Michael Kevane

More idiotic hyperbole from the OLPC people, who want to take your money away from proper libraries with proper books.  Ask yourself, if he has to outright lie about the product, why should anyone give any money to it?

The experiment is being done in two isolated rural villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa. One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000 feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Rift Valley. Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.

“Never seen printed materials…”?  Who is he kidding?  Only someone who has been reading only Boingboing for last 10 years would believe that, or not immediately say, “Baloney.  Don’t they use money there? Don’t they have ID cards?  You bet they do.”

via Illiterate kids given sealed boxes with tablets figure out how to use, master, and hack them – Boing Boing.

One of my PhD advisors at Berkeley was Michael Watts, whose wonderful, massive, and dense work Silent Violence was a great inspiration…. but like Pinker remember thinking that while I understood the argument– social structure led to outcomes, like death through famine, as inexorably as a two-by-four– I wasn’t sure whether it was a helpful argument to be making in terms of clarifying concepts.  In particular, the “inexorable” part just doesn’t work.

From Pinker:

Isn’t economic inequality a form of violence? 

No; the fact that Bill Gates has a bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It’s not that these aren’t bad things, but you can’t write a coherent book on the topic of “bad things.”

We ask whether people are predisposed towards selfishness, behaving cooperatively only through active self-control; or whether they are intuitively cooperative, with reflection and prospective reasoning favouring ‘rational’ self-interest. To investigate this issue, we perform ten studies using economic games. We find that across a range of experimental designs, subjects who reach their decisions more quickly are more cooperative. Furthermore, forcing subjects to decide quickly increases contributions, whereas instructing them to reflect and forcing them to decide slowly decreases contributions. Finally, an induction that primes subjects to trust their intuitions increases contributions compared with an induction that promotes greater reflection. To explain these results, we propose that cooperation is intuitive because cooperative heuristics are developed in daily life where cooperation is typically advantageous. We then validate predictions generated by this proposed mechanism. Our results provide convergent evidence that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, and that reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses.

via Spontaneous giving and calculated greed : Nature : Nature Publishing Group.

Publicity-hungry entrepreneurs have special advisors who sit in rooms all day cooking up catchy one-liners that will get them noticed, never mind the incoherence of whatever they have to say.  The latest such is Magatte Wade, a Senegalese skin-care mogul-in-the-waiting married to “bleeding-heart libertarian” Michael Strong, buddy of Whole Foods mogul John Mackey.  She’s connected!  She’s also spent many years living in small villages interacting with development/aid workers.  Not.  But really, she knows all about them!  As she tells us in her op-ed.

I know as a Senegalese that her attitude [a woman questioning how to help the poor from a position of privilege] is precisely what disgusts us about many who work at NGOs. Every year we see thousands of “privileged” young Americans and Europeans eager to come “help the underprivileged”. Don’t they understand how contemptuous that is?

[MK Note- I’ll remember Wade’s spin on the desire to help next time I read the parable of the Good Samaritan.  Contempt!  And BTW, the woman was precisely asking about this issue, so not clear why Wade is disgusted…]

I prefer the humanity of a tough business person in a negotiation in which he or she is trying to make a deal. While there are jerks out there, I want to be engaged in relationships with people who believe that I’m worth struggling with, not just pitying. If you approach me with a worldview in which you are privileged and I need your help, there is no possibility of an authentic relationship. You may as well see yourself as the master and me as the slave.

[Again, not to go on and on about the parables, but this is just like those whining workers at the vineyard wanting to be paid more… Matthew 20!]

I know that there are countless people in the NGO world that have done a great deal of good. But I would like to propose that NGOs either refuse to hire, or simply fire, anyone who has a condescending attitude towards the poor. We need to certify a new class of NGO: “No pity shit” NGOs. Moreover, the problem goes well beyond these organisations. Many from the developed world – in government, multilateral agencies, business, and academia – have a similar attitude. I don’t understand why it is so hard for some humans to see other humans as also human. Your perception of “privilege” is your problem. Get over it.

Completely incoherent.  So no-one is privileged.  Or, some people are privileged, but only libertarians have the right attitude about their privilege… and only their message: poor people should strive to be privileged too just like us…. is a non-racist message.

According to the economist Daron Acemoglu and the political scientist James Robinson, economic development hinges on a single factor: a country’s political institutions. More specifically, as they explain in their new book, Why Nations Fail, it depends on the existence of “inclusive” political institutions, defined as pluralistic systems that protect individual rights. These, in turn, give rise to inclusive economic institutions, which secure private property and encourage entrepreneurship. The long-term result is higher incomes and improved human welfare.What Acemoglu and Robinson call “extractive” political institutions, in contrast, place power in the hands of a few and beget extractive economic institutions, which feature unfair regulations and high barriers to entry into markets. Designed to enrich a small elite, these institutions inhibit economic progress for everyone else. The broad hypothesis of Why Nations Fail is that governments that protect property rights and represent their people preside over economic development, whereas those that do not suffer from economies that stagnate or decline. Although “most social scientists shun monocausal, simple, and broadly applicable theories,” Acemoglu and Robinson write, they themselves have chosen just such a “simple theory and used it to explain the main contours of economic and political development around the world since the Neolithic Revolution.”Their causal logic runs something like this: economic development depends on new inventions such as the steam engine, which helped kick-start the Industrial Revolution, and inventions need to be researched, developed, and widely distributed. Those activities happen only when inventors can expect to reap the economic benefits of their work. The profit motive also drives diffusion, as companies compete to spread the benefit of an invention to a wider population. The biggest obstacle to this process is vested interests, such as despotic rulers, who fear that a prosperous middle class could undermine their power, or owners of existing technologies, who want to stay in business. Often, these two groups belong to the same clique…

Gated, at Foreign Affairs.