People have asked me things like “what were the big ‘ah-hah’s’?” Or, “any big take-aways?” As part of my reflections on the year, I wrote down some things which seem like “big learnings.” There were a lot of them so stay tuned for a few different posts about Politics, Empires, Infrastructure, Economics, Religion and Human Rights, Technology in Developing Countries, and some good Books. It will be interesting to look back on these later and see how many I still agree with. 🙂
I hope you enjoy!
Politics
Communism is dead. While some countries still claim to be communist (China, Vietnam, Cambodia) they have market economies, so it’s not clear what communism really means there. It seems to mean that they have a big, deep totalitarian government that is involved in all aspects of life.
The Khmer Rouge still runs Cambodia. It’s really hard to get rid of bad people.
Corruption is everywhere – it’s just a matter of degree. When the richest people are in government, you know the government is corrupt. When the cops demand bribes instead of enforcing laws, you know it’s bad.
Government really matters. When I was younger I used to ignore it and think it didn’t matter. I was wrong. Different kinds of governments can really make life easier or harder for people. Taxes are one thing, sure. So is corruption. But it’s different when people disappear and no one can say anything. People live with anxiety and fear in such places (Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa, Egypt). It’s not a nice feeling to have all the time.
Democracy is hard work. In Egypt a few people independently told me they don’t think Egyptians are ready for democracy, because they don’t know what it is and how to vote intelligently. Their recent democratic elections led to radical islamists coming in to power and trying to change the government to be religious and totalitarian. They said Egyptians should be educated in democracy before they have the freedom to vote. \\ In South Africa someone told me that South Africans don’t know what freedom means, and that’s why things are so broken there. Many people think it means “I get things for free” like free houses and free welfare. They don’t understand that it means that people can choose their own (economic) path, but they are accountable for their own actions.
A secular government is really, really different than a religious one. Religious governments use religious mantras to justify anything they wish to do – and because of this, religion makes the leaders too powerful. Secular governments seem to control fewer aspects of life, whereas religious ones want to control all aspects of life. This becaume clear when we visited Turkey: We expected it to be similar to Egypt or the middle east, but instead it was much more similar to the US or Western Europe, with a secular democracy – even though they are 99.8% muslim. Granted, they have their problems with President Erdogan seizing power in the press and the courts, and eroding the checks and balances, but because they have a notion of checks and balances, and the culture seems much more European as a result.
Western democracies seem to struggle over a central tension between equality and liberty. Equality, at its most basic, means everyone has the same thing. Liberty, at its most basic, means everyone may choose their own path. In some ways they are contradictory, and this may underlie a lot of political disagreement in the West.
Empires
China is taking over SE Asia. China seems to be in control of Vietnam, and Vietnam seems to be in control of Cambodia. They have already claimed Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and are rapidly expanding into many islands of the South China sea, including ones that used to belong to Vietnam. (Vietnam is not even complaining – perhaps they owe favors from when the Chinese armed the Vietnamese communists during the civil war.) Bhutan is afraid of China, and has allied with India to have some protection.
Chinese tourism is completely taking off – it’s huge. There is a lot of middle-class disposable income in China now and people are traveling more. Chinese are not interested in supporting local economies – they want familiarity and home comforts. So they bring their own tour companies, their own cooks and restaurants, their own chinese-run hotels, etc. The locals make little money from this arrangement. This may be a sign of China as an upcoming economic superpower that wants to bring Chinese culture throughout the world.
India is big, disorganized, but powerful. They have a lot of food, and lot of people – 1.4 Billion right now! That’s a lot of “human capital.”
Language reveals history. Why do we speak English in the US? Because the British conquered our land. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Kenya, and India also speak English because the British invaded those lands at one point and made people there learn English (and sometimes killed people who didn’t). Similarly, Brazilians and Uruguayan speak Portuguese because Portugal invaded them in the past and forced them to speak a new tongue, or die. Central and South Americans who speak Spanish do it because the Spaniards forced their ancestors to, or were Spaniards themselves.
I think the Spanish were the most brutal of the European conquerors. The Inquisition came to the Americas with the glory of God and proceeded to massacre millions of natives, stole their gold, their land, their food, and their history from them. They left the Spanish language behind though, and lots of churches. The British built their empire differently, using businesses and private capital to extend the empire (although the crown often chose to step in later). They were not always so nice either, for example in the opium wars the British navy attacked China in order to keep opium legal in China and keep British opium businesses alive – even though addiction was basically an epidemic there and the government really wanted to do the right thing for their people.
Genghis Khan, who I always knew as a brutal warlord, is celebrated as the hero and founder of Mongolia. He united the tribes in Mongolia, and then within 25 years he created an empire controlling half of Asia (it took Rome 350 years to get as big). In empire-building, expanding through fear seems to be faster than through influence.
Infrastructure
If a country can make enough food, they are OK. Everything else is secondary. (In part this is because having food requires having water.) In countries that were agriculturally rich, like Vietnam and India, people live with a certain ease and comfort, despite worries they may have about politics. People are worried about politics almost everywhere.
I used to think infrastructure was king of boring. Now that I see how many people live without things like water, toilets, electricity and internet, I appreciate it a lot more. It seemed to me that the priorities for infrastructure went something like this:
- Shelter and clothing.
- Food. If you have food, you are ok. If not, you may have a revolution.
- Water (need this to make food). If it’s not clean people survive but suffer. People with bad water will not revolt (they may be too weak to revolt).
- People. Friends, community.
- Jobs. People revolt over this too. We all need a purpose, what to contribute, and need money for the basics listed above. This is especially true in cities where people can’t live off the land (everything is imported into cities).
- Electricity
- Entertainment.
- Education. Low on the list because it really matters, but people are often sort of lazy and would rather watch TV than learn something useful.
- Internet. It’s still a novelty in the developing world.
When the power went off in Spain, I noticed that a modern city without electricity is quite similar to an East African village. Electricity brings light at night, a modern kitchen with things like refrigeration, time-saving devices like washer/dryers, and the internet. In rural Zimbabwe many people would have a solar panel for their cell phone and maybe a light bulb. It’s quite transformative.
Economics
Money is everywhere – it is almost like a global language. Everybody uses money, and everybody pretty much uses it in the same ways. Market economics have taken over even the few communist countries left.
The US Dollar is the king of currencies – everyone wants it and it works everywhere (some countries like Cambodia and Zimbabwe will even offer USD along with local currency in the ATM machines.)
English is “the language of trade,” as a Jordanian put it to me. It’s valuable to know English – more and better jobs are available.
In some countries money controls power. In other countries power controls money.
The central concept in modern economics is growth. This concept has enabled investment capital to give rise to startup companies, the stock markets, and the population explosion since the industrial revolution. Countries that prioritize growth are rewarded with foreign investment and trade.
Despite the global success of market economics, some older traditions still hold. In East Africa, most people measure wealth in cows. Dowries are paid in cows (and there are conversion rates for different kinds of cows to dollars). Cows have intrinsic value (milk, cheese, meat) and also can be moved to follow the changing landscapes. This has been important because weather changes demand migration. (Fun fact: the Maasai told us they own all the cows in the world – even the ones in California. Some day they will come claim them!)
Corporations are the second most powerful entities in the world, after governments. They both have the power to shape and change lots of people’s lives.
Capitalism, left unregulated, can lead to horrible outcomes such as the Atlantic slave trade. Slaves were brought to America because businesses were financing most of the European expansion and investors in Europe wanted larger profits. Free labor helps increase profits. So companies started importing lots of slaves. Africa was a big source because germs killed most of the American natives, and Africans already had an established trade of malaria-resistant slaves who survived in the tropics. This sort of thing happens because corporations’ only responsibility is to maximize profits, while human societies also value ethics and morals. The lesson is that capitalism needs some limits/regulation/balance or else some people can suffer horribly.
Religion and Human Rights
Religion is a really big organizing force all over the world. Nearly everyone seems to be religious. The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are all fairly similar, even though people fight over the details. Some religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism, are really different. Christianity and Islam, two “universal” religions (one god for everyone, everywhere) are competing, via proselytizing, to be the dominant religion in the world.
Lots of people mix old (often animistic) religions with newer ones: shinto + buddhism in Japan; Hinduism+old gods and spirit worship in India; Christianity and witch doctors in South Africa.
Some people, like my wife, are atheists – atheists I met either come from a liberal democratic foundation in which reason provides an ethical foundation and liberalism is the community, or from communist foundations where communism itself was viewed as the religion.
Hinduism and the caste system are alive and well in India. They support each other and they don’t seem to be going anywhere, because everyone seems to play along with the rules.
The UN has this concept that peace requires basic human rights to be fulfilled: food, clean water, jobs, education, community. When these things get disrupted, people will stop being peaceful.
People seem to be tribal everywhere. Sometimes this leads to racism. Racist governments are the worst because governments have the ability to make life horrible for certain people.
Women have few rights and little power in most of the world. They also do most of the work in most rural developing areas we visited (cook, clean, fetch water, birth and raise children, farming), and it was not uncommon to hear about husbands who were drunk or just lazy.
Human Rights, as a concept, is a liberal western invention from the enlightenment. But it’s helping the world be more peaceful, safer and healthier for a lot of people.
The Millennium Development Goals from the UN outline the basic needs everyone should have to enjoy a peaceful world. They are pretty awesome. Check them out if you haven’t.
Technology in Developing Countries
What people do with their phones
I asked people all over the developing world, what do you do with your phone? People everywhere use it to contact people. Phones are about people.
Every single person I spoke to mentioned Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram as the first thing they do with their phone. Facebook owns all 3! Why these apps? They work. They work off the grid, with crappy networks, on crappy phones, and they are super pleasant to use, even when the network is unreliable.  In some places (like parts of India) Facebook is the whole technology experience. People use the Facebook Business pages for business, the friends features to support their communities. Google doesn’t matter in these places – it is more of a convenience than a necessity, and not something people think of when they think “my phone.”
I asked people, do you use Google? “Oh, yes, uncle Google!” People may use search and they probably use YouTube if they can afford the bandwidth. But in some places Google Search seemed more like a novelty, like the truth really needed to come from a human being, preferably someone you knew (and in these places sometimes YouTube was preferred to Google Search, because there was a person delivering the answer). Maps is sometimes used if there is local data (traffic is reliable many places). Many other Google products (hangouts, photos) are basically non-functional on unreliable networks. Gmail is reliable, but email is not popular compared to messaging apps like WhatsApp.
Learning with tech
When people teach “technology,” they are teaching Windows Office: MS Word, Excel, and Power Point. (I assume they are somehow getting this for free, but I’m not sure.) They may have the internet, but not know how to use it for learning. For example, most technology educators I met did not know there’s free education online with things like Khan Academy, nor do people know about or use Google Apps for Education.
Handsets + Mobile Infrastructure
People still do a lot of voice and SMS, in part because old Nokia infrastructure exists and works in rural places. Good 4G infrastructure will unlock a lot of latent markets in which people currently often own 2 phones. (Heard in Indonesia: “This is my Nokia for calls and texts – it works everywhere – and this is my Instagram phone.”)
People do business with their phones everywhere. Sending money around is part of this, and even in southeast Africa where smartphones are rare, people exchange money with GSM codes on networks like Ecocash. Most communication there is phone/SMS but I can imagine Facebook may take over as they are doing in places like India.
The prices of internet varies widely. In Cambodia, it’s $1 / month for unlimited 4G. In Kenya the prices are equivalent to the USA, so no one can afford it. (People have satellite TV for $20 / month in Africa, though.)
People don’t know about Android, and that Google made that. The phone comes from the hardware manufacturer: people never say I have an Android phone, they say things like, I have this cheap Chinese phone… someday I want an iPhone because they are more reliable.
No one seems to be making the “Honda of cell phones,” i.e. something targeting consumers that is reliable and well designed, which “just works” and which doesn’t need to be replaced after 3 years. I think there’s probably a big opportunity here, if a company can get the runway needed (probably 7-10 years to become profitable).
Good Books
I learned a few interesting things from these books this year.Â
I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind three times this year. It’s amazing. If you enjoyed reading these recent posts, read this book.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is good too. A bit slow and academic, so skim it after the first chapter(s).
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, is also good. Read the beginning and ending, and skim the middle.
Also, my daughters are both writing books this year. Paloma’s is about the experiences of children she met around the world this year. Anika’s is a series of bedtime stories and poems about animals of the world. I can’t wait for them to be published!
