lot of things to do. It bustles and moves, and is itself a spectacle.


Alas, I'm leaving the city. My next destination is a village called Osino where I'll be working with an organisation called Innovations for Poverty Action, which is the face of Jameel Poverty Action Lab away from MIT. It's pretty exciting stuff. Already I'm learning little facts that I hadn't thought about before. For example, there's a lot more to microfinance than I understand. There are so many lending methods, subtly different to suit people from different economic and geographical situations -- and I'm only just getting to know them as simplified models.

Another lesser known fact is that farmers have traditionally got the short end of things with banks. Because their income is often unreliable and very heavily dependent, in size and timing, on the harvest, they make poor customers even for the microfinance institutions aimed at alleviating poverty. Most farmers can't pay back a fixed sum regularly through the whole year, but do need sizeable sums of money every now and then just like everyone else, whether it's to pay for a hospital visit or the childrens' school fees.

One idea IPA is exploring is products to help farmers take loans they can repay, often involving some bet against the weather and crop prices. IPA is also running studies to look at products to help organise their stream of income to allow them to accumulate substantial savings. In a country that is over 50% small, subsistence farmers, this is pretty significant.

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It has become very clear to me these days how little I walked in Boston -- only between my bicycle and anywhere else I had to be. I can feel my legs growing and adapting to how I transport myself these days, walking what feels like a long way between places. My calves and shins hurt.

pow wow

I just spent an hour listening to the Habeas Schmabeas episode of This American Life. It's superbly well done (won a Peabody Award) and incredibly moving.

I must require that if you have not already, you must listen to it, here.

Habeas Schmabeas tells of the unbelievable atrocities committed by the US government on the premise of national security in places like Kandahar and Guantanamo, from extensive research and firsthand from detainees and volunteer attorneys.

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A few weeks ago, I also saw Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen Fund speak, and she was super awesome. She's a hero I don't have time to worship.

Acumen Fund is doing really awesome stuff supporting innovators and entrepreneurs in developing country, both by investing in them and by providing them with top notch advice and consultation. And I haven't even begun to describe how effective and amazing what they're doing really is.

If you have time, you should watch all of her TED talks.