If you have been reading here at all, you should know that I am persuaded that the large difference between developed and developing nations lies at least part in the "cultural" or "world view" differences.
BUT - it is clearly a complex problem. In an article about Africa, the author is very clear that the legal infrastructure of land ownership is a major problem for African development. This is certainly for agriculture - which is pretty much the basis for any solid level of developed society.
You can find the article here: Maximizing Africa's Agriculture. Part of the problem is that most of Africa's farmers are women, and women cannot legally hold title to land in many societies. Another part is that only a 10 percent of African land is actually titled or registered in such a way that one can even claim ownership.
In one instance I am aware of, the government of Tanzania dedicated a part of the Serengeti, the historic home of the Maasai tribe, to an Arab hunting ground. Of course, some money changed hands in the course of this. The Maasai are barely farmers, but the little farming they do is severely restricted by the government, so as not to interfere with tourism and the like.
So, besides a favorable world view, it is also essential to development that the social infrastructure be consistent and supportive. As Amartya Sen has clearly shown, humans will prosper, provided we have some basic "freedoms" - a stable, supportive government infrastructure is one of them. And that depends largely on a world view that finds such an infrastructure important to create and maintain. Where the world view is top down - the top is in charge and the rest of us depend on it - that infrastructure is unlikely. Corruption, failure of the legal system, no land ownership system, all work against our innate ability to prosper.
Prior to the invention of agriculture, land was NOT owned by anyone. You used it, you moved on, no one complained. With agriculture, it became important to own that piece of dirt that you used to maintain your livelihood. And MOST of us were farmers - we fed ourselves and sold a bit for other things we could not make. We also settled down, and needed a place to call home. Now, in the U.S., less than one per cent of us actually farm. Yet our amazing agriculture productivity is one of the major sources of our wealth and prosperity.
And, once again, given that we know this, how the heck do we change it? My biggest fear is that the "world view" that underlies the amazing creativity and productivity of the U.S. is gradually being worn down by our individualistic, selfish approach to sharing the wealth. We are so divided now that we cannot do the simplest thing in our infrastructure to foster growth and freedom in our society.
One of the most recent efforts at a bi-partisan law was to restrict the ability of NSA to spy on all of us. Now, who would not support that? Well, a bipartisan group supports it, and another opposes it. The opposition includes the Speaker of the House and the President. With those two agin it, it ain't going anywhere - ever. We are giving up freedoms for security - the same thing happened during the civil war and the World War II. But those wars ended and we got back to normal. The current war is never going to end.
Canadians do better. Scandinavians do better. Baah.
Your thoughts?
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Monday, June 3, 2013
How To Fix the Economy - Share the Wealth
I've been reading about economics a bit - the history, the various schools of thought, etc. One thing is clear - it is pretty complicated. AND - it is hardly a science. I see the beginnings of something like a science - ideas tested with actual experiments. But right now, it is mostly a war of words and opinions - a lot like religion! People get religious about their economic solutions, and there is no way to have a rational discussion about it all.
I happened to read two articles about minimum wage which gave me the classic juxtaposition between opposing views. The first one is by Henry Blodgett, and you can find it here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-fix-the-economy-in-one-simple-chart-2012-8
Mr. Blodgett is a former investment analyst. He is more a journalist than an economist, but he writes fairly knowledgeably about economics and investments.
Share the Wealth to Generate Consumers
His idea is pretty simple. Our economy is primarily a consumer one - that means people buy things they really do not need. And they don't do that if they don't feel they have adequate wealth. Of late, the real incomes of the middle class and lower have been declining. But the wealth retained by corporations is growing rapidly. Companies are making money, storing up profits, and the workers are not. He sees the problem with a simple solution - with a lot of charts to back him up. Corporations should pay more, and have less profit. He says Henry Ford understood that. He paid this workers enough that they could buy one of the cars they were making. He did not have to do that - there was not much competition for that work force - but he did. It was his investment in the rest of us. He made a bit less profit on each car, but the economy boomed.
The problem here is, how does this come to pass? He closes the article on a wish and a prayer, as it were, with a call for companies to pay more. But there are powerful incentives in our system for a company to make as much profit as possible - and no incentive to pay their employees a living wage. It is like the environment. How do we get one paper mill on the Charles River to stop polluting, if that is going to cost that firm more money? The others will compete on price and drive them out of business. The only way to do that is to mandate environmental protections, so that they all have an equal requirement.
How does one encourage employers to pay a living wage? Raise the minimum wage laws? Establish some legal guideline for the worth of positions based on their complexity or training, or productivity? It sounds like a good idea, but tough to make it happen! We have tremendous wealth in this country. Companies like Apple are sitting on hordes of cash - not investing it because of uncertainties. How do we encourage them to invest in the rest of us? Apple doesn't need to encourage more buyers - they can sell all the gadgets they make at huge markups.
Minimum Wage a Bad Idea?
On the other side of this, I also read an article by the Mises Institute on how ridiculous it is to think that we can mandate a minimum wage, or adjust wages in any other way than by the free market. The article is here: http://mises.org/daily/6121/The-Effect-of-WageRate-Interventions.
They publish a kind of ongoing course in the Austrian School of Economics. If you are not familiar with this school of economics, they are pretty much absolute libertarians. Let the market do its work, with the minimum possible human intervention. Ron Paul is a proponent of this school, and most Republicans give it some form of lip service. It is as though God created the free market and we should not meddle with it.
This article argues that it is impossible to legislate wage rates. The market determines wage rates - what people are willing to pay for a good or service, and what wages people are willing to work to obtain. If you get into this mode of thinking, it is pretty seductive. People will eventually figure out what something is worth. If we intervene with legislation we just mess up the efficient working of the market.
There are a few problems with that approach. There never has been a free market. We have managed and regulated markets since the King established the East Indian Trading Company to get some income from all of that trade. And trade groups and industries have been "fixing" prices and wages for centuries. That is why we have things called "anti-trust" laws and labor laws. They have been somewhat neglected in the recent decades, but they clearly had a salutary effect on the market.
Libertarians seem to think that we are all in this together in a communitarian kind of way, and the best outcome will automatically occur if each person selfishly pursues their own personal good. But that really doesn't work! Those folks have lived in these northern climes way too long. In most of the world, everyone is out to get some of yours, not to help you. Northern climates have a bit more of a common goal focus - but it is not universal by any means.
Make the Market Rational
Humans are intelligent. We are not blind adherents to any law of economics. We do not need to descend to the lowest common denominator. We can exercise intelligent control over some portions of our competition for goods and services. We have eliminated child labor and slavery for the most part, which were extremely efficient market mechanisms for producing goods at low cost. We should also establish a livable minimum wage. We will all pay for it, just as we are all paying for the lack of those cheap child laborers. But the price is worth it. If someone is working a 40 hour week, they should make enough to live on - period.
Jobs Disappearing
As our levels of automation increase, it is also highly likely that the actual number of jobs will eventually decline. When all garment manufacturing is being done by that completely automated factory next to the cotton field, what becomes of those entry level jobs? We still generate the wealth, but how do we share it with the general populace so that they can actually BUY the things they produce?
We could, of course, shift gears entirely and tax ourselves to pay people to do really USEFUL things for us - not just to create gadgets and trinkets. That sounds like a wonderful idea - and the Scandinavians might be able to pull if off. They do seem to think that we are all in this together - thank you Red Green.
I happened to read two articles about minimum wage which gave me the classic juxtaposition between opposing views. The first one is by Henry Blodgett, and you can find it here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-fix-the-economy-in-one-simple-chart-2012-8
Mr. Blodgett is a former investment analyst. He is more a journalist than an economist, but he writes fairly knowledgeably about economics and investments.
Share the Wealth to Generate Consumers
His idea is pretty simple. Our economy is primarily a consumer one - that means people buy things they really do not need. And they don't do that if they don't feel they have adequate wealth. Of late, the real incomes of the middle class and lower have been declining. But the wealth retained by corporations is growing rapidly. Companies are making money, storing up profits, and the workers are not. He sees the problem with a simple solution - with a lot of charts to back him up. Corporations should pay more, and have less profit. He says Henry Ford understood that. He paid this workers enough that they could buy one of the cars they were making. He did not have to do that - there was not much competition for that work force - but he did. It was his investment in the rest of us. He made a bit less profit on each car, but the economy boomed.
The problem here is, how does this come to pass? He closes the article on a wish and a prayer, as it were, with a call for companies to pay more. But there are powerful incentives in our system for a company to make as much profit as possible - and no incentive to pay their employees a living wage. It is like the environment. How do we get one paper mill on the Charles River to stop polluting, if that is going to cost that firm more money? The others will compete on price and drive them out of business. The only way to do that is to mandate environmental protections, so that they all have an equal requirement.
How does one encourage employers to pay a living wage? Raise the minimum wage laws? Establish some legal guideline for the worth of positions based on their complexity or training, or productivity? It sounds like a good idea, but tough to make it happen! We have tremendous wealth in this country. Companies like Apple are sitting on hordes of cash - not investing it because of uncertainties. How do we encourage them to invest in the rest of us? Apple doesn't need to encourage more buyers - they can sell all the gadgets they make at huge markups.
Minimum Wage a Bad Idea?
On the other side of this, I also read an article by the Mises Institute on how ridiculous it is to think that we can mandate a minimum wage, or adjust wages in any other way than by the free market. The article is here: http://mises.org/daily/6121/The-Effect-of-WageRate-Interventions.
They publish a kind of ongoing course in the Austrian School of Economics. If you are not familiar with this school of economics, they are pretty much absolute libertarians. Let the market do its work, with the minimum possible human intervention. Ron Paul is a proponent of this school, and most Republicans give it some form of lip service. It is as though God created the free market and we should not meddle with it.
This article argues that it is impossible to legislate wage rates. The market determines wage rates - what people are willing to pay for a good or service, and what wages people are willing to work to obtain. If you get into this mode of thinking, it is pretty seductive. People will eventually figure out what something is worth. If we intervene with legislation we just mess up the efficient working of the market.
There are a few problems with that approach. There never has been a free market. We have managed and regulated markets since the King established the East Indian Trading Company to get some income from all of that trade. And trade groups and industries have been "fixing" prices and wages for centuries. That is why we have things called "anti-trust" laws and labor laws. They have been somewhat neglected in the recent decades, but they clearly had a salutary effect on the market.
Libertarians seem to think that we are all in this together in a communitarian kind of way, and the best outcome will automatically occur if each person selfishly pursues their own personal good. But that really doesn't work! Those folks have lived in these northern climes way too long. In most of the world, everyone is out to get some of yours, not to help you. Northern climates have a bit more of a common goal focus - but it is not universal by any means.
Make the Market Rational
Humans are intelligent. We are not blind adherents to any law of economics. We do not need to descend to the lowest common denominator. We can exercise intelligent control over some portions of our competition for goods and services. We have eliminated child labor and slavery for the most part, which were extremely efficient market mechanisms for producing goods at low cost. We should also establish a livable minimum wage. We will all pay for it, just as we are all paying for the lack of those cheap child laborers. But the price is worth it. If someone is working a 40 hour week, they should make enough to live on - period.
Jobs Disappearing
As our levels of automation increase, it is also highly likely that the actual number of jobs will eventually decline. When all garment manufacturing is being done by that completely automated factory next to the cotton field, what becomes of those entry level jobs? We still generate the wealth, but how do we share it with the general populace so that they can actually BUY the things they produce?
We could, of course, shift gears entirely and tax ourselves to pay people to do really USEFUL things for us - not just to create gadgets and trinkets. That sounds like a wonderful idea - and the Scandinavians might be able to pull if off. They do seem to think that we are all in this together - thank you Red Green.
Face to Face Democracy
This is an old document (1996) that has been on my web site for some time. BUT - I am dismantling the website - so I thought I would post it here for posterity, or some such. We invented this thing called democracy - and it sucks, to put it mildly. It's time we fixed it.
The Current State of Affairs
The current form of government utilized in these United States and most parts of the world is a model drawn on the landed aristocracy of the early American Colonies, and the British experience with landed gentry. Ladies and gentlemen, times have changed.
The current system has some serious drawbacks. To enumerate a few:
1. Elected officials, pejoratively labeled as politicians, spend an inordinate amount of time and money and energy trying to get elected and stay elected, so that they can accomplish something. Running for a congressional seat every two years is tremendously distracting from the job at hand.
2. The popular vote is popular, but it is not very well informed. Most people have very little time and energy for government and politics. The net is some horrendous results of popular elections. In my own town, we had a candidate come within 16 votes of a city council seat, although she had moved out of the city and ceased being a legal candidate several months before the election. She was on the ballot, and she had an obviously female name in a crowd of male candidates. No one with any idea of the issues and candidates would possibly have voted for her -- yet half of the electorate did. People vote at the polls based on names -- a scary idea at best.
Another candidate at the state level won her party's primary for attorney general, although she was not an attorney and completely unqualified for the position. Her own party disowned her candidacy. At the state level, she garnered over 30% of the vote based on a female, Scandinavian sounding name!
3. We have had elected officials in major state offices, that were not well mentally. They sounded OK for a few minutes of door to door conversation, but any prolonged discussion with them always went off into never / never land. Anyone that met them, or read any serious commentary about them would have known in five minutes that you could barely trust them to find their way home, let alone run state government.
4. Sound bytes and simple slogans are what sell. We have not had a simple issue in government since the revolution. When I was running for local office, people would regularly want a 30 second description of my position on a controversial topic -- they were never happy when I said it was not quite that simple! This is not the way to get elected.
5. Our major parties are at war -- not at government. In order to get elected, they characterize each other as the enemy, the forces of evil, the beast to be defeated. In fact, often enough they both have decent ideas, which they should talk about and negotiate over. If they felt free to negotiate, to spend time to come up with a creative alternative that would solve our problems, we would be much better served. In place of creative thinking, we have warfare. They can't even talk to each other lest it be seen as caving in. They can't express understanding and concern for the other view, lest they be seen as wishy-washy, waffling, not strong. In our state government, they do not even SIT next to each other! Give me a break.
This is nonsense. We aren't asking them to arm wrestle over issues -- we're asking them to come up with some very creative answers to some very difficult questions. Today it is winner take all, and kill the loser. We all need to live here together, and we will never all agree. Let's move to something that's closer to similar instead of drawing everything as black and white.
6. Voters are NOT rational. The book, Thinking Fast and Slow describes an experiment, where subjects are shown pictures of the candidates for actual political offices, and asked to name the winner. They are 70% accurate just by looking at the picture. What wins? A square jaw and confident smile. Pardon me, but this is NUTS!
We can probably list another 20 things broken with the system -- how on earth does one fix it?
What Can We Do?
First of all, there's no natural law of democracy. We made this up, it's trial and error. We should try to improve it, not just put up with it. We, the people, are in charge of this system. Let's 'fess up that it is broken, and let's fix it.
While it is essential to democracy that the electorate know and feel that they have a say in their government, this participation does not have to be structured as it is now. Today most officials are directly elected by popular vote. We have abandoned this model for many of our courts, and for most of our professional government service staff. We recognize that we simply could not survive if those people were amateurs and subject to change every 2 years.
Why not move to an indirect democracy? We could lay down some simple principles, and try a number of pilots at city, county and state legislative levels and find a practical mix that works. Here are a few basics to my mind:
Executive Officers Directly Elected - NOT!
I originally thought we could continue to elect the chief executive officer directly, as in the president, governor, and mayor. But in light of our recent history and the current occupant of the oval office, that does not look like a great idea. The same problems as cited above can easily give us a dundering idiot for our fearless leader. We need some other way to encourage a true leader to step forward and be recognized. The Prime Minister, Parliamentary model has some potential. The idea of electing electors - the original US model for naming the President - looks to be as good as any. At a minimum, we get one more level where an independent decision by a thoughtful group might result.
The other alternative would be to make it much easier to remove a leader, given a majority of elected officials agree. Our current impeachment process at the federal level is less than clear.
Given most of our government structures, it's not too dangerous if we get a marginal person in here on occasion. The legislative branch can remove them, and they generally need cooperation from the legislative to make any significant change. But the leadership role is significant. They are our royalty, our rallying point, our spokesperson.
I'd like to remove the partisan politics from this over time, but I don't see a good way to do that now. If we fix the legislative one, perhaps this will follow.
Legislative elected through Electoral Panels
For the legislative branch, adopt the following principles:
1. Maintain the basic structure of city council, county board, state legislature, U.S. Congress. I don't have an opinion about bicameral or not -- I tend to think it is a waste of time and energy at the state level, but it offers some safeguards at the national level.
2. Establish intermediary bodies from the local neighborhood up to the congressional district whose sole purpose is to discuss, advise, and elect the people at the next level up. Make the groups such that people only vote for someone that they actually know. This implies that the electoral body for any given person has to be fairly small. I think 30 would work -- I'm sure 500 would not. They should be able to regularly get together in a room and discuss things. I would like to see the elected official able to poll this group on their opinion, and argue and discuss differences with them. This also implies that the elected person from any electoral body has to originally be from that body. I say originally, because we need to keep them insulated from lower layers -- see below.
We would have neighborhood precincts (a bit smaller than today, I think, but perhaps not), that would each elect one candidate for the next level electorate. Depending on the size of the city, these people would elect the council, or they would elect another body one level up in large cities. This might be a few levels in really large cities, but that's their problem. Most of us know our mayor on sight and can talk to that person if we want to. Let them divide the cities up if they're unworkable. In fact, at a small group size of 100, and a city of 1 million would have 10,000 primary groups or neighborhoods that would elect 100 "electors". For a city of 6 million, they would end up with 600 electors, and that would call for another, intermediate electoral body.
At the county level, the same groups that elect the city legislators elect another electoral panel or panels that name the county representatives. With primary groups sized at 100, up to 50 million voters can be represented by no more than 3 layers of "electors". Counties and cities are the worst problems, given their variable size.
A third group of electoral panels names the state legislators. A fourth group is responsible for the congressional district. These districts tend to be a standard size, and may continue to cut across cities and counties. This electoral panel is only one layer deep -- the neighborhoods and the electors, even for U.S. Congress.
It's possible for an elector to be named to more than one of these trees, but that may generate serious problems with participation at the next level up. I'd start these off disallowing participation in more than one. That would also allow up to 4 members of every group of 100 at the neighborhood level to serve on an electoral panel up one layer -- giving most people with an interest the ability to represent their neighborhood. In my experience, a normal precinct generates 25 active caucus participants in most election years!
3. When someone from an electoral panel is elected to go higher, they are replaced by a new election at their neighborhood. They are no longer their neighborhood's representative, but the representative of the electoral panel that named them. You might think it would make sense to have them all participate at 2 levels. It would cut down on the need for formal communications. But some members are clearly going to be members at 2 or 3 levels, and they cannot function as members of that many groups.
4. Set normal terms at the 4 year level, staggered every year for different layers and the city, county, state, and U.S., so that only a quarter of an electoral panel could be replaced every year. That would keep some continuity and guarantee some independence.
5. In place of term limits, authorize the electoral body for each person to be able to recall that person at any time by a formal recall vote of a very large majority of the group -- perhaps three fourths, naming a replacement from their membership. This would keep each level responsible to their electoral body.
The actual elected legislator can only be recalled by the group that elected that person.
Potential Benefits
What might this accomplish? A number of hopeful things:
Regular political discussions or town meetings should flourish. Everyone would have an opportunity, probably once a month, to get together with the representative they elected to the panel or to the actual legislature to discuss issues, ideas, concerns.
Thoughtful decision-making is possible. The legislators could actually talk with their electoral panel. They might explore difficult issues, explain complex matters, ask for a show of hands or an e-mail vote from their constituents. I would be disappointed if they simply acted on the basis of that vote -- I would prefer that they use their good judgment and act independently of the group.
No election campaigns. If you regularly meet with 100 folks, or the 25 who show up, your major problem in getting elected at the grass roots level would be to generate interest in those who do not normally attend the meetings! This would be good, not bad, and you should be able to bear an expense like that with minimal fund raising.
Political parties might remain. They would still work for the executive branch, and they could rally people around ideas and movements -- but they would have no power to dictate candidates.
Elected officials might work together. They no longer need to play to the masses -- just to the 100 people that they meet with monthly. They might work with their "colleagues" to come up with truly creative ideas to resolve our differences, instead of waging war.
Copyright Carl Scheider, 2013, 2019 - changes to CEO election process.
The Current State of Affairs
The current form of government utilized in these United States and most parts of the world is a model drawn on the landed aristocracy of the early American Colonies, and the British experience with landed gentry. Ladies and gentlemen, times have changed.
The current system has some serious drawbacks. To enumerate a few:
1. Elected officials, pejoratively labeled as politicians, spend an inordinate amount of time and money and energy trying to get elected and stay elected, so that they can accomplish something. Running for a congressional seat every two years is tremendously distracting from the job at hand.
2. The popular vote is popular, but it is not very well informed. Most people have very little time and energy for government and politics. The net is some horrendous results of popular elections. In my own town, we had a candidate come within 16 votes of a city council seat, although she had moved out of the city and ceased being a legal candidate several months before the election. She was on the ballot, and she had an obviously female name in a crowd of male candidates. No one with any idea of the issues and candidates would possibly have voted for her -- yet half of the electorate did. People vote at the polls based on names -- a scary idea at best.
Another candidate at the state level won her party's primary for attorney general, although she was not an attorney and completely unqualified for the position. Her own party disowned her candidacy. At the state level, she garnered over 30% of the vote based on a female, Scandinavian sounding name!
3. We have had elected officials in major state offices, that were not well mentally. They sounded OK for a few minutes of door to door conversation, but any prolonged discussion with them always went off into never / never land. Anyone that met them, or read any serious commentary about them would have known in five minutes that you could barely trust them to find their way home, let alone run state government.
4. Sound bytes and simple slogans are what sell. We have not had a simple issue in government since the revolution. When I was running for local office, people would regularly want a 30 second description of my position on a controversial topic -- they were never happy when I said it was not quite that simple! This is not the way to get elected.
5. Our major parties are at war -- not at government. In order to get elected, they characterize each other as the enemy, the forces of evil, the beast to be defeated. In fact, often enough they both have decent ideas, which they should talk about and negotiate over. If they felt free to negotiate, to spend time to come up with a creative alternative that would solve our problems, we would be much better served. In place of creative thinking, we have warfare. They can't even talk to each other lest it be seen as caving in. They can't express understanding and concern for the other view, lest they be seen as wishy-washy, waffling, not strong. In our state government, they do not even SIT next to each other! Give me a break.
This is nonsense. We aren't asking them to arm wrestle over issues -- we're asking them to come up with some very creative answers to some very difficult questions. Today it is winner take all, and kill the loser. We all need to live here together, and we will never all agree. Let's move to something that's closer to similar instead of drawing everything as black and white.
6. Voters are NOT rational. The book, Thinking Fast and Slow describes an experiment, where subjects are shown pictures of the candidates for actual political offices, and asked to name the winner. They are 70% accurate just by looking at the picture. What wins? A square jaw and confident smile. Pardon me, but this is NUTS!
We can probably list another 20 things broken with the system -- how on earth does one fix it?
What Can We Do?
First of all, there's no natural law of democracy. We made this up, it's trial and error. We should try to improve it, not just put up with it. We, the people, are in charge of this system. Let's 'fess up that it is broken, and let's fix it.
While it is essential to democracy that the electorate know and feel that they have a say in their government, this participation does not have to be structured as it is now. Today most officials are directly elected by popular vote. We have abandoned this model for many of our courts, and for most of our professional government service staff. We recognize that we simply could not survive if those people were amateurs and subject to change every 2 years.
Why not move to an indirect democracy? We could lay down some simple principles, and try a number of pilots at city, county and state legislative levels and find a practical mix that works. Here are a few basics to my mind:
Executive Officers Directly Elected - NOT!
I originally thought we could continue to elect the chief executive officer directly, as in the president, governor, and mayor. But in light of our recent history and the current occupant of the oval office, that does not look like a great idea. The same problems as cited above can easily give us a dundering idiot for our fearless leader. We need some other way to encourage a true leader to step forward and be recognized. The Prime Minister, Parliamentary model has some potential. The idea of electing electors - the original US model for naming the President - looks to be as good as any. At a minimum, we get one more level where an independent decision by a thoughtful group might result.
The other alternative would be to make it much easier to remove a leader, given a majority of elected officials agree. Our current impeachment process at the federal level is less than clear.
Given most of our government structures, it's not too dangerous if we get a marginal person in here on occasion. The legislative branch can remove them, and they generally need cooperation from the legislative to make any significant change. But the leadership role is significant. They are our royalty, our rallying point, our spokesperson.
I'd like to remove the partisan politics from this over time, but I don't see a good way to do that now. If we fix the legislative one, perhaps this will follow.
Legislative elected through Electoral Panels
For the legislative branch, adopt the following principles:
1. Maintain the basic structure of city council, county board, state legislature, U.S. Congress. I don't have an opinion about bicameral or not -- I tend to think it is a waste of time and energy at the state level, but it offers some safeguards at the national level.
2. Establish intermediary bodies from the local neighborhood up to the congressional district whose sole purpose is to discuss, advise, and elect the people at the next level up. Make the groups such that people only vote for someone that they actually know. This implies that the electoral body for any given person has to be fairly small. I think 30 would work -- I'm sure 500 would not. They should be able to regularly get together in a room and discuss things. I would like to see the elected official able to poll this group on their opinion, and argue and discuss differences with them. This also implies that the elected person from any electoral body has to originally be from that body. I say originally, because we need to keep them insulated from lower layers -- see below.
We would have neighborhood precincts (a bit smaller than today, I think, but perhaps not), that would each elect one candidate for the next level electorate. Depending on the size of the city, these people would elect the council, or they would elect another body one level up in large cities. This might be a few levels in really large cities, but that's their problem. Most of us know our mayor on sight and can talk to that person if we want to. Let them divide the cities up if they're unworkable. In fact, at a small group size of 100, and a city of 1 million would have 10,000 primary groups or neighborhoods that would elect 100 "electors". For a city of 6 million, they would end up with 600 electors, and that would call for another, intermediate electoral body.
At the county level, the same groups that elect the city legislators elect another electoral panel or panels that name the county representatives. With primary groups sized at 100, up to 50 million voters can be represented by no more than 3 layers of "electors". Counties and cities are the worst problems, given their variable size.
A third group of electoral panels names the state legislators. A fourth group is responsible for the congressional district. These districts tend to be a standard size, and may continue to cut across cities and counties. This electoral panel is only one layer deep -- the neighborhoods and the electors, even for U.S. Congress.
It's possible for an elector to be named to more than one of these trees, but that may generate serious problems with participation at the next level up. I'd start these off disallowing participation in more than one. That would also allow up to 4 members of every group of 100 at the neighborhood level to serve on an electoral panel up one layer -- giving most people with an interest the ability to represent their neighborhood. In my experience, a normal precinct generates 25 active caucus participants in most election years!
3. When someone from an electoral panel is elected to go higher, they are replaced by a new election at their neighborhood. They are no longer their neighborhood's representative, but the representative of the electoral panel that named them. You might think it would make sense to have them all participate at 2 levels. It would cut down on the need for formal communications. But some members are clearly going to be members at 2 or 3 levels, and they cannot function as members of that many groups.
4. Set normal terms at the 4 year level, staggered every year for different layers and the city, county, state, and U.S., so that only a quarter of an electoral panel could be replaced every year. That would keep some continuity and guarantee some independence.
5. In place of term limits, authorize the electoral body for each person to be able to recall that person at any time by a formal recall vote of a very large majority of the group -- perhaps three fourths, naming a replacement from their membership. This would keep each level responsible to their electoral body.
The actual elected legislator can only be recalled by the group that elected that person.
Potential Benefits
What might this accomplish? A number of hopeful things:
Regular political discussions or town meetings should flourish. Everyone would have an opportunity, probably once a month, to get together with the representative they elected to the panel or to the actual legislature to discuss issues, ideas, concerns.
Thoughtful decision-making is possible. The legislators could actually talk with their electoral panel. They might explore difficult issues, explain complex matters, ask for a show of hands or an e-mail vote from their constituents. I would be disappointed if they simply acted on the basis of that vote -- I would prefer that they use their good judgment and act independently of the group.
No election campaigns. If you regularly meet with 100 folks, or the 25 who show up, your major problem in getting elected at the grass roots level would be to generate interest in those who do not normally attend the meetings! This would be good, not bad, and you should be able to bear an expense like that with minimal fund raising.
Political parties might remain. They would still work for the executive branch, and they could rally people around ideas and movements -- but they would have no power to dictate candidates.
Elected officials might work together. They no longer need to play to the masses -- just to the 100 people that they meet with monthly. They might work with their "colleagues" to come up with truly creative ideas to resolve our differences, instead of waging war.
Copyright Carl Scheider, 2013, 2019 - changes to CEO election process.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Thinking, Fast and Slow - a book report
Some interesting ideas from Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel
Kahneman.
I was visiting with some friends the
other day, and because of the conversation, I felt morally obliged to introduce them
to this book: Thinking, Fast and Slow by
Daniel Kahneman. I would be negligent if
I did not also point the few readers of this blog in the same direction.
This is a VERY interesting book. I learned more from it than any I have read of
late. I actually created a “cheat sheet”
of the main ideas to help me remember them. Let me give you a bit of an overview of the contents,
to entice you to read it.
Overview
The author of this book is a psychologist,
who has been researching how we make decisions for decades. He won the Nobel
Prize for economics for his explanation into how humans really make economic decisions.
The basic insight is that we are barely rational. Most of our decisions are from
our gut, our instinct. He calls that our “fast brain”. We react to things quickly,
and instinctually, because evolution tuned us to do that as a survival mechanism.
For really complex problems we do engage our “slow brain”, but it is a lot of work,
we can’t do it when we are tired, or have been thinking a lot, or are hungry, etc.
The book is full of experiments that give
great insight into how we actually make decisions.
Why is this a big deal? Because most people are making economic and political
decisions that affect ALL of us from their gut instinct, not from any rational argument
or thinking. And the result is what you might expect – this is not a rational way
to deal with our economic and political reality.
Here are a couple of short hand examples,
just to entice you to read the whole book.
1. Election prediction. People were shown two pictures of candidates running
for a political office, and asked which one won. They guessed the winner correctly in 70% of the
cases, by just looking at the pictures for a fraction of a second. The winners tend
to have a strong chin and a confident smile.
2. Libertarian Economics. The Austrian School
of economics, or the Libertarians (think Mises, Ayn Rand and Ron Paul) are working on the
premise that humans make rational, economic decisions. We should, therefore, let
them make decisions that are free from other constraints as much as possible. It’s
called the free market. In fact, most economists are working on the same premise. But
humans are not really rational about their economic decisions. We are persuaded
by fears, prejudices, recent history, misinformation and outright lies much more
than by any rational argument. Any policy based on these abstract theoretical economic
theories is doomed to failure.
3. Investments. We have something called an illusion of understanding or expertise. If
I know a lot about a topic, I am persuaded that I make good decisions in that realm. Facts will not persuade me otherwise. In the investment
world, it becomes the “illusion of stock picking skill”. In fact, based on mountains
of statistical evidence, everyone is absolutely wretched about identifying good investments,
or predicting any future event, because our rational thinking is so clouded by this
illusion. Based on one chapter of this book,
I dropped my “advisor” approach to managing my investments with a broker, saving
myself several thousand dollars per year in fees. I adopted a low cost approach,
and feel much more comfortable about my investment strategy. This is not really
news to anyone – it is a purely random walk, a dart throw – you name it.
4. Cognitive Ease. If we have heard something before, even if we knew
it was a lie or wrong at that time, we are much more predisposed to believe it the
next time we hear it. I think our political candidates understand this one all too
well.
That
should be enough to entice you to read the book. Trust me on this. Remember, I’m pulling for you. We’re all in this together.
Update: 2015.07.31
Just to entice you further, here's a nice summary of some of the key ideas in this book, complete with illustrations of the cartoon type - you might find it equally interesting.
https://blog.bufferapp.com/thinking-mistakes-8-common-mistakes-in-how-we-think-and-how-to-avoid-them
Update: 2015.07.31
Just to entice you further, here's a nice summary of some of the key ideas in this book, complete with illustrations of the cartoon type - you might find it equally interesting.
https://blog.bufferapp.com/thinking-mistakes-8-common-mistakes-in-how-we-think-and-how-to-avoid-them
Monday, March 4, 2013
Language Savings Rates Thinking and Economic Development
Culture and Economics
If you have been reading along here, you realize that I am smitten by the idea that our culture, or better, how we think, has a lot to do with the economic differences among countries. My best summary of this is back a few years - you can read it here: http://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2011/01/culture-and-developing-nations.html
I just had some additional insights along those lines which are very interesting.
Language Savings Rates
This is a TED talk by a Chinese researcher which correlates the language one speaks with savings rates. You can find it here. http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/19/5-examples-of-how-the-languages-we-speak-can-affect-the-way-we-think/
You will find the TED talk there, as well as some additional information which this researcher has discovered - which is all quite amazing.
The speaker notes that in Chinese, he has to provide a lot more information just to identify his uncle. "The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger."
He also notes that in Chinese, there is no real "future" tense. With some global research, he discovered that languages with a future tense correlate with a higher savings rate! He can actually compare comparable people in the same country who speak different languages - say Flemish and Dutch speakers in Belgium - and the language with the future tense has a higher savings rate.
The same effect is found in similar "future" things - like smoking, obesity, health choices, use of condoms, etc.
I had seen this effect once before in a story about a class in international relations. The author Geert Hofstede mentions it in his book, Cultures and Organizations. In these sessions, almost everyone spoke both English and French. When the instructors conducted the class in English, the working groups quickly got into practical solutions. When they conducted it in French, the groups would talk forever, and rarely get to practical things. I find my own brain goes to a different place when I am speaking French, or another language. Your native tongue will influence you, but it does not prevail when you are speaking a different one. Interesting.
Causality
He notes that Spanish and Japanese tend to say things like, "The lamp was broken". In English, people tend to say, "Joe broke the lamp". For the Spanish and Japanese speakers, they may not actually remember WHO broke it - that is not the significant thing. Their criminal justice system also tends to focus on repairing the damage, rather than punishing the perpetrator - which is the focus of the English criminal justice system.
What to do with this
He holds out some hope that these "constraints" on people can be "overcome". I am not quite sure how that works. These are not 'good' or 'bad' things - they are simply things - traits of a culture or language. They change very slowly. I guess if you bring them to people's attention, then they can work harder to overcome them when they become a problem. For example, here in MN we have a "victim's advocate" role for our court system, so we do not forget the need to make the victim whole. I am not quite sure how you enforce saving rates or healthy behavior, but that would certainly be a fruitful area for research. Daniel Kannehman advocates something similar for making decisions, since our "fast brain" tends to overwhelm our rational thinking. We could teach these things in gradeschool, along with reading and math. This is how humans think, at least in this culture and language.
If you have been reading along here, you realize that I am smitten by the idea that our culture, or better, how we think, has a lot to do with the economic differences among countries. My best summary of this is back a few years - you can read it here: http://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2011/01/culture-and-developing-nations.html
I just had some additional insights along those lines which are very interesting.
Language Savings Rates
This is a TED talk by a Chinese researcher which correlates the language one speaks with savings rates. You can find it here. http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/19/5-examples-of-how-the-languages-we-speak-can-affect-the-way-we-think/
You will find the TED talk there, as well as some additional information which this researcher has discovered - which is all quite amazing.
The speaker notes that in Chinese, he has to provide a lot more information just to identify his uncle. "The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger."
He also notes that in Chinese, there is no real "future" tense. With some global research, he discovered that languages with a future tense correlate with a higher savings rate! He can actually compare comparable people in the same country who speak different languages - say Flemish and Dutch speakers in Belgium - and the language with the future tense has a higher savings rate.
The same effect is found in similar "future" things - like smoking, obesity, health choices, use of condoms, etc.
I had seen this effect once before in a story about a class in international relations. The author Geert Hofstede mentions it in his book, Cultures and Organizations. In these sessions, almost everyone spoke both English and French. When the instructors conducted the class in English, the working groups quickly got into practical solutions. When they conducted it in French, the groups would talk forever, and rarely get to practical things. I find my own brain goes to a different place when I am speaking French, or another language. Your native tongue will influence you, but it does not prevail when you are speaking a different one. Interesting.
Causality
He notes that Spanish and Japanese tend to say things like, "The lamp was broken". In English, people tend to say, "Joe broke the lamp". For the Spanish and Japanese speakers, they may not actually remember WHO broke it - that is not the significant thing. Their criminal justice system also tends to focus on repairing the damage, rather than punishing the perpetrator - which is the focus of the English criminal justice system.
What to do with this
He holds out some hope that these "constraints" on people can be "overcome". I am not quite sure how that works. These are not 'good' or 'bad' things - they are simply things - traits of a culture or language. They change very slowly. I guess if you bring them to people's attention, then they can work harder to overcome them when they become a problem. For example, here in MN we have a "victim's advocate" role for our court system, so we do not forget the need to make the victim whole. I am not quite sure how you enforce saving rates or healthy behavior, but that would certainly be a fruitful area for research. Daniel Kannehman advocates something similar for making decisions, since our "fast brain" tends to overwhelm our rational thinking. We could teach these things in gradeschool, along with reading and math. This is how humans think, at least in this culture and language.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Why the Singularity is Not Coming Anytime Soon
I have been absent from this blog for a while. I am working on some things to post here - mostly to do with economics. I am persuaded that we need to get a some "general concepts" of economics into our heads so we can make rational political decisions, instead of the craziness that is going on out there.
But - that is taking me a bit of time. I am reading stuff, etc.
Today, I stumbled on an article published this very day, that hit me so perfectly that I had to share it with someone - you, for instance. It is about "The Singularity", or Artificial Intelligence. Fellow name of Ray Kurzweil talks about it all the time. I got this from Zite - it's an app for iPhone, iPad, etc. It serves up stuff based on my likes and dislikes - my personal magazine. Check it out as well.
This piece is an amazing summary of this Singularity or AI idea, covering its history - and then pointing out the real fallacies in that approach. Kurzweil's idea is that we are advancing so rapidly in our technology, that it will not be long before we build a "brain" smarter than ourselves, at which point that brain can make one smarter than itself, and so on. At that point - intelligence explodes, and we are somewhat irrelevant.
I always thought that Mr. Kurzweil and others were ignoring a major part of what humans are - our body! They are focused on just the brain - but what goes on in our "intelligence" and capabilities is much more complex than that. AND - this brain is the product of a few million years of evolution. I am sure we can eventually understand it fully - but we are MANY years away from doing that. It is even more likely that we will manage our own evolutionary development long before we get an artificial one up and running.
But . . . go read the article. The author says it much, much better than I can manage.
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/scaruffi20130211
If that link dies, you can go to the website: www.ieet.org and look for the author, piero scaruffi. The organization is the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. What a novel idea!
But - that is taking me a bit of time. I am reading stuff, etc.
Today, I stumbled on an article published this very day, that hit me so perfectly that I had to share it with someone - you, for instance. It is about "The Singularity", or Artificial Intelligence. Fellow name of Ray Kurzweil talks about it all the time. I got this from Zite - it's an app for iPhone, iPad, etc. It serves up stuff based on my likes and dislikes - my personal magazine. Check it out as well.
This piece is an amazing summary of this Singularity or AI idea, covering its history - and then pointing out the real fallacies in that approach. Kurzweil's idea is that we are advancing so rapidly in our technology, that it will not be long before we build a "brain" smarter than ourselves, at which point that brain can make one smarter than itself, and so on. At that point - intelligence explodes, and we are somewhat irrelevant.
I always thought that Mr. Kurzweil and others were ignoring a major part of what humans are - our body! They are focused on just the brain - but what goes on in our "intelligence" and capabilities is much more complex than that. AND - this brain is the product of a few million years of evolution. I am sure we can eventually understand it fully - but we are MANY years away from doing that. It is even more likely that we will manage our own evolutionary development long before we get an artificial one up and running.
But . . . go read the article. The author says it much, much better than I can manage.
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/scaruffi20130211
If that link dies, you can go to the website: www.ieet.org and look for the author, piero scaruffi. The organization is the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. What a novel idea!
Friday, January 4, 2013
Farming Assistance in Africa
This entry is a collection of some contributions from others - which I found very interesting. This blog has been pestering about issues in the developing parts of the world. The solutions I have been reporting are all "community based". These are Small groups, working to empower people to make a difference in their lives. This article takes a totally different tack. Instead of community based efforts that work to change how people see themselves and their opportunities, this effort is a huge commercial investment in agricultural productivity.
As this works out, the society could make the same shift that most western ones did - moving from individuals farming to urban and manufacturing - or whatever replaces manufacturing in the future.
Midwest Farmer Helping in Africa
The initial article on this was a piece on MPR - Minnesota Public Radio - by Dan Gunderson. It recounts the plans of a Midwest farmer to travel to Africa to help the people there learn how to raise their productivity in agriculture. You can find that article here:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/12/27/business/midwest-farmers-operations-africa/
This gentleman, Wallie Hardie, is part of an organization known as Aslan Global Management. You can find their website here: http://www.aslan-global.com/.
In this project, they are working to assist Mozambique to raise their production of corn and soybeans. "Hardie said the plan is to develop a large intensive agriculture system, using profits to help local residents start their own farms." That sounds very positive, but the way these things normally go, the foreigners make a bunch of money, and the locals are left wondering what happened when they are gone.
One of the co-founders of Aslan stated their plans this way: "It's very important for us to not be in Africa to extract wealth," Larsen said. "We are in Africa to create wealth or to create value. And that's a very big distinction between what we're doing and what others do."
These farms are huge. The one in Mozambique is 25,000 acres, and the one planned in Tanzania is 98,000 acres. They are talking about helping the locals start farms that are more like 100 to 200 acres. Based on my limited experience in Tanzania - I've been there twice - that still sounds like a very large farm for local producers. I was thinking that they are probabably not going to be able to get the local population to buy into that approach. They may work on the farm, but it will take some time before they can actually manage 200 acres.
A MN Farmer Perspective
Knowing very little about this, I sent a copy of this article to a friend of mine who is a retired farmer, and who has been working for the US AID office to help establish agricultural cooperatives around the world. His response was generally negative. And for very good reasons, I thought. This is the text of his response.
-----------
I am not very enthusiastic about this proposal. First, a (government) lease on a huge block of land will displace a lot of people who are now eking out a subsistence living on that same land. No matter who has title to the land, needy people are squatting on it and trying to get by. Will the new enterprise hire any of them and pay them a living wage? I doubt it.
Second, most agricultural production on existing, subsistence farms is food for the family: milk, goat meat, corn, beans, bananas, other fruits and vegetables. Corn and soybeans are commercial crops, and will bypass the local food economy.
Since the principles in this enterprise are Americans who plan to grow American crops, I presume that they also plan to use capital intensive (American) production methods, like they do in the Red River Valley. More capital input means less labor input. Big tillage and harvest machinery will displace hundreds of manual laborers. A principle of economics is that when labor is cheap, and capital is expensive, use more labor, and vice versa. Labor is cheap and abundant in that part of Africa, so labor intensive production is likely to be more profitable, and certainly would be better for the multitude of work and income starved laborers in the area.
I saw a similar farm from the road north of Nairobi in Kenya. The crop was pineapples on thousands of acres of contiguous land. There were no people living on that land, and I didn't see any workers in the field. They probably showed up at harvest time, but maybe that was done by machine. I didn't see any schools, hospitals or social institutions associated with that farm.
Maybe the proponents of this enterprise know how to grow more and better crops than the locals do, and that may serve the shareholders, but it is hard to see how the locals will prosper from it.
-----------------
My Reflection
I trust this gentleman's perspective, and share it to some extent. Folks from the Midwestern US probably have a very poor idea of what is going on there at the moment. But, I think the idea of using labor versus other techniques is a touch of Luddism - we do not create wealth by utilizing labor intensive methods. There would clearly have to be some transition from the existing methods to more productive ones. Africa has to eventually get more productive to feed its population. When the U.S. was founded, 97% of us planted crops and harvested them. Now less than .7 % do the same task with a much higher level of productivity. It does not create wealth for anyone to keep a bunch of high school graduates keying prices into cash registers, when automated registers can do the same job for less expense. Increased productivity actually generates wealth. Of course, we have to find a way to share that wealth with the displaced cashiers, a problem we are still working on!
Another Perspective from Tanzania
That said, I also shared this piece with another friend who has been living in Africa for the last 35 years. He had a very different perspective - he wished these folks well. And his reasoning got my attention. See what you think:
--------------
Wallie Hardie is starting from a successful farm in the U.S. It's good to start from success. My experience, of others who have tried and who have listened well to what's going on locally, is that it CAN work and IS needed.
Mozambique, however, is quite different from Tanzania. We have lots of very fragile and only minimally fertile land here. It is, for example, more expensive to bring locally produced fertilizers into Mbeya (where there is lots of rain but poor soil) to grow maize and soy beans, than it is to import them from the U.S. That is even without considering the government subsidies. So you have to do the math first to see if it will work.
The farms have to be big. While I am all in favor of competition, and often small IS beautiful, small farming -- anywhere in the world -- is a ticket to poverty. It's not always true if you are growing poppies or marijuana of course, but that's another discussion.
There IS indeed an element of neo colonialism in all of this. But I still remember the bumper sticker on an old rusty taxi driven in Arusha in Tanzania during the worst of the economic crisis in the 1980s. It said: "Bring Back the British." Interestingly, despite the politicization against stuff like that, the Tanzanian taxi driver drove the car around for years, venting what appeared to be common sense for all except the politicians. People want things to work, but they often don't know how, or can't get past the bureaucracy. Big farmers have a better chance at that.
A current case in point is the flower growers in Arusha. They are the largest single employer of local labor. More than 40,000 people in Arusha get work from the mostly Dutch flower farmers. But for months, seedlings that need to be exported to European markets daily, have been sitting in warehouses or have been destroyed for lack of simple plastic bags to ship them in. The government banned plastic bags for many good environmental reasons, but wouldn't exempt the flower growers who, by EU regulations, must have flowers packed in such bags to import the seedlings into Europe. It took months for this large farm lobby to get the exemption. No small farmer can weather that kind of impasse. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost.
Another aspect is that lots of land is NOT being used by small farmers or anyone for that matter. Some is extremely fragile with topsoils only an inch or two thick. It can be farmed once. Some, as in Mozambique, is still covered with land mines from the war. It would be great for large scale farmers to plow through the whole area to explode the mines and get the land useable again. Other vast areas are infested with tsetse fly and the sleeping sickness it carries. Clear cutting a 400 foot perimeter of a large land area and using spray planes once inside the perimeter makes the area tsetse free. But this is not something a small farmer can do by hand or even with ordinary sized tractors.
Local attitudes need real skills and lots of time to help change. The part of Tanzania where I live has had the best rains in a hundred years this year. This was accurately forecast by the Tanzanian meteorological department. I talked with my staff about planting food crops in October rather than waiting till February. We would have had a bumper harvest in the coming dry month of January. Instead I was told that we couldn't do that because we would be the only farm with food then. It would all be stolen by the neighbors who will not plant till February no matter what the experts say. Large farms can change those attitudes. On our 16 acres, we can't.
The religious motivation and basis in respecting the local people is a potentially important added ingredient of the Aslan group. I DO think it can make a difference. These are the people who tend to stick with such projects for long periods.
One comment on people just sitting, not working, being a motivation to Hardie: He might be seeing something whose reality is actually very different. For years, southern Tanzania exported enormous amounts of cashews. However, now, few people will work the labor intensive farms for wages which are affordable for the farmers to pay. It is cheaper for them to send the unhusked nuts to India where they are shelled, roasted and canned and exported, than it is to pay Tanzanians to do the work. Indians will work for much less pay. There is also -- all along the coast -- a feeling that all work is beneath the dignity of a free person. All work is seen as something for slaves. Free people don't work. That is a hard post-slavery attitude to change. Also, why would someone who has all the food they want from sending the children to catch a fish once a day, and bring a coconut down from the tree, why would they want to work? For what? We work because we want. If one feels no want....
The line that really struck me was the following:
> "Sub-Saharan Africa has enough land to feed five times its
> population," Larsen said. "But currently it's dependent on other
> countries for two-thirds of its food. Our view is if we can come
> alongside with some capital and some know-how, they will be feeding a
> very large chunk of the world 15 or 20 years from now."
This is not doing the math. Tanzania has 45 million people now. Conservative UN projections show it will have 310 million by the year 2100! Africa's population is growing 53 times faster than Europe's! Six times faster than North America's. Far from Africa being able to feed a large chunk of the world in 15 or 20 years, the reality is that scientists see 2030 as an end point -- a perfect storm -- for the whole world, where there will be mass starvation, nowhere near enough fresh water, and an ever growing population of people with insufficient education to make a difference. The reality is that those of us doing medical work are working too well. We are creating a population bomb. Education, farming, and every other field is falling further and further behind the population curve. Africa might have enough land to feed five times its current population now, but Tanzania's population will be six times higher in 2100 than it is now. Forget feeding the rest of the world.
That said, I am still hopeful, but not in farming as an end solution. The efforts of people like Wallie Hardie are needed right now. But food will ultimately have to come from carbon-based nano-engineered foods. Farming in any form will shortly be as obsolete as a Model T-Ford -- functional, but not useful. Employment will not come from farms but from cities.
(I deleted a reference to a document on population growth in Africa that was attached to the original. Pat sent it to his community for their General Chapter. If you want to see that - let me know.)
A couple of weeks ago I flew a Dutch gynecologist from a remote rural Catholic hospital in central Tanzania back to Arusha. He had, in his 30 days there, done more than 100 gynecological procedures. More than half of them were to repair botched illegal abortions. That shows the absolute desperation of rural women in Tanzania where practical birth control is simply not available, where the leaders of the government and the churches and the mosques have their eyes firmly shut to reality, and where large families have no realistic way out of poverty. We need to combine modern food production with serious population planning, even -- I'm afraid -- if it is coercive.
Pat
Flying Medical Service
P.O. Box 508
Arusha, Tanzania
Phone: +255-(0)27-250-8760
Phone: +255-(0)27-250-8583
Phone: +255-(0)784-416217
Web: flyingmedicalservice.org
--------------
Conclusion
As always, Pat brings a unique perspective, and makes me think. The good thing here is that someone is working on a solution to the agricultural productivity of Africa. The downside is that it seems to require an absolutely immense investment. This is not a community based effort. This is a major commercial undertaking. I guess if the Dutch can profitably grow tulips in Tanzania and employ 40,000 people to make it work, that is not a bad thing. I had envisioned the solution to poverty as something based on the sustainable development espoused by Jeffrey Sachs. What Pat is saying is that this is the historical path taken by the Western countries - tremendous increases in agricultural productivity, with urban development that provides the jobs as people move from the countryside. Well, that has been the actual experience of most of the planet - why not Africa.
Pat's reference to the local sense that free persons do not engage in labor is also interesting. That has reference to all of the "cultural" issues that I have focused on in other entries in this blog.
See: http://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2011/01/culture-and-developing-nations.html.
I trust that this has given you an opportunity to reflect on some different ideas. Any comments here below?
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