A Work of Art

Given my pseudonym it would be remiss of me not to post this:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyI5hAvkIug

Acting Locally

There’s a beautiful piece in The Age today, which doesn’t seem to be online, about a school where almost all the children came from refugee families. A teacher asked children to bring in their favourite book from home. Most didn’t, and those that did produced very damaged copies – in one case only two pages were left.

The teacher put out a call for help, and was absolutely deluged in offers. Not only did people line up to hand over books they were no longer using, many dipped into their pockets (in one case to the tune of $2000) to buy new ones. The target has already been exceeded ten times over, and presumably this publicity will send it higher. Moreover, all sorts of other support is being offered – people with no connection to the school are offering to come in and read to the children, or construct containers for storing the books etc.

It’s all very inspiring in the way many films try to be, while being true and real and not-faked up at all.

I think it also provides an indication of how some of the problems we often see as intractable are anything but, if we can only find the right triggers for action.

This might seem a big claim. The responses have solved the immediate problem of a shortage of books in the children’s homes. We’ll have to wait quite a while to discover if they will solve the real issue of limited reading, let alone social disadvantage. And all this is just one school – there are hundreds across Australia with similar problems, along with thousands of individual students at schools where the problem is less universal.

It’s a big leap from this to saying we can beat Global Warming or war. However, I think the case that these problems are soluble with enough commitment has been made adequately elsewhere. The question has always been “is that commitment achievable?” Examples like this indicate the answer is yes if we can find the right triggers.

Something about this case caused people to take the steps required to fix the problem. The efforts they made are not all that much smaller (and in the case of the $2000 donor not smaller at all) than that required to solve the world’s macro problems. Of course only a minority of those who received the plea for help acted. Maybe there’s a finite number of people who will ever step up to the plate, but I’d like to think not. Some of those who gave to this cause were probably the usual suspects – the same people on Oxfam’s regular donor list and volunteers for all sorts of causes.

But I doubt it. I’ll bet some were people who don’t give a lot the rest of the time. This appeal touched them, they saw the problem as being manageable, and they did something.

It’s the reason for the slogan “think global, act local”. Most people find it difficult to relate to global problems, or those too big to be solved through individual action. The solution, at least sometimes, is to break the problem down into manageable parts – often based on geography – and get people to deal with these. An appeal for books to solve the problem of children growing up without them in the home, without the specific manageable case of a single rather small school, would probably have produced much less of a response.

This is one of the less acknowledged reasons why those who argue Australia shouldn’t “take the lead” on fighting Climate Change because we only produce 2% of the problem are talking utter horseshit. It’s not just that this approach would have seen us stay out of both World Wars (desirable as that may have been in the first case) or individuals refuse to pay taxes if even some others are evading.

It’s that its only by breaking the problem down to more manageable scale we can get it addressed at all. My suburb only produces 0.0001% of the worlds Greenhouse Gasses. However, making it carbon neutral is a goal that might inspire people in a way that zero national emissions might not – it’s possible to imagine it happening and one person making a difference to it.

If we can make examples like this attractive we might be on the path to putting together the pieces to get the whole jig saw fixed.

Music To Change The World By

Thornton McCamish quotes David Nichols in The Age today on U2. "This was a band that was made for people like me - middle class male, with a social conscience. And that annoys me even more. I don't need a soundtrack to my social conscience."

This annoyed me quite a lot, as does a lot of the criticism of Bono and U2. I'm also middle class and male and I bloody well do need a sound track to my social conscience. I find activism rewarding, but also bloody hard. Music, particularly music with political lyrics, helps inspire me to do what needs to be done.

Now I don't know David Nichols. I have no idea what he has done with his social conscience. I couldn't find evidence in his latest blog posts when I googled him. If he achieves a lot without the need for political lyrics good for him, but I resent the sneering condemnation of anyone who finds music reaffirming in their beliefs.

I'd add here that U2 have never been the most important band for me in sparking my activism. As my introductory post indicates, I prefer a much more obscure solo artist. And there are plenty of others who've meant more to me than the Irish foursome. I only own two of their albums, and can't find one of those. But I like the Joshua Tree and listening to it is more likely to raise than lower my next donation to Oxfam. I'd add that lyrics opposing violence or poverty don't seem so bad when you compare them with the self-indulgent paeans to one's current love object that make up the bulk of the music industry's output.

This whole thing seems to me to go with the frequent dissing of Bono for his activism. Now there are many, many ways I think Bono could be a better spokesperson for the movement to abolish poverty. Constructive criticism is good. Even carping criticism is fair enough if it comes from people at the coalface - representatives from the world's poor or the NGO workers who spend years in hell to make a difference. But you seldom hear it from those places.

The NGOs aren't always happy with Bono (still less with Geldof), but they don't go in for slagging the pair off as Irish millionaires who should shut their mouths except to sing. They know the two have saved millions of lives. If they'd been smarter and less arrogant they could have saved more, but I'll take their achievements any day over most of their critics, who can't seem to do a damned thing to make the world a better place other than sneer at the most visible representatives of those who are trying.

Ethiopia At Risk

I got an email today about a crisis in Ethiopia. Again. The rains failed. Again. Millions are at risk. Again.

But this isn't just another gloom and doom story. Apparently UNICEF programs for treating malnourished children have been working, and infant mortality has fallen significantly (not sure if that is in the statistical sense or in common parlance).

Rather than asking for money, the email asked everyone to raise awareness, both of the dangers but also of the successes. To tell people that foreign aid can work, and if we move fast we can prevent another tragedy. One of the ways they ask us to do this is postings on our blogs.

Given that my webtracker is still telling me no one reads this site at all, which clearly is not entirely true, I've no idea whether I'm achieving much at all with a post on the topic, but I think its a worthy idea. Info here.

The Psephology of Giving

I am a big fan of the Internet sites that raise money for charities by having ads played to you when you either click the link, or use them as a search engine. Collectively they have raised millions, translating to hundreds of millions of meals for the hungry, thousands of square meters of rainforest saved, hundreds (at least) of children taught to read and so on. Admittedly some of this is illusion, with money shuffled from one charity to another, but it still looks like the net effects are positive.

One of the smaller sites in this regard is Search Kindly. They use the Google Search engine, but get to pass on half the income from sponsors to charities, rather than it all going to Google. Search Kindly differs from other such sites in that you get to choose which charity you want the money to go to. They've tried this in a few ways, but at the moment run polls each month where those using the site can choose from a list of six charities. Whichever gets the most choices gets the money for the month. You don't have to choose when you use the search engine, but I usually do.

Only very rarely do the options include a charity I actually think would be a bad choice, but there is no doubt that some would make the money go a lot further than others. At the start of this month I was pleased to see the Grameen Bank on the list, and enthusiastically voted for them every day. Alas by mid month it was clear they would come third (although at least there are consolation prizes for 2nd and 3rd). I decided to switch to MedShare International, a charity I'd never heard of before, but who sound like they've got a great program, collecting medical supplies Western Hospitals can't use for shipping to aid groups in the fourth world.

The thing that struck me about this is that it is a rare case of voting where you get to see the score as the vote progresses (I mean rare in terms of things that matter, not worthless web surveys). If the vote was run like an Australian preferential secret ballot I'd have voted Grameen 1, Medshare 2, but what if it was a US plurality style ballot? Even if I had known Grameen was probably not going to make it, I might have voted for them anyway. However, confronted with the clear reality of a two-horse race I shifted my vote.

I don't really have a conclusion to this (other than use Search Kindly or Ripple or one of the others out there), but it does provide yet more evidence why preferential voting is better than First Past the Post. It's just crazy that one can be left with this choice between voting for what you really believe in, and voting for what might actually win, sometimes without even the information Search Kindly offers to facilitate.

The Poor Will Not Be With You Always

Apparently it is Global Blog Action Day today, or something like that, and the theme for this year is poverty. So...

I doubt we will ever remove relative poverty. Certainly all attempts to create a sufficiently egalitarian society for this to be realistic have failed. But I think we can aspire to end absolute poverty. And since that would rank with ending war in the greatest human achievements of all time, it seems to me a pretty worthy goal.

And clearly this is achievable. Human productivity has risen so much over the last couple of centuries that there now certainly is enough for everyone to have adequate food, clean water, decent if spartan housing and basic medical cover. Yes all that and still enough for large sections of the world to live in unimaginable luxury.

Global Warming will make things much, much tougher, but science isn't going to stop. The productivity of the world, from an economic point of view, will slow, but its unlikely to go much backwards, even per head.

So ending poverty is all about willpower. We haven't done it because, collectively speaking, we simply don't care enough. The developed world giving 1% of its wealth to the poor would do it, just as the UN agreed on it back in 1970. (Note the agreed figure is 0.7% government aid, the rest is to come from private individuals. Indeed, the target is a lot easier to reach these days than it was back then. A goodly chunk of the rich world is now in China and India. The money doesn't even have to flow across national boundaries. The traditionally rich world needs to look after Africa and substantial sections of Asia and Latin America, but it no longer has to worry about the whole rest of the world.

It's true that local wars mean that some regions are resistant to anything the wealthy world can do, but that's actually a pretty small proportion of global poverty. The main thing that is needed now is good aid (not the stuff that ends up with the military and in politicians' pockets) and fair trade. And one of the main things stopping that from happening is the lack of belief that it can work. It really is a case of "nothing to fear but fear itself".

I think the most important thing to do is to keep the pressure on governments to increase aid, or at least not cut it in the face of the credit crunch. But private giving is important as well, and the wonders of the Internet mean you can do that without costing anything but your time.

Most famously. But one can do even better with the search engines that send their profits to charity rather than shareholders. Here or here. You can even feed the world by playing games online. It's true these online measures are a bit of a drop in the ocean. And in some cases the sponsors are other aid organisations, so in a sense the money is just going round in circles, unless they succeed in getting you to actually donate (or buy from their online stores). Which is why its important not to lose site of the main game of putting pressure on the politicians. But these websites do make a powerful point. The rich world is now so rich, credit crisis not withstanding, that it only takes a little of that wealth slopping over the sides to end absolute poverty. So little of the wealth in fact, that we wouldn't even miss it if it was gone.