An intellectual whirlwind of a week

In the throes of the existential angst which often accompanies grad school, it's easy to take for granted the incredible privileges of being a student in Cambridge. This week has been a whirlwind - in addition to working with Caltech-esque intensity to prepare to present my research on Wednesday, I also attended two lectures at Harvard by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and have been attending the inaugural Millenium Campus Conference this weekend which has included an astounding lineup of luminaries in the global poverty fight including Paul Farmer, John Wood, and Amy Smith.

The conference opened Friday with Henrietta Fore, the current administrator for USAID, followed by keynote speaker John Edwards. Given that Fore is the Bush Administration's voice for poverty alleviation, it's no surprise that her speech was by far the most underwhelming of the entire conference. Her speech possessed about as much verve and urgency as an address to the Westchester parent-teacher association, and nothing in her manner or the content of her speech betrayed any true empathy for the world's poor. Still, it was interesting to get a first-hand look at the administration in (in)action on an important issue.

I had never watched an entire speech by John Edwards until yesterday, and now it's hard for me to understand his populist appeal. Compared to the numerous passionate and well-reasoned voices which followed him, Edwards came off as mannered and equivocating. What passes for charm in politics feels to me more like barely-tolerable self-satisfaction, albeit with a high-wattage smile. He started off by spending several minutes bragging about being on the Colbert Report on Thursday (which was brilliant by the way) with an un-funny re-cap of the jokes he made on the show. I was feeling hopeful when he talked about his inspirational experiences in Rwanda and other poor nations and emphasized how unimaginable some of their circumstances are even to the relative poor of the United States. But right after implying that all Americans are still pretty well off compared to the world's desperately poor, he went right on to draw a comparison to the 37 million Americans who experience hunger. Although I sympathize with the plight of poor Americans, hunger is a word that means two very different things in America and in Africa.

Edward's one real point was that although our next President must be a "visionary leader" (whatever that means) to lead the fight against global poverty, a key task for us was to build the political will to tackle the problem among the general populace. Certainly a valid point. But in perhaps his worst equivocation, he decried farm subsidies for the pernicious force of oppression that they are ... and then went on to talk about his proposal for revising the subsidies to include only farmers making less than $250,000 per year. Even if his revised subsidies could be passed and would not be gamed by multinational agricultural firms, they still seem like little comfort to farmers in developing nations living on a dollar a day whom he so eloquently feigned empathy for only a few sentences before.

In contrast, Amy Smith was a revelation. One of the visionary innovators of our time, the understated MIT professor dazzled the audience with matter-of-fact stories of how she has brought simple, incredibly cheap inventions to people in developing nations all over the world, engaging local communities and inspiring new generations of students to take on the challenge of affordable design. A $3 corn shucker which increases efficiency by 7.45 times, a $1 charcoal-cake press that helps turn corn cobs into usable charcoal. These are the innovations that will bring people out of poverty.

Friday evening, Stanford economist Paul Romer surprised me with an astounding and radical new idea for development: "opt-in colonialism". His idea is to create city-states which can take in inhabitants from poorly-governed nations which are not governed democratically by the populace, but controlled instead by external democracies such as Norway. These islands of good governance can not only bring growth to regions stymied by corrupt institutions, but may help usurp power from brutal regimes without direct military intervention. It's a crazy idea, but if any economist has the clarity of vision to make it work, Paul Romer just might be it.

Saturday's session opened with Paul Farmer, founder of an incredible organization called Partners in Health which brings health care to thousands of people in countries like Haiti and Rwanda. Farmer spoke out with ardor and reprehension against the use of concepts like sustainability and scalability to deny care to the desperately needy. While the nonprofit community has come to embrace the idea of social entrepreneurship and sustainability through commercialization, Farmer asserts that people should not have to pay for basic socio-economic rights such as safe water, food, and medical care, and discards the notion that people might value vaccines or bed-nets more if they had to pay for them. Farmer called for NGOs to work with the public sector - while it's much more difficult to coordinate with local governments to rebuild and staff existing facilities, he argues that it's much more sustainable in the long. In economic terms, NGOs must strive to complement the public sector, not substitute for it.

The education keynote on Saturday was given by John Wood, a former Microsoft executive who quit his job after a trip to Nepal and founded an organization which builds schools and brings books to children around the world. Wood was brash and hilariously funny, but although his speech was well-practiced and polished, in contrast to Edwards he really seemed to mean every word of it, and he never seemed rehearsed, jaded, or disingenuous. What Wood and the rest of the speakers emphasized was a model of intervention which empowers local staff and local people to innovate and help themselves out of poverty.

In contrast, a more traditional model of activism which I have long been critical of is that in which expatriates see a problem, decide what *they* think is the right answer, and then go to a country to try to impose their own solutions without empathy or understanding for the culture or the real issue on the ground. I personally have always felt uneasy about criticizing this approach since most people still mean well and I myself have not yet taken any meaningful action. But still, sometimes I wonder whether organizations driven by feel-good intentions might do more harm than good.

Many people I know who have worked for nonprofits in development seem to be doing it for their own goals - to enlighten their own lives and experience the excitement of *feeling like* they're making a difference. But when satisfaction comes from our personal goals instead of being strictly aligned with making the biggest difference for the people we are trying to help, people's interests drift, their commitment wanes, and promises go unfulfilled, undermining the precious hope of the people we are supposed to help. A prime example of well-intentioned hypocrisy is the story of how John Wood began his quest to bring education to the developing world. He was trekking in Nepal on vacation from his hectic job at Microsoft, and he came upon a dilapidated school building teeming with bright-eyed children eager to learn, but with a library that had no books. Moved by the school's poverty of resources, he vowed that he would return with books for the village. "Many people have come through our village," said the school headmaster, "and many have promised to come back with books. But no one has ever done it."

Although it is nice to imagine a kind of selfish altruism - whereby we can help others by helingp ourselves - sweeping the world and bringing all of us together to solve global poverty, I believe that this kind of movement can only succeed if selfish altruism is laid on a foundation of true altruism. Self-interest can be harnessed with great benefit toward good, and I believe that ultimately what helps others does bring meaning and happiness to our own lives. But self-interest is also fickle, and the exhilaration of "making a difference" is fleeting. If we rely on self-interest alone, we will all inevitably bore of making a difference and seek new thrills and new challenges before the long-term mission of ending poverty can come close to being realized.

The final keynote speaker, Ira Magaziner, probably put it best by saying that the happiness and satisfaction of his staff is a far lesser priority than the mission of serving and helping those in need. Since all of the leaders who spoke at the conference seem to agree that effective intervention must empower the local people, must entail sustained, lifelong commitment, and must work with local institutions, I am instilled with the conviction that this is the approach I must take when I finally find the right opportunity to take action myself. In the meantime, perhaps the best I can do is learn, develop usable skills and expertise, and raise money for the people who are truly making a difference.

Finally, my favorite quote from the conference was one put up by Amy Smith, from activist-priest Daniel Berrigan:

“One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something, and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.” — Daniel Berrigan