Population Again
By Kevin
When I was studying the Singapore population back in 2004-2005 as part of my 'Major Research Paper' (supposedly a Chinese High innovation as part of the Integrated Programme to make good use of the time otherwise used to prepare for O Levels), the total fertility rate of Singapore stood around 1.26. It was already pretty controversial that time because people were basically screaming about how our country has been below replacement fertility for many years and that the people were not reproducing themselves.
In the Population in Brief 2011 (pity I didn't have such a reference material during those days when I was working on the research), it seems that fertility in Singapore has fallen even further but it seem to have stopped being such a big deal as the government internalized the social message at large, 'don't bother us with this matter'. There's even a line that says, "We recognise that getting married and starting families are personal choices and decisions." And in a typical Singapore-style bossiness that cannot tolerate inaction or lack of response to something deemed unsocial, it went on, "The Government aims to create a pro- family environment, through a comprehensive set of measures, including the Baby Bonus cash gift and co-savings, tax reliefs and rebates, as well as child care subsidies."
Up, up, up more slowly now...
In the latest LSE100 module which I recently completed, we explored the question, 'Is Population Growth a good thing?'. I was thrown back into a world I was familiar with from research and study of Human Geography back in High School. The Demographic Transition Model, Pro- and anti-natal policies, the 'development as a contraception' argument and so on. It was both interesting and somewhat annoying that themes in the discipline hasn't quite changed much. I guess the discipline is in itself shaped by the themes so I can't expect too much. But to consider population growth over a longer period and look at its dynamics from the perspective of the development of the human civilization and forward is interesting especially when you add technology, resource constraints and the notion of ideas into play.
And of course, more dramatically, the world just crossed a new milestone of having 7 billion people in the world - I remembered that the 6 billion mark was crossed some time in late 1999; my Geography teacher used so say that she and her geography class got the chance to watch the countdown (or count-up?) to 6 billion. More so than ever, we're all just another tiny soul wandering around the increasing crowded surface of our planet.
Happiness & Money
By Kevin
Does money bring happiness? Apparently for some, it may bring more misery; and this may be the case for the ultra, mighty rich who are basically not such happiness-efficient consumers of material wealth (ie. they already have so much material wealth that their riches can't buy the marginal stuff they desire). This is the finding of a paper published late last year, The Heterogeneous Effects of Income Changes on Happiness.
While 98% of people get a bit more satisfaction out of life (but not a lot) when their incomes rise, the remaining 2% are known as "frustrated achievers" — more money only makes them more unhappy, according to a team led by Leonardo Becchetti of the University of Rome Tor Vergata in Italy. Studying data on UK households, the researchers found that 70% of the frustrated achievers are female, and divorce is more common among this group than among the rest of the population.
Which brings me to the interesting idea explored in a public lecture in LSE last month; two professors 'debate' on the validity of using happiness as a measure of social progress rather than the 'traditional' indicators of income-measurements and development figures (mortality, access to services, nutrition, etc).
Indeed, happiness might often be relative and too often depends on context and circumstances. Our method of asking people if they are happy is as good as trying to measure the wealth of economy by randomly selecting people on the streets and then noting the amount of cash in their wallets. Too much of data relating to happiness is being missed out in the way it is captured now, making it difficult for happiness to be a measure of social progress though ideally, it actually serves as a good benchmark.
The Microfinance Experience
By Kevin
This is a long overdue reflection of my experience with development work as well as Microfinance during my last academic session and the a short trip to Ghana in Summer 2011, as part of a community development brigade under the Global Brigades.
During my course on Microfinance (organized by The Student Initiative), I wrote an essay to conclude the course. It discusses the development of microfinance briefly and focused on the idea of expanding savings in the whole social enterprise of Microfinance. I covered the issue of financing of these enterprises and addressed the question of the future direction of the industry. It was interesting how this intellectual view connected with my personal experience on the ground when I went to Ghana.
Personal savings facilities did have a latent demand there. Previous experiences with micro-credit hasn't always been positive for the folks and they hope to reverse the financial equation and accumulate for investment rather than borrow to invest. These made sense to a certain extent: their proximity to poverty and sometimes subsistence lifestyle means that their access to money was limited; this made it difficult for them to repay loans when their investments pays them off in terms of crops and livestock that may not be readily liquidated (owing to price fluctuations in the market that may be in conflict with the repayment cycles). Accumulating savings and subsequently investing savings meant that there was less pressure trying to convert the non-monetary wealth back to money.
At Ekumfi-Ekotsi, where our brigade served, we designed a simple banking operation that the folks from the community can implement to accumulate savings to provide small, community-based loans as well as generate returns to finance community development projects. The focus was on savings and the incentives that these folks have for savings. We wanted to make the system simple for them to quickly see the benefits and save effectively. Our Microfinance Brigade even has a website set up on future recommendations for the brigades serving at the particular village. It included a report we've written to guide the future development of the fund. On the day before we left, there was 6 accounts set up with the fund and approximately 50 Cedis saved.
It was thus amazing that we later learnt that the number of savers went up to 200 when the next LSE brigade went down. They made it drastically easier for people to set up accounts by subsidizing the costs of passport-sized photographs required for account opening. And many more little workshops and marketing to promote the importance of savings. I attended the Global Brigades Student Leader Conference for Europe just last week and met a member of the brigade who was last serving at the community in late September - approximately 3 months after we left. The description of our projects progress was amazing; the folks at Ekotsi have almost internalized the idea of saving and using the fund as if that had been part of their lives all the while. There's now 350 savers and they garnered sufficient funds to start making loans.
I didn't get the chance to fully understand the current operations but the new savings products which I recommended did get implemented (way before the timeline I've laid down); as a matter of fact, the brigades had to move fast the execute ideas because there will be a period without any volunteers at the community and the committee of the operation will be pretty much managing it all on their own.
Perhaps we really did make an impact, with our ideas if not our work there. The model we created became the standard for Microfinance conducted by Global Brigades in Ghana. Granted, we adapted from the FUNDER model they came up with in Honduras and consequently, they are more receptive to our community-oriented, social benefits-driven model. It was still a fantastic success. Looking back, we're just a bunch of 9 foreign students in Ghana for 10 days after all.
Mundane Creativity
By Kevin
Who would have expected to fold his plug?
As businesses set out to look for the next big thing, there are plenty of stuff we already have that needs to be improved and would have a huge market out there.
For a full decade, laptop computers have been improved continuously, getting slimmer, with more processing power packed into them and lighter batteries invented to match the shrinking size of these machines - but alas, there was little improvements made to the power adapters. Beyond Apple's 'Magsafe' power adapter innovation and their attempts to shrink the size of the clunky component, the computing and engineering world appeared to have little interest in improving the peripherals of computing that were still unfriendly to users.
Which is why I'd applaud Min-Kyu Choi's three-pin plug design. Folding neatly from a standard 3-pin layout to a little slice no thicker than a MacBook Air was already quite a design feat. Even more amazing was the improved multi-plug system that makes great use of the wonderful folded design. It compacts the typical bulky design into the size of a single typical plug that we use today. This guy is a total genius.
And so is the 'A Liter of Light' project in the Philippines. The video demonstrates how a simple and elegant solution can make a huge difference to the lives of people.
Baring the occasional breakthrough that perhaps take years to be widely adopted and to start revolutionizing the economy, incremental innovations and even seemingly petty ones like latest version of Yosion's Apple Peel that turns your typical iPod Touch into a iPhone 4 are the staples that helps to keep the economy humming.
Washing Machine
By Kevin
Since I posted the entry about Joy of Stats documentary hosted by Hans Rosling, I've been watching quite a few of his videos on TED.com. Hans Rosling really exceeds all my expectations when it comes to presentations and talks. He gives such wonderful talks with so much passion and energy you cannot possibly doubt what he says. Here's his latest talk on TED.com about washing machines:
It's amazing how much thought he puts into his talks to engage his audience; the kind of computer graphics that presents what he wants to say, the props that he brings, the way he is able to relate his ideas through the props. He's such a great actor at the same time while speaking without much hesitation. And on to the content, I totally agree with his last point. Technologies that raise productivity back in homes have the amazing effect of being able to raise productivity further by freeing up time invested in education, in generating higher quality output.
And this is why being able to move up the technology ladder helps generate such a huge advantage and great returns. More importantly, this could partly explain sources of inequality, some sort of feedback from technology. Washing machines themselves don't help economies grow, but when combined with time freed for other productive activities, the economy could develop sufficiently for people to enjoy even higher standards of living.
Joy of Stats
By Kevin
Rosling's Charts
I was catching up on finishing my previous issues of The Economist before 2010 ends and I stumbled upon an article about Hans Rosling and his Gapminder Foundation. This Swede is really passionate about statistics and its presentation to the world. And I went on to discover that he came up with the Trendanalyzer software which Google took over and is now the Google Motion Chart.
Hans Rosling doesn't look like an exciting man on first impression; to rave about statistics and its presentation seem like a really odd thing for this professor of public health who is a physician by training. Yet he impresses people with the passion and enthusiasm he displays when he talks about development. It is the development statistics that are of particular interest to him; it is the way these numbers change or stay constant, correlate or indicates no relationship (though more often than not, they indicate false ones). You can watch his talks on TED.com and you'd discover that statistics is very much his starting point to drive home messages. And his grand message is really that if you can measure something, and you know about it, you can try and do something about it.
He presented a documentary on BBC, appropriately titled 'The Joy of Stats' where he talked about the uses of statistics and the powerful visualization tools in the real world and how it influences the lives of ordinary people.
Case study of family planning in Thailand
By Wei Seng
How to make family planning fun
The title of the video sure captures your imagination: How Mr Condom Made Thailand A Better Place. A talk by Mechai Viravaidya, Thailand's Mr Condom, uploaded onto TED.com recently details how Thailand fought high birth rates and population growth with family planning, by involving everyone in the community from the religious leaders down to schoolchildren, through no-holds-barred methods like sex education in schools and even seemingly inane events like condom blowing competitions.
This talk is a very entertaining and hilarious talk, sprinkled with slightly PG-rated jokes, but it is worth watching to learn of alternative ways to promote family planning other than state-directed heavy-handed initiatives such as the One Child Policy of China, which might have been justifiable based on certain grounds but was nevertheless rather draconian and too government-directed.
From the talk, one seems to have the impression that condoms are available everywhere, and that even little children seem to have contact with condoms. Then some might have doubts about these initiatives. Many Catholics do not believe in condoms because they believe children are a gift of God, while many conservatives feel that sex education or promotion of condoms encourages promiscuous behaviour and experimentation, which would wreck the institution of marriage. These certainly are valid concerns, but I do not believe that a problem goes away by burying one's head in the sand. It probably worked for Thailand because the majority of people are Buddhists, and the religion's stand is generally neutral / encouraging on use of contraceptives and family planning. And especially important in the fight against AIDS is the use of condoms. It would be hard to reduce AIDS transmission rates without promoting the use of condoms, as abstinence is a very hard virtue to promote and there is a need to protect the women who are exposed to these diseases as a result of their promiscuous husbands.
Correlation between infectious diseases and IQ?
By Wei Seng
Eliminate poverty and stop the blight of human potential!
In the Science and Technology column of The Economist, I saw an article that proposed an intriguing correlation between the occurence of infectious diseases in countries and the IQ of the people in those countries. Sounds like a pretty audacious correlation to make, but it seems like the research done by these scientists from the University of New Mexico (which is, by the way, in America and not Mexico) seems to bear this out.
One's IQ might be genetically influenced, but why does IQ vary across places, being on average higher in certain places and lower in others? And apparently IC seems to be "rising in recent decades". The hypothesis of the researchers assert that the occurence of infectious diseases affect IQ variation. In other words, "places that harbour a lot of parasites and pathogens... have their human caiptal eroded, child by child, from birth".
This sounds scary and damning, but the link is not exactly impossible. From newly born children to adult, the brain uses a huge proportion of the body's metabolic energy far exceeding its weight within the body, from 87% in a newborn to "about a quarter of the body's energy" even as an adult, when your brain weighs "a mere 2%" of your body weight. When parasites and pathogens (that cause infectious diseases) reside in the body, they can damage the body tissue, provoke immune system reactions and / or compete for resources such as nutrients from food consumed.
Statistically plotting infectious disease burden on life years lost against average IQ, the more developed countries with "relatively low levels of disease" have a higher average IQ and vice-versa. Singapore features prominently as the country with the highest average intelligence with relatively low infectious disease burden. "Correlation is not causation", certainly, and the researchers have considered some alternative causes for lower IQ but these seem to diminish in importance when measured vis-a-vis the consequences of disease.
The importance of this study? If further research validates this groundbreaking postulation, the onus upon developing countries to develop economically and improve healthcare becomes even greater as the consequent health problems from low levels of development damage the country's potential. These countries may be stuck in a vicious cycle, but then the onus is also upon the developed countries to provide aid and assistance to the developing countries to break out of this disease-potential trap. Indeed, as the writer valiantly suggests, it is time for policymakers to recognise that "one of the main aims of development" would be to eliminate disease, instead of doing so as "a desirable afterthought".
Modern Slavery – A Review
By Wei Seng
Not extinguished as you might think it is
I chanced upon the book Moden Slavery - The Secret World of 27 Million People by Kevin Bales, Zoe Trodd & Alex Kent Williamson while I was at Choa Chu Kang Library during a nights-out last week. As always interested in affairs of Third World development, I picked up the book to skim through. It is short and succint but packed with case studies and arguments. Slavery never occured to me as an issue that the Third World and even some More Economically Developed Countries (MEDCs) such as the America faces, but this book will tell you otherwise. Slavery, instead of being extinct and non-existent, is very much alive and hidden today, with an estimated 27 million slaves around the world.
Many of us in Singapore are hardly exposed to the concept of slavery because of our short human history but also because of the level of Singapore's economic development as well as law enforcement. But in our neighbourhood, slavery is very much still present, albeit hidden from public view. Slavery still afflicts many of the poorest countries in Africa, such as Mali and Burkina Faso, but it is also present even in some parts of countries that are more developed, including Thailand, India and America. And while the occurence of slavery very often occurs out of desperation due to poor economic conditions, that are many factors that can lead to enslavement and bondage (a term frequently used in the book, but not in a naughty way), such as natural disasters, racial & religious differences (e.g. the caste system in India) and civil war. And this slavery could occur in many forms as well... forced labour as well as forced prostitution.
I shall not go into too much detail but ask that you read this book if you wish to have some food for thought, but dont have much time. This book might be rather simple to digest in terms of amount of information, but you will be surprised (I wont say shocked, unlike what the blurb promises you) by what it tells you: that slavery can still take place in today's world. I must say that I have been very much sheltered from a lot of poverty and violence, living in Singapore. An individual might not be able to do much to free those enslaved, but to raise awareness to many of the ignorant about the prevalence of slavery today would be what one could do to help these unfortunate hidden souls.
For more information, you could visit BBC.com's Special Report or Anti-Slavery International's website.