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2008-11-28T10:22:02Z

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A former classmate asked me to explain what I was up to, and I wrote back:

The greatest problem in economics is valuing anything that doesn't
have a price. Nobody knows where to start. What is the Return on
Investment for a newborn baby? What is the business case for
destroying the world? Current financial practice is to discount
everything at some assumed interest rate. If you do that, you can't
ever invest in your grandchildren, or in particular donate to your
alma mater.

For those who regard the survival of their own family, their various
in-groups, their country, the species, the planet, as non-negotiable
imperatives, this question of setting a valuation doesn't arise. But
now we are outside the mainstream of economic, political, legal, and
every other kind of thought, which has completely accepted the total
bottom-line focus as the only imperative for corporations, and is
trying to do the same for real people. Well, so be it. We will be
laughed at, and then fought, and then we will win, as Gandhi told us.
(And then the others will claim that it was their idea all along. Eh.)

Anyway, children are fun, and fascinating to the inquiring mind. It
has been said that the proper study of mankind is man, but it's really
the study of children that has been moving us forward in the last
century or so since William James first lectured on educational
psychology, and more so after Jean Piaget took up serious research
into child development. All GUI software going back to the Apple Lisa
and Macintosh is a minor side effect of the Xerox Dynabook research
project to design computer software for children (Smalltalk), a
project that is now coming to fruition, and that promises to end
poverty.

Here is a bare outline of the work yet to be done.

We have the first-generation children's laptops, and design of the
second generation (target price $75) is under way. We have a usable
suite of Sugar software, including the Etoys version of Smalltalk, but
we have only scratched the surface of what is possible. Think of World
War I biplanes vs. any modern jet aircraft. In particular, we have
searchable, hyperlinked PDFs and other static electronic versions of
textbooks, but no textbooks redesigned to use other available software
throughout. There is plenty of prototype material in software such as
Macsyma/Maxima, Mathematica, Dr Geo, and Matlab to use in any such
design exercise, and some work using SciPy and other appropriate
Python libraries.

Schools need electricity and Internet connections in order to use the
laptops most effectively. Depending on weather, terrain, and other
factors, we can look at any renewable power source: solar, wind,
water, any kind of biomass, animal, or child power. In some places all
of the existing systems are problematic for technical or economic
reasons, and we are trying to invent further alternatives. I am
recruiting for a project to convert the Playpump playground
merry-go-round from a water pump to an electric generator. We believe
that such units could be placed in the poorest and most remote village
schools using microfinance, with loans to be paid back by selling
surplus electricity in the community.

WiMax wireless (IEEE 802.16) has a much greater range and bandwidth
than WiFi. Combined with point-to-point links from towns to villages,
WiMax can easily provide Internet for 90-95% of a country's
population. It costs about $10 per person to install complete systems,
with an expected life measured in decades. Pakistan was among the
first to order such a system installed nationwide. The relatively few
locations out of reach of such systems will need satellite dishes, and
in some countries new satellite operators willing to break the current
oligopoly pricing club.

The OLPC XO has immediate benefits in any developing nation. The
laptops are cheaper than textbooks, particularly when you think of
providing even a tiny fraction of the information on the Net locally.
School attendance is up in schools with XOs, and math and reading
scores are (anecdotally) showing improvements in some countries. This
is before we get to the real innovations in educational software and
the new classroom teaching and learning methods that they enable.

But we need research on program results and best practices, and in
particular we need to know how these educational opportunities will or
will not translate into better jobs for graduates, and the creation of
new companies able to hire many more graduates. This will depend on
the local business climate, corruption, regulation, infrastructure,
terms of trade, etc. That means that someone has to tackle teaching
the children how to get together around the world and start
sustainable international businesses together. That's the primary
Earth Treasury mission, but we tackle anything that gets in the way.

There are opportunities, and some data for e-commerce, outsourcing,
local IT services, and much more, but it has not been put together and
reduced to a plausible ROI and "business plan" that will tell
governments how they might afford the full program, and what
specifically to do to have the greatest chances for success. Global
aid programs need to be restructured to focus on these opportunities,
and away from the typical top-down development projects. We will of
course need to continue emergency food and disaster recovery aid, and
aid for building out and delivering health services, for as long as
emergencies and disasters and pandemics continue, but I would argue
that almost all other aid should be redirected to education, local
electricity generation, and Internet until we have all children
enrolled and connected. Except possibly for Myanmar and North Korea,
which aren't having any under the current regimes.

Then what? Well, if all goes well, education and jobs will deal with
all of the Millennium Development Goals, ending poverty, hunger,
treatable and preventable diseases, and creating a fair amount of
co-operation on political and social development. We will reach the
last and least of the low-wage nations, and have the opportunity to
bring them up to world standards for pay, working conditions, safety,
human rights, and the environment. At that point, the anti-immigration
debates will lose their economic focus, and have to rely on simple
intolerance.

So a lot of us need to get together to make sure that all goes as well
as possible. Then:

"We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still
can't cope with is therefore your own problem." Douglas Adams, The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

User:Mokurai/Coping Strategies - Revision history

Patrol: moved Anal bleaching 2/Coping Strategies to User:Mokurai/Coping Strategies over redirect: revert

Anal bleaching: moved User:Mokurai/Coping Strategies to Anal bleaching 2/Coping Strategies: Anal bleaching

Mokurai: New page