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

Goodbye to a gratuitous exercise in understanding global poverty

It's been emotional. Credit: Tumblr

I've exited my MOOC (massive open online course) adventure via the exit survey and can now claim to be an MIT alumnus according to my pdf certificate (classy). Time for some reflections on 'The Challenges of Global Poverty'. I'll split this into two: first, comments on the MOOC itself for those who might be interested in doing one/it, then some nuggets on content. Feel free to skip one or the other section, or indeed both.

The MOOC itself was a beauty. 14 weeks, each consisting of a couple of video lectures, split into bitesize chunks with (mostly multiple choice) questions after each to check you were following. It was perfect for that time after lunch when you don't want to do anything productive but feel you kind of should. Then each week there was a (again mostly multiple choice) homework which sometimes required dipping into the 'further reading' section, which was basically just Poor Economics so not too taxing. Overall perhaps 5 hours a week. Finally on top of that, a final exam (you've guessed, multiple choice) and a 'project' or 600-word essay on a topic of your choice, which was self-marked (I nobly docked myself one mark out of twelve). They got the level of questioning pretty much bang on in that it wasn't so hard that you had to continually go back to the videos, but generally you couldn't answer the questions without having watched the videos at least. I found it verged on the easy side but that's probably also a function of the fact that I'm a native English speaker, doing a related degree, who had already read the book which was the foundation of the course. I could have chosen a harder MOOC.

In terms of the MOOC experience more generally, it was perfect for what I wanted: a way to channel my slightly workoholic desires towards a topic of interest which would, unlike the course I'm taking simultaneously on international development at university here in Madrid, leave me with more knowledge than when I started. The baby homeworks and multiple-choice exercises keep you hooked with enough momentum to reach the end of the course and there's even a little section with percentages and bar charts to track your 'progress' and boost your ego as you nail yet another self-graded question. I really didn't engage much with the 'discussion forum' or 'community' sections, although they were pushed a fair amount and this podcast suggests that's where MOOCs are going, as they attempt to become more like 'real' unviersity, social interacion and all. I remain unconvinced.

Abhijit Banerjee speaks really slowly so I had to double the speed (literally) on the video to avoid boredom. Content was good though. Credit: The Guardian

As for the 'Challenges of Global Poverty' themselves, they are, predictably, many: from education to entrepreneurship, food to family planning. But in essence, this was a course about poverty from the point of view of social policy, where the basic message is that you need to pay attention to the details. The world's poor often don't obey the theories of policymakers, unfortunately, due to their being normal human beings. In the course and in their book, then, Banerjee and Duflo (B&D) try to get to the micro level, using experimental studies to identify why people act in certain ways at what that means for policy.

As a final farewell, I'll note their counter-argument to those like Bill Easterly who say that randomistas like B&D, in focusing on micro-level policy questions miss the bigger picture (seamlessly taking up a theme from an earlier post - see argument #6). If, as many profess, Institutions like Democracy and Property Rights (capitalisation explained later) are what ultimately makes USA better off than Chad, then this tinkering around the edges is surely just re-arranging deckchairs? Well no. Because even if you can't precipitate a social revolution and re-engineer a country's social fabric (engineering fabric?), institutional change (small-i) is possible even when Institutions (big-I) are bad. B&D cite a study that found improvements in outcomes when limited levels of democracy are introduced in village councils in China (but wait, China's communist?), and likewise mention effective health and education policies in 'bad institutional environments' like Indonesia in the 1970s. If you're lucky, policies can even sometimes change politics. So although the 'big questions' addressed by the development high priests like Sachs, Easterly, Acemoglu and Robinson are often fun to think about, it's at the ground level where the important stuff often happens. B&D argue that the question should be “where can we make a small push and see if we can make a change?” After completing their MOOC, I'm inclined to agree.

Dancing to stop malaria: as good as bednets?

For a couple of weeks now, the (non-)progression of the story of the girls abducted from Chibok in Nigeria's Borno state has been winging its way around my blogroll. It's a pretty horrific one: on April 15, Boko Haram gunmen attacked the town and kidnapped between 85 and 235 girls, and have allegedly sold some of them into slavery in Cameroon. Within Nigeria this has naturally received a lot of attention, and in Abuja on Sunday they protested at the government's inaction. As is the case depressingly often though, this kind of story from an African country didn't initially get all that much airtime in much Western media, but apparently we've reached the tipping point according to Africaisacountry. [In fact, I wrote that intro on Sunday and now the story has definitely reached the mainstream; when Michelle Obama gives it the hashtag treatment, you know the shit has hit the fan]

So I read the articles. I try to empathise, to the limited extent that I can put myself in the shoes of a Nigerian guy whose sister has been abducted by terrorists. I retweet. I sign the change.org petition. My awareness is raised.

On April 25, Tom Murphy, my favourite of Humanosphere's two Toms, put out an article about a MobMalaria, "a global, student-run project to raise awareness of malaria and its eradication efforts through fun," according to its website. The idea was to organise identical flashmobs in Harare, Changsha (China) and Cambridge (USA). In Harare, according to the Harvard Crimson, they tailored the event to include guidance on prevention and other local concerns. In Cambridge (USA), they danced about malaria for four minutes. In Tom's words, "The impact...on the students at Harvard is yet to be determined".

Fighting malaria at Harvard. credit: www.defeatingmalaria.harvard.edu

Let me first say that I'm not trying to belittle either the global effort to reduce malaria (627 000 deaths in 2012) or the campaign to bring back the kidnapped girls. In fact, the key message from this article so far is that political mobilisation (Nigeria) and locally-tailored efforts to solve problems (Zimbabwe) seem like pretty good ways to address these issues respectively.

But as for the rest (can't keep this in any longer), dancing about malaria?! And in my own case, a retweet and an online signature?! Where is chain of events leading to change in either of those situations? The chance that my retweet or change.org signature will persuade Abubakar Shekau, leader of Boko Haram, to rethink his considered opinion that "in Islam, it is allowed to take infidel women as slaves," or to persuade President Goodluck Jonathan to take time from feting his daughter with golden iphones to seriously address the situation in Chibok, is slim. Even more unlikely is a flashmob persuading a mosquito not to bite someone. Teju Cole captures the awareness-raising-as-hot-air point pithily: ' "What can I do to help [in the Chibok girls case]?" Unless you're a Nigerian with constitutional rights to participate in Nigeria's democratic process: almost nothing'. Mark Leon Goldberg is similarly wary about the current wave of Twitter activism. And sometimes achieving almost nothing isn't the worst part: the MobMalaria's idea involved loads of students in a rich country downloading instructions onto their ipods to supposedly check the progress of malaria, a disease mostly affecting the poor... I mean you've got to have a bit of self-awareness.

Reigning in my pot-shots to just student development/global health 'awareness-raising' groups, I myself have experienced their stealthy pull, almost firing off an application to the World Conference on Youth 2014 designed to 'mainstream youth in the post-2015 agenda'. A chance to proceed 'directly to Go' and change the world, courtesy of my unique perspective as one of only 3.5 billion people worldwide under the age of 30, with free return flights to Colombo as an extra kickback. Likewise on Twitter I followed a load of youth-led global health/development groups the other week so I could rage with jealousy at their 'success' in establishing themselves in the 'world-changing' industry.

WCY2014: where I have little right to be
(resisted temptation to put in a Kony meme instead)

I think I was wasting my rage. The burden of proof is on awareness-raising groups to show they have a concrete impact, over and above boosting their own self-esteem (and careers: apparently the MobMalaria founders will be spending this summer employed as "social media specialists for the Harvard Global Health Institute," which shows the campaign has had some impact at least). In the case of MobMalaria, we shall wait and see.

In the meantime, I guess I'll go find some online petitions to sign.


ps. Naturally the Onion has something brilliant on this: How Can We Raise Awareness In Darfur Of How Much We're Doing For Them?

Replacing 'Africa' with Africa

The Guardian released a podcast the other week busting some myths about Africa. Before I get into anything though, I just want everyone to enjoy for a second the irony of the Guardian hosting an event focusing on how we should go beyond misleading images often peddled by the media in their hipster hangout café at Shoreditch Boxpark. If you're not from London, this article should give you the gist.

Anyway they hit up ‘Africa is corrupt,’ ‘Human rights don’t matter in Africa,’ ‘Africans are always in poverty,’ ‘Africa can’t do capitalism,’ ‘Aid is good for Africa,’ jaunting through the issues of colonialism, gay rights, the pernicious effects of aid, the links between poverty and corruption, to name a few. As one of the panel members commented, though, they didn’t have time to cover a number of other myths, so I’m going to give it a go here. I’m also going to replicate their format and try to fit multiple enormous issues into a hopelessly short space with inevitably inadequate consequences.

‘Africa rising’

If it's not declining...?

‘[O]ver the ten years to 2010, six of the world's ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa’. Annual GDP growth was 4.8% from 2002 to 2011. Nollywood. M-Pesa. HowwemadeitinAfrica. There’s even an IMF conference in Maputo this month called ‘Africa Rising’. Is Africa rising?

Now clearly many African countries have enjoyed strong economic growth in the last 10-15 years, leading to this binary switch in Economist titles from ‘the hopeless continent’ to 'Africa rising'. Aside from any the fact that such a simple narrative must be wrong, there are also a number of concrete, interrelated problems with this. One is that economic prosperity isn’t being shared; Afrobarometer shows that there is “widespread dissatisfaction with current economic conditions despite a decade of strong growth”. Project Syndicate points out that while the richest 10% of East Africans have an average income of $2100, comparable to Central America, the bottom 40% of East Africans have to get by on $225 a year, well under $1.25, the World Bank’s pretty meagre cutoff for extreme poverty, as well as suffering from all associated problems of poor services, child mortality, inadequate sanitation etc. Much of the wealth created also goes into oiling patronage networks, or flows back out of the continent – $1.4 trillion was lost between 1980 and 2009 according to a African Development Bank/Global Financial Integrity report.

Economists also argue that African economies haven’t achieved the basic transformation required to sustain and broaden growth. Today’s rich countries got there by building big tasty factories, which hasn’t really happened in Africa, where it’s mainly been extractive industries. Nigeria’s GDP rebasing (GDP growth of 90% overnight, not too shabby) has meant oil’s share of domestic product has dropped to 14.4%, but this only means that it’s leapfrogged the industrial part to a services-oriented model, and no-one ever got rich by selling call-credit. Ha Joon Chang: “…it is a fantasy to think that developing countries can skip industrialisation and build prosperity on the basis of service industries”. So ‘Africa rising’ myth slain, and much to ponder for African governments.

I was going to move on to 'Africa is dangerous' next, because it's one of my favourites to use to snark at people (because I have ever-so-slightly more knowledge than whoever asks the question). 'Uganda? Dangerous? Jeez mum, the war in the North ended like over five years ago'. SLASH, 'the Global Disease Burden finds that road accidents account for almost as many deaths as HIV/AIDS worldwide and Uganda has one of the world's worst rates so you're actually right mum but we'll keep quiet about that especially cause I'm planning a 20-hour coach ride from Nairobi to Mbarara this summer...'

But more valuable than taking down another straw man (which is what most of these are) is to point out the underlying craziness of trying to encapsulate a continent within one narrative. The problem isn't that we need to replace the misleading myths about Africa with others; we need to rid ourselves of them altogether, and also question who 'we' are. Suffice to say that most of these myths come from non-Africans imposing their vision and thereby deliberately suppressing the (often mundane) messiness of reality. I'd argue that at least some of it springs from a semi-colonial impulse to present Africa as exciting/novel/backward/mysterious/incomprehensible/different/pick-your-adjective. But Uganda is like Colombia is like the UK, in that they are just places with coca cola and trees and jealousy even if they are very different in other respects. When people in Europe/North America speak of the Democratic Republic of Congo with the same placid (but informed) indifference that characterises responses from Britons to the question, "What do you think about Belgium?," the world will be a better place.

If you want any more information on any of this, I suggest you read the news basically (not that Western media makes it that easy for you). All myths and misconceptions about Africa are disproved every day by the real world, which is available ready-digested via the following outlets (AllAfrica.com; Think Africa Press; African Arguments; Africaisacountry; BBC Africa Today podcast; Twitter and countless other sources)