A new charter for philanthropists

This is an op ed from the Ford Foundation president.  He details the history of modern philanthropy as a product of the Gilded Age, a way for dirty fortunes to quell the social unrest caused by inequality.  In this mold, the magnitude of philanthropy will always be a pittance compared to the magnitude of the inequality that breeds gargantuan fortunes.

But the writer proposes a new use, a new direction for philanthropy, based not on merely salving the most egregious wounds of inequality in order to allow it to continue comfortably, but rather on destroying the very bases of that inequality and injustice.  This is a noble proposition, and I believe it is the only entirely coherent goal for those who wish to improve the world's state.  But it would totally undermine the status quo economic system that produces philanthropists.  I don't see this as a bad thing--if wealth were more equally distributed, we wouldn't need billionaires to donate large sums to help the wretched of the earth, because there would be neither billionaires nor wretched.  But I don't think the billionaires would stand by quietly to become like the rest of us.  Ergo, I don't see their money financing foundations whose aim is to do away with the billionaire's excessive wealth.

The End of Work?

Here is a reflection on why we still work so much even though we theoretical have the technology to work only fifteen hours a week or so and still produce an abundant output of goods to ensure a comfortable life for everyone.  It is a them also explored in a book called The End of Work, which I bought a few years back but haven't yet gotten to reading.

All hail the Goblin King

I was really sad to hear about David Bowie's death.  I didn't know the guy personally, but he played a prominent role in my childhood (and has forever remained for me) as the Goblin King of the movie Labyrinth.  Reading some of the obituaries, I realize that I didn't really know much of his music.  I would like to--he seems to have been a real innovator, a sui generis force in the popular music world.

Ditching smartphones

This is the first-hand account of someone who decided to get rid of their smartphone and replace it with just a regular cellphone that makes and receives calls and text messages.  It's a bit precious and naive in the same way as New York Times articles about supposedly widespread trends that really only apply to the cultural elite of Manhattan.  The author has to dig through all his drawers to find an old phone, only to learn that it doesn't work, and then buys a $200 not-smart-phone that itself is pitched not as a replacement for but rather a complement to one's smartphone.  If he had been more in touch with regular people, he probably would have thought to buy a replacement battery for her old phone, or pick up a $30 phone at any store. 

That said, I think the author's reflection on the value and peace one gains by not being constantly connected is a valid one.  It's one of the main reasons I don't want a smartphone--it's just easier not to be so addicted to something like that.  Another major reason I don't like smartphones is that they impinge on your liberty, not just the peace-of-mind-type liberty that the author describes, but the liberty of not signing a contract with a phone company, of not having a leased phone, of not paying more money for data and then feeling obliged to use that data.  I like the freedom of not worrying about having my phone stolen, since I'm not at all attached to it.  And I like that my phones rarely need servicing, and when they do there is no intellectual property protection that prevents a technician from working on them.  Dumb phones are difficult to trace; they have no GPS capability, and don't automatically synchronize with other devices.  Most of all, I value having an open-band phone that I can slip any SIM card into, without some nefarious service provider blocking me from freely using a device I paid for.  I have gone to great lengths to fix an old phone, lengths and costs in no way justified by the phone's market value, but rather by how much I value my own freedom.  And I'm not the only one.  In both the US and especially in the developing world, I know plenty of people who prefer "dumb" phones.  It's not as rare or far-out as the article would have you believe.  Some have never had a smart phone while some, like the author of this article, are returning to a normal, not-smart phone after a dalliance with smartphones.

An optimistic take on fighting climate change

This is a relatively optimistic, though I think well-founded, take on the prospect of the human race's limiting the horrific consequences of global warming through technological innovation and political commitments.  It jars me from my default setting of resigned despair regarding the future of the world.  The one major threat it identifies is the prospect of a Republican US president in 2016 derailing all of our country's regulatory framework around carbon emissions.  Here too is an article describing the economic and industrial details of how renewable energy generation has gotten so cheap, so fast.

Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique

A few months ago PBS produced a documentary series on the Gorongosa Natural Park in Mozambique.  It was very interesting, capturing both the stunning wildlife, as well as some of the human context surrounding this park as it struggles to bounce back from a civil war and thrive as a protected area within an impoverished country.  You can't watch it online anymore for free, but you can buy it for some $30.  I'd consider that a good investment.

British vs. US kids' fiction

This is a really good analysis of the difference between British fiction for kids (which tends to be more imaginative and fantastic) and US kids' fiction (which is more moralistic, historical, and about heroic individuals, not fairy lands).  I don't know if I prefer one or the other, but thanks to this novel analysis, I feel that they really complement one another.  The free-wheeling, open fantasy worlds of the great British works provide an important outlet for readers' imaginations, but the US historical fiction provides orientation in values, fighting adversity, and injustice, as well as a real sense of place (think Huck's river, or Laura Wilder's woods and prairies) and the magic in the quotidian.

Best rapper of each year since 1979

I ran across this long article describing who the authors claim to be the most important, influential rapper of each year since 1979.  My familiarity with the artists and their music starts waning around 2004, when I graduated from college and left Chicago soon after.  But reading this makes me think it would be a cool personal project to listen to the highlighted album from each year on this list (as if I had the free time to actually do such a thing.)

Terrorists in Oregon?

Here is one of many articles calling attention to the US government's relatively soft treatment of armed insurgents looking to take public land into private hands (and potentially overthrow the federal government?), vs. the severe treatment of peaceful protestors calling for an end to police violence against the innocent.  On the other hand, here is an article urging the Left not to dehumanize these protestors or overlook the common cause they may share.

Paris attacks and dependency theory

A few weeks ago I read an article about the worldwide outpouring of sympathy in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, contrasted with the relative paucity of news coverage and general solidarity in the face of many other terrorist attacks and massacres (in Kenya, Nigeria, Lebanon, etc.).  Or maybe it was about our collective dismay at the San Bernardino attacks, contrasted with our relative apathy about the Syria crisis.  The fact is that I've been looking for this article for the past few days, and can't find it again.  The fact that Paris was unlucky enough to have two major massacres in 2015, and both very heavily covered and commented by mainstream media and the blogosphere, makes my search all the more difficult.

The reason I want to find this article is because it offered an interpretation (based on dependency theory and world systems theory, though I don't think it used these terms) that I had not seen much elsewhere, and it really encapsulated many of my thoughts on the matter.  But since I can't find it to link to, I'll just try to summarize its argument here.  Maybe one of my elite (meaning very small) group of faithful readers will run across the original article after reading my description of it.  If so, please share the link in the comments section.

Anyway, here goes what the article more or less said:

Many have expressed shock or outrage at the Paris attacks, and many others have expressed shock or outrage that the world should care so much about attacks on Paris while not really caring about violence in the poorer (or less white) parts of the world.  I don't understand the surprise of either of these groups.  Of course most people, both in the rich world and even in the poor world, value lives lost in Paris more than lives lost in Beirut or Nigeria or Kenya.  We have constructed a world (or at least a conception of the world) in which there is a small, privileged sphere of safety, largely limited to the US, Europe, and a few other generally wealthy places, in which widespread violence is not supposed to happen, juxtaposed with a large, peripheral rest of the world in which we all expect there to be disproportionate, inhuman levels of violence.  In fact, through the legacy of the slave trade, colonialism, and now postcolonial neoliberalism, the safe, rich sphere has indeed exported violence, its own violence, elsewhere, thus effectively lending truth to the conception of a safe half of the world and a violent half of the world.  So when terrorism strikes New York City or Paris, we care because it punctures our system, our conception of how things are supposed to be, while if such violence affects other places most of the world doesn't care, because those places have been assigned the role of recipient and receptacle of violence.  All this is to say that it doesn't surprise me at all that the world seems to care more about Paris than about Kaduna, Nigeria.

I'm not totally in agreement with everything the author of this vanished article argues, but I think that he or she offers a very insightful explanation of why our reactions differ to tragedy in the rich world vs. tragedy in the poor world.  My main debate with the author would be that these spheres of safety and violence aren't so neatly delimited by country, but rather they exist within countries.  Black folks in the US have lived under ebbing and flowing levels of terror and insecurity for as long as there have been black folks in the US, and our society accordingly assigns them to the sphere of violence.  In other words, the general public in the US reacts with much more surprise and dismay if a white, middle-class person is massacred than if blacks suffer the same fate, again because the former challenges our conception of a sphere of safety, while the latter conforms to our conception of the rightful role of those who inhabit the sphere of violence.  In almost all societies I've seen, there exist such internal divisions of those who count, who aren't supposed to suffer violence, and those who don't count and are expected to suffer.  That said, in many of the countries outside of the rich world, violence and misfortune seem to be more real and ever-present concerns even for the wealthy than what I've seen in the US.  The cocoon of safety for the privileged is more visibly an illusion in places like Colombia or Nigeria, where even a well-off family may be afflicted by "poor people problems" like lean times, violence, addiction, etc.

In my search for this article, I found quite a few that argued something similar.  The difference is that these other articles decried the hypocrisy of our collective concern and apathy for Paris and Beirut, respectively, while the one I've tried to paraphrase here didn't decry it or even consider it hypocrisy but merely the outgrowth of a well-established oppressive world system.

In any case, I'm including a few good articles discussing the recent Paris attacks.  This one comes the closest to articulating our "hierarchy of valuation" of human life, from those that really matter to the mere "collateral damage" of Western drone strikes on hapless villages,

Sort of on this note, I'd been meaning to write about the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris ever since they happened, just over a year ago today.  My take was that the mass advocacy for "freedom of speech" looked less like a defense of the speakers of difficult truths against encroaching oppression, and more like support for French society's widespread bullying of its beleaguered Muslim populace.  But I didn't and don't have a very eloquent way of sharing these admittedly shallow impressions of mine.  So here are a few eloquent bits from others:  Teju Cole on the difference between supporting Charlie Hebdo's right to free speech and supporting its depraved, racist, Islamophobe agenda.  He also posits that a few lone Islamist fanatics do not by a long shot comprise the only or even the principal threat to freedom of expression in the West.  A Guardian article about "how the secular ideology used to break the grip of the powerful is now used to discipline the powerless, [and how] the right to single out one religion for abuse has been raised to the status of a core liberal value".  

Here is an article claiming that the rich world lives "in a 'cupola' where terrorist violence is a threat which just explodes from time to time, in contrast to countries where (with participation or complicity of the West) daily life consists of uninterrupted terror and brutality".  

Contrasting with this vision of a safe sphere of the world opposed to a violent sphere is Teju Cole's critique of people complaining about "First World problems", as if those in the Third World only spend all their time suffering and looking haggard in Sally Struthers ads:

Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn't disappear just because you're black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here's a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.

Anyway, if anyone out there finds the article I'm looking for, the one that says of course people care more about deaths in Paris than in the Third World because our system is set up to keep Paris safe and the Thrid World violent, then please pass it on to me.

Responsible voluntourism

And in a follow-up to my last post about why you shouldn't do voluntourism at orphanages, here are some guidelines for how you can responsibly volunteer somewhere, contribute to a worthy cause, and learn something for yourself, all in a context of mutual respect and solidarity.

Orphanage tourism

This is a fascinating article about "orphanage tourism", which is something I didn't even know existed.  Apparently it's big in Southeast Asia.  At any rate, I've long wondered why the institution of orphanages seems to disappear as countries develop.  In places like the US or even Colombia, I don't believe there are many (any?) orphanages left.

Instead, there is a strong state institution in charge of assuring child wellbeing.  Such an institution works with parents that can't provide adequate love and care to their children, and tries to strengthen them in that regard.  If this doesn't work, the institution declares the parents unfit for childrearing, and looks for other family members that may be able to provide a decent home for the child.  If they can't find such family members, the institution looks to place the child in adoption with a family that's been extensively screened to determine their social, psychological, economic, and physical fitness to be good parents to the child.  And while the child is waiting, he or she is placed temporarily with a similarly-screened foster family.  I learned about this entire process recently when an official from the Colombian Institute for Family Wellbeing explained it to my wife and me.

So between my reading the article about the problems with orphanage tourism, and my learning about the global gold standard for protection and placement of adoptable children, I now understand that orphanages are a pretty distant last-best-choice for care of such children.  The article I've linked above describes in depth that the best environment for a child's development is within a family, with personalized, not institutionalized attention (as they'd receive in an orphanage).  Apparently, even if the family is poor and has its problems (as all families do), it's still usually a better option than an orphanage where the child won't get lots of close interaction with her caretaker, and may be even more likely to be subject to abuse than in the most dysfunctional of families.  The article further demonstrates that the trend of orphanage tourism creates perverse monetary incentives for orphanages to subject their children to even more depersonalized interactions (with the tourist strangers passing through day after day) and possibly abuse at the hand of these strangers.  And the monetary incentive creates a cycle in which families will even give up their children to these orphanages, because the orphanage revenue allows for it to provide schooling, healthcare, and other luxuries not afforded to the local families or their non-orphan children.

What the Quaker campaign against such orphanage tourism proposes is that people visit and donate to community projects that support marginalized families and children, without turning children into tourist attractions and thus hurting their normal mental development.

Unconditional cash transfers

This is an article about how children's wellbeing improves in a number of predictable and also some unexpected ways when their poor parents get a regular cash infusion.

We in the development business are big on cash transfers to poor families.  Often it is the most effective way to improve their wellbeing, even more so than if a development agency used that money to buy families goats or give them job training or something.  This makes intuitive sense--who better to decide what poor people need to spend money on to improve their lives, than the poor people themselves?  But usually we talk about conditional cash transfers, meaning that the money is only given to families that send their kids to school, or take them to monthly nutrition monitoring sessions, or vaccinate them, etc.  This is also sage--we as donors thus attain two positive outcomes at once (the behavior we donors demand of cash recipients, and their benefits from having the cash).

In any case, this example from North Carolina shows that unconditional cash transfers with no strings attached, especially if they are of significant sums over a long time period, are very effective at achieving positive development outcomes.

Drought in Iran

This is a sad and scary story about vast swathes of a country succumbing to desertification, and after having tapped most of its groundwater, there seems to be no prospect of improvement.