I think western designs work actually very well in developing countries, such as south america and south east asia. Where they fail is in non-developing countries such as central africa, where the problems of war, crime, drugs, and corruption run so deep that technology is unable to solve any problem, just as giving a washing machine to a crack addict is not going to help him stay clean.
A good example is digging a well in the village to get water. But why isn't there a well in the first place ? Because in most of the case they're getting their water via water trucks from a corrupt government agency who's quite interested in making sure no well ever works for long, and the locals don't have access to the financial, technological and judiciary infrastructure to make long term investments and commitments worthwile. In other words the problem of the village is not the lack of the 'well technology' in the skill tree.
I read an article a while back about the success of handing out “iron fish” to people in villages. It’s literally a little fish-shaped hunk of iron that people keep in their cooking kettle that slowly leeches iron in their food and helps with lots of anemias. A key observation was that it was basically useless for anything else. It’s not valuable. It’s a small hunk of cutely shaped iron. Recipients largely used it as intended because there wasn’t anything else to do with it, really.
Contrast with another agency that passed out mosquito nets to hang over beds. Turns out they made good fishing seine, so most people either took their net to the nearest river to fish with it or sold it to someone else who wanted to.
I’m sure the people who got mosquito nets would’ve loved sleeping without being bit by mosquitos. A stable food supply was their more pressing issue though.[0] The humble iron fish addressed its problem by being good for one thing only.
[0] Seine fishing quickly devastated the local fish stocks. “Oops, sorry our gift is now causing you to starve.” A critical lesson here: ask the recipients of such a “gift” whether they actually want it and what they’ll use it for. They’re not you. Don’t assume they’ll use it the same way you do.
Maslow's hierarchy, though a flawed model, does offer some predictive power on the rational reasoning people turn mosquito nets into fishing nets.
You need food...basically now....a few times a day.
Mosquitos are a maybe once a day thing, and the diseases they might cause come with irregular frequency. If you can sleep with them biting you, you've satisfied the priority of Maslow for attending to Physiological needs before Safety.
I would bet that if the same villagers had access to an unlimited supply of these nets, once they had used them for every single conceivable method to feed themselves including agricultural uses, they'd inevitably end up covering beds at night.
Imagine an NGO with infinite cash started handing out free rooftop solar installations to anyone that wanted it in the US. The oil companies would lose their collective minds over the sudden drop in profits. You would instantly see legislative backlash to put a stop to it. Those in power spend a lot of time and energy making the status quo what it is and they don't like when it's threatened.
I don't see a point in imagining an impossible hypothetical. If we imagine a world with infinite resources a lot of problems as we know it would go away. It is precisely because we live in a complicated and imperfect world that we have problems, and we must solve those problems within that reality. Competing priorities between different parties (e.g., "oil companies") cannot be simply ignored if you want to actually discuss anything meaningful and not merely wishful/imaginary.
>Those in power spend a lot of time and energy making the status quo what it is and they don't like when it's threatened.
Kinda like how the sugar and fast food industry don't like that people are now indulging in Ozempic, or other weight loss drugs since they just decrease your appetite making people eat less.
Interesting method of thinking. I call most countries in Africa developing countries, but some of them aren't developing at all but instead are regressing and are in a worse state than before.
Our technophilia often blinds of from this, even in the US. Techno-optimism is basically a cult that says all our woes can be solved with engineering rather than social effort. Climate change, wealth inequality, etc will not be solved with technology. They will be solved with sweat effort and social change. To believe anything else is delusional.
That may be true to an extent, but at the same time technology should get a lot of credit for civilization improvements such as near extinction of slavery in the West once machinery became cheaper/more productive than manual labor.
In case of climate change, perhaps technology is not the complete solution. But again money talks, and if technology can result in availability of cheaper and more environmentally friendly inventions, it can help a great deal. Case in point, many new power plants across the world are built using solar/wind presumably because of lower cost, not out of some altruistic concern for the environment.
>but at the same time technology should get a lot of credit for civilization improvements such as near extinction of slavery in the West once machinery became cheaper/more productive than manual labor.
When people on this site talk about "tech", they don't mean something on labor saving machinery for humanity as most of the low hanging fruit there has been picked decades ago, but more on the spectrum of which new VC funded app can make the most lucrative exit, using the $CURRENT_DAY hype like blockchain or AI.
Sure, new and more advanced machinery is coming out, like ASML's stuff, but those ASSML steppers aren't saving people from hard labor, starvation or poverty, like the mining or agricultural machines for a century ago.
To be fair, for climate change a technological solution is probably the more practical one, since people are unlikely to go against their own interests for the greater good. Much easier to have renewable energy and electric cars and geoengineering than to try and encourage/force the entire world to change their lifestyle.
I can at least sympathize with the notion. Social revolutions and upheavals are always going to be unpleasant regardless of the means and ends and some people are simply content with the way things are.
> Social revolutions and upheavals are always going to be unpleasant
Removing the rot is always going to be painful for some (usually the current ruling and asset owning class). And almost everything rots with time. More food delivery start-ups aren't going to improve that.
Those who believe in technology (usually web stuff) being the miracle salvation are those who have it very good anyway and see no need to change but your poverty stricken people can't eat apps, but they can eat you on your way to work.
I always felt that was more or less a religion sold to engineers in order to get them to work on whatever meaningless tech product du jour was used to extract money from some VC or other. Some would say I'm a miserable cynic though.
I've beendownvoted into oblivion on this website for arguing with crypto pundits who were preaching here how much Bitcoin will save the poorest countries from poverty.
"Western" is somewhat of a biased term to limit nations to an in-group of rich, affluent, mostly culturally eurocentric/euroderived nations. If you don't fit all of the qualifiers, you're not in.
LATAM is missing out on the affluence (and, some would argue, a certain racial component), so they get excluded. Japan, SKorea, etc are also sometimes included or made adjacent for similar reasons.
No. It means the Western part of the Old World as opposed to the Near East, India, China, etc, plus the parts of the New World setted by that part of the Old World.
Modern day philanthropy is primarily self-serving and ego-driven more than it is actual altruism. A bunch of very wealthy people, largely divorced from reality, seeking accolades and affirmations that they are good. Some may have their heart in the right place, but time and time again, the results show a disconnect, and that being in such a privileged position does not automatically qualify someone of "knowing what's best" or that their ideal "greater good" is, well, actually good.
I'd like to have a catchy short-hand term for this phenomenon, so I can conveniently raise the point in conversation. Like "helicopter parenting", it's such a big factor in parts of society.
Philanthropy comes from philo and anthropos, so love of humanity, or thereabouts. A fun start would be looking up Greek and Latin words of a slightly more honest nature, things like hatred of humanity, love of self, love of control, reputation washing, fear of the mob, obsession with ego, obsession with public image, etc.
Modern day billionaire philanthropy is probably in most cases about maintaining one's range of options in the public and private sphere. Some of them may very well be petulant and needy enough to actually care what people think, and nurture a secret desire to be "loved", or at least respected, but presuming some of these billionaires are more intelligent and calculating than that, I can only guess that the desire in those cases is to hedge one's bets against any sort of public and/or political backlash to one's plans. Of course, some may very well sincerely believe that they're godlike entities who can solve humanity's problems, but I won't venture to attempt an analysis on the psyche of those people, if they do really exist.
Of course there's the tax-dodging element, but there's tons of ways for billionaires to dodge taxes, and only some of them deem it worth the effort to go down the route involving magazine spreads about their philanthropic largesse.
It's a way of absolving oneself publically from one's past villainies, real or perceived. Or, you could put it in more Nietzschean terms, things involving rebirth and phoenixes and Christ-figures, it could all get fairly poetical.
If anything is certain, it's that it's not about helping people, it's about the giver themselves. The issue and its sufferers are secondary at best - background details. It's the opposite of the old-fashioned Christian notion of charity to an almost caricatural degree.
People will talk about billionaire philanthropy as if it is charitable, generous, moral, and good, when in reality it's calculating, self-centered, life-negating, belittling, amoral, and even one could argue rejects ethics generally as naive and cloying. The name itself implies that it involves love directed toward humanity, when in reality it involves the desire to dominate and bully and no love, and humankind is a prop with the billionaire themselves centre-stage.
What to call that? I don't know. Misanthropic philanthropy made me chuckle, but it doesn't exactly name the new thing, rather it just pokes fun at it and highlights its Orwellian doublespeak nature. Pseudo-philanthropic ego-tripping / ego-washing? Obviously too wordy, but I feel that's at least some chunk of the essence of the thing.
A lot of western designs work very well in developing countries but they tend to be the same designs that work in developed countries too, if at the cheaper end of the market.
Like when I was in Tanzania, communications had been transformed by cell phones and smartphones but the same ones you can buy in the west. More $100 Androids not iPhones. Also a lot of transport is in Toyotas the same you buy in the west (maybe with less lux specs) etc
What doesn't work so well is making things for those other people that you wouldn't use yourself like the One Laptop per Child thing. I bet the people who made that wanted their own kids educated with good teachers, text books and writing, not with crappy laptops.
They wanted their kids to have a computer of any sort, which they already did. They remembered how much they themselves got out of an XT or Apple II, and how a OLPC is 500x better than those.
I got an XT when they were well obsolete and essentially free junk. Getting that thing on to BBS's with a modem that didn't even have mnp5 error correction and figuring out how to get anything out of it's other limitations set me up for life.
olpc is if anything too good. It's all complete and buttoned up and there are no problems to solve.
It's a useful tool to do a job not enough of them need doing. Python and spreadsheets are not going to feed those kids.
I think the reason the XT did so much for me was, 1 I lived in an environment where IT skills are useful and valuable. 2 I had other better computers to aspire to. I couldn't afford a good machine, but I could see them all around so I knew what they could do that mine could not, but I could also see how mine almost could, how it actually had all the same important essence, and I could do a version of all the same things by trading some compromise and some effort and time in place of money. For instance I found a software solution for the modems lack of error correction, and managed to make BBSing functional. And using BBSs in place of Compuserv and Prodigy.
It was very rewarding and fun to try to soup up that turd, because it was my turd, and it was infinitely soup-up-able with ISA slots and socketed cpu and empty FPU socket etc. It was exactly like working on a mini bike or a carr (back when cars were mechanical and could be worked on)
olpc is like, here's a thing that's already complete, and it's already the best thing around. There is nothing to hack, and nothing to aspire to to make you want to even think to try. And what it's good for as a tool, is a thing no one around you needs you to do.
I am in no way an expert on developmental aid, but one thing that has always bothered me about (my impression of) it is how the overall technological "ecosystem" and historical processes seem to be entirely ignored.
It's very much just, "here's this individual disconnected thing that is supposed to solve a problem" and not "our civilization has centuries of thought and development behind this thing, so here's how we got from there to here, and here are a few intermediary-but-now-outdated forms that illustrate progress." The approach is totally out of context and doesn't seem to be interested in setting up a sustainable tech ecosystem that can eventually support itself. It's just a one-off thing and it keeps the recipient dependent on the ecosystem where the single item came from.
Again, I'm not an expert at all, but historically Japan "solved" this problem by bringing in tons of foreign experts and paying them for their knowledge and training, with the result that Japan became an industrial power in less than a century. I have never seen a similar approach taken in modern development. Singapore, maybe?
To bolster their burgeoning watch-making indistry, the USSR imported a defunct American watch factory... and many of the employees. They were paid to stay for a set amount of time, were given the choice of staying indefinitely, and taught the Soviets how to make timepieces
Today the Russian company Raketa is one of only five companies in the world that can make a watch start to finish, including the hairspring, a critical component in all mechanical timepieces
> This is why it's so hard to design for cultures and contexts that you're not a part of. You don't even realize all the skewed perceptions you have about the objects surrounding you.
That's something all technology people need to keep in mind all the time, even in their "home" culture, which many seem to totally fail at. You really need to respect people who are different than you, and not just in some politicized identity politics sense.
IMHO, it seems very easy for technology people to create for themselves a weird subculture and lose sight of how things are outside that subculture, let alone something truly foreign like an undeveloped nation.
Very interesting topic but the “light beats” playing in the background made it hard to focus on what he is saying. I wish there were an option for turning off background music.
If you're okay with robot voice audiobook version you can grab the transcript and have it read aloud by your browser. I used Edge so it's "Read Aloud Selection" in right click. Not sure where it is in other browsers. https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=CGRtyxEpoGg
A good example is digging a well in the village to get water. But why isn't there a well in the first place ? Because in most of the case they're getting their water via water trucks from a corrupt government agency who's quite interested in making sure no well ever works for long, and the locals don't have access to the financial, technological and judiciary infrastructure to make long term investments and commitments worthwile. In other words the problem of the village is not the lack of the 'well technology' in the skill tree.