Emily Oster, you idiot.
So I’m taking a break, eating my Waitrose pesto pasta salad, feet up on the table, and decide to watch something on TED.com. Emily Oster’s talk, about “flipping” our thinking on AIDS in Africa catches my eye and, I have to say, it was hard to keep myself from gnawing at my keyboard.
She’s wrong. Oster sounds like someone who has never been to Africa, yet conducts epic analyses with data presumed to be accurate, then claims to know much more about the continent than Africans themselves. Don’t believe me? See for yourself.
A huge problem here is that she’s making lots of assumptions about the data. AND SHE’S TAKING CORRELATIONS TO MEAN CAUSATION. Just because one data set looks like another when you plot them on a graph DOES NOT MEAN THEY ARE RELATED. It only means they’re correlated. Correlations might suggest predictive ability, but they DO NOT PROVE predictive ability.
This is science at its worst.
This is economics at its worst.
Emily Oster, if you want insight into African crises, move to Africa. Live there. Not forever, if you’re not inclined, but at least a couple of years. Long enough to learn things, like how people don’t die when they get malaria (there’s an immunity developed amongst most locals, which is actually the reason for its prevalence), and how disparate beliefs and contexts play a massive role in HIV infection rates — a role that easily confounds your assumption that Egyptians and other Africans differ only in that Egyptians don’t die early from AIDS.
Sometimes, Life Just Isn’t Fair.
Imagine that you were born a black man. That you grew up in a small Congolese village, somewhere near Goma, near the Rwandan border, around soldiers and UN peacekeepers. Life is hard. You eat bananas every day, when you can get them. You walk in your bare feet, and, having few clothes, sometimes sleep without a shirt on the cold dirt floor.
Then one day, after a long day of working (collecting enough roots and bananas to eat tomorrow, really), some guys come into your hut and rape you.
Sometimes, life just isn’t fair.
Weapon of Choice
There are many reasons why I don’t carry a gun when walking. Only two are important: first, guns are heavy, and, second, guns invite thieves who carry guns. I, alternatively, choose to carry an assortment of weapons, depending upon where I need to be and when I need to be there.
The first of these is a Chinese-style knuckle duster, bought for a couple of dollars in Chinatown. It’s cheap and dirty, and breaks open the skin the way you need to when you’re surrounded by five guys in daylight and need to scare them quickly.
Next would be a telescoping baton. After 15 years of Escrima, how can I not be comfortable with this in my hand? It’s my insurance policy during off-hours, in the middle of the night, when no one is around and 12 very angry men want to see how well stones bounce off my head.
The third is pepper spray. I usually only carry this when I know there’s going to be a riot and I might need to find a way through the crowd. It’s also the reason why I don’t deal with knives. I always thought a knife fight was a lose-lose situation — mace offers enough of an advantage against a knife or machete that I no longer deal with the bending and accidental cutting involved with carrying them.
All of this is not to say I don’t carry my appearing cane from time to time. There’s something about a good magic trick that scares the shit out of people that I just can’t get over.
The Ethicist: Not so ethical
Randy Cohen writes The Ethicist, a NY Times Magazine column about doing the right thing when the right thing is not so clear. I started reading The Ethicist during long afternoons at Cafe Pap — once Kampala’s only free internet cafe (they have now started charging) — where it granted me momentary but wonderful pleasures: Cohen helped me remember what it was like to have manners and righteousness and, most importantly, clean fingernails — things which, like water and sunglasses, hold unreasonable value in Africa.
Cohen now writes The Moral of the Story, a blog on the NY Times website. In his first post, Cohen tackles Madonna’s recent attempt to adopt an African child. Sadly, Cohen is just flat out wrong here.
But as far as helping children, adoptive parents might do so more effectively simply by donating money (as Madonna has also done in Malawi). A fraction of the typical $20,000 spent on an adoption or the $250,000 it takes to raise a middle-class American child could assist a great many African kids. But the ethical obligation to help suffering children does not apply only to those who wish to adopt; it is a general duty we all share.
Cohen, shame on you. Yes, you can indeed donate money, but the majority of donated funds never reach those who need it, especially in Africa (ahem, corruption). And yes, while $20,000 seems like it could help lots of kids, that does not mean it will be well-spent; for instance, let’s say you want to use the $20k to buy 20 metric tons of porridge, so hungry children can eat. Well, you need transportation and storage and administration and cooking fuel and plates (or cups) and labor and, perhaps, licenses (because you can’t just start feeding kids without some kind of approval) — all of which might cost, say, $20,000. Moreover, once the food is gone, who will provide the next shipment? (In effect, you are creating dependence and disenfranchising the disadvantaged as they — and their leaders — look to you for their future survival.) So, while I do understand the overarching argument of having an obligation to aid suffering children, I think Cohen is incorrect in suggesting throwing money at the problem, to help many children, is more effective than committing to the well-being of a single child via adoption. What Cohen is advocating, in essence, is that we fulfill our obligation by causing harm.
I say this for two reasons. The first is that when we donate money to Africa, for whatever cause, it is generally conditional. That means the receiving government must fulfill some kind of obligation in return for the funds (e.g., meeting poverty-reduction goals or improved governance and accountability). While this has the veneer of righteousness, what it does in the background is undermine the democratic process. It should be the ruling government, expressing the people’s wishes, that decides what goals should be met or what things should be done within their country. This is the right of every voting citizen and, I believe, it is neither appropriate nor correct to assume that, because we are blessed with money and they are not, we can dictate terms with more weight than the indigenous voter.
The second reason is that adoption vs. institutionalization must be considered. Research shows that nurturing (via adoption) results in overall higher IQ levels than institutionalization. In addition, in this particular context, Madonna could have afforded the child a stellar education and diverse opportunities. Is it possible, then, that one Madonna-orphan could have a greater impact on humanity than 200 orphans in Malawi? This, too, must be calculated and weighed — and this careful deliberation of (hidden) issues is what I think Cohen needs to think about before committing to any particular remedy.
As The Ethicist, he’s got that obligation.
In search of sorcery
Pope Benedict traveled to Angola recently to tell them they’re heathens. I figure he thought it best for Angola, since he just happens to be a white man in a white robe, wearing a white hat, in a country full of black people. But hey, people make mistakes (love these super-clear police affidavits) - I mean, I once remember, as a freshman in high school, running towards a girl I liked, then slipping and falling on some black ice, and her running over to see if I was O.K. (The mistake wasn’t the slipping, which cut my head open, it was not pursuing that girl; she was classy - she could have laughed, after all. Damned if I ain’t screwed: I have to slip and fall in front of every girl I date now to see if she’s up to snuff.)
The problem here is not just that you have an influential figure working to stamp out the remnants of an ancient culture, but the fact that there is so little being done to preserve or study or record it. Once these traditions are gone, they are likely gone forever (which would suit the Pope, and probably Rush Limbaugh, and maybe some other people who wear white robes and hats, just fine).
The problem I have with it is that cultural traditions preserve evolutionary features. Andean peoples, for instance, have developed, over centuries, physiological responses (e.g., larger lung capacity) as well as cultural traditions (e.g., chewing coca) to cope with high altitudes. In the context of hypnosis, if we are to believe it actually exists, then we must first define its role in human evolution; then, if that role is reasonable, we should subsequently be able to see hypnosis in varying forms in other cultures beyond our own. I believe these rituals Benedict is talking about extinguishing are where we can uncover these varying forms.
So what am I going to do about it? Well damn, that’s not on me: NBC didn’t like Tour Dementia and I have a pharmacology paper to write. I tried…
Myopia
“My goal is just to survive,” said Luo Guoliang, an executive at the Yang Xin Long Fu Company in Shandong province, which makes polyester and polypropylene filaments for fabric and rugs, all of it recycled material (NY Times, March 11, 2009).
The plastic scrap market has gone down the tubes for one reason: we bet it all on China. Recycling, in America, works like this: you buy stuff, you use stuff, you throw some stuff away, and sometimes you send stuff for recycling. What you probably don’t know is that China was buying all of your crap, just so they could sell it back to you:
> Plastic bottles (PET) are made into polarfleece (as well as some other types of cloth).
> White paper is usually made into toilet paper.
> Cans are melted down and made into roofing sheets or nails or other goods.
My contention with recession-era recycling is that Africa still needs these materials and is still able to recycle them. Many African nations would love to get cheap or free raw materials, yet, because the Chinese have such a strong infrastructure and massive market share, it makes it impossible for smaller players–with their small budgets and lack of influence–to penetrate.
It’s time to recognize the other players.