Kerabu

Showtime at the Smithsonian: The opposite of privatization?

The Smithsonian's entrepreneurial impulse to exploit new media for profit is a healthy one, at root.  The Smithsonian is already a quasi-private entity, where most staff is on the public payroll, while most executives are paid with privately solicited donations. It could conceivably, like the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and the federal student loan agency Sallie Mae, aspire to becoming a self-supporting entity within the government. 

So of course, the institution is taking a lot of flack for its deal to produce on-demand, for-pay documentaries in conjunction with Showtime.  Congress has even joined in, cutting the institution's funding while citing the high executive pay as an excuse.  The deal is bad, but not for the reasons being stated in editorials.  It is bad because of an anti-competitive clause that gives Showtime first-refusal over the 'right' to fund documentary projects seeking to use Smithsonian archival material.  Far from privatizing the Smithsonian, this makes Showtime a de facto government agency.  Forcing documentarians to seek funding from a single source in order to pursue a creative project based on national archival material is an awfully pink concept, and the kind of move that gives privatization a bad name.

Cross-posted on Samizdata.

Why aid still won't work

In this month's lead essay at Cato Unbound, 'Why Aid Doesn't Work,' William Easterly makes a rational case for directing international aid dollars toward programs where the results can be objectively measured by hard scientific methods. He's persuasive, but in the end, the scientific method is still just a patch, a facsimile for what's really missing: legality.

In the developed world, the distinction between government and non-government organizations is meaningful, but not in places where government is corrupt and ineffective. In a lawless state (ie, one where corruption dominates the channels through which people get things done, for good or for ill), both aid organizations and entrepreneurial warlords effectively operate by the same rules. One's moral orientation is not the point. If the basic sphere of operation is illegal (in the deepest sense of the word), then there is little chance that your efforts will result in enlightened, long-term improvement. Will Connors, a Chicago journalist and blogger working in Ethiopia has written compellingly about corruption in the aid community there.

Any aid-before-government aparatus is still going to break down--it will just do so further down the road. As Easterly suggests, you may demonstrably produce healthier, taller, better-educated children by buying them meat to eat twice a week, but if the best they can hope for is to grow up to be a corrupt low-level official, have you really accomplished anything lasting?

Better to see aid dollars spent as investment dollars--sunk into private businesses, rather than programs of any kind. It is possible. It is even possible that the weaker the local (corrupt) government, the greater the opportunity for leveraging capital investment. In Carol Pineau's documentary, Africa: Open For Business, the CEO of Daallo, a Somali airline, marvels that the only reason he's able to thrive is that there's no government at all in his country. No government means no corruption, he observes dryly.

cross posted on Samizdata.

Lords of Hypocrisy

A superbly written blog I've been following of late is Will Connors' Things We Should Have Written Down, chronicling the author's adventures covering conflict in and around Addis Ababa. Connors is a correspondent for a regional newspaper there, but the blog is far better than any newspaper reporting.

What prompts me here is a two-part post on "Lords of Hipocrisy," or the "opulence and inefficiency" of NGOs in the area. In Part 1 Connors details several anecdotes about aid workers from Care, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders and other groups tooling around in their SUVs and generally lording it over the locals. Here is Part 2:

The estimated budget for an upcoming 17-day ‘research trip’ by an acquaintance working for an anti-hunger NGO:

SUV rental: 500 birr per day x 17 = 8,500 birr ($979)

Gas for SUV: 600 birr per day x 17 = 10,200 birr ($1,175)

Hotels: 200 birr (two people) per night x 17 = 3,400 birr ($391)

Miscellaneous supplies: 100 birr per day x 17 = 1,700 birr ($195)

Estimated Total Expenses: 23,800 birr ($2,741)

Destination: Several of the top tourist spots in Ethiopia

Justification for this trip: “Preliminary research for a future survey”

Hungry Ethiopians that could have been fed with $2,741: ???

I'd go so far as to draw a parallel: Connors' blog is a far better resource on Ethiopia than any newspaper.  And like newspapers, these aid organizations are similarly obsolete, bloated and ineffective.  What blogs have done for information, entrepreneurial types will soon be doing for development. And we can probably learn a lot about the opportunities and pitfalls New Development will face by looking at what New Media has gone through in the past few years. Might save some wheels from being reinvented.

The Globalization Institute's Launch

The Globalization Institute held its launch party last night in London. President Alex Singleton's speech is worth quoting in its entirety.:

Thank you all for coming tonight. I'm Alex Singleton, president of The Globalization Institute. In the next few minutes, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the Globalization Institute and we're also going to hear from Bill Emmott, the Editor of the Economist, and Alan Beattie, the World Trade Editor of The Financial Times.

We follow the Manchester School of Economics. That's the school founded in the 19th Century by economists, businesspeople and campaigners who argued for free trade. Why would we want to dig up the ideas of some dead economists?

Well, it's because history repeats itself. Over 150 years ago a group of Manchester men, most notably Richard Cobden and John Bright - our intellectual heroes - set up the Anti-Corn Law League to campaign for free trade. Free trade however wasn't an entirely popular idea, though, and a speaker they employed to travel the country sometime found an angry mob would form to prevent him from speaking. Protectionists held protectionist meetings to say why Britain - then a developing country - needed to protect its economy. The problem was that this protection - while nice for farming landowners - was causing people to starve.

Nowadays we have a new generation of protectionists who say that today's developing countries should protect their economies. India did that in the 30 years after independence. Like in 19th Century Britain, the result was starvation.

We are not neo-liberals. We have healthy skepticism of neo-liberal institutions. We think the World Trade Organization, for example, is OK and we wish it well. But in the two decades, most of the lowering of protection has been done unilaterally - most notably by China and India. It's the liberalisation from below that works best. Ultimately it's going to be nations deciding individually to adopt free trade that will be the big idea of the 21th Century just as it was in the 19th.

If you want to label us, label us as lower-case l liberals. Philosophically are real liberals - not neo-liberals, not neo-conservatives, not corporatists. We are pro-enterprise but not in the pockets of big business. We don't represent multinational companies. After all, there are lots of first-rate public affairs companies that do that already. Most of our funding comes from a wide spread of individuals and grant-making foundations. We of course welcome contributions from businesses who wish to facilitate free thinking on policy issues, but we limit the amount that any particular company can give us in order to preserve the independence of our work.

So what are our successes so far? The Archbishop of Canterbury preached about one of our reports in St Paul's Cathedral. We succeeded in getting Christian Aid to alter some of its advertising. Our website is getting over 1000 visitors a day. And we're already getting a huge amount of broadcast media hits on the subject of globalization.

I'll leave you with a quote from Richard Cobden which sums up our frame of mind quite perfectly.

"I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe - drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race and creed and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace... I believe that the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires - for gigantic armies and great navies - for those materials which are used for the destruction of life and the desolation of the rewards of labour - will die away; I believe that such things will cease to be necessary, or to be used, when man becomes one family and freely exchanges the fruits of his labour with his brother man."

Or, in other words, free trade is a good thing not just because it promotes prosperity but because it promotes peace. So I propose a toast: to free trade and world peace.

No money please, we're a charity

It's very easy to get caught up in one's own perspective and loose sight of the deep reservations a lot of people have about technology. Here's an interesting, entertaining and slightly scar lesson from David Steven, about his attempt to make a charitable donation via paypal:

 It’s a long story, but I ended up selling some theatre tickets for the Producers on eBay after one of the people I was going with had to have an operation.

It didn’t seem right to make money from an illness, so I thought I’d donate the profit to charity. Via PayPal.

Email to the Royal Marsden and the Leukaemia Research Fund (two charities I have a strong affinity with):

“I have around £250 that I would like to donate which is in a PayPal account. Will you accept a donation via PayPal? If so, please send me your PayPal details.”

In case they didn’t know how big PayPal was these days, I sent them a link showing that $17bn of PayPal transfers are now made a year.

A few hours later, a bloke from Leukaemia Research phones up - seemingly under the impression I’m engaged in Internet fraud.

Convinced that I'm not trying to rip off people with nasty blood disorders, he explains that it would be too expensive for Leukaemia Research to set up a PayPal account and, if that’s the only way I’m prepared to pay, they’d rather not have the money.

The guy had clearly never heard of PayPal and had no idea how it worked. Nor had he any interest in finding out. But he was quite sure he didn't think that much of me, my money or the world's other 56 million PayPal account holders.

The Marsden is yet to get back to me.

It's easy to snicker at the charities for being oafs, but the truth is that when you use any technology, it seems rather simple.  And when you don't, it seems mystifying.  When I was renovating my boat I learned how to sweat copper pipe.  It's easy to do. But use the phrase "sweat copper pipe" to most intelligent people as if they should know what it means or worse, how to do it (and in a tone that indicates they're dopes if they don't), and you'll likely get a similar reaction.

The rub, of course, is that charities are in the business of accepting money, and this does make them oafs for not knowing what Steven is talking about.  In their field, this doesn't represent mere technology-phobia but a higher order of dysfunction:  resistance to innovation.  But their reaction doesn't surprise me.  The majority of people in any field are unreceptive to innovation of any kind.  Actually, to call resistance to innovation a "dysfunction" is a bit like calling death a dysfunction of life.  It is just that, of course, but what's the point?  I've spent my life around innovators, and they're my favorite people. But I have no particular interest in teaching non-innovators to innovate; the important thing is to have an innovation-friendly culture, not a culture where everyone innovates.  At least that's what I think off the top of my head. Anyone else?

ADDENDUM.  Stevens doesn't have comments on his blog, or I would have said there: Since you don't have to have an account to recieve a papyal payment, just an email address, it seems to me that an exceedingly effective, friendly yet humiliating way to "introduce" the Leukemia Research Fund to paypal would be for everyone who reads Stevens' post to send them a dollar via Paypal.  A few dozen email notification of such payments later, maybe they'll get it.