This image is making the rounds, and for good reason.
But it does make me wonder how many PowerPoint presentations over the next two years will use this image to make a wince-inducing point.
Be creative! Stretch your capacity! Or maybe even something simplistic about teamwork. Phrasing suggestions welcome.
Jonas
The Center for Global Development releases the Commitment to Development Index annually, comparatively tracking how supportive developed countries are of developing countries. The resulting maps and charts are entirely too fascinating for my workday productivity.
I don’t find the overall score to be very helpful (the US is towards the bottom, Scandinavian countries take the lead), but poking around gets you to some interesting findings. For example, a surprisingly large portion of the US’s Aid points are in the private aid category. Digging a little deeper: it’s because (this time not surprising) we’ve been penalized for our nasty habit of giving a large percentage of our total aid to “less poor and relatively undemocratic governments” and tying or partially tying our aid so that recipients can only spend it on donor goods and services.
The Migration score also caught my eye—especially since Greece and the US, unlikely partners by my reasoning, received the same score. US points mostly come from an increase in the number of unskilled workers allowed into the country. Greece gets points for a large foreign student population and the number of refugee and asylum applications accepted, the latter particularly worrisome in light of this story.
Poking around at the Trade score, and particularly the “trade-distorting farm subsidies,” I wasn’t expecting Norway to score so poorly. Those are some unbelievably high subsidies!
Anyway, you get the picture. Go play.
Jonas
This is near the top of my to-read list, along with the Stiglitz Commission report on the financial crisis: a joint ILO-WTO report titled “Globalization and Informal Jobs in Developing Countries” (warning: big PDF download). According to this In These Times story, and corroborated by my quick scan of the executive summary, the report concludes that globalization has not helped the bulk of the world’s poor. The research presented here focuses on the creation of informal job sectors in developing countries which are unregulated and contribute little to overall development.
One nice tidbit:
Finally, globalization has added new sources of external economic shocks. For instance, global production chains can transmit macroeconomic and trade shocks through several countries at lightning speed, as observed in the current economic crisis. Moreover, in such circumstances developing countries run the risk of entering a vicious circle of higher rates of informality and rising vulnerability. Countries with larger informal economies experience worse outcomes following adverse shocks. Indeed, estimates suggest that countries with above-average sized informal economies are more than three times as likely to incur the adverse effects of a crisis as those with lower rates of informality.
Addressing informal labor markets is one side of the solution, but I am not convinced that this sentence must be as true as it is today: “globalization has added new sources of external economic shocks.” The aforementioned Stiglitz Commission report discusses how WTO-driven deregulation of financial services has made individual economies more exposed to global shocks. Reverse that trend, give countries more options for protecting (oops, there’s that word) their financial markets, and perhaps economic instability would not be quite so wildfire-like, consuming every country in its path in rapid succession. As long as chains of production are global, economic instability will always be global as well, but it seems to me that we’ve made things much worse than necessary by depriving individual countries of many of the appropriate tools for dealing with or forestalling such instability.
I’m sure I’ll have more intelligent things to say after I’ve actually read both of these papers.
Flying Whale
The notion that the restrictions on international labor mobility are a gaping inefficiency in global development isn’t a new one. But this takes the role of immigration to a new, and quite innovative, level. Here, Matt Collin takes on “climate aid,” or the policy proposal that populations most affected by climate change (who are also, for the most part, least equipped to cope with it) deserve some kind of payment from the populations that are the primary polluters. The whole post is worth a read, if only to remind you what an in-the-box thinker you are, but here’s an excerpt:
First, every country in the globe gets a certain amount of “emigration” points, which constitute a budget for purchasing the right to move to a new country. These points are indexed to the relative rise in average temperature for that country (they would be set at zero for those living in areas least affected by climate change). When an emigration slot is purchased using this budget, the government allocates that slot via a lottery system (perhaps on a family-by-family basis).
On the supply side, countries are free to continue polluting, but the more carbon they emit, the more immigration slots they have to offer up for sale.
…
The political ramifications of excessive immigration (and I’m talking about mass immigration) would act as the shadow price of pollution. If they acted as incentive enough to reduce emissions, then we are ok – disaster averted. If they are not, then the worst polluters must accept those that are the worst effected. It is not a perfect internalisation of the externalities at hand, but it would suffice.
The political feasibility of this is somewhere below zero. But that doesn’t make it any less interesting to think about.
Jonas
A couple of weeks ago, I ended up in a conversation with a relatively high-up at the Department of Corrections about the Center on Actual Innocence. It’s a little-bit-of-everything non-profit that helps individuals who have been wrongly convicted gain freedom and advocates for the kind of changes within the criminal justice system that would make those situations increasingly rare. The Center has gotten some attention lately because of the exoneration of Alan Gell; his case reminded folks (again) that there is a need for this type of work.
The Gell case unnerves me. Prosecutors in the case withheld statements from 17 witnesses who said they had seen the victim alive after the time that Gell could have killed him. After his lawyers discovered the eyewitness accounts that proved Gell could not have committed the murder and asked a judge to throw out his conviction, the Attorney General’s office argued that Gell should still be executed. The judge vacated Gell’s conviction and the Attorney General decided to try Gell again. What?
Policy Watch gets it just about right:
The criminal justice system is not perfect. No system administered by humans can ever be. But we have a right to expect that folks who work for the department named Justice seek it tirelessly, even when it means admitting they are wrong.
So back to my conversation with a DOC employee. She said something that really stuck with me, which I think is an interesting answer to why Justice Department folks aren’t always willing to admit that they were wrong. She said that it’s quite possible for every single person within the criminal justice system connected to a given conviction to do their job perfectly. By the book. No short-cuts, no mistakes.
And still convict the wrong person.
Hopefully it isn’t very likely. But its entirely possible.
And then she asked me this, “If the system, not the person, is broken; if the person was just doing their job the way they were supposed to, why should they apologize of the system arrives at the wrong conclusion?”
That certainly wasn’t the case with Gell. There is plenty of real blame to level at real people. But it its a worrying question for the cases in which it might be true.
I know I’m asking for push-back, but I believe that systems are made up of people with agency. And participation in a system carries potential culpability. I appreciate protecting folks by differentiating between mistakes and jobs correctly done that led to incorrect outcomes.
But it doesn’t mean that folks just get to shrug and point to a system they’ve conveniently personified.
Jonas
From a policy standpoint, I find this amendment to the Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill absolutely mind-boggling. In short, Vitter and Bennett don’t think that undocumented folks should be counted in the census. And they think the best way to make that happen is to insert a question about immigration status/citizenship into the line-up.
I’ve got several problems with this.
There are other reasons that this is bad policy. But that’s my first draft. Feel free to add.
And, you know, if your rep Senator is on the fence, feel free to give him/her a call too.
Jonas
There’s a very interesting article at Newsweek about Joe Biden’s role in the administration as Obama’s foil on certain issues. Cover story, if I’m not mistaken (but I’m all Digital Age and haven’t seen a hard copy version of Newsweek in ages, so I don’t actually know for sure). Fascinating reading, for insights into Biden’s personality, Obama and Biden’s relationship, and the role of a vice president more generally.
Essentially, the article paints Biden as being unafraid to oppose Obama and the bulk of his advisers if he feels they’re about to do something silly, yet willing to fall in line for the public to give an appearance of consensus within the administration. One of the chief issues of contention is Obama’s war in Afghanistan (yes, I thought about that possessive before writing it).
And here’s Arianna Huffington going off the deep end, her response to the article being that Biden should resign in protest of the war in Afghanistan. Come on – exit over voice already? Did she even bother to read the article? The whole thrust of it is that Biden could very well end up being a very effective voice within the administration. Not to mention that “Biden has been incorrectly characterized as a dove who wants to pull out of Afghanistan. In fact, according to his ‘Counterterrorism-Plus’ paper, he wants to maintain a large troop presence.”
I don’t follow Huffington because I find Huffington Post an incomprehensibly designed website (not to mention sensationalistically sexist). Is she always this bizarre?
Flying Whale
As I alluded to in my last post, the NYT article on E. Coli in ground beef got me thinking about investigative journalism. I find it tempting to join in the panicked chorus asking who will do the kind of investigative journalism we need to be well-informed and make socially-responsible decisions when print newspapers die.
Luckily, there are a handful of folks out there rolling their eyes at the panic (and scheming about innovative ways to turn the death of print newspapers into opportunity).
Last week, Kate and Amanda over at Wronging Rights started a ruckus by questioning whether “The New York Times, the Associated Press, and Reuters have all published quotes misleadingly attributed to a Darfuri “refugee representative,” who is in fact (a) fictional, and (b) part of the PR operation of the rebel leader Abdel Wahid Al Nur?”
The back and forth has been illuminating and raises some important questions about the authenticity of the quotations that fill out the narrative of so many international news stories. More importantly, it has gotten a whole lot of people stirred up. And there isn’t a single print media institution on the light-shining side of this investigative journalism series.
It reminds of this Huffington Post piece and its good-sense ending:
When papers say, “if we’re gone, who will keep government honest?”, the answer is, every other media outlet that covers city, state and the federal government. There is nothing inherently inky about investigative journalism.
Sounds about right to me. Consistently good investigative journalism seems to require a good number of elements: relationships with folks inside systems and institutions who are willing to pass along information and tips, the ability to ask hard and insightful questions, persistence. Then there are the skills that help one sort through lots of information, find the relevant pieces and put them together into a big picture story. Some kind of God-given instinct, I’d imagine. And access to email and a phone. I’m sure a travel budget would make things easier. But the point is, as far as I can see, none of those elements are outside the reach of emerging media forms.
I’ll end this post by saying: I don’t know anything about this subject, but several of you readers do. And I’m very open to being completely wrong. Comment away.
Jonas
By now, I think everyone has read the NYT article about E. Coli in ground beef. And it seems that anyone who either is a vegetarian, isn’t a vegetarian, or is trying to convert someone else one way or the other is talking about it (that covers everyone at least once, right?)
One of my first thoughts–once I finished unproductively fuming–was that we really, really need investigative journalism like this. And I started to worry, along with lots and lots of other folks, that the information age is on the edge of becoming less informative (more on that next).
But, interestingly, that hasn’t remained my strongest takeaway from the story. My strongest takeaway is that the majority of the folks around me seemed to miss the point. Conversation in the office was about bleaching cutting board and kitchen counters. Phone conversations were about whether or not someone should eat at Five Guys. But almost no one was talking about food safety standards.
Everyone was asking: how can I keep myself safe from this? No one seemed to be demanding: why aren’t our regulatory agencies keeping us safe from this?
No one seemed appalled that Tyson refuses to sell to Costco lest they be caught supplying contaminated meat. No one seemed astonished that someone within the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the USDA would say “I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health.”
It’s a case in which we have the information. We just can’t seem to find our way to using it very well.
Jonas
In what reads more like a Stuff White People Like post than the usual commentary on humanitarian aid, Michael Bear tells us how to sound like a expert on the “poverty-stricken, war-torn country of your choice.”
1. Memorize the names of various tribes and semi-obscure towns. Ask questions like: “But what do the [insert name of random tribal group] think?” Or “What about the situation in [semi-obscure town]?”
Both of which are best said with a thoughtful expression, verging on concerned. There’s nothing like seeming to agree with your interlocutor while subtly pointing out that his or her analysis is rather facile for ignoring said tribe or district.
2. Memorize the date of one significant or semi-significant event in the country’s history. Tie all current political and / or military developments back to that date: “You make an interesting point about Liberian politics, but it’s all really just an outgrowth of what happened on September 9th, 1990.”
Don’t deign to explain further; instead, act as tho of course everyone should know what happened in Liberia on September 9th, 1990.
3. Acronyms, acronyms, acronyms. Saying you dislike the Sudanese Government is one thing, but doesn’t really separate you from the crowd. Saying you dislike the NCP is better. Extra points if you can work NCP, SPLM, GNU and HAC into one semi-coherent sentence.
First, I’m nearly positive I had a conversation with someone last night who somehow managed to read this post before it was written. We were talking about the most recent ethnic group from Burma to be granted refugee status (both of us having some organizational contact with refugees more broadly) and I swear he was following this formula (and Tip #1 quite well). Suddenly that whole conversation makes more sense. I feel enlightened.
But more substantively, it strikes me that this would more or less work for lots and lots of topics.
Nothing says “I know school reform” like talking about the synergistic momentum that NLNS, KIPP and TFA are creating (Tip #3).
And how many times, in talking to folks younger than forty about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina did someone say, “Gosh, this is just like 1965.” Good grief folks, call it Hurricane Betsy and actually know a little something. Yes, the levees failed both times, but there is a hell of a difference between 76 deaths and 1,836 (Tip #2).
Anyway. My plan moving forward: follow up conversations like the one last night with a “Great to talk with you” email. And a link.
Jonas
Echolocation 