“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.“

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

Every year, more than 130 million children are born on this globe (1). Each of them are endowed with a set of innate talents, which can be cultured for many different uses. Some manage to use their talents for the benefit of the World, while others use them for privately profitable, but socially damaging, activities. Unfortunately, most talent is simply wasted.

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Women in the informal sector generate much lower incomes than other population groups in Bolivia, and it is natural for the development community to want to help this group through specific policy initiatives targeted at this group. Indeed, I have been hired to study the problem and come up with gender and sector specific policy recommendations on how to help informal business women grow their micro-enterprises and become formal (1).

Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion that most such initiatives would be either wrong, ineffective, or counter-productive.

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During the crisis of 1999-2003, most economic and social indicators in Bolivia showed significant deteriorations — even the ones you would not expect to. While poverty rates and unemployment rates may go up during a recession and progress in the provision of basic services may stagnate, you would not expect the education levels of adults to go down, nor the share of households who use electricity in their house to decrease.

But according to the annual MECOVI household surveys carried out in Bolivia this is exactly what happened. The share of people who use electricity in their house went down from 71.2% in 1999 to 69.1% in 2003/4, and the share of the working age population who has university level education went down from 11.8% in 1999 to 9.9% in 2003/4.

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“The only justifiable purpose of political institutions is to ensure the unhindered development of the individual.” Albert Einstein

Having good institutions that guarantee citizens a large degree of economic freedom has been shown to be strongly correlated with the usual development indicators, such as GDP per capita, life expectancy, and literacy rates, and negatively correlated with poverty, child labor, child mortality and informality (1).

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“Poverty, like beauty, lies in the eyes of the beholder.” Mollie Orshansky

According to official estimates, there are at least 3 million extremely poor people in Bolivia (about 38% of the total population). Judging from their very low incomes, they shouldn’t be able to buy even the minimum basket of subsistence goods. The majority of people in this group does not have electricity in the house, and thus none of the convenient inventions that run on electricity. Still, only a minority of them (18.5%) actually feel extremely poor (see Table below).

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Carbon-offsetting (paying others not to emit carbon into the atmosphere so that you can keep emitting) recently got an absolutely hilarious equivalent: CheatNeutral (http://www.cheatneutral.com/).

This brilliant initiative allows you to pay somebody else to be faithful, so that you keep going on as usual. Of course it is recommended that you first look for ways of reducing your cheating. But once you have done this, you can use CheatNeutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating. This supposedly neutralizes the pain, unhappiness and heartbreak in the atmosphere and leaves you with a clear conscience.

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“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.”
Henry David Thoreau

“Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time.”
Margaret Bonnano

“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.”
Albert Einstein

Economists, especially development economists, almost always measure the level of well-being in a society by per capita income, noticing that this simple economic measure is highly correlated with most other indicators of development they can think of (life expectancy, child mortality, income equality, education levels, etc.).

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Reverse psychology is frequently applied by parents: If you want your kids to do something (like washing the dishes or mowing the lawn), tell them they can’t. That is often much more effective than begging or threatening them to do it.

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The World Tourism Organization publishes facts and figures on international tourism, including a table of the World’s Top Emerging Tourism Destinations, as measured by the growth in international tourist arrivals.

The good news is that Bolivia has made it to the table! (Mexico and Brazil didn’t). The bad news is that it is at the very bottom of the table. Of the 76 countries included, Bolivia was last with an average annual growth rate in international tourist arrivals of 4.0% between 1995 and 2004.

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Governing a country is a lot like raising children. You have to make sure your subjects are kept safe and healthy and receive a useful education they can live on in the future. You also have to teach them what is right and wrong, and what are their rights and obligations. You should abstain from violence, but still be very clear about what kinds of behaviors are unacceptable.

Good parenting will lead to responsible, independent citizens who contribute to society, whereas bad parenting will lead to spoilt, immature, dependent and/or corrupt citizens who constitute a liability to society.

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