“All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC)
“When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: ‘Whose?'” Don Marquis
Most poor people work in the informal sector in precarious, low-paying jobs with no forms of social security. So key to improving the living standards of the poor seems to be to improve the quality of their jobs.
But what exactly constitutes a good job?
“100 years from now we will know that the biggest crime against humanity was vaccines.” Guylaine Lanctot, MD
In Bolivia, vaccination rates depend strongly on the education level of the mother. More educated mothers are more likely to have their children vaccinated than less educated mothers (1).
In United States the relationship is the opposite. Highly educated mothers are less likely to have their children vaccinated (2).
In China, when you are one in a million – there are 1300 other people just like you. Microsoft saying in Beijing
Globalization has recently shifted into warp drive, integrating the world and increasing competition in a way we have never experienced before. Many services that used to be non-tradable (like accounting), are now being done just as well on the other side of the globe at a fraction of the cost.
And many services that previously could only be supplied by large organizations can now be done just as well, or better, by independent individuals (news reporting, for example). Barriers are tumbling down all over the world, and everybody with an Internet connection and an imagination can do really well (1). Read More »
Most of the people who write about poverty have never themselves been poor (including myself). This is not so strange, since the poor are too poor to write, even if some of them have the ability. They do not have the surplus of energy and time alone that is required to sit down and write to record or transmit their feelings, thoughts and ideas. They do not write blogs or diaries and they virtually never get hired as consultants to study poverty.
Might it be the case that the ones writing about poverty don’t really understand it?
It is not quite clear which is the best way to use exceptional oil and gas revenues (1), but the worst way is probably for the government to use expected future revenues as collateral to borrow money. This would not only increase inequality and poverty during the boom (see How can $700 million in hydrocarbon revenues be bad for the poor?), but also burden future generations with excessive debt, which become difficult to service after the boom has ended.
Ecuador is a scary example of that (2). After discovering oil in the rain forest in 1967, Ecuador quickly became the second biggest oil exporter in South America. By 1974, oil accounted for half of all export earnings (like Bolivia’s gas now) and approximately half of the government budget.
There are many gigantic problems in the world (hunger, diseases, wars, corruption, lack of safe water, pollution, climate change, etc.), but there are also a great many efforts to solve these problems (hundreds of professional development organizations, thousands of NGOs, millions of volunteers, billions of dollars of foreign aid).
So, why is progress towards solving these problems so painfully slow?
One possibility may be that we haven’t gotten our priorities straight. Clearly we can’t fix everything at once (if we could, all the problems would already have been solved), so we should try to apply the limited funds available for fixing global problems to the areas where they can do the most good.
“The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.” Charles Franklin Kettering
“Some people change their ways when they see the light; others when they feel the heat.” Caroline Schroeder
It has happened to most of us, even the poorest of the poor. We used to feel safe and secure; the things we needed seemed to come to us automatically without any effort on our part. We were living in a care-free world, with no worries, little pain and few threats, cushioned from all shocks.
The Precautionary Principle basically says that we should not do something unless we are sure it will have no harmful or potentially harmful side-effects.
On the face of it, that may sound reasonable, but in reality it is a one-sided consideration, which completely ignores the benefits or potential benefits of any action/product/invention. The Principle does not weigh benefits against costs; it just says that if there are any costs at all, the action should not be carried out. For example, a new invention which could benefit millions of people, but also might possibly harm a few (people or other species) in the process, should be banned according to the Precautionary Principle.
“Everything has its limits – iron ore cannot be educated into gold” Mark Twain, 1835-1910
Even if you could educate iron ore into gold, it would not necessarily be a good idea to do it. Steel is incredibly versatile and useful and we need a lot of it, whereas gold is mainly a luxury item, which gets its value from scarcity and has little practical use, except for keeping track of who is married and who is not.
The higher education system in Bolivia seems to try to turn a lot of iron ore into gold: 90% of public spending on higher education goes into universities (supposedly producing “gold”), whereas 7% goes to the formation of teachers and only 3% goes to technological institutes (producing “steel”) (1).
Since the main purpose of education is to raise the future income generating capacity of the students, it will take several decades before we can truly know how well our present education system is doing.
Past experience is of little help as both the education system and the structure of demand has changed tremendously over the last few decades.
A commonly used shortcut to evaluate current education quality is to use standardized academic aptitude tests. According to the last internationally comparable test that Bolivia participated in, public schools in Bolivia are in really bad shape (see Figure 1).
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