The data revolution: what's behind the barricades?

A modified version of this post first appeared on the Giving What We Can blog.

A bed net is distributed in the forest and no one is there to track its delivery and use. Does it contribute to reducing the incidence of malaria?

This question gets to the heart of a key issue in development policy: data. And with the much-heralded ‘data revolution’ demanded by the UN High-Level Panel on the post-2015 development agenda, it seems to be rising up the list of priorities for governments and multilateral institutions. In this post I want to take a look at this ‘data revolution’ and why data are important for tackling global poverty.

Why do we care about data?

But first, the ‘so what?’ question. Why is data important? The first reason comes from an efficiency argument: you need to gather data to judge whether an intervention is having the effects it was supposed to have, and thus whether it is a success. What we really mean when we talk of investing in data collection is investing in effective school systems, in well-run hospitals or in successful nutrition programmes. That much is familiar. But this can alsocontribute to the democratic political process, by equipping people with the information they require to hold their leaders accountable.

Claire Melamed, of the Overseas Development Institute, makes a further, ‘equity’ argument for gathering data: we tend to have least information about the people who are most marginalised (e.g. slum dwellers, women, the disabled), which leads them to receive less attention in terms of policy responses.If we had more information about these groups we would provide better services for them. These are three compelling reasons for caring about data or evidence.

What are the current problems associated with data collection in developing countries?

The problem is that the current state of data collection in many developing countries is extremely poor - so much so that Morten Jerven has written an entire book about the poverty of GDP statistics in Africa. And here we are not talking about minor mistakes: for example, when Nigeria’s GDP was re-based, the new estimate showed a 90% increase. And to give another example, the High-Level Panel’s briefing document on the data revolution states that every year around 50 million births go unregistered.

The ‘data revolution’?

Given this situation, some sort of ‘revolution’ seems appropriate. But the term ‘data revolution,’ officially comprising ‘two main objectives’ and ‘four components’, is a slippery one. As Claire Melamed discusses on a Development Drums podcast on the subject, it holds different meanings for different people.

For some it means bringing ‘big data’ into the mainstream of measurement and policy. This could mean using mobile phone data to track refugee movements, or satellite imagery of trees to measure rates of deforestation.

For others, it means strengthening capacity in traditional government statistics agencies: training more statisticians, getting computer systems to work, etc. Perhaps, then, the ‘data revolution’ is simply an aspirational term, pushing policymakers to prioritise “more data, better data, disaggregated data, frequent data,” as Amanda Glassman of the Center for Global Development expresses it in the same podcast. It has certainly succeeded in drawing political attention.

A compact for data

For Glassman, one of the key issues is addressing the fundamental problem of incentives underlying the poor data. Administrative, government-collected data remain low-quality in many countries partly because of donor actions: they have demanded accurate household surveys to be able to evaluate their programmes, and to track indicators of their interest (e.g. the Millennium Development Goals). This has produced a system of little coherence and with certain types of information prioritised over others, for example at the national level at the expense of more data disaggregated into population groups.

Faced with this situation, one concrete proposal for donors is to engage in funding compacts with recipient-country governments to achieve certain standards on data, following the payment by results strategy discussed in an earlier blog, and with civil society oversight. This could perhaps be nested within what the High-Level Panel calls a ‘Global Partnership for Development Data’, which would also help set common global standards for data reporting, reducing fragmentation and double-collecting.

Visible, user-friendly and practical data

What else can be done here and now to improve the data we collect? Melamed identifies some such steps, for example ensuring that data are made available, particularly by publicly-funded bodies such as the UN, and also linking existing data together to create a baseline for 2015 by which we can judge progress on the Sustainable Development Goals, the successor to the Millennium Development Goals. These are both linked to the further point that the final packaging of data must be ‘actionable data’ i.e. visible, user-friendly and practical. The UK Department for International Development leads the way on this matter with its Development Tracker.

Whichever particular proposal you favour - making better use of ‘big data’ for development, forming ‘data compacts’ to improve statistics agencies in developing countries, standardising the way data are reported, or any other initiative - the key point is to take advantage of the current political moment to create a list of specific actions which can be taken forward even after attention has moved on from the data revolution (which it will), balancing the need to strengthen existing systems with the potential advantage to be gained from tapping into new and exciting data projects.

When the world is complex, how should we think and act?

“...it is not as simple or easy as we would prefer; neither is the world we are trying to manage...”

Warning: more thoughts on complexity. To some extent covering the same ground here (apologies), but more from a philosophy of science perspective, which has been at the same time interesting and thoroughly boring, unless you find the differences between genetically modified potatoes and genetically modified corn to be a significant one.

Complexity books: good covers. Credit: Amazon

Sandra Mitchell, in ‘Unsimple Truths,’ argues for a new approach to science which takes into account the world’s “tractable, understandable, evolved, and dynamic complexity”. Because if the world is complex, then our approach to representing and explaining it should be too. Her expanded, complexity-informed epistemology of science is therefore 1) pluralistic, accepting multiple explanations and models at a variety of levels of analysis, thus allowing for emergent properties when ‘the whole is more than the sum of the parts’; 2) pragmatic, recognising that whenever we represent nature it’s always for some purpose and so can be done in different, equally-valid ways and 3) dynamic, in that our knowledge of the causal structures of the world evolves as that world evolves. The latter of which is a novel thought to me, at least in that form. So the “greedy reductionist strategy” epitomised by the Newtonian physics and universal, exceptionless laws we love to hate, isn’t always wrong, but is when you try to explain everything using it.

Mitchell conveniently pulls out some implications for public policy: she, like Ramalingam and Beinhocker, takes aim at ‘predict-and-act’ models of policymaking which rely, essentially, on predicting the future, or at least assigning vaguely accurate probabilities to different outcomes. The problem is that “uncertainty about the probabilities of outcomes is pervasive, multiplicative, and often non-linear in complex systems” [such as climate change, mental health disorders, the macroeconomy etc.]. In such cases, we need to replace the ‘predict’ with models of “multiple alternative futures” and the ‘act’ part with adaptive management.

The first part of that involves mapping out multiple scenarios of the future, even if the likelihood of one or another is unknown, and comparing policies by how robust they are to the uncertainties in each scenario. This method captures the information we have about the future better than any single estimate. The second part essentially means picking an approach, then monitoring the results of that approach in the short term and modifying it based on the findings. “[A] dynamic, iterative, feedback-rich strategy for decision making that matches the dynamic, feedback-dependent reality of complex systems”.

If not, you end up with the climate change situation as is currently: the inability to come to an agreement on a single quantitative assessment of the probability of various outcomes (2 degrees warming? 10 degrees warming?) undermines any scientific contribution to public policy decisions. The inevitable uncertainty of the issue challenges the credibility of any scientific claim, leaving us to rely on ignorance and intuition: if you’re optimistic you can content yourself with the knowledge that technology will save the day; if you’re pessimistic you can content yourself with the fatalistic observation that we are already screwed.

So more flexibility in our approach to science, more scenarios, more computer modelling, more feedback, more tinkering, more informed actions, more successful policies. Only thus can we manage our “dynamically changing, complicated, complex, and chaotic but understandable universe”.

Donating in the face of corruption

This post first appeared on the Giving What We Can blog.

Corruption exists in developing countries. Transparency International’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer indicates that in a list of 23 countries, including those among the world’s poorest such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia, almost every second person reported paying a bribe for a public service. In two of these, Sierra Leone and Liberia, this figure was over 75%, while individual high profile cases are never far from the headlines.

This gives rise to justifiable concerns when donating to charities working in developing countries where reported corruption is high, and governance and institutions are weak. Won’t our money, or the goods it buys, just be stolen? Faced with this challenge, how should a prospective donor respond?

Corruption is common in many countries across the world. Source: Transparency International Global Corruption Barometer 2013

First, what do we mean by corruption, and why don’t we like it? Here I’m not referring to ‘grand corruption’, large-scale looting by those taking advantage of their position in public office (e.g. Suharto, Marcos, Mobutu and others); what’s most relevant for Giving What We Can is ‘petty corruption’ in the form of theft of inputs or money designated for improving the lives of the poor by individuals or organisations.

This is clearly a bad thing: the poorest are totally deprived of the benefits of an intervention, and the donation that funds it is wasted. This sort of graft can also undermine confidence in the organisation concerned, and, on a macro level, the “psyche and moral fiber” of local society, according to some.

Corruption deprives the poorest of the benefits of an intervention. Credit: futureatlas.com

One response might be to avoiding donating altogether, which certainly ensures zero corruption in the use of your donations. But it also ensures zero impact; ideally we want to find some way of giving responsibly and still contributing to the alleviation of poverty.

Alternatively, you might demand a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to corruption from organisations you support. In fact, this has been the attitude of World Bank president Jim Kim, who in December 2013 declared corruption to be “public enemy number one,” adding, “we will never tolerate corruption, and I pledge to do all in our power to build upon our strong fight against it.”

Certainly, from a practical point of view, it’s a good idea to ensure that the charity you are giving to is aware of the risks of theft and corruption and has processes in place to avoid them. For example, the Against Malaria Foundation has a detailed risk register and places a high priority on ensuring nets are indeed distributed to beneficiaries through rigorous receipt mechanisms, data reporting post-distribution and independent monitoring. It also claims to work only with reputable distribution partners.

Likewise, the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative ensures that all transfers are checked and accounted for against a budget agreed jointly with the local Ministry of Health, regularly commissions audits of country programmes, and establishes close partnerships with those with whom they work in country (as well as having the advantage of distributing a drug with little to no market value). These sorts of procedures, in line with MANGO’s guide to financial management for NGOs, can help to give a donor confidence in the integrity of a charity’s operations.

However extending this to a ‘zero tolerance’ attitude is misguided for a number of reasons.

First, because you can never be certain of eliminating corruption. If corruption is actually an unfortunate fact of life in all societies to a certain extent (witness ample examples of corruption in ‘developed’ countries like the UK, such as LIBOR, and in Europe, where the cost of corruption may be up to £99bn), then it is fruitless to try to avoid it entirely. To paraphrase William Savedoff in a blog post for the Center for Global Development, corruption is not going away anytime soon. In this context, a genuine ‘zero tolerance’ attitude is impractical: the standards would be so high as to render any work on the ground impossible.

Second, formal corruption controls have had limited success historically according to the evidence. It makes sense: if, as Nancy Birdsall of the Center for Global Development (whose argument is about public sector corruption but is still relevant for our purposes) you recognise that corruption is “almost always a symptom of a broader problem of weak systems of control, entrenched patronage, insider rents and privileges,” then it follows that stringent formal reporting requirements imposed from outside aren’t likely to be totally successful in avoiding the problem.

Third, a single-minded focus on corruption potentially overstates the threat it poses, and is itself a waste of resources. Above I mentioned that corruption is present in all societies. But that does not mean it is always present: because corruption stories in nonprofits make a good story, they often garner disproportionate press attention, giving the false sense that all charities inevitably suffer immense losses from corruption.

Savedoff discusses this very problem, arguing that, given our ignorance of how representative corruption cases are, stories of corruption in aid organisations are more likely to reflect better reporting of allegations than an actual greater fraud or corruption risk. Likewise but more generally, Olken and Pande, in their 2012 paper, find that “estimated levels of corruption are remarkably heterogeneous [in low-income countries]”.

Given this uncertainty, Professor Alan Fenwick, director of the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, sees “prejudices and fears of corruption and wastage” as a distraction and obstacle to SCI’s work. Corruption is a key concern when working in certain societies, but some organisations may find it less of a problem than others. Witness the Against Malaria Foundation, which, fortunately, has experienced no material loss of nets through theft”.

This leads to an alternative point of view: as Savedoff points out, ‘how much money is wasted?’ might not even be the right question when we think about aid interventions. Rather, if our aim is to improve school attendance through deworming, for example, the first question should be ‘does the money that gets through have the desired impact?’ This chimes with the increasing interest in cash-on delivery and payment by results approaches to aid in larger-scale bilateral programs, where payment is made by funders to a recipient government or organisation only after there has been confirmed progress towards an agreed-upon goal.

Translating this philosophy to charitable giving at the individual level, it means we should look at the good done by an organisation as the principal measure of whether we should support them. This also has the advantage of working to minimise corruption in practice; if we make our donations conditional on an organisation’s achieving certain outcomes, then there is less scope for diverting money away from beneficiaries as this will result in reduced achievement of these outcomes. In essence, minimising corruption follows on from an emphasis on results.

Recognising that, when donating to charities, effectiveness comes first is not to say corruption should not also be tackled head on separately. And here, it is to developed country governments and companies that we must direct our attention. Global Financial Integrity (GFI) finds that for each $1 developing nations receive in foreign aid, $7 in illicit money flows abroad, depriving millions of public services. GFI research suggests, further, that about 45% of illicit flows end up in offshore financial centres, and 55% in developed countries, demonstrating rich countries’ complicity in this. No matter how much effort is put into making aid as effective as possible, without simultaneously addressing this crippling outflow of resources the net effect of rich countries on poor countries will continue to be negative. For those concerned about corruption, then, organisations working to combat it through increased financial transparency like Global Financial Integrity, Tax Justice Network, andTransparency International are good places to start informing yourself.


Each year a huge amount of money flows out of developing countries illegally. Credit: Global Financial Integrity

Returning, then, to the issue of corruption and charitable giving, what can we conclude? When faced with corruption, still give, but give smarter: seek out those organisations with credible mechanisms in place to avoid corruption, and, more importantly, which can demonstrate the biggest ‘bang for the buck’. Meanwhile for those who are particularly concerned about corruption, a promising start to an intervention is investigating illicit outflows from developing countries.

A trip to Ruhiira and the Millennium Villages Project: undoing (?) and redoing (?) cynicism

I felt awkward waiting at the Millennium Villages Project offices in Mbarara on a Monday morning, waiting to join the UN convoy on its way to Ruhiira: they were here because they had things to do, me because I was a white person who’d read a book by Jeff Sachs and wanted to see his brainchild development project in the flesh. Although we were mostly ignored to be honest, as the MVP staff milled around and chatted over mandazi and chai. It turns out they receive visits about three days a week so I shouldn’t have been surprised. We arrived at the Ruhiira office, cold and slightly bewildered, while the most of the convoy passengers piled into a small room for their weekly meeting.

The Millennium Villages Project (MVP), in a nutshell, is a development project run in (initially) 10 sites in 10 countries in Africa. The strategy is ‘integrated rural development,’ or doing many things (health, livelihoods, agriculture, sanitation etc.) at once, with the aim of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). And not only to achieve the MDGs, but to unleash a cycle of self-sustaining economic growth: Sachs’ idea is that undeveloped areas suffer from one or more of a number of ‘traps’ and once you get them out of these traps, they can ‘climb the ladder of development’ on their own. Out of the trap, up the ladder, you’re sorted.

Snakes and ladders for maternal health

Obviously, Sachs has come in for a lot of criticism over MVP, most recently sparked by Nina Munk’s ‘The Idealist’. A cursory listen to a podcast about the book (no time for reading) quickly shows where she stands on Sachs/MVP with phrases like “this was neither sustainable nor was it scalable,” “the terrible tragedy of this project...” “Jeff Sachs... cruelly disappointed and harmed the people he supposedly set out to help”. Her basic point was that the project didn’t bring lasting, sustainable change. Clearly if you throw money at a community, there’s likely to be some return, and maybe even a very good return, but Sachs grand, top-down plan failed, and those returns won’t be there for the grandchildren of the people of Ruhiira. Jeff Sachs, on a later podcast, rebutted all of the above, and in doing so showed why people call him manipulative and arrogant. Listen just to hear academics argue like schoolkids. Anyway, all this was in my head when we arrived.

So, was this a locally-integrated, locally-owned and sustainable initiative? Or was it a classic uber-development project, UN 4x4s, logframes, distortion and the rest? Well there were no expats, at least, but those working there that we met didn’t seem to be from this part of Uganda: Shaquilla, head of communications, was from the east of the country, and had previously worked for UNDP in Kampala for example. References to the Ruhiira district as ‘the field,’ giving figures in dollars not Ugandan shillings and the stereotypical orange ‘African’ sun on the background to the introductory presentation were also jarring. More worrying than symbolic things are claims that partnerships of local artisans with Tommy Hilfiger or farmers with the World Food Programme are signs of organic, locally-driven development, or a model that can be scaled up. When in fact it's massive external distortion. On the other, locally-owned, hand, when we asked Lawrence, responsible for education, what was the first thing MVP did when going into new schools, he answered ‘asking the community what they wanted changed’; on the agriculture side, we were also told that local tree-growers had ignored MVP’s advice about growing leguminous trees to replenish the soils and had gone for eucalyptus instead, for more cash return. There’s also a community radio providing an outlet for views and concerns.

The Ruhiira project office

When I was there though, these debates about sustainability left me cold. During the presentation we were given, we heard the following facts, among others: proportion of population below extreme poverty line ($1/day) reduced from 58% in 2006 to 10 % in 2011; access to clean water increased from 8% to 42%; prevalence of malaria reduced from 17% to less than 1%; health staff increased from 10 personnel to 60 staff including 2 medical doctors and 20 midwives. I could go on. Away from the stats, we visited Robert, a farmer: with MVP’s support he now has biogas production, cross-breed cattle, a silage pit for the cattle, and coffee and banana plantations. He’s also been promised a cooler at a 50% subsidy so that the cooperative he’s a part of can start selling milk on a larger scale. You kind of see where Sachs exasperation with the mauling he gets from the ‘development bubble’ comes from: ‘look! These people here are doing much better/are not dead because of this project!’ Surely all the rest is just cynicism?

Biogas pit: where cow dung becomes energy

But the question is not whether outsiders with loads of money can make things better (they obviously can), it’s whether they can help local people make things better for themselves in the long term. And when James, head of agriculture, remarks that there’s been a massive population influx to the area caused directly by the project, you have your doubts as to whether the ‘success’ being enjoyed currently isn’t going to fade away or even reverse when the money dries up. MVP is currently ‘handing over’ to local government to continue the work, and the government is implementing new MVP pilots in other parts of Uganda. But if the project only works as long as money is being pumped in, government take-up doesn’t really mean anything apart from that it’s been persuaded to divert budget from wherever it was formerly directing it to where Jeff Sachs has suggested it be directed to.

But ambivalence, yes, as suggested by the number of sentences starting with ‘but’ in this post. When we left Ruhiira trading centre, we passed concrete buildings, power lines and water tanks that people really appreciated and which didn’t exist before MVP. Robert’s wife told us that for her, “MVP is of great importance”. Who am I, a middle-class kid from London, to say any different?

Further reading/listening:

Nina Munk on her book 'The Idealist', on EconTalk and on Development Drums

Jeff Sachs defending MVP on EconTalk
MVP website

Criticism of MVP's evaluation strategy by Michael Clemens

FACTS! Or why I should have studied engineering

So one of my abiding worries with my degree (basically Politics and Spanish) is that I fear that I will finish it without actually knowing anything new in any tangible sense. No matter how many times I tell myself "it's the transferable skills Charlie! The transferable skills!" the fact that I'm basically no better off knowledge-wise than a person who has the Guardian as their internet homepage is slightly disconcerting. One of the things I do to combat this anguish is to learn 'facts'. Here are some of the facts on topics about global development/poverty/health/inequity which I have accumulated, along with (often not original) sources. Some are 'classics'; others will perhaps surprise. In any case, in no particular order, enjoy:

1. Worldwide, maternal and child mortality both nearly halved between 1990 and 2012.
(Development Progress)

2. The global cost of containing violence or dealing with its consequences reached a staggering $9.5 trillion (11% of global GDP) in 2012.
(UN Dispatch)

3. Close to half of all international migrants settle in the developing world, including 10 percent in Africa.
(Washington Post)

4. Globally, deaths from tobacco use each year exceed the number of deaths from HIV/AIDs, TB, and malaria combined.
(Center for Global Development)

5. It is estimated that women in the Global South spend a cumulative 200 million hours a day collecting water.
(Think Africa Press)

6. An estimated $18.5 trillion is stashed in offshore tax havens. That’s $3 trillion more than the gross domestic product of the United States.
(Oxfam, Working for the Few)

7. One study finds that potatoes may have been responsible for 12% of the global increase in population between 1700 and 1900.
(Banerjee and Duflo, Poor Economics)

8. The net fiscal balance of overall immigration to the UK between 2001 and 2011 amounts therefore to a positive net contribution of about £25 billion, over a period over which the UK has run an overall budget deficit (both EEA and non-EEA).
(Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration)

9. The Uganda Demographic and Health Survey found that 39 per cent, more than one in three, women and girls aged 15-49 had experienced sexual violence during their lifetime.
(Amnesty)

10. From 1980 to 2008 in USA, the bottom 90% of taxpayers saw their inflation-adjusted pre-tax incomes grow for total increase of 1.9%. For the top 1%, it increased 2.35 times.
(Angus Deaton, The Great Escape)

11. To ‘top up’ the incomes of the 800m people worldwide living on less than $1 day would require the adults of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, USA to give $0.15 a day.
(Angus Deaton, The Great Escape)

12. Between 2005 and 2009, the typical African American in the USA lost 53% of her wealth.
(Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality)

13. World GDP per capita doubled to $180 between 15 000 years ago and 1750 AD, then in the following 250 years increased 37-fold.
(Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth)

14. 72% of the world's poor live in middle income countries.
(Owen Barder)

15. 59% of the variance in people's income can be explained by the country in which they live.
(Michael Clemens on Development Drums) 

A nice fact-based video on progress in global health from Development Progress; Video credit: Development Progress

ps. there's no such thing as an objective fact

The first time I went to Kampala the third time I was there.

Kampala through the eyes of a tourist can be ‘done’ in one day. A ‘special-hire’ taxi takes you from the imposing Gaddafi mosque, to the museum, to the Kasubi tombs, and can drop you in some nice restaurant in Kololo in time for a dinner of ostrich curry and grilled crocodile imported from South Africa. That’s all very nice.

Kampala

Kampala through the eyes of those who live and work there is, inevitably, another city. Felix is the contact who has brought us here, to make some media appearances on behalf of our organisation. He got his first job at ten, founded an events management company at the age of fourteen, has worked for the government, in another life was a DJ, and now finds himself a civil society activist more-or-less under the wing of a leading Ugandan philanthropist. From our mzungu-dominated hostel, where loud pop music oppresses those eating breakfast and Sunday is mudwrestling day, he leads us through 

Kampala’s rush-hour of snaking taxi-buses and swarming taxi-bikes. London has far more inhabitants than Kampala, but here it seems that more of those inhabitants find themselves in the same place at the same time. It’s overwhelming. Through this density of street-vendors, commuters, high-rise blocks and small identikit businesses, we reach the industrial area all-concrete, all-broad streets, and comparatively empty. This is where the media studios can be found. 

Snaking taxi-buses

Robert is our host on the show. He speaks English with a soothing, honeyed accent, a mixture of educated Ugandan and BBC World Service. And he talks with a disarming, welcoming familiarity, dropping in reminiscences of his time in south-west London and lamentations about the teaching style in Ugandan schools. It’s like a conversation with an old friend. He’s the exception, though, in this environment dominated by young, energetic media professionals. The next show to be filmed is on social media, and the 24-year old producer Irene, in ripped jeans and converse, is running around trying to locate a Mac charger whilst shouting her Twitter handle at me. Our turn is over, though, and Felix leads us out and on.

The next stop is the offices of the civil society organisation, aimed at inspiring and empowering Ugandans. The office is luxurious - dark polished wood and leather seats - and the partitions are in an Oriental style; we are told that it was a Chinese company that did the renovations. While we wait for the organisation’s head to finish a meeting, we are shown pictures of events, of massed crowds, tree-planting ceremonies and panels of speakers. Certificates on the wall give further proof of success. When we are finally shown in, John is a whirlwind; leisurely seated, one leg over the other, he unleashes a wave of charisma and forthright opinions about anything we care to mention or not mention, which stuns us into awed and appreciative silence. He speaks with such passion that I don’t want him to stop, as the whole of Africa’s problems are laid out and solved in a matter of minutes. There is a lot of wisdom there – “if you want anything out of Africa, you must involve Africans... if you are not impacting the lives of people then you should go on holiday”- and whether or not you agree with all that he says, you have to respect this man, who is made “bitter, and hungry and angry” by the state of his country, and has contributed a large part of the fortune he has amassed to doing something about it. Abruptly, our interview is over, and we file out, clinging to his business card and recoiling from the force. We continue our journey with Felix.

His manner now is informal and confident, self-assured, throwing in jokes here and there and indulging in directness that verges on bluntness with these people he barely knows. This is his city and he leads us, halting traffic with his hand and informing us about the buildings we pass. We reach the enterprise fair, which is slightly limp in the light rain. There are stove-manufacturers here, ‘Uganda’s first chocolate-makers,’ spice-sellers, and a woman much-celebrated for making jewellery and accessories out of drinking straws. The soundtrack is pop, interspersed with comments from the eccentric MC – “Go and eat lunch, I want to see happy, smiling faces... Microfinance, the next song is yours”. His slight absurdity leaks into reality with the appearance of a solitary camel, which strolls through the stalls. Just when we turn to leave, the dancers arrive, hips detached from the rest of their bodies as they shake. Felix’s invitation to us to join in is politely declined.

Gratuitous camel at the SME fair

We wander back towards the mosque, which we do intend to visit (we are tourists, not natives of Kampala), back through the many layers of the city. Our guide and the language barrier insulate us from the slight intimidation I have felt before here. He does translate the occasional comment, though, and they range from the outright offensive to the strangely epic: “there are many white people roaming around”. We negotiate the taxi park and climb the Old Kampala hill, reaching the mosque with Felix’s shoes and suaveness intact. It’s here we part, the visitors dropped delicately back into the role of bazungu tourists, where perhaps we belong.

Names have been changed.

“Over there is like here, neither better nor worse”

For someone who is spending a fair amount of time outside his own society, and has to deal with the romanticising and/or exaggeration of difference, in my own mind and in the minds of others, Tayeb Salih, in his enigmatic novel ‘Season of Migration to the North,’ has some nice antidotes.

 

The narrator comes back from seven years in England, to his native Sudan. He’s asked about the people ‘there,’ and remarks to himself,

“...that just like us they are born and die, and in the journey from the cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated; that they fear the unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child; that some are strong and some are weak; that some have been given more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the differences are narrowing and most of the weak are no longer weak”.

Or,

“[o]ver there is like here, neither better nor worse.”

It’s a sentiment I sympathise with. Finally, for those who want to believe Africa is a ‘hopeless continent’ or alternatively that it is ‘rising’, Salih replies:

“[j]ust because a man has been created on the Equator some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean?”

Colonialism, sexuality, violence, destruction, poetry, hope, hopelessness: it’s a good read.

Entrepreneurs won't save the world, but entrepreneurship will

23 Things

The entrepreneurial energy in a country like Kenya is overwhelming. You can illustrate it with stats: self-employment accounts for fully 66% of total employment in Kenya. You can illustrate it with stories: take one of the entrepreneurs we are working with at Balloon Kenya as an example. He tutors Masters students on research methods, and also writes business plans, manages three distinct tea plantations, grows wheat, and used to be in a dance group hired out for events. He’s 24 years old. It’s the dynamism of such inventive individuals that will create economic and social change, and pull Kenya forward.

Or maybe not.

The problem is that there is too much quail here in Kericho. A couple of years back there was a sudden boom and now, even in our small group of Balloon Kenya entrepreneurs, there are no less than five quail farmers. And these businesspeople are committed and enthusiastic, so much so that one individual wore a shirt imploring people to “Ask Me About Quail” to the bar we went to last Saturday. It’s a problem you see pretty much everywhere around Kericho town: as soon as something is shown to be profitable, people pile in, be it touting tea or shining shoes.

For Ha-Joon Chang, whose book ‘23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism’ I’ve been reading, this is the “fallacy of composition”: the fact that some people can succeed with a particular business does not mean that everyone can. Now this wouldn’t be a problem if there were constant innovation in the development of new business lines. Number of quail farmers triples? Some move in to farming quail for export, or selectively breeding the quail for a better product, and we are back to quail harmony. But unfortunately this isn’t possible most of the time; as Ha-Joon notes,

“...there is only a limited range of (simple) businesses that the poor in developing countries can take on, given their limited skills, the narrow range of technologies available, and the limited amount of finance that they can mobilize...”

An individual can’t be productive on her own; productivity is collective, coming from the entire socio-economic system you are operating in. Societal institutions, scientific infrastructure, company law, the education system, the financial system, patent and copyright laws: these things are what make it happen. Since the Second World War, there’s been huge growth in the world economy, but it’s not because of individual pioneers like Gates or Edison, says Ha-Joon, it’s the work of the collective.

I’ve always found the idea of the ‘heroic entrepreneur,’ who makes something out of nothing, to be grating, I think because I’ve felt jealous that it wasn’t me. The reason I should find it grating is that the idea of the heroic entrepreneur is a myth, distracting us from the real task of ‘building institutions and organizations of collective entrepreneurship’ which is the real way for countries to escape poverty. Entrepreneurship, but not just by entrepreneurs.

As in many spheres of life, you can't succeed in entrepreneurship on your own

One of the entrepreneurs we work with wants to retire a multi-millionaire (in Kenyan shillings that is) at 40, having created a large, innovative business employing tens of people. He’s an avid reader of business books with titles like ‘Think, and Grow Rich’. Unfortunately, without the right environment, thinking is unlikely to be enough.

Culture shock: what is ‘development’ again?

Balloon Kenya encourages “entrepreneurial thinkers to imagine the solutions that will not only create new avenues for growth and prosperity, but also recast the course of human development”. After previous posts gushing about the freshness and coherence of the Balloon approach, the ‘d’-word appears and it all gets messy.
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Balloon Kenya foregrounds the entrepreneur as a primary agent of social, economic and technological change, transforming the society around her. Here in Kericho, aid is dead, replaced by youthful exuberance and Business Model Canvasses. The talk is of empowerment, of young people undergoing transformative processes that give them the confidence to unleash the creative, innovative potential inside, and improve their own lives through doing so. Four weeks into the process, the stories of personal-level development are emerging, both from international participants, and from Kenyan entrepreneurs; hearing Everlyne remark “I have never thought about that” when working with us to come up with a tutoring business to operate alongside her small tea shop was quite momentous, even for a cynic. And the implicit point is that the benefits for the individual spill over to the surrounding environment (“...recast the course of human development...”).

This makes me jumpy. When we’re talking about the concrete case of the individual, the benefits are palpable, even if their sustainability is uncertain. Of course Balloon Kenya isn’t claiming to have all the answers; its approach to bringing about social good is inevitably partial. But the seductive slide, more or less present, into thinking that we have found a new model for societies to develop on a broad, macro scale is troubling.

Because “development, when you get down to it, is a political process”. As Guillermo Toro points out, whether you adopt the right-wing version of this (think Easterly) or the left-wing (i.e. From Poverty to Power) is less important than accepting the basic concept. Which means that encouraging enterprise carries ambiguous benefits, because the private sector emerges and evolves within the context determined by a number of groups, businesses, citizens, states and all. We’ve seen this at a macro-level recently in the criticism of the turn to the private sector of a number of development agencies.

Part of this unease is definitely about culture: coming from an NGO-, blogosphere-background, used to academic debates about power and institutions, an unapologetically pro-enterprise attitude grates, even if I often agree with the ideas. To be jolted out of your comfort zone is no bad thing: as the great Chris Blattman puts it “If you work in international politics or development and do not have an intellectual and existential crisis every year, then something is wrong”.

Kericho: causing me headaches

But, coming back to the micro-level, one of our entrepreneurs’ businesses is to act as a middle man between tea farmers and factories; tea farmers individually do not produce huge quantities of tea each day, meaning that factories often subcontract out the management of the plantations. So the middle man acquires a contract from a given tea factory to supply a certain weight of tea per month, earning significant profits working relatively few hours, once he has the all-important license. The process smells a lot like rent-seeking, and the benefits to society seem debatable. You don’t see many rich tea labourers around despite them putting in the hours, rain or shine. And this isn’t the only example: the difference between moneylender and loan shark is a thin one. These are, at least partly, questions of political economy, where the focus on entrepreneurship and innovation has to be complemented by a look at the social, political and economic context.

I guess I am asking too much. During the programme, the word politics is not even mentioned but that’s because we are not here to ‘do development’ (not that that exists), we are here to help individuals. The broader effects of that on society could be positive or negative. We shall see.

'Talking to people about tea'

This post originally appeared on the Balloon Kenya blog

... The answer I have given every working day for the last week to the question, “What have you been up to today?” ‘Testing’ has begun, and for my partner and me, it has meant asking passers-by how much they would pay for a pack of Kapchebet; ascertaining from restaurant owners why they switched from Litein to Toror; discovering that Tusky’s (a local supermarket) stocks 12 different tea brands but none from the Kenya Tea Development Agency; and much more.

In a way, our ‘Dream Team’ group of entrepreneurs, now streamlined to three businesspeople all stationed at various overlapping perches in the tea supply chain, has worked out perfectly. From plantation to consumer, it’s allowed us the chance to immerse ourselves in the tea industry: fragrant, if nothing else. Plus we’ve been able to wow unsuspecting Kerichans with our in-depth knowledge of local tea prices, which is almost as good as speaking Swahili.

Immersed in tea

So we’ve been testing. The word brings to mind ideas of objective science, experiments, the confirmation or rejection of a hypothesis, and those are precisely the terms in which we were introduced to the concept in the Balloon curriculum. Go out and test your assumptions, convert those guesses into facts. A coffee business illustrates the alluring clarity of the idea: build your ‘minimum viable product’ (i.e. 100 cups of coffee) and test the assumption that people will pay for fresh coffee (run around town selling those 100 cups).

In real life, it’s often not that simple. Talking to people, the method of ‘testing’ we have used most, does not give straightforward answers: confirmation bias, ambiguity, uncertainty, and the general messiness of human psychology and social reality gets in the way. ‘Just sell’ sounds easy, but translate that into a tea agent trying to get a school to make an order, and an hour sitting in the cateress’ office and two mugs of uji (porridge with the texture of liquid gravel) later and slowly the snappiness of the idea, and my ability to think, fades. Product accepted or rejected? Who knows. Preferences are elusive, inconsistent and unpredictable; we surveyed nearly twenty restaurants and hotels and asked them which tea they stock; we got 11 different answers but one reason: [insert tea name] ‘tastes the best’.

This feeling of wading through mud makes me wonder if the Balloon Kenya-endorsed, build-measure-learn approach is really any different to how any other entrepreneurship consultant would go about things. But I would still say it is; the relentless emphasis on customer development has meant that there has been a rush to get to this phase, which cannot be taken for granted.

At Toror Tea Factory: a key stage in the tea production process. Also describes the experience of talking to customers at times.

Is speaking to people always useful? No: testing can be done well or badly. Witness this guide to customer development, or the laziness implied by the fact that many in our group resorted to the ‘customer survey’ within 2 days of the first pair to do so, with perhaps less reflection on how to do this well than eagerness to start.  Personally I’d definitely confess to this.

Testing: easier in the classroom.

So, conclusions? Testing is a tricky concept, and not all talking is useful talking. But better to muddle vaguely with customers than to muddle vaguely inside your own head. For someone with antisocial tendencies and a penchant for writing lists, that is saying something.

Business strategy by Balloon and Beinhocker

Given complexity economics, Balloon Kenya’s approach to business makes total sense. This much is clear. I want to nail down here a little more on how Beinhocker’s conception of strategy parallels Balloon’s thinking, and how they seem about right.

Some basics on strategy: it has two key characteristics: it’s forward looking; and it’s about creating a plan and committing a course of action specified by that plan. That means if it’s an easily reversible decision, it’s not really strategy, because there’s no real commitment.

Moving on to Balloon vs. Beinhocker, I want to pick out threepoints of comparison:

1) The ‘traditional,’ planning approach is barking up the wrong tree.

Balloon and Beinhocker both take aim at the traditional/old/straw man guide to strategy, based on planning and essentially predicting the future. Both recognise the (crippling) difficulty of this, Beinhocker in particular highlighting that there is a near-infinite number of possible future states of the economy, and which branch is taken depends on a series of impossible-to-predict frozen accidents. The Balloon curriculum is full of quotes and one captures this point brilliantly: Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977: “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home”. Yeah.

2) Learning is the key

Given this “inherent uncertainty of the future,” we need to “emphasize learning and adapting over predicting and planning” (Beinhocker). This could practically be taken out of the Balloon textbook, which states: “start-ups in their early stage don’t execute. They search”. ‘Searchers’ vs. ‘planners’ takes us to Bill Easterly and so we complete the loop back to complexity-compatible thinking. The basic idea that both Balloon and Beinhocker are hitting on is that the knowledge required for success in the economy is not to be found in the heads of clever people, but out there with customers.

3) How do you learn? Test.

Testing for Balloon is the means of converting guesses into facts. Whether by talking to people, building a prototype or just trying to make some sales, it’s the crucial step between the ‘building’ of a product and the ‘learning’ that we’re all here for. Beinhocker has the requisite pithy phrase: strategy for him is simply “a portfolio of experiments”. He gives the example of Microsoft in the 80s, which kept a population of competing business plans within the organisation (many irons in the fire), each with tight feedback loops, to give the best chance of success. Some are going to fail – there’s got to be a tolerance of risk – but as long as those failures are small, who cares?

So there we are: three crucial ways in which Balloon and Beinhocker are peas in a pod. To flog this dead horse one more time, the correct mindset is “highly pragmatic. It values tangible facts about today more than guesses about tomorrow, doesn’t expect that everything will work out as planned, and prefers lots of small failures to big ones”. Quote from Balloon? Beinhocker? It doesn’t matter.

Balloon Kenya, or ‘doing’ Complexity Economics

This post originally appeared on the Balloon Kenya blog which you can check out here

When you live in a big city, you often get to know the geography of different ‘islands’ within it without being able to connect them in your head. When this eventually happens, and West and Central London lock together, it’s a good feeling. When this same thing happens with two ideas, the feeling is even better. When this happens with two ‘spheres’ of your life, say intellectual and professional, it feels bloody awesome.

I’ve recently begun a project with Balloon Kenya, an organisation which trains UK based students (a good mix of international and British) in entrepreneurship and uses their enthusiasm and skills to support aspiring Kenyan entrepreneurs. The approach to entrepreneurship they promote is based on the ideas of Sara Sarasvathy, who differentiates between ‘causal’ and ‘effectual’ reasoning. ‘Causal’ reasoning starts out with a “pre-determined goal and a given set of means, and seeks to identify the optimal, fastest, cheapest most efficient alternative to achieve the given goal”. It’s a planning mentality, where you break the problem down into its constituent parts, come up with some logical answers, build your product, and either sink or swim.

‘Effectual’ reasoning starts with the means and “allows goals to emerge contingently over time,” in an iterative method with a heavily action-oriented, trial-and-error-based mindset. Testing – and learning along the way – is key. It’s an exciting, and potentially revolutionary approach to unlocking the entrepreneurial instincts buried inside all of us. And it locks in perfectly to an evolutionary view of the economy as a complex adaptive system, my pet intellectual concept at the moment. Cue mental fist pump. In fact, complexity can explain why this ‘effectual’ approach to entrepreneurship is the most effective.

The Marshmallow Challenge demonstrates the difference between causal and effectual thinking. The aim is to build the tallest structure out of spaghetti, tape and a marshmallow – which has to go on the top.

As I’ve been reading recently in Eric Beinhocker’s ‘The Origin of Wealth’ the economy, in the evolutionary complexity-based view, is a system of millions of interacting, boundedly-rational agents; who are constantly learning and adapting their behaviour. This produces an economy that is dynamic and has ‘emergent’ properties which are more than the sum of its constituent parts. Its behaviour is non-linear, meaning that small changes can have huge effects (think the financial crisis or mobile money transfer cascading across the Kenyan economy) All this makes it mighty hard to predict or plan, beyond human intelligence in fact. Alain Lewis, for example, shows that the perfect rationality required to process all the information in the economy is beyond a ‘Turing Machine,’ an imaginary, all-purpose, all-powerful computer. ‘Causal’ thinking for entrepreneurship here takes a big hit.

“Evolution is cleverer than you” says Orgel’s Second Law. And in the economy, wealth is created not by individual human rationality but by the operation of a simple evolutionary algorithm that differentiates, selects and amplifies successful models for conducting business, with the market as its ‘weapon of choice’. Essentially this algorithm ensures that those ’fit’ models best suited to the environment survive and therefore proliferate, whilst the unsuited die out.

Evolution basically says I will try lots of things and see what works and do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. The effectiveness of ‘effectual’ thinking makes total sense in light of the above. A customer-oriented approach – which takes the burden of selecting successful and innovative ideas from individual human brains and places it with ‘customers’ (Balloon Kenya’s terminology) - aggregated into ‘the market’ (evolutionary economics-speak) is a formula for success.

For Eric Beinhocker, complexity economics pioneer and author of 'The Origin of Wealth', “Wealth is knowledge and its origin is evolution”. For Eric Ries, Balloon Kenya pin-up and author of the ‘The Lean Startup,’ “Value in a startup is….validated learning about how to build a sustainable business”.

West and Central London just locked together.

Left wing? Right wing? It’s complex.

In ‘The Origin of Wealth’ (see initial review here), Beinhocker has a long section where he applies his ideas about complexity and evolutionary economics to more practical contexts. He’s a McKinsey man, so one is obviously business strategy and organisation. Another is politics, where his ambitions are humble: “the Complexity approach to economics has the potential to make the historical framing of politics obsolete”. And we aren’t just talking “mushy” (his word) Third Way, New Labour pragmatic populism here.

"Nail them, even at personal cost to yourself" credit: SenorGif

He characterises the dominant Left-Right distinction as based on two disagreements: 1) how to view human nature (Left: humans are essentially altruistic and bad things are society’s fault vs. Right: humans are essentially selfish and pursuing self-interest is an inalienable right). And 2) the role of states vs. markets. According to complexity economics in both cases they are both wrong. On human nature, it turns out we are “conditional co-operators and altruistic punishers,” that is to say we operate according to a (hilariously) modified Golden Rule of: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you... but if others don’t do unto you, then nail them, even at personal cost to yourself”. Which has an intuitive resonance given my childhood Monopoly-playing experiences. Anyway, that nugget should be the foundation of policymaking (and Beinhocker shows how in welfare debates, for example), not outmoded conceptions based on Left/Right distinctions.

More interesting are his ideas about states and markets. I’m summarising horribly but basically, strong government intervention in the economy as advocated by the Left is misguided because, 1) faced with the vast complexity of the economy, human rationality is hopelessly inadequate - as Orgel’s Second Rule states “evolution is cleverer than you are,” so don’t try to be a market. And 2) if the arbiter of economic fitness is some politician or party at the centre (in Beinhocker's terms, 'Big Man') then the economy is likely to start to orientate itself towards promoting the interest of that politician or party. On the other hand, the Right's fantasy of unadulterated markets existing in pristine isolation is equally misguided, because the market as part of the economic evolutionary system is constructed out of a vast array of Social Technologies, comprising institutions, norms etc., many of which rely on government. The complexity solution? States help shape the ‘economic fitness function’ (= what we value and want the economy to work towards) whilst markets carry out the job of differentiating, selecting and amplifying Business plans according to this fitness function.

So what, expressing things in terms of complexity doesn't remove the niggly problems and trade-offs that are inevitable in politics, right? This is my initial feeling - taking the example above, to be honest at this point, pretty much everyone in the political mainstream agrees that states and markets both have an important role to play, so the caricatured socialist Left and free-market Right that Beinhocker slays aren't the issue. But complexity's basic insight that micro-behaviour matters for the operation of the system as a whole could be key. In fact Beinhocker suggests that it's here that we can find the answer to persistent poverty: in the norms guiding individuals’ behaviour (i.e. culture), which means that the usual prescriptions of the Left (redistribution) and the Right (laissez-faire, individual incentives) won't solve the problem. Some of the stuff he says about national cultures I am immediately wary of (anyone citing Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ gets my alarm bells ringing), but otherwise it seems plausible.

I had a little rummage around Google Scholar and apparently the above paragraph sums things up more or less: according to Paul Cairney at the University of Aberdeen (gated, apologies), some people think that Complexity Theory in politics is a passing fad, whilst others gibber unintelligibly about a ‘paradigm shift’ (*ahem*). Getting concrete remains the issue: ‘mapping the landscape’, ‘modelling the struggle’ and ‘encouraging systemic emergence’ all sound wonderful but are basically unintelligible. Add in a greater use of trial and error, learning from pilot projects, and accepting a degree of ‘error’ when designing policies instead of seeing error as ‘failure’ and we’re getting closer to 'Monday morning' realities, but still vague.

Great, but what does it mean in practice? credit: http://thewildpeak.wordpress.com/

Specifics are in short supply, so as a conclusion I’ll veer hazily back to fun, broad, sweeping ideas. If evolution is super clever at sorting through designs to get the best one, we need to bring evolutionary processes inside political decision-making somehow. Duncan Green spells out the implications: “we need to find a way of designing and strengthening institutions to make non-market forms of selection and amplification as effective as possible”. And this means nibbling away at the margins at the goals of individual agents, the norms that guide behaviour and the feedback loops in the system.

This all amounts to saying that the answers remain very much unclear. But at least we have a new question: no longer “Left versus Right” but rather “how best to evolve?”

Goodbye Spain, you're going backwards

"I suppose there is no one who spent more than a few weeks in Spain without being in some degree disillusioned." George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

I've come to the end of my time living in Spain. Unfortunately I haven't uncovered new truths about the nature of the Spanish soul. I do have a couple of quick sources of disillusionment to share about Spain and development though.

1. Spanish cuts in development have been drastic. As my hard-Left development professor begrudgingly pointed out, while Britain with its 'gobierno conservador' has hit the magic 0.7% target, Spain has gone from 0.49% GDP to 0.17%, with an overall fall of 70% since 2008. In some areas, like Spain's contributions to the FAO, UN or WFP, the budget cut has been up to 90%, which has reduced the country to irrelevance in multilateral debates. Not a month goes by without El Pais releasing something about 'los recortes en ayuda'. At the same time a former Valencia regional deputy has just been sentenced to prison for diverting aid funds for real estate projects. Add to that the permanent crisis of migrants trying to enter Spain via its North African enclaves (whilst occasionally being shot at with rubber bullets and subsequently drowning), and you have a mess.

2. Spanish NGOs are stuck in the 80s. In terms of professionalism, my experience of Spanish NGOs can be summed up with the word 'chaos'. This almost certainly has something to do with 1. above i.e. they have no money and so no paid staff, but even so... Aside from that, and I've mentioned this before, but NGO advertising in Spain, even from big-hitters like UNICEF, manages to hit up all of the 'poverty porn' no-nos. De-contextualised view of the situation in developing countries with white people sending money as the inevitable, paternalistic solution? Check. Dehumanising pictures of unnamed brown/black children depicted without dignity or respect? Check. One dimensional view of poverty? Check. Africa = hunger, disease, death? Check. You get my point.

I say Spanish NGOs are stuck in the 80s; I meant 60s. On the left is an advert I saw on Wednesday in Madrid and on the right, an Oxfam collecting tin from the 1960s. photo credit: WhyDev

I can't say I'm too optimistic about either. Although 81% of Spanish people agree that giving aid is "a moral duty and helps to build a more just and sustainable world," it's just not a priority for most people. Meanwhile, as Emily Roenigk points out, poverty porn works, as pernicious as it is.

I just hope that the kid in the picture is getting a chunky commission for her image rights.

Complexity meets economics: from caveman to the present today in three easy steps

“Wealth is knowledge and its origin is evolution”

Hark, those of you who don’t know about economics but would like to, or those who know about economics but are dissatisfied with the Neoclassical mainstream. Read this book. In fact, anyone who thinks about politics, business or development or anything should read it too, because it will fling open new mental doors (leading to complexity theory and other fun things).

In 450 compelling pages (hah), Beinhocker uses evolution theory to sketch out sometimes mindblowing answers to the basic questions of ‘what is wealth?’ and ‘how can it be increased?’. First of all, he meticulously sweeps away the Traditional economics which has so conspicuously failed in recent years, with its ridiculous assumptions like perfect rationality and fixation on the concept of equilibrium. Apparently it got lost in 19th century physics and forgot that “if the universe cannot escape the Second Law [of Thermodynamics], then neither can economics”. Instead, he shows how wealth is knowledge, emerging from a simple evolutionary algorithm: differentiate, select and amplify. Essentially, what biological evolution does for genes and living organisms, economic evolution does for business plans (broadly defined) and companies. As Beinhocker himself puts it, evolution says: “I will try lots of things and see what works and do more of what works and less of what doesn’t”. And the result of this ‘deductive-tinkering’? A complex adaptive system (‘explained’ in an earlier post so I won’t bore you here) which doubled world per capita GDP to $180 in the 15 000 years to 1750 AD, then in the following 250 years increased it 37 fold.

Because blurry tables explain things better than I do.

Going beyond parsing the intro, it’s a book that makes you challenge how we instinctively conceptualise the world around us. How often is it that you’ve heard a Business defined as “a person, or an organized group of people, who transforms matter, energy and information from one state into another with the goal of making a profit”? It’s rewarding but hard, thinking in systems, and not because you’re stupid; it’s “just that our brains are not wired to think this way”. Beinhocker also produces new, or at least unfamiliar terminology for his cast of evolutionary characters, from ‘Physical and Social Technologies’, to the ‘evolutionary design space’ to ‘schema readers’. But it’s done in an accessible way - at one point he uses the analogy of a toddler making Lego figures – and even with the occasional amusing anecdote: who knew that the Italian economist Pareto “spent his later years as a recluse in a Swiss mountain chalet with twenty angora cats”?

So an economics that can take us from caveman to the present day, and which does not depend on ironing out our humanity to make its models work. And with lessons for business strategy (think portfolio of experiments not taking a big bet), organisations, policymakers, and anyone who wants to effect change. Even nearly 10 years since it was first published, these are ideas that still haven’t broken through into the mainstream, as Kate Raworth recently pointed out. But it’s an exciting time for thinking, when the ground is shifting beneath your feet.

More to come on this, for sure, but for now, read the book.

Credit: cheezburger.com

When HIV/AIDS is really funny

"...54% of all Indians shit outside... And we can't afford that shit - it's not like with Japan... where there's a tsunami that cleans all that shit - we don't have that facility in India.... And this number's being going up since 1947. In the 40s it was 34% and then 50s 44%, and it's being going up. Basically the British left and we started shitting outside - I think this is the best defence strategy any country can adopt... People have defence budgets, we have lunch."

Nothing like taking a joke out of context to kill the humour. It's all in Tanmay Bhat's delivery, as you can see here. But the main point of this post is the fact that that previous link doesn't go to a blog, or to a news article, not even a caustic comment from the Twitterati, but to a stand-up comedy set. 'Development' issues, like sanitation or HIV/AIDS can be funny, as the Stand Up Planet project shows.

According to its mission statement, "Stand Up Planet is a documentary TV show, transmedia series and digital campaign that showcases life in some of the toughest places on Earth – in parts of India and South Africa – through the lens and experiences of stand-up comics." I experienced this primarily through the TV show, and it's a breath of fresh air. It takes the often-used media model (I'm looking at you, Guardian 'poverty matters' blog or El Pais 'Planeta Futuro') of look-at-this-awful-situation-you-should-really-know-about-this-because-it's-really-bad and turns it on its head, and whilst recognising the seriousness of the fact, for example, that 4000 children die every day from diarrhoea, it hands the agency back to Indians or South Africans to highlight the issues through humour. A release from the slightly grave and slightly defensive campaigning mindset that often characterises media reporting on development. It turns "problems to punchlines," and returns the colour to the limited picture of the developing world we get in countries like the UK. How Matters provides an elegant summary.

"Stand Up Planet reminds us that people have to be at the center of any solutions. It moves viewers from despair to hope in a genuine and elegant way, creating a balanced and constructive story about some of the world’s biggest and most deeply-entrenched social issues – a new narrative so needed in our sector."

Stand Up Comedy director Hasan Minhaj. credit: MTV

The show itself is really entertaining - go ahead and watch away - as this Los Angeles-based comic, Hasan Minhaj, travels first to Mumbai then to Johannesburg to explore the comedy scenes and perform there before inviting Aditi Mittal and Mpho Popps back to perform in LA. Generally it gets the balance right between funny and serious, and leaves you with a hopeful smile. Having said that, there is something slightly disappointing in the 'Take Action' section of the website linking everything back to lobbying US Congress to spend more on aid. An exciting project foregrounding comedy artists from India and South Africa ends up handing the agency back to the USA, though this isn't the main focus and the organisations it proposes for donations are almost all national or local initiatives from India and South Africa.

Anyway, before I descend further into the type of 'serious' development media tone that this sort of comedy provides an antidote for, I will shut up and splatter you with links to funny people talking about important issues.

The documentary itself here
Aditi Mittal here
Mpho Popps here
Tanmay Bhat here
Loyiso Gola here