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How "Big Ideas" Are Actually Hurting International Development
schnell writes: The New Republic is running a fascinating article that analyzes the changing state of foreign development. Tech entrepreneurs and celebrities are increasingly realizing the inefficiencies of the old charitable NGO-based model of foreign aid, and shifting their support to "disruptive" new ideas that have been demonstrated in small experiments to deliver disproportionately beneficial results. But multiple studies now show that "game changing" ideas that prove revolutionary in limited studies fail to prove effective at scale, and are limited by a simple and disappointing fact: no matter how revolutionary your idea is, whether it works or not is wholly dependent on 1.) the local culture and circumstances, and 2.) who is implementing the program.
The moral of the story is to never give brown skinned people anything. They will simply squander it.
The only thing that foreign aid has helped accomplish so far (the last FORTY years!), is prop up dictators and help them balance their budgets, so as to keep their weapons-buying programs out of harms way. This article sounds like somebody has a cushy job to lose.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
If anyone can be accused of being oblivious to "local culture and circumstances" it's the NGOs. Parachuting into theocracies and kleptocracies will medicine and sewer systems does not harm the theocrats or kleptocrats.
And harm is exactly what it needed.
So the Big Ideas are like religions to be evangelized. Perhaps the pushers of the big ideas should consult the evangelical organizations cross religions doing such things before going to all-out raping and pillaging the local cultures. ;)
people got them into their current situation and people are keeping them there, it's that simple. it's a global problem, it's just worse in some areas.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
No.
Says a guy typing on a computer that couldn't exist along with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
For the record, agriculture was the first development that freed up labor from the "hunter/gatherer" mode to allow enough surplus to develop things like, oh, computers (along with the rest of civilization).
And another one decribed that lifetyle as "nasty, brutish, and short".
Just curious, have you ever tried a "hunter/gatherer" lifestyle? Gone to a wilderness area, ditched the trappings of civilization (clothes, cellphone, computer, canteen, all that stuff), and tried living on what you could hunt down or gather (and no, I'm not referring to what you can gather at the local Mcdonald's...)...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I do not understand why the need to give foreign aid in the first place, I really don't
I am from China, and when I was in China, China was hit by the double whammy from Chairman Mao - in the form of great famine and cultural upheaval
Tens of millions of people perished
Despite of the suffering, China didn't receive any fucking foreign aid from nobody --- and at the end of it, China still survive, and the population of China is still over one Billion
Why then the West wants to give out money to help those "poor" countries? I mean, what the West is thinking?
They think without the "foreign aid" those poor countries will die?
For thousands of years the people of those "poor countries" were there before the "West" is known as the "West ... and they never got any "Western aid" at all, and still, they survived, right?
Don't care if it's brown skin, white skin, dark skin, yellow skin or whatever shade of skin those people are, with or without foreign aid they will survive
With or without the "disruptive method", those "foreign aid" is a waste of money anyway
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Please define "better". For myself, the greatest achievement of humankind is the advancement of knowledge about the world. Depending on what your priorities are, you could argue that a different era was "better" (e.g. less polution, less stress [doubtful], more "natural", or whatever floats your boat). But if you give up on what makes us what we are, you could argue that the best way to live your life is to be in a coma. Yes, today sucks but it is still better than any day before. YMMV.
Just curious, have you ever tried a "hunter/gatherer" lifestyle? Gone to a wilderness area, ditched the trappings of civilization (clothes, cellphone, computer, canteen, all that stuff), and tried living on what you could hunt down or gather (and no, I'm not referring to what you can gather at the local Mcdonald's...)...
I said hunter-gatherer, not living all by myself. They had things called tribes and families, you know. See Dances with Wolves sometime.
And another one decribed that lifetyle as "nasty, brutish, and short".
Again, you seem to equate hunting/gathering with lawless anarchy where it's every man for himself. Ice Age hunters formed groups and undoubtedly worked well with each other.
I'm not talking about *you* per se, I'm talking about poor people in Africa. A healthy hunter-gatherer lifestyle seems preferable to dying from lack of clean water.
Feel free to take family and friends with you on your great experiment in living the hunter/gatherer lifestyle. If you can convince them that living in the woods scrounging for food is better than sitting in their comfortable house watching the interwebs....
Hmm, we've found physical evidence of murders among Ice Age hunters, so they "worked well with each other" no better than we do now. And "anarchy" is a lack of government. Which pretty much defines the Ice Age hunters. Or did you consider your Grandfather to be "government" when you were growing up?
By the by, I am by no means trying to suggest that "hunter/gatherer" is synonymous with solitude or anarchy. I AM trying to suggest that the lifestyle looks a lot better from the easy chair at home than it does when you're actually living it. And that romanticizing the hunter/gatherer lifestyle from your computer desk is, at best, silly.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What makes you think hunter/gatherers historically had access to clean water? What makes you think that water that the rest of the animal kingdom has been crapping and pissing in is "clean water"?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What works is the "tinkerer's blessing" (opposite of the curse of natural resources). Chronicled in Yuzo Takahashi's history of Japanese radio technicians https://muse.jhu.edu/login?aut... , development is best done through normal trade with geeks and technicians. South Korea, Singapore, Guangdong, Taiwan, etc. all developed from refurbishing and reverse engineering used technology. Benjamin Franklin was engaged in buying used surplus printing machines and textile machines for reassembly in the USA, Technicians, nerds, repairers, fixers tend to be smart quiet truthful people, and when economies grow from talented knock off (Shanzai in Chinese) to outsourced contracting to ODM, you wind up with Terry Gou, Simon Lin, and Lee Byung-chul.
What has tragically happened in Africa and India is that do gooders and celebrities like Annie Leonard have found a recipe of white guilt and created a bogus "e-waste" crisis which puts African geeks and nerds in prison. FreeHurricaneBenson. Forums like Slashdot, where repair and tinkerers gather, have been important places to assess the ewaste hoax. http://retroworks.blogspot.com... I lived in Africa in the mid 1980s and have been finding win-win trade with display devices for almost two decades, and see Africans getting increasingly furious at the people making up fake stats, taking pictures of kids at dumps, and making money without sharing. Search Heather Agyepong's "The Gaze on Agbogbloshie", or read Emmanuel Nyaletey's "My Reaction to The E-Waste Tragedy" http://www.isri.org/news-publi... Emmanuel is an electronics repair technician who grew up a few blocks from Agbogbloshie, Ghana, the scrapyard in a city of 4 million people (Ghana). currently on scholarship for coding at Georgia Tech. I'll put my money on geeks like Emmanuel and the free market over anti-trade rantists and celebrity AID show Bob Geldoffs all day long.
Gently reply
this is really really important: anyone wishing to make a difference in the world really REALLY needs to read the book written by Professor Yunus, the joint winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Price, "Creating a World Without Poverty".
in his book, Professor Yunus describes how he naively studied Economics because he believed that he would be able to change his country's financial situation through studying first world economies. after graduation he set out just after one of the worst natural disasters his country had experienced and realised how completely pointless his studies had been. however he did not give up, and set out to work out what the problem actually was.
he learned that the poor are first and foremost incredibly resourceful... mostly because they have to. he also learned that many of them are, because there are no enforceable usury laws, permanently kept in debt to money-lenders. this shocked him so badly that once he freed an entire village from debt just from the small change in his wallet: something like $USD 15 was all it took to pay off a decade of usury.
what he discovered is that the gratitude of these people when freed from their former situation is immeasurable. the Grameen Bank doesn't have lawyers or debt collectors. the people that they lend money to are so GRATEFUL that they work non-stop to turn their lives around and pay off their loan. in fact, the repayment success rate is around NINETY EIGHT percent. it's so high that the *GRAMEEN BANK* considers it to be THEIR FAULT if one of their customers is ever in default. by contrast in the western world the default rate is 88%. i'll repeat that again in case it's not clear: only TWELVE PERCENT of creditors in the western world pay their debts on time, every time, and in full.
but the main reason why anyone wishing to help the emerging markets and the third world should read his book is because he patiently, with all the knowledge from his economics background, outlines why NGOs, Charity and the "Corporate Social Responsibility" clauses of standard profit-maximising Capitalist Corporations are all worse than doomed but are guaranteed to be ineffective at best and invariably seriously damaging and counter-productive.
right at the start of his book he outlines a surprising offer by Danone to work with him (follow his advice) to actually be effective. it was Professor Yunus's first experience of having been "under the microscope" of people with both big resources and heart. in other words the team at Danone were huge fans of what Yunus was trying to achieve: when he explained to them the financial structure that was needed, they listened, and they did it. they did not go in with a charity, or with donations: they set up a "non-loss, non-dividend" business, selling *locally-produced* yoghurt that happened to have the nutritients that the local population happened (by a not-coincidence) to be chronically deficient in.
the yohurt was sold not at a loss but at an affordable financially sustainable price because the focus was on remaining *stable*, not on exploitation through maximisation of profits: the focus was on allowing people to feel proud of what they achieved, and to take responsibility for their own wealth. they were EMPOWERED through the enormous generous resources of Danone's, but it was a successful venture because they LISTENED to what Professor Yunus had to say.
"disruptive" new ideas that have been demonstrated in small experiments to deliver disproportionately beneficial results...fail to prove effective at scale
Don't you suppose the effectiveness of classic models ALSO depend on "local circumstances and who is implementing the program". Seems like a 0% signal to noise to me.
We need a better word for studies (or headlines) that are a Nop...
Hunting and gathering works only for small human populations. That's why the one place where advanced western societies are still hunting and gathering, at sea, has led to a horrendous problem of fish depletion. For the good of the oceans we need to ban use of that stupid "Wild Caught" label on fish and get good at aquaculture.
Feel free to take family and friends with you on your great experiment in living the hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
Where? Overpopulation and ubiquitous nation-statism preclude it.
If you can convince them that living in the woods scrounging for food is better than sitting in their comfortable house watching the interwebs....
Societies grow - you can't just "convince" people to enter one. See also: all the "convincing" state capitalist revolutions of the 20th century from Hitler to Mao.
we've found physical evidence of murders among Ice Age hunters, so they "worked well with each other" no better than we do now.
Anecdote is not the singular of data.
I AM trying to suggest that the lifestyle looks a lot better from the easy chair at home than it does when you're actually living it.
Happiness and lack of harm are more important than "ease". H-G lifestyle was full of challenges, but how would a hunter-gatherer fare here now?
And that romanticizing the hunter/gatherer lifestyle from your computer desk is, at best, silly.
It is a ridiculous denial of human intelligence to suggest that a person has to live something to recognise its good points. The Interweb for me is a way of hiding from the noise and loneliness of modern life, not something I celebrate.
You do realize that in the days of hunter gatherer lifestyle, average lifespan was about 30? Makes it hard to justify as healthier.
we have to blame the business people here
the problem is that the people with money don't know the difference between a *good* tech innovation and *bullshit* marketing gussied up as tech innovation
the problem is ignorance of the decision makers, not our ideas
there are plenty of good ideas to be had floating in the ether...
Thank you Dave Raggett
Oh I think we know how to do aquaculture. But people buy the cheap stuff, and companies reduce costs by feeding who knows what. I think that messes up the taste. There are very good tasting farmed fishes, e.g. some organic, though the cheap standard ones can be quite bad sometimes.
Alas, WW2 doesn't seem to have been about religion
Six million people killed for practicing Judaism, as well as members of the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses sent to the camps for their pacifism, would disagree with you.
Um, no sir, he was not. That nasty, brutish and short was all at the hand of dear, kind Mother Nature herself. Animals fight back you know. Winter is brutish and unforgiving. Life is short because of those things and the fact that you had better not get injured or sick.
And, FYI, being a hunter/gatherer takes a helluva lot more space than an agrarian or our society does. So, to even achieve your proposed Utopia, first we eliminate 6.7 billion humans. And don't for one second think you won't be in that number, simple odds are against you.
You can apply this to pretty much anything.
Congress has the Constitutional Authority to set appropriations and spending levels for all Federal Government agencies and functions.
To stop Obama, Congress can defund Department of Homeland Security and all White House operations! Require that all monies and all accounts revert ownership to the Department of Treasury. In addition, all the cars, furniture, SUVs, silver ware and buildings revert their stewardship back to the General Services Office. Even Air Force One, Two, Marine One and Two, and all the other jet aircraft that Kerry uses to live on the go will be un-available and Obama cannot usurp a C-130 or any other DoD aircraft or buy a Boing or Airbus aircraft for joy ridding around the globe. IRS can then start recovering all monies payed to DHS and WH personnel and start criminal Felony charges proceedings on each employee.
The White House kitchen wont even have peanut butter.
Then on January 21 2016, five minutes after the real President is sworn in, he nullifies all Obama executive orders!
Simple matter. Simple as biology.
People are always looking for quick fixes and silver bullets, preferably centrally administered and implemented in a few years. They don't work for international development, but they also don't work in national politics.
The best way of achieving prosperity and development is to ensure that people are free to make their own choices, not to dump government aid or programs on them.
He just hasn't gone to enough TED talks. My 1 hour presentation really will change the world.
Because a "big idea" that fails to provide widespread beneficial results is, by definition, not game changing*. It sounds like your PR people just got a bit ahead of themselves while trying to raise venture capital.
*On the other hand, a few people trying to lash together a couple of DEC PDPs with no grandiose thoughts of being game changing seem to have done just that.
Have gnu, will travel.
> China didn't receive any fucking foreign aid from nobody
They actually received billions in foreign aid, cash from the US and subsidized loans from Japan. Aid to China has dropped dramatically over the last 30 years, but USAID is still sending taxpayer money to China to subsidize their green energy industry. At the same time, the US is suing China for illegal subsidies to their solar industry, which violate trade agreements.
So the current standard operating procedure in the US is:
Make a trade deal woth China agreeing to no subsidies to companies engaged in international trade.
Borrow money from China.
Give that money back to China, on the condition that they use it to subsidize green energy companies.
Sue them for subsidizing the green energy companies.
Developing economies need the ability to strategically protect infant industries with tariffs, subsidies, and foreign ownership restrictions. See this book by University of Cambridge development economist H.J. Chang: http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986
This is the way the vast majority of developed countries (USA, England, South Korea, Japan, Germany, etc) became developed. By reducing the ability developing nations to enact trade barriers, we ensure they can never develop competitive industries.
Hunter-gatherers' lives were not necessarily short and brutish. To start, there were many different societies that could be described as hunter-gatherers. Here in Alaska, the native peoples had substantial homes, extensive trade networks, astounding arts, and sophisticated political and commercial organization.
As far as I can see, the only thing you got right is that most subsistence life styles require a lot of space.
See Dances with Wolves sometime.
That's it. I'll live on a movie set. The interns will bring anything I need...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Ideas that work well ... oftentimes only apply to the specific area which was studied. ... charitable development needs to stop thinking big and start working incrementally, village by village
But wait! Homogenizing problems is what the government excels at! It's "too hard" to examine all of the individual situations*, and they'll all match up in the wash, so let's come up with a single, proven solution that solves things for everyone, everywhere, always. Any Unforeseen Consequences, if they exist, have a short Half-Life.
I really hadn't considered that NGOs had succumbed to this, I thought it was just something in the culture in D.C. and elsewhere. (Space aliens from Mars with their mind control, still pining for our Earth women, maybe.)
So is this a self-limiting thing of politics, the gathering of people and ideas together for a common cause? In order to reach a consensus you have to flatten out the facts SO MUCH that in some situations you miss the problem completely or even aggravate it?
(This does not bode well for the upcoming One World Government. Maybe the Illuminati invented the internet for this very reason?)
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*) Unless one of the members needs to profit from a particular situation; then we'll make an exception.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Because we have not been farming most species for very long, there have been a lot of early problems with fish farming. This should not deter us from getting better at it. If the ultra-green New Zealanders can do it, so can we.
Hi schnell - this was a good find. Thanks
a noteworthy scholar had commented once that a hunter-gatherer from 100,000 BC lived better than the average man in 19th century London.
The average working man led a pretty horrible life in an industrialised 19th century city, so that is entirely possible.
However, the relevant comparison is with an average person in 21st century London. I know which lifestyle I'd prefer, and as a clue it's the one where I can walk into a supermarket and buy food for my kids.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
For the record, agriculture was the first development that freed up labor from the "hunter/gatherer" mode to allow enough surplus to develop things like, oh, computers (along with the rest of civilization).
Most archaeologists and anthropologists would have agreed with your sentiments about 50-60 years ago. The idea that the "primitive" lifestyle was "nasty, brutish, and short" idea is attributed to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in 1650, and lasted for centuries. So your post is about 50-60 years out of date, a record even for Slashdot.
There is a big difference between philosophical speculation and science, the latter being based on evidence (as opposed to just making things up).
Evidence started coming out around 1966 that the "nasty, brutish, and short" idea was incorrect. Marshall Sahlins was one of the proponents. The evidence came from a combination of sources, including the study of modern hunter gatherer societies, and direct archeological evidence (lifespan and health can be determined from bodies, for example).
The most recent well known work in this area is Ross Sackett's 1996 meta-study, which suggested that hunter gatherers work an average of 6.5 hours a day, compared to 8.8 hours for the modern "civilized" adult. Also, their lifespans were considerably longer than the average city dweller for most of human history.
Civilization did result from cities, but it wasn't because of freeing up labor, or from better living conditions. Agriculturalists worked harder than hunter gatherers, and cities were generally disease-ridden cesspools where people died quite young. Instead, the key factor was that cities allowed the work of the agriculturalist to be siphoned off and used for other purposes (city dwellers could form military forces that dominated the lands around them, simply by their size). The agriculturalists had to work harder, and thus had even less free time, so the few on top could afford both luxuries and the weapons needed to stay on top. It was the continued development of weapons and luxuries for the dominate few which eventually would led to civilization.
Just curious, have you ever tried a "hunter/gatherer" lifestyle? Gone to a wilderness area, ditched the trappings of civilization (clothes, cellphone, computer, canteen, all that stuff), and tried living on what you could hunt down or gather (and no, I'm not referring to what you can gather at the local Mcdonald's...)...
People who grow up in this lifestyle know how to survive and prosper in their native environment. This environment is no longer the native environment for most of modern humanity, and it is foolish to expect those without the appropriate knowledge and experience to prosper. Further, hardly anybody has to do this without some sort of equipment, however primitive it might be by modern standards (even just a few hand-crafted tools passed from parent to child), so expecting people to make do without any equipment is also foolish.
Even in such a case, however, one can make do if one has the appropriate knowledge and the weather is sufficiently mild.
Agriculture developed independently in multiple places. In each case it would have involved former hunter-gatherers deciding to cultivate crops instead. Clearly there was something attractive about the idea or they wouldn't have bothered with it. Probably just something daft though, like having a stable source of food or being able to produce an excess to survive through a lean period, and allow some of the population to do something other than constantly hunt and gather... but who really needs that?