Dyer on an African "Marshall Plan"

People talk about the need for a 'Marshall Plan' for Africa, but the original Marshall Plan, designed to help European countries recover after the devastation of the Second World War, provided around $75 billion (at today's prices) in American food and supplies over a period of three years to help Europe rebuild. It did rebuild, and has long been just as prosperous as the US. Whereas fifteen times as much money per capita, over fifteen times as long, has left most of Africa poor, chaotic, and miserable.

The basic difference is politics. Europe had a skilled labour force in 1945, but more importantly it had governments that were determined to maintain the education and health services that produced that labour force. Africa's elites simply stole the money in many cases -- both the aid money, and their own taxpayers' money -- and condemned their people to ignorance, violence, poverty and disease. Simply increasing the aid will not change this equation.

There are well-run African countries where targeted development aid can help, like South Africa and Botswana; there are spectacularly corrupt ones like Nigeria and Angola that nobody in their right minds would send development aid to; and there are basket-cases like the Congo where there is no longer any modern economy and only disaster relief has any immediate relevance.

The politics is the problem, and only Africans can fix that. But the best incentive for reform that the rest of the world can offer African countries is fair access to its markets if and when they get their own acts together. Fair trade, not 'free' aid, is the key.

Dyer is no capitalist pawn, so he's especially credible when he says the key intervention for African is to open our markets. On this one point even Bush might cooperate, though "Fair" is a tricksy word.

Africa is also a good lesson on the limits of a libertarian state.

It's over. We lost. Thanks George.

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | Julia Roberts has a better chance of winning this war

Today the New York Times had a picture of a girl, the same age as my son. She was kneeling and she was crying. Blood ran off her hands and over her clothes. It was the blood of her parents. They allegedly ran a checkpoint. They were killed by US forces. We'll probably never know what happened. Did her father realize it was a US checkpoint? Did he fear SU forces would kill or torture his family and rape his daughter? Was he afraid it was an insurgent checkpoint? Did he even see it? Did he really choose to run, or did he never know he'd arrived at a checkpoint? Did the troops follow procedures? Was the checkpoint marked?

It doesn't much matter. That picture was the best summary of the war so far. I'd mail it to George Bush, but that would be a waste of a stamp; at most it would get me a call from the secret service.

On the same day as that picture came out, the Guardian had an interesting editorial by Max Hastings. I believe Hastings has been a relative supporter of the US effort. He feels the military effort is lost, but he holds out hope for Iraq. Emphases mine.

There is growing dissension and dismay in the US armed forces about their prospects of victory in Iraq. The yellow ribbons, lapel pins and yard signs expressing solidarity with the nation's soldiers are still conspicuous around army bases across America. But commanders and soldiers alike are conducting an increasingly anguished debate.

There are four reasons for this. First, many service people are shocked by the incontrovertible evidence that the justifications offered by the Bush administration for invading Iraq - WMD and a link with international terrorism - were false. Second, bitter and painful fighting, notably in the showpiece assault on Falluja, has failed to suppress insurgency. Third, there is deep scepticism about progress in recruiting Iraqis to assume the security burden. Even General David Petraeus, the US airborne general charged with organising Iraq's new forces, is said to be increasingly despondent. And finally, the army and marine corps are acutely aware that they have to sustain the occupation without sufficient troops to control the country effectively.

Having begun the campaign convinced of the justice of their cause and their ability to secure victory, many members of the US military and their families now suspect that the cause may be invalid and the battle unwinnable...

... In the minds of many US soldiers looms the spectre of Vietnam. In recent years, the US army has been forged into a motivated, effective tool for large-scale military operations overseas. But it has never been suited to combating insurgency. Guerrillas and suicide bombers can impose a deadly corrosion on conventional forces.

... The US armed forces are fighting the sort of conflict that least suits their capabilities. It would be a devastating blow to the confidence painstakingly rebuilt since Vietnam if the US, having committed enormous resources and suffered painful casualties, was obliged to quit Iraq without achieving its purposes.

... I do not think the US armed forces will achieve their military purposes in Iraq. The American soldiers who have become pessimistic about the campaign they are waging are probably right. But in a long historic view, Microsoft and DreamWorks could achieve a dominance of Baghdad and a power over Iraqi society that eludes George Bush and his armoured legions.

It's a curious proposition. The thesis is that we should hope that Iraq really is Vietnam -- where we lost the military conflict but won a sort of strategic semi-victory. Small consolation to the wounded.

I think Chechnya may be the better comparison. We'll see how things go after the retreat. Militarily, however, we have lost.

Managing complexity: the lifelong data repository

Faughnan's Tech: Yahoo! Desktop (X1) is the new champion

In my tech notes blog I posted a review of X1. I've been using it for a while. It needs work, it's not as polished in some ways as Lookout, but it's pretty good. We have a lot further to go, however.

Lookout works well because Outlook content has lots of metadata and context. Email has dates, links to people, descriptive text surrounding attachments, etc. Email tends by nature to provide focal chunks of context. In contrast Google works well on the web because web pages have links that can be weighted, a robust form of metadata. Heck, web pages even have descriptive titles.

By comparison today's desktop file store is a barren desert. There's very little to go on to help search tools work. The most useful tool is probably the folder name -- pretty meager fare.

This wasn't such a big deal when we managed a few MBs of data. But what of the dataset that grows over a decade? That repository may be vast. Unfortunately, due to lack of supporting metadata, it's easier to find documents on the web than it is to find them on the desktop.

The good news is there are no lack of ideas to make things better. Heck, even as one uses today's software to search for items, one can be layering metadata atop the file system. If I do a search and open a file, then it's clearly more valuable and might earn a higher value score. The list of ways to assign value is very long; it will be fun to see how they get instantiated. Some of those ideas are 50 years old (Vannevar Bush described most of them in 1945 or so), I doubt any of them are truly new -- but the implementations will bring surprises.

PS. This is an old interest of mine.

Update 2/21/05: I've taken to appending the string [_s#] where # is 1-5 to the end of filenames to provide some crude metadata value scores. Full text search programs that index file names can then be filtered by the suffix value.

What Fates Impose: The 2004 annual lecture to the British Academy

British Academy - King: "What Fates Impose"

Mervyn King is the Governor of the Bank of England. He presented the annual lecture of the British Academy at the end of 2004. The British Academy is what is technically known as a daunting audience. Governor King, with, I assume, help from his staff, rose to the challenge. His lecture on risk and probability is a classic, with footnotes. He chooses as his working example pension reform -- a topic of some interest in America.

Everyone should read this, particularly decision makers. It is, alas, wasted on our current government.

... Whether in policies for health or transport, matters monetary or meteorological, in times of war and peace, decisions should reflect a balance of risks. Yet policy debates continue to be permeated by the ‘illusion of certainty’.

The reluctance to give adequate prominence to risks may reflect the fact that many of us feel uncomfortable with formal statements of probabilities. Probability theory is relatively recent in our intellectual history, dating back to a flowering of ideas around 1660 from Pascal, Leibniz, Huygens and others. Despite advances since then, statistical thinking remains prone to confusion and is often avoided. Television weather forecasts in Britain rarely employ the language of probabilities used by the meteorologists themselves. Professor Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin has demonstrated in a series of studies how poorly doctors, lawyers, and other professionals understand probabilities. And despite Seneca’s maxim that ‘luck never made a man wise’, airport bookshops stock titles on how to become rich by successful investors and entrepreneurs who are confident that their success is the result of outstanding business acumen rather than good fortune.

Many of these misunderstandings stem from a failure to grasp basic statistical concepts. Juries are not informed that, in a country of our size, multiple cot deaths are likely to occur several times a year, that several people will have DNA that matches the incriminating sample, and that in themselves these coincidences are not evidence of guilt. Bookshops do not stock such titles as ‘I would have been a billionaire if only Lady Luck had been faithful’...

...I want to illustrate those two propositions by considering as an example public policy about pensions -- an issue, you might think, of particular interest to many of us in the Academy. When the Pensions Commission reported in October, it highlighted the financing gap in our present system. But we must not lose sight of the equally important question of what are the risks incurred in pension provision and how should they be shared among us? It is not my intention to make any recommendations. That is for the Pensions Commission next year, and the Government in its turn. But I do want to show that risk is at the heart of the issue...

...As Bertrand Russell said, ‘The whole problem of the world is that
fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts’...

If only, if only .... Ohio. Florida.

Another big thing the media missed

The New York Times > National > Bush Nominee Wants States to Get Medicaid Flexibility

An astounding statement from the former secretary of health and human services.

Mr. Leavitt said he did not believe that the secretary should have the power to negotiate with drug manufacturers to secure lower prices for Medicare beneficiaries.

The current secretary of health and human services, Tommy G. Thompson, said last month that he wished Congress had given him that power. But Mr. Leavitt said that a healthy, competitive market was a better way to hold down drug prices.

I'm not surprised Mr. Leavitt does not want a federal formulary. A great deal of money was spent to prevent such a thing.

I'm very surprised Tommy Thompson did want one, or at least that he wanted the power to negotiate for best prices on a national level. There was not a whisper of this while he was in power. Was he silent out of fear or loyalty to Bush? Why didn't the media realize how big this alleged statement of his was? We're only talking about hundreds of billions of dollars.

What's wrong with American journalism?

Google oddities: my "top ranked" page

Home Video Editing

I'm shopping for a digital video camera. So I do a Google search on "pass-through", "video" and "quality".

A page I started in 2000, advised by my brother Brian, came out #1. Ok, so it was a good start and it did attract some email, but there's no way it's a terribly useful web page. I aborted the project in mid-2000 because I decided the software/hardware solutions weren't there yet - especially on the PC platform. Instead I went into digital photography in a big way.

Now, with iLife 2005 and a G5 iMac (pending) I think I can do what I want in a semi-tolerable way. I have to move anyway, my analog tapes are getting old. (Actually I really want the 2006 G6 dual-core dual CPU Mac with 4GB of RAM, but I can probably start now.)

So maybe I'll update the page ... eventually.

At last, the obvious begins to be discussed. It's the technology stupid.

INTEL DUMP - Be afraid... but be prepared

From an Atlantic article by a counterterrorism guru

... This 'war' will never be over, unlike the Civil War, the Vietnam War, or even the current war in Iraq. There will always be a threat that someone will blow up an airplane or a building or a container ship. Technology has changed the balance of power; it is easier for even a handful of people to threaten a community than it is for the community to defend itself. But while we have to live in danger, we don't have to live in fear...

I wrote this in October of 2001:

Over the past century technology has increased destructive power more than it has increased defensive capabilities. Technology, including communication networks and knowledge distribution, has brought to individuals and small groups (micro-powers) the capabilities once limited to nation states; the cost of acquiring and deploying nuclear and particularly biological weapons has decreased substantially. It has increased the harm potential of individuals and small groups. I sometimes call this the AIM problem, a pseudo-acronym for Affordable, Anonymous Instruments of Mass Murder. Our technologies are lowering the cost of the havoc, and the new weapons can be deployed anonymously. Anonymity means invulnerability. We cannot be anonymous, so we are are at an enormous disadvantage -- eventually contending against an invulnerable opponent with irresistible weapons.

John Kerry's petition: replace Rumsfeld

:: Donald Rumsfeld Must Resign ::

Of course I'll sign as a gesture of support to John Kerry. I feel I owe him for fighting hard against terrible odds (a special thanks to for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band). I'm sure Bush will pay a lot of attention ...

King George

BBC NEWS | Americas | Kings in the White House

Stephen R Graubard, a historian, has a book out claiming that George Bush has the unchecked power of a king, and behaves like aone. I'm not sure that's so different from the CEO-president role Bush's admirers claim; even though CEOs of public companies in theory report to a board, in practice the board is often subverted.

It will be interesting to watch the succession. Will King George continue to reign even behind the scenes? (Assuming he does officially retire 4 years from now ...)

How you know you're middle-aged

jfaughnan's Yahoo! Profile

This is amusing. I have a profile on Yahoo that I set up years ago when I was running some Yahoo groups and needed a profile for the group. I never gave it much thought. Of course it persists, and it has my age as 42 (true way back then). Serendipitously I came across it today. When I view it I see the inevitable ads for personals (I guess that's why Yahoo does these directories -- duhhh). Only, unlike the usual personals ads one sees on the net, the models featured are clearly over 35. Maybe it's chance, but since Yahoo knows my age, there's no reason they couldn't target the ads a bit.

How sweet. I think I'll adjust my age to 85 and see what happens.

Update: At age 85 the "personals" go away. Instead I get some very generic ads that look like they're pretty low rent.

Seymour Hersh: The Next Wars

The New Yorker: Fact

Another Hersh article worth reading. If he didn't have such a good track record, and if Bush were not brutally wilfull, this would not be believable. As it is, I trust Hersh more than Bush. Where, though, will we get all the soldiers?

AuthenticGOP.com

AuthenticGOP.com

My favorite "A person of tolerance and diversity keyed my car."

This is indeed a well titled site. "Authentic GOP" indeed.

The Darwinian Society

Ownership Society

..An ownership society values responsibility, liberty, and property. Individuals are empowered by freeing them from dependence on government handouts and making them owners instead, in control of their own lives and destinies. In the ownership society, patients control their own health care, parents control their own children's education, and workers control their retirement savings.

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Darwin was an outstanding scientist and an exceptional human being. Alas, his name is not his own any more. So, with apologies to the great scientist and humanist, let us declare that the "ownership society" is social Darwinism in the Spenglerian tradition.

In social Darwinism "excellence" is rewarded by wealth (theoretically by progeny, but that part didn't work out). Weakness is punished -- by misery and death.

The Ownership Society is about rewarding Strength and Excellence. And, conversely, by elimination of the weak.

That's the agenda underlying "social security reform". Those who are strong will do well, those who misjudge, who are frail, who are weak, will perish. Unless, of course, they have wealthy families who will save them.

Only the poor and the weak will truly perish.

Sound familiar?

I don't like the idea of living in that world. I don't want my children to grow up in that world. The saddest irony of all is that Bush was elected, in part, by those who were too "weak" to see through his agenda. They and their children will pay the price -- unless, by some miracle, we turn this back.

NYT Magazine has an in depth review of social security

The New York Times > Magazine > A Question of Numbers

... Overall, the [Bush] plan is gentler toward lower-income seniors than wealthier ones, but all seniors would be poorer than under present law. In other words, absent a sustained roaring bull market, the private accounts would not fully make up for the benefit cuts. According to the C.B.O.'s analysis, which, like all projections of this sort should be regarded as a best guess, a low-income retiree in 2035 would receive annual benefits (including the annuity from his private account) of $9,100, down from the $9,500 forecast under the present program. A median retiree would be cut severely, from $17,700 to $13,600. On the plus side, budget deficits would be lower in the future. But, because of the lengthy transition, that ''future'' is exceedingly remote -some 50 years down the road. In the interim, deficits would rise by up to 1.5 percent of the country's G.D.P....

An in depth review. How many people know that since 1997 the insolvency date has moved back 13 years -- because lifespans have not extended as much as expected. The obesity epidemic perhaps?

This detailed article is robust evidence that this is a battle about ideology, not demographics and not economics. Social security is fundamentally "socialist" (progressive) -- those that have give to those that have not. It's easy to see why extremists, like Bush, want to eliminate it.

Among all the details and surprises in the article, one impression stands above all. The politicians who did this, and the people who worked for and with them, tower over our current leadership. It's not that America was any better; the historical context is very familiar. Bile spouting morons on the radio, whacko extremists proposing radical revisions, the dark specter of fascism off to one side -- heck, the American people were then as they are now. What puzzles me is why the politicians, and the bureaucrats who built social security, were so superior to what we now endure.

PS. Social security is mandated by law to do 75 year predictions. This is pathetically funny. We may not even be human in 75 years.

My home town paper shows some spine ... callling a lie a lie

Editorial: Social Security/Blacks get more, not less, from it

Of all the lies -- let's call them by their right name -- that the Bush administration is spreading about Social Security, none is as vile as the canard Bush repeated last Tuesday, when he said, 'African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the [Social Security] system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people. And that needs to be fixed.' That is an entirely phony assertion; it has been debunked by the Social Security Administration, by the Government Accountability Office and by other experts. Bush and those around him know that. For them to repeat what they know to be a blatant lie is despicable fear-mongering.

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Wow. The Strib is usually as dull as dishwater. Someone must have put something in the water coolers. Good for them.