How to Change the World by Michael S. Roth, President, Wesleyan University. Roilo Golez notes Coursera

How to Change the World
by Michael S. Roth, President, Wesleyan University
WEEK 1
Introduction: Social Good and Tragedy of the Commons
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/7
Course has origins in Social Good Summit.
Actions that people can take in the world on some of the most pressing global challenges
Decided to create a Massive Open Online Course that Introduce students to some of the great players Provide basic information on these key themes
Active learning is something that professors do
We’ll talk about social goods:
non exclusive
goods that can’t be sold
can’t be privatized
goods that belong to us in common
We’ll talk about how those kind of values, or resources can be sustainably used, can be used with justice, can be put into the service of humanity than for the disservice of humanity
We have to think conceptually about what a non-exclusive good is.
We will each week have three sub themes:
What do we know?
Why should we care?
What can we do? As individuals or in groups
We will give factual and conceptual information
What is at stake in the issue, what is gripping for us
Garrett Hardin wrote an article decades ago called “Tragedy of the Commons” - identified a Game Theory about what happens when people are sharing a resource motivated by self-interest? What happens, he says, is a tragedy. Published article in 1968. For him the overriding issue was population growth. Whether the planet could sustain a certain number of people. We were in danger because of population growth, of exceeding the number of people that the planet could sustain. and he wondered whether there were mechanisms for controlling population growth that would be acceptable to people or whether there was an inexorable tragedy in the making. A disaster for people because of a tendency that could not be stopped.
“The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension of morality.” Garrett Hardin
So its not just about more food, about pollution, about fundamental extension of morality, people have to change in order to get out of the vise grips of this dilemma.
What is the dilemma we identify? Imagine a pastureland. everybody comes with his cow.We may destroy the resource that we are competing about. The competition for resources will destroy the
resources as long as there is no regulation on the amount of use of those resources. And Hardin says

resources as long as there is no regulation on the amount of use of those resources. And Hardin says this will require significant changes on how we regulate this ink order to avoid the tragedy
“If it is correct we can assume that men will control their individual fecundity so as to produce the optimum population. If the assumption is not correct, wended to reexamine our individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible.”
Hardin
We will through our freedoms create disaster.
The most dramatic resource we are destroying is the atmosphere by dumping carbon and other pollutants
“The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.”
William Foster Lloyd
It’s easier to go along with our self interest than to recognize a long term problem. “...natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial.”
Hardin
“The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.”
Hardin
There are only two possibilities to deal with the tragedy of the commons:
Private ownership
Some kind of private ownership
Tragedy of the commons: There is a conflict between short term individual interest and long term communal interest
Interview with Professor Moon: Let’s talk about the concept of social good, how its related tom private good, terms that have a long history in political theory and history.
Opens with the questioning Scorates’s Republic: on whether Justice is a private good for the powerful or whether it is a genuine social good
Hobbes: Fable of the bees - If everybody is pursuing his individual private interest, he will have an incentive to discover or learn what other people’s interests are, they can provide them with goods and serves that they will pay them for. Hobbes is focusing on the problem of security as a social good in a world where everybody is generally equal so the only way that you can protect yourself is through some kind of a social organization.
Genealogy of the idea of Social Good:
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/9
Inverview of Professor Moon:
Who would be the standard bearer for the communitarian view? It would be Rousseau who in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. Hobbes said private goods are inherently conflicting because of scarcity. If I want something and you want the same thing, we become enemies. Hobbes said that because we are rational, we prepare for the future and our needs are augmented by our rationality. We all have an inherent desire for what Hobbes calls glory. Status. In part 2 of Leviathan, Hobbes asked: Why do some social animals live together? Man whose consists on comparing himself with others can desire only that which is eminent. These social desires aren’t hard work. They are a function of the kind of world in which we live. We live in such kinds of social worlds which develop our desires. In those kinds of social world, theres not much of a common good, because if your interests are inherently antagonistic, there won’t be a common good between you and the other persons. But if you have desires that are compatible with the satisfaction of other people, then you can have a common good and you can organize a society. Honor can be drives of the society.
Stephen Pinker: Talked about the potential for overcoming violence. We have over away from violence. within domestic societies and at the world level.The results are political structures that secure order.So people don’t have to rely on self help for defense. We are moving away form the Hobbesian state of nature towards a state of civil order. In Hobbes case, there is a sense of conflict. We now pursue rationality. Hardin was talking about common property situations. For example the ocean fisheries. Fishers take as much as they can. so

their total yield exceeds the sustainable level. That’s the same dynamic that Hobbes thought characterize

their total yield exceeds the sustainable level. That’s the same dynamic that Hobbes thought characterize nature. Because of insecurity, people tend to strike first, To avoid this , people agreed to erect a form of authority that would limit our choices. You don’t discover the common good on your own. it has to be drilled into you by an outside authority, You need an authority with coercive powers to impose those rules with force.m It is in our private interest to follow the rules.
Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons.
The first common is the land itself. Hunters gatherers didn’t take possession of the land. That would be okay for as long as the land can support all the hunters gatherers. they will begin to over harvest. The solution to that is privatization. Here John Locke’s Treatise on government would apply: If we settle the land and go into agriculture, the land becomes more productive and we will be able to support a much larger population compared to treating the land as a commons. Every individual proprietor has an interest. By dividing the commons into private properties, you can increase productivity. And we will be better off than we were before.
From Locke’s perspective we don’t need a strong external authority because it is in our interest to preserve our land for the future. Prior to Hobbes, all philosophers thought that reason was the key to harmony. Hobbes turned that around and said that reason is sometimes the source of our disputes.
Hardin thought almost the same. The rational perspective would lead us to disaster. What was Hardin thinking about? What was the issue? He was thinking about the population. Growing at unsustainable rates. We should think about reproductive decisions. Affecting th carrying capacity of the planet. He fought that the solution would be to adopt some kind os an authority for population control like in China. A Hobbesian solution. Pass a law.
Hobbes saw human beings as learning how to live with one another. External authority which will be internalized becoming norms. We learn to restrain ourselves rather than cops doing it,
How can we be fee and live in a society with others? There are norms we have to conform to. You are free because you conform to the rules which are in your interest.
Critics of Hardin:
Eleanor Ostrom - won Nobel prize. She talked about all kids of arrangements where people can live together. Having a centralized system without the police. System can be self regulating. it will be in your self interest to conform to the rules, otherwise the rest would withdraw their cooperation. Idea of Social Capital. The areas with the low level of
human performance were those with Hobbesian rules. The strong Hobbesian government creates new problems
Hobbes (h
bz), Thomas 1588-1679.
English philosopher and political theorist best known for his book Leviathan (1651), inwhich he argues that the only way to secure civil society is through universalsubmission to the absolute authority of a sovereign.
Reciprocity and giving back to the commons
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/11
Reciprocity: In the Hardin-Hobbes world, you have the self-interested person wondering whether he wants reciprocity or not.
Ostrom: Reciprocity is there to store.
Reciprocity is part of what it is to be human.
Shift in many areas of public policy towards focusing on the incentives that providers are offered for engaging in certain kinds of behavior.We have these wonderful words like incentivize. Alternative to that is code of

in certain kinds of behavior.We have these wonderful words like incentivize. Alternative to that is code of conduct. Profession is tied to the moral good. My performance as lawyer is not.
measured by the returns I get, but by my conformity to a code of ethics . what do people count as part of their self interest and that would be part of their identity.
Core of individuality is constructed in relationships.
Wikipedia - cooperation can become one’s ethos (guiding beliefs).
Our intellectual property laws in this country have become way out of whack.Creating these strong property rights, they wall people from each other. The growth of culture is a function of the free flow of ideas. The idea of property laws is to protect people but when overdone, it can undercut the growth of knowledge.
The protection of the individual can be an impoverishment of both of the cultural and the individual.
Climate change, education, etc it’s part of our business.
Cap and trade system. Creates property rights.
Ostrom: It’s important that the actions of people are visible to each other. system of communal management and participation.
Need for traditions of trust. How do you ignite traditions of trust without creating a leviathan.
It’s important in this class: How do we promote social good. We are not asking people to subscribe to an ideology. But how to promote an enrichment of the commons.
People’s conceptions of their own good can be tied to the command good
The following are ingredients that can mitigate the “tragedy of the commons.” Trust
Reciprocity Social capital traditions
As a professional, you also work for the social good because you have incorporated the social good into your identity.
Roth, Wesleyan president: What we hope is for people in this class who are studying these large scale global challenges will begin to see how these challenges are relevant to them as citizens of different parts of the world, as activists trying to make a positive difference in the world not just for their own consumption but because they see themselves as in web in a world that faces extraordinarily dangerous consequences because of our pursuit of particular self interest or because of our pursuit of policies that lead to radical inequality. And one of the things we are trying to do in the class is really an experiment to encourage the students to think about very specific and small scale things they can do that would contribute to the social good. And to try to write briefly about that and what that might be, the kids of alliances they create, actions they create, if you will return something to the commons or replenish the social good to some extent. And the first thing we have to do is have some shared sense of what the facts are. we’re going to be talking about poverty next week - what do we know about poverty, what do economists tell us, whether some of the best appraisals of the issue in contemporary science. and the second part, and I guess this relates back to the notion of relationships is why you should care? If you are watching this class, chances are you are not suffering from exptrem poverty, you have good internet connection, so why should you care? And the third thing is what might you do that would be positive, that would give back to these commons.
Moon: That;s really interesting, one thing that social scientists mention In Picket, an odd title of this spirit level, that they nook at inequality and measures of social well being among rich countries, they begin with observations that have been confirmed over and over again, that measures of subjective well being go up quite quickly with income and after you’ve escaped poverty it really flattens out. And the same is also true at the national level as well among countries that are relatively rich, what;’s really remarkable is that a among countries that are relatively rich there is a very high correlation between equality and good social outcomes. They test this looking at OECD nations and they test this whiting the 50 states of the US, and they look at what percent of the population is in prison, how much inequality is there, what percent of the pollution commit suicide, and its remarkable over and over again, that equality is associated with better standing in society. Why should you care? Because equality leads to a better life. Living in an unequal society may give you a beer well being if you are at the top.

Roth: The wager of this class, by getting some information out there, by sharing strategies, dealing with these global challenges, we will have a sense of participation in the community, we will have a sense of mitigating some of the nefarious effects of inequality, of the depletion of the commons, of the perpetuation of unequal access to education, increasing awareness and giving people tools for action, of greeter wekll b wing and increased capacity to initiate change.
Moon: And more control over the conditions of our collective existence. Poltiics is often thought of as the struggle for power. Book Politics, Who Gets What, but really the political is where we can separate ourselves from what is going on in the society and see how we are interacting and producing outcomes that we don’t want and take that into consideration so that we can create things that we do want so that we can have control over our lives as individuals and that can only be done cooperatively.
The Tragedy of the Commons
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full 1. Garrett Hardin
+Author Affiliations
1. The author is professor of biology, University of California, Santa Barbara. This article is based on a presidential address presented before the meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Utah State University, Logan, 25 June 1968.
ABSTRACT
The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.
At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York (1) concluded that: "Both sides in the arms race are ...confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation."
I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical solution to the problem. An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.
In our day (though not in earlier times) technical solutions are always welcome. Because of previous failures in prophecy, it takes courage to assert that a desired technical solution is not possible. Wiesner and York exhibited this courage; publishing in a science journal, they insisted that the solution to the problem was not to be found in the natural sciences. They cautiously qualified their statement with the phrase, "It is our considered professional judgment... ." Whether they were right or not is not the concern of the present article. Rather, the concern here is with the important concept of a class of human problems which can be called "no technical solution problems," and, more specifically, with the identification and discussion of one of these.
It is easy to show that the class is not a null class. Recall the game of tick-tack-toe. Consider the problem, "How can I win the game of tick-tack-toe?" It is well known that I cannot, if I assume (in keeping with the conventions of game theory) that my opponent understands the game perfectly. Put another way, there is no "technical solution" to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to the word "win." I can hit my opponent over the head; or I can drug him; or I can falsify the records. Every way in which I "win" involves, in some sense, an abandonment of the game, as we intuitively understand it. (I can also, of course, openly
abandon the game--refuse to play it. This is what most adults do.)

abandon the game--refuse to play it. This is what most adults do.)

The class of "No technical solution problems" has members. My thesis is that the "population problem," as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem--technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe.
What Shall We Maximize?
Population, as Malthus said, naturally tends to grow "geometrically," or, as we would now say, exponentially. In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease. Is ours a finite world?
A fair defense can be put forward for the view that the world is infinite; or that we do not know that it is not. But, in terms of the practical problems that we must face in the next few generations with the foreseeable technology, it is clear that we will greatly increase human misery if we do not, during the immediate future, assume that the world available to the terrestrial human population is finite. "Space" is no escape (2).
A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed.) When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham's goal of "the greatest good for the greatest number" be realized?
No--for two reasons, each sufficient by itself. The first is a theoretical one. It is not mathematically possible to maximize for two (or more) variables at the same time. This was clearly stated by von Neumann and Morgenstern (3), but the principle is implicit in the theory of partial differential equations, dating back at least to D'Alembert (1717-1783).
The second reason springs directly from biological facts. To live, any organism must have a source of energy (for example, food). This energy is utilized for two purposes: mere maintenance and work. For man, maintenance of life requires about 1600 kilocalories a day ("maintenance calories"). Anything that he does over and above merely staying alive will be defined as work, and is supported by "work calories" which he takes in. Work calories are used not only for what we call work in common speech; they are also required for all forms of enjoyment, from swimming and automobile racing to playing music and writing poetry. If our goal is to maximize population it is obvious what we must do: We must make the work calories per person approach as close to zero as possible. No gourmet meals, no vacations, no sports, no music, no literature, no art. ... I think that everyone will grant, without argument or proof, that maximizing population does not maximize goods. Bentham's goal is impossible.
In reaching this conclusion I have made the usual assumption that it is the acquisition of energy that is the problem. The appearance of atomic energy has led some to question this assumption. However, given an infinite source of energy, population growth still produces an inescapable problem. The problem of the acquisition of energy is replaced by the problem of its dissipation, as J. H. Fremlin has so wittily shown (4). The arithmetic signs in the analysis are, as it were, reversed; but Bentham's goal is still unobtainable.
The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum. The difficulty of defining the optimum is enormous; so far as I know, no one has seriously tackled this problem. Reaching an acceptable and stable solution will surely require more than one generation of hard analytical work--and much persuasion.
We want the maximum good per person; but what is good? To one person it is wilderness, to another it is ski lodges for thousands. To one it is estuaries to nourish ducks for hunters to shoot; to another it is factory land. Comparing one good with another is, we usually say, impossible because goods are incommensurable. Incommensurables cannot be compared.

Theoretically this may be true; but in real life incommensurables are commensurable. Only a criterion of

Theoretically this may be true; but in real life incommensurables are commensurable. Only a criterion of judgment and a system of weighting are needed. In nature the criterion is survival. Is it better for a species to be small and hideable, or large and powerful? Natural selection commensurates the incommensurables. The compromise achieved depends on a natural weighting of the values of the variables.
Man must imitate this process. There is no doubt that in fact he already does, but unconsciously. It is when the hidden decisions are made explicit that the arguments begin. The problem for the years ahead is to work out an acceptable theory of weighting. Synergistic effects, nonlinear variation, and difficulties in discounting the future make the intellectual problem difficult, but not (in principle) insoluble.
Has any cultural group solved this practical problem at the present time, even on an intuitive level? One simple fact proves that none has: there is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero. Any people that has intuitively identified its optimum point will soon reach it, after which its growth rate becomes and remains zero.
Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum. However, by any reasonable standards, the most rapidly growing populations on earth today are (in general) the most miserable. This association (which need not be invariable) casts doubt on the optimistic assumption that the positive growth rate of a population is evidence that it has yet to reach its optimum.
We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly exorcize the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography. In economic affairs, The Wealth of Nations (1776) popularized the "invisible hand," the idea that an individual who "intends only his own gain," is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote . . . the public interest" (5). Adam Smith did not assert that this was invariably true, and perhaps neither did any of his followers. But he contributed to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society. If this assumption is correct it justifies the continuance of our present policy of laissez-faire in reproduction. If it is correct we can assume that men will control their individual fecundity so as to produce the optimum population. If the assumption is not correct, we need to reexamine our individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible.
Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons
The rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is to be found in a scenario first sketched in a little- known pamphlet (6) in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852). We may well call it "the tragedy of the commons," using the word "tragedy" as the philosopher Whitehead used it (7): "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things." He then goes on to say, "This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama."
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component.
1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.
2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular
decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of −1.

decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of −1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit--in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
Some would say that this is a platitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was learned thousands of years ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial (8). The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.
Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
A simple incident that occurred a few years ago in Leominster, Massachusetts, shows how perishable the knowledge is. During the Christmas shopping season the parking meters downtown were covered with plastic bags that bore tags reading: "Do not open until after Christmas. Free parking courtesy of the mayor and city council." In other words, facing the prospect of an increased demand for already scarce space. the city fathers reinstituted the system of the commons. (Cynically, we suspect that they gained more votes than they lost by this retrogressive act.)
In an approximate way, the logic of the commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate. But it is understood mostly only in special cases which are not sufficiently generalized. Even at this late date, cattlemen leasing national land on the western ranges demonstrate no more than an ambivalent understanding, in constantly pressuring federal authorities to increase the head count to the point where overgrazing produces erosion and weed- dominance. Likewise, the oceans of the world continue to suffer from the survival of the philosophy of the commons. Maritime nations still respond automatically to the shibboleth of the "freedom of the seas." Professing to believe in the "inexhaustible resources of the oceans," they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction (9).
The National Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all, without limit. The parks themselves are limited in extent--there is only one Yosemite Valley--whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the parks are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the parks as commons or they will be of no value to anyone.
What shall we do? We have several options. We might sell them off as private property. We might keep them as public property, but allocate the right to enter them. The allocation might be on the basis of wealth, by the use of an auction system. It might be on the basis of merit, as defined by some agreed-upon standards. It might be by lottery. Or it might be on a first-come, first-served basis, administered to long queues. These, I think, are all the reasonable possibilities. They are all objectionable. But we must choose--or acquiesce in the destruction of the commons that we call our National Parks.
Pollution
In a reverse way, the tragedy of the commons reappears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons, but of putting something in--sewage, or chemical, radioactive, and heat wastes into water; noxious and dangerous fumes into the air, and distracting and unpleasant advertising signs into the line of sight. The calculations of utility are much the same as before. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.
The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a
cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for

cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated. We have not progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution. The owner of a factory on the bank of a stream--whose property extends to the middle of the stream, often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural right to muddy the waters flowing past his door. The law, always behind the times, requires elaborate stitching and fitting to adapt it to this newly perceived aspect of the commons.
The pollution problem is a consequence of population. It did not much matter how a lonely American frontiersman disposed of his waste. "Flowing water purifies itself every 10 miles," my grandfather used to say, and the myth was near enough to the truth when he was a boy, for there were not too many people. But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.
How To Legislate Temperance?
Analysis of the pollution problem as a function of population density uncovers a not generally recognized principle of morality, namely: the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed (10). Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable. A hundred and fifty years ago a plainsman could kill an American bison, cut out only the tongue for his dinner, and discard the rest of the animal. He was not in any important sense being wasteful. Today, with only a few thousand bison left, we would be appalled at such behavior.
In passing, it is worth noting that the morality of an act cannot be determined from a photograph. One does not know whether a man killing an elephant or setting fire to the grassland is harming others until one knows the total system in which his act appears. "One picture is worth a thousand words," said an ancient Chinese; but it may take 10,000 words to validate it. It is as tempting to ecologists as it is to reformers in general to try to persuade others by way of the photographic shortcut. But the essense of an argument cannot be photographed: it must be presented rationally--in words.
That morality is system-sensitive escaped the attention of most codifiers of ethics in the past. "Thou shalt not . . ." is the form of traditional ethical directives which make no allowance for particular circumstances. The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly suited to governing a complex, crowded, changeable world. Our epicyclic solution is to augment statutory law with administrative law. Since it is practically impossible to spell out all the conditions under which it is safe to burn trash in the back yard or to run an automobile without smog-control, by law we delegate the details to bureaus. The result is administrative law, which is rightly feared for an ancient reason--Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?--"Who shall watch the watchers themselves?" John Adams said that we must have "a government of laws and not men." Bureau administrators, trying to evaluate the morality of acts in the total system, are singularly liable to corruption, producing a government by men, not laws.
Prohibition is easy to legislate (though not necessarily to enforce); but how do we legislate temperance? Experience indicates that it can be accomplished best through the mediation of administrative law. We limit possibilities unnecessarily if we suppose that the sentiment of Quis custodiet denies us the use of administrative law. We should rather retain the phrase as a perpetual reminder of fearful dangers we cannot avoid. The great challenge facing us now is to invent the corrective feedbacks that are needed to keep custodians honest. We must find ways to legitimate the needed authority of both the custodians and the corrective feedbacks.
Freedom To Breed Is Intolerable
The tragedy of the commons is involved in population problems in another way. In a world governed solely by the principle of "dog eat dog"--if indeed there ever was such a world--how many children a family had would not be a matter of public concern. Parents who bred too exuberantly would leave fewer descendants, not more, because they would be unable to care adequately for their children. David Lack and others have found that such a negative feedback demonstrably controls the fecundity of birds (11). But men are not birds, and

that such a negative feedback demonstrably controls the fecundity of birds (11). But men are not birds, and have not acted like them for millenniums, at least.
If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own "punishment" to the germ line--then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state (12), and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.
In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement (13)? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.
Unfortunately this is just the course of action that is being pursued by the United Nations. In late 1967, some 30 nations agreed to the following (14):" The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else."
It is painful to have to deny categorically the validity of this right; denying it, one feels as uncomfortable as a resident of Salem, Massachusetts, who denied the reality of witches in the 17th century. At the present time, in liberal quarters, something like a taboo acts to inhibit criticism of the United Nations. There is a feeling that the United Nations is "our last and best hope," that we shouldn't find fault with it; we shouldn't play into the hands of the archconservatives. However, let us not forget what Robert Louis Stevenson said: "The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy." If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, even though it is promoted by the United Nations. We should also join with Kingsley Davis (15) in attempting to get Planned Parenthood-World Population to see the error of its ways in embracing the same tragic ideal.
Conscience Is Self-Eliminating
It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience. Charles Galton Darwin made this point when he spoke on the centennial of the publication of his grandfather's great book. The argument is straightforward and Darwinian.
People vary. Confronted with appeals to limit breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. The difference will be accentuated, generation by generation.
In C. G. Darwin's words: "It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Homo progenitivus" (16).
The argument assumes that conscience or the desire for children (no matter which) is hereditary--but hereditary only in the most general formal sense. The result will be the same whether the attitude is transmitted through germ cells, or exosomatically, to use A. J. Lotka's term. (If one denies the latter possibility as well as the former, then what's the point of education?) The argument has here been stated in the context of the population problem, but it applies equally well to any instance in which society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good--by means of his conscience. To make such an appeal is to set up a selective system that works toward the elimination of conscience from the race.
Pathogenic Effects of Conscience
The long-term disadvantage of an appeal to conscience should be enough to condemn it; but has serious short-term disadvantages as well. If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons to desist "in the name of conscience," what are we saying to him? What does he hear? --not only at the moment but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he remembers not merely the words we used but also the
nonverbal communication cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he

nonverbal communication cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are contradictory: (i) (intended communication) "If you don't do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen"; (ii) (the unintended communication) "If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons."
Everyman then is caught in what Bateson has called a "double bind." Bateson and his co-workers have made a plausible case for viewing the double bind as an important causative factor in the genesis of schizophrenia (17). The double bind may not always be so damaging, but it always endangers the mental health of anyone to whom it is applied. "A bad conscience," said Nietzsche, "is a kind of illness."
To conjure up a conscience in others is tempting to anyone who wishes to extend his control beyond the legal limits. Leaders at the highest level succumb to this temptation. Has any President during the past generation failed to call on labor unions to moderate voluntarily their demands for higher wages, or to steel companies to honor voluntary guidelines on prices? I can recall none. The rhetoric used on such occasions is designed to produce feelings of guilt in noncooperators.
For centuries it was assumed without proof that guilt was a valuable, perhaps even an indispensable, ingredient of the civilized life. Now, in this post-Freudian world, we doubt it.
Paul Goodman speaks from the modern point of view when he says: "No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties" (18).
One does not have to be a professional psychiatrist to see the consequences of anxiety. We in the Western world are just emerging from a dreadful two-centuries-long Dark Ages of Eros that was sustained partly by prohibition laws, but perhaps more effectively by the anxiety-generating mechanism of education. Alex Comfort has told the story well in The Anxiety Makers (19); it is not a pretty one.
Since proof is difficult, we may even concede that the results of anxiety may sometimes, from certain points of view, be desirable. The larger question we should ask is whether, as a matter of policy, we should ever encourage the use of a technique the tendency (if not the intention) of which is psychologically pathogenic. We hear much talk these days of responsible parenthood; the coupled words are incorporated into the titles of some organizations devoted to birth control. Some people have proposed massive propaganda campaigns to instill responsibility into the nation's (or the world's) breeders. But what is the meaning of the word responsibility in this context? Is it not merely a synonym for the word conscience? When we use the word responsibility in the absence of substantial sanctions are we not trying to browbeat a free man in a commons into acting against his own interest? Responsibility is a verbal counterfeit for a substantial quid pro quo. It is an attempt to get something for nothing.
If the word responsibility is to be used at all, I suggest that it be in the sense Charles Frankel uses it (20). "Responsibility," says this philosopher, "is the product of definite social arrangements." Notice that Frankel calls for social arrangements--not propaganda.
Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed upon
The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort. Consider bank-robbing. The man who takes money from a bank acts as if the bank were a commons. How do we prevent such action? Certainly not by trying to control his behavior solely by a verbal appeal to his sense of responsibility. Rather than rely on propaganda we follow Frankel's lead and insist that a bank is not a commons; we seek the definite social arrangements that will keep it from becoming a commons. That we thereby infringe on the freedom of would-be robbers we neither deny nor regret.
The morality of bank-robbing is particularly easy to understand because we accept complete prohibition of this activity. We are willing to say "Thou shalt not rob banks," without providing for exceptions. But temperance also can be created by coercion. Taxing is a good coercive device. To keep downtown shoppers temperate in their use of parking space we introduce parking meters for short periods, and traffic fines for
longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long as he wants to; we need merely make it

longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long as he wants to; we need merely make it increasingly expensive for him to do so. Not prohibition, but carefully biased options are what we offer him. A Madison Avenue man might call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of the word coercion.
Coercion is a dirty word to most liberals now, but it need not forever be so. As with the four-letter words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over without apology or embarrassment. To many, the word coercion implies arbitrary decisions of distant and irresponsible bureaucrats; but this is not a necessary part of its meaning. The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.
To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it. Who enjoys taxes? We all grumble about them. But we accept compulsory taxes because we recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the conscienceless. We institute and (grumblingly) support taxes and other coercive devices to escape the horror of the commons.
An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance--that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of "like father, like son" implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust--but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.
It is one of the peculiarities of the warfare between reform and the status quo that it is thoughtlessly governed by a double standard. Whenever a reform measure is proposed it is often defeated when its opponents triumphantly discover a flaw in it. As Kingsley Davis has pointed out (21), worshippers of the status quo sometimes imply that no reform is possible without unanimous agreement, an implication contrary to historical fact. As nearly as I can make out, automatic rejection of proposed reforms is based on one of two unconscious assumptions: (i) that the status quo is perfect; or (ii) that the choice we face is between reform and no action; if the proposed reform is imperfect, we presumably should take no action at all, while we wait for a perfect proposal.
But we can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action. It also produces evils. Once we are aware that the status quo is action, we can then compare its discoverable advantages and disadvantages with the predicted advantages and disadvantages of the proposed reform, discounting as best we can for our lack of experience. On the basis of such a comparison, we can make a rational decision which will not involve the unworkable assumption that only perfect systems are tolerable.
Recognition of Necessity
Perhaps the simplest summary of this analysis of man's population problems is this: the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density. As the human population has increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after another.
First we abandoned the commons in food gathering, enclosing farm land and restricting pastures and hunting and fishing areas. These restrictions are still not complete throughout the world.
Somewhat later we saw that the commons as a place for waste disposal would also have to be abandoned. Restrictions on the disposal of domestic sewage are widely accepted in the Western world; we are still struggling to close the commons to pollution by automobiles, factories, insecticide sprayers, fertilizing operations, and atomic energy installations.
In a still more embryonic state is our recognition of the evils of the commons in matters of pleasure. There is almost no restriction on the propagation of sound waves in the public medium. The shopping public is
assaulted with mindless music, without its consent. Our government is paying out billions of dollars to create

assaulted with mindless music, without its consent. Our government is paying out billions of dollars to create supersonic transport which will disturb 50,000 people for every one person who is whisked from coast to coast 3 hours faster. Advertisers muddy the airwaves of radio and television and pollute the view of travelers. We are a long way from outlawing the commons in matters of pleasure. Is this because our Puritan inheritance makes us view pleasure as something of a sin, and pain (that is, the pollution of advertising) as the sign of virtue?
Every new enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody's personal liberty. Infringements made in the distant past are accepted because no contemporary complains of a loss. It is the newly proposed infringements that we vigorously oppose; cries of "rights" and "freedom" fill the air. But what does "freedom" mean? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals. I believe it was Hegel who said, "Freedom is the recognition of necessity."
The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.
The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. "Freedom is the recognition of necessity"--and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.
From legitimate communal regulation to pressures for exploitation
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/13
So Hardin is looking at this different mechanisms for controlling self interest so that this remorseless working of things doesn’t kick in. His major preoccupation was population growth in the late 60s.
But it really applies to a lot of other resources we have.
“The great challenge facing us now is to invent the corrective feedbacks that are needed to keep custodians honest.”
Garret Hardin
“We must find ways to legitimate the needed authority of both the custodians and the corrective feedbacks.” Hardin
How do we know that the authority is legitimate? That’s why there so much noise about this issue of climate change. How do I know your authority is legitimate? You were not elected as a scientist. etc. People do things to get out of regulations,. to get out of the remorseless working of things.
“The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.”
Hardin
Roth: This kind of coercion is now what social scientists, anthropologists see as the way to go. Obey authority when they feel it was mutually agreed upon.
“To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend that we enjoy it.”

“Who enjoys taxes? We all grumble about them. But we accept compulsory taxes because we recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the conscienceless.”
Hardin
Roth: We need authority. But it is authority that we need.
“We institute and (grumblingly) support taxes and other coercive devices to escape the horror of the commons.” Hardin
We accept the limitation of our freedom because we recognize the necessity of the law.
“But what does ‘freedom’ mean? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so.” Hardin
“Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin; once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals.” Hardin
“Freedom is the recognition of necessity.” Hegel
That notion that we are willing to and able to accept regulation when we think we have agreed upon it, there is a law of tradition about that in political philosophy. We can think back to the French philosopher just before the French Revolution, Jean Jacques Rousseau:
“Freedom is obedience to a law that you give yourself.”
Emmanuel Kant: “Freedom is conforming your will to universal law.”
When you take on coercive forces against your self interest, you escape this Tragedy of the Commons.
Ten years after Hardin came out with the article, many economists and commentator reviewed this Tragedy of the Commons. they found some groups that have managed quite well to regulate themselves, preserved their commons.
The most important is Eleanor Ostrom. Cites example of farmers who formed group and watched each
other to make sure no one takes more than their share.
Cooperation, taking on self limitation through cooperation has become a subject of enormous interest to people commenting on economics and climate change
Benkler: Many of us have assumed that everyone is guided by self interest.And always looking just for themselves, but actually cooperation speaks to a very powerful and natural tendency of a human being, a social tendency and a natural tendency. the tragedy of the Commons can be avoided by tapping into our natural interests in socializing, cooperating and finding solutions together.
READINGS:
Lewis Hyde, author of Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

Art, and Ownership
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23204
Mike Linksvayer, August 27th, 2010
Poet and scholar Lewis Hyde has been writing about the commons for over thirty years. His first book, The Gift (1983), is regarded as the modern classic on Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World–the 25th anniversary edition’s subtitle. His new book, Common as Air, directly addresses the cultural commons, and could hardly be more relevant to understanding at a deep level the work of Creative Commons.
I’ve taken this opportunity to ask the author a series of long-winded questions about the commons. Many thanks to Lewis Hyde for his forbearance in answering, and for the great inspiration he has given to many who support Creative Commons, and the commons writ large!
Your first book, The Gift, evinces great concern for the cultural commons, in some cases (e.g., commentary on science) very explicitly in language recognizable to current movements that share such concerns. You were probably writing The Gift at about the same time Richard Stallman was becoming what we’d now recognize as a free software activist. Having been a Berkman fellow for a number of years and writing about free software, Creative Commons, and related movements in Common as Air, you’ve obviously been aware of these movements for some time. When and how did your path first cross with one of these movements?
My book is dedicated to my late father, by profession a physicist with a specialty in optics. As the dedication says, it was he who first told me about “Dollond’s case,” an eighteenth-century patent dispute involving telescope lenses in which Lord Mansfield ruled that ownership of an idea belonged not to the person who kept his invention secret but to the person “who brought it forth for the benefit of mankind.”
The point being: for a long time I’ve been aware of the commons narrative in regard to ideas and for a long time I’ve thought of something as old as patent law as being among the methods we’ve devised for moving potentially private knowledge into the public sphere.
As for the more specific modern innovations in this line, I had a vague awareness for a long time but the fight over copyright term extension in the mid 1990s managed to focus my attention. I wrote an essay–“Created Commons”–arguing against such extension; I was co-signatory to one of the amicus briefs in the Supreme Court case, Eldred v. Ashcroft; and I was present on the day that Lessig argued for Eldred before the Court. I consequently watched with attention and admiration as Creative Commons came to life in the years following.
One sentence in particular in The Gift presages current free software and free culture practice: “A gift community puts certain constraints on its members, yes, but these constraints assure the freedom of the gift” (p 107). This sounds exactly like the copyleft mechanism of the GNU GPL–the requirement that an adaptation be distributed under terms offering the public the same freedoms offered by the source work. In Common as Air you argue that copyleft would be better described as copyduty, reflecting that rights come with responsibilities. Two questions concerning this. First, the GPL is often described as a key innovation in the history of free software–clearly it is, but I wonder if its typical description doesn’t seem a bit taken out of history, not cognizant of antecedents in gift cultures nor of the likelihood the precise mechanism would have been invented in a similar time frame had Stallman never become a free software activist? Second, the copyleft mechanism is known as ShareAlike in the Creative Commons license suite–how do you think this terminology comports
with your explanation of copyduty?

It is surely the case that the GPL has antecedents in gift cultures. As I explain in The Gift, one old ethic asks that gifts be “kept in motion”; they ought to be passed along in the same spirit with which they were received. Put another way, in a gift culture one is not supposed to capitalize on the generosity of others or of the community.
That said, such ethics belong to custom rather than law; the wit of the GPL was to give legal footing to the gift ethic of the software community. As for antecedents in that line, I note in Common as Air that I found one other example of a gift norm that got grounded in law: Pete Seeger and his friends secured the copyright on “We Shall Overcome,” then set up a trusteeship to donate the money earned to support “African-American music in the South.” That trusteeship has a “claim and release” structure not unlike the one built into the later GPL.
As for links between the Creative Commons license suite and my sense of copyduty, I’m not sure these need be limited to the “Share Alike” option. Many are the duties that arise from a person’s sense of both self and community. One might, for example, feel a duty to contribute to the public domain with no strings attached, in which case “copyduty” would be best expressed by the CC0 tool. That was Benjamin Franklin preferred mode, by the way. He believed that any claim to own his ideas and inventions could only lead to the kind of disputes that “sour one’s Temper and disturb one’s Quiet.” He never took a patent or registered a copyright.
Each of your three prose books concern keeping various aspects of society “lively”, through the circulation of gifts, transgressive art (Trickster Makes This World, 1997), and the cultural commons. Furthermore, the mechanisms required to maintain liveliness change with the overall environment (e.g., The Gift’s portrayal of usury as vice within a tribe, necessity for commerce with strangers) and can have the effect of changing or destroying a settled order (as primarily told through myth in Trickster). I don’t get a sense from Common as Air of the trajectory of the cultural commons in these dimensions–something to feel loss over (such as perhaps close knit tribal groups and pre-enclosure land commons) but never to be dominant again or something ascendant, and if the latter, something that will be digested by the current cultural order, or something that will replace the current order?
The question calls for a bit of soothsaying or prophecy and that makes me think of a remark of Foucault’s cited at the end of Trickster: “I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.” Are the cultural commons doomed to enclosure, or will they thrive and therefore alter (or replace) the current landscape? Hard to say! What I’ve tried to do in the book is describe, as clearly as I can, the cultural tensions we now live with, believing that clarity is the precondition of action, however action itself eventually plays out.
That said, for a thoughtful survey of how the commons, cultural and otherwise, might thrive inside of, or along with, with current conditions I recommend Peter Barnes’s book, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. One of Barnes’s points is that our debates about the future often imagine only two actors: the government and private business. Barnes suggests a third set, common property trusts (as, for example, the kind of land trusts devised by the Nature Conservancy). There is much to say about common property trusts but for now the point is simply that we already have a mix of cultural modes and should continue to have them going forward with, I hope, the commons recognized and strengthened.
You emphasize in Common as Air that maintaining a commons requires regular “beating of bounds”– for pre-enclosure land commons this involved destroying private encroachments such as fences and cultivation, often with a merry-making and somewhat extralegal components. Preserving the cultural commons necessarily takes a different kind of bounds beating–proprietary bits can’t be “destroyed”, nor must they (patents on math, genes, and other discovered as opposed to invented things, which you dub the third enclosure, might be an exception, as they do fence off areas from the commons). I can imagine at least three different cultural commons bounds beating activities: (1) Building up and expanding the bounds of the cultural commons, sometimes (perhaps increasingly) out-competing proprietary culture (Wikipedia and free software running the internet infrastructure being the obvious examples). This is obviously the strategy of Creative Commons, the free software movement, and similar–and a truly wonderful thing in that it relies entirely on construction rather than destruction. (2) Pushing back when the commons is threatened, e.g., fighting diminution of fair use and other
exceptions and limitations, something which groups like the EFF do with some success. (3) Pretending to ignore the current order altogether (except when thumbing one’s nose at it), i.e.,

Pretending to ignore the current order altogether (except when thumbing one’s nose at it), i.e., unauthorized sharing, especially the self-conscious pirate movement. I am a little surprised Common as Air does not address the third, given it is the clearly extralegal and putatively destructive option–at least superficially most like beating the bounds of a land commons. Surprised but not upset–I suspect that unauthorized use competes with building of voluntary commons, serving as a marketing and price discrimination mechanism for proprietary culture. What is your take on each of these three as bounds beating for preserving the cultural commons, and are there others I’m missing?
You offer a good summary of ways to enlarge and protect a cultural commons. I don’t have much to add except to expand on your third category a bit. It isn’t entirely true that Common as Air avoids addressing the piracy / unauthorized use option. After all, there’s a whole chapter called “Benjamin Franklin, Founding Pirate”! When Franklin ran away from his Boston printing apprenticeship, he broke the law and, in a sense, “stole” the craft knowledge that his brother had been passing on. More to the point, when Franklin was stationed in France after the Revolution, he encouraged British artisans to ignore their country’s anti- emigration laws and bring both machinery and know-how to America–clear acts of piracy from the British point of view.
Elsewhere in the book I discuss the fact that, in the eighteenth-century, Scottish “piracy” of books that London booksellers thought they owned outright triggered the legal battles that arose around the first copyright laws. It took about fifty years to sort that out at the end of which it became clear that the Scottish booksellers were not pirates at all; the London booksellers, rather, were monopolists hoping to fence off the public domain. Here as elsewhere the charge of “piracy” was in fact a harbinger of an enlarging commons.
In Trickster (p. 130) you say that among ways of acquiring things (make, buy, receive, steal, find) the last is the odd one out, for only it is accidental. However, for anyone who lives much of their life on the net, “acquisition” of intangible goods through “finding” is natural, intentional, and perhaps even dominant. In both Trickster andCommon as Air (p. 202) you tell the story of a baby Krishna–”who when asked by his mother if he has stolen butter from the pantry, answers with a question of his own: ‘How could I steal? Doesn’t everything in the house belong to us?’” It strikes me that so-called digital natives, culture, and the net are akin to the baby Krisha, butter in the pantry, and the Krishna household, respectively–”How could finding and using any culture on the net be stealing? Doesn’t all culture belong to us in common?” It seems that to the extent there is a vibrant voluntary cultural commons to draw from, the tension between “finding” and “stealing” is obviated. Further, I wonder if “finding” is not the means by which “receiving” scales–gift-giving and -receiving via mechanisms like Creative Commons licenses tend to happen asynchronously, globally, and often with no further relationship between the parties–all in contrast with traditional gift cultures. Thoughts on the sanity (or perhaps mere inanity) of these extrapolations?
You touch on what I think of as the link between the book on gift exchange to the one on trickster figures: the Greek word hermaion means “a gift of Hermes” and is usually translated as “lucky find” or “windfall.” It is the gift that comes out of nowhere; it is an odd sort of gift, then, carrying with it none of the social obligations often associated with gift exchange.
There is a hidden problem in the gift book: much gift exchange takes place is communities with a strong sense of in-group and out-group. Gift giving may be a wonderful thing, but what if you happen to be in the out-group? What if all the scientists are men and they don’t share their data with the women? In the Greek stories, Hermes is potentially in the out-group (an illegitimate child, etc.) and he begins his relationship to the gods by stealing Apollo’s cattle (pirate!).
Well, there’s much to say about all of this–it’s all in those two books. Here let me just say that digital copying and the internet have created a kind of neo-Hermetic space in which many things “happen” outside of any domesticating or ethicizing container. The rules are not clear. Then we get these polar camps: amateur anarchists on the one side, who happily believe we need no rules, and old guard “intellectual property” purists madly trying to enforce and sharpen the rules that worked so well back in 1965. What Creative Commons and others are doing is trying to enlarge the middle ground.
The basic trope–or mischief, as you put it–of Common as Air is a comparative study, a method far too little used, in particular with respect to copyright. Your points of comparison (among many others

little used, in particular with respect to copyright. Your points of comparison (among many others possible: you mention “children in China”, and “during the Protestant Reformation” as examples) are the 1700s, primarily in the core areas of the United States and colonies that formed it, and current claims about cultural ownership. The critique of current copyright that falls out of such a comparison will be familiar to many readers involved with Creative Commons. However, you tell another story as well concerning changing attitudes not just about cultural ownership, but about culture, and public life in general, across the 1700s and 1800s–could you say a bit about that arc, and perhaps what current cultivators of the cultural commons might learn from it?
The main thing I might add, not fully rehearsed in the book, is the point that Neil Netanel makes in a Yale Law Journalessay, “Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society.” Put simply, in the eighteenth century, at least, if you wanted a civil society that could stand free of the government, the aristocracy, and the church, then you would welcome the rise of an “intellectual property” market. Independent authors, publishing houses, newspapers: all these appear as a print market arises. And right now, of course, we see many of them struggling as that market is undermined.
The Washington Post just published a fine account of the pervasive post-9/11 secret intelligence establishment: who will have the money (and therefore the time and resources) to do that kind of journalism if newspapers like the Post can find no business model fitted to the digital future? Here again we need more thoughtful work in the thinly populated space between the amateur anarchists and the old guard IP purists.
I should leave well enough alone, as you earlier answered that Creative Commons and others are trying to enlarge the (thinly populated as yet) middle ground. That is positioning we like. However, (1) I had in mindanother shift occurring across the 1700s and 1800s–very coarsely, from the conception of great people as building on the work of others, with concomitant responsibility to society at large, to the conception of great people as singletons, with no responsibility but self-aggrandizement. In Common as Air you wonderfully note this shift in the changing public narrative about Ben Franklin during and after his life. (2) Does not your answer “money (and therefore the time and resources)” privilege the default argument of “old guard IP purists”? Though business and money are crucial, time and resources may flow from non-pecuniary sources–”cognitive surplus” is a newfangled term for one such source; you’ve described many others. Learning how to fully leverage such sources may be just as important to society as new “business models”–and would seem to be a major determinant of how big of a role the cultural commons has to play in this world. To wrap up, I wonder if you have thoughts on any causal relationships in either direction between popular conceptions of how innovation occurs (by accumulation of knowledge and widespread collaboration, or singularly great and self-aggrandizing individuals) and how innovation is pursued (with or without sharing) and the implications of such?
You are right that I answered in terms of “money” and “business” and you offer one of the useful ways to widen my response–to include all the non-monetary ways to tap time and resources.
I am obviously someone who cares about gift-exchange and sharing in the creation of knowledge and culture but I am also a bit of a contrarian and thus find that sometimes I want to underline the complications that necessarily arise around gift-exchange in our current situation.
In Common as Air I devote some space to the publicly financed part of the human genome project. It makes a good example of an enterprise undertaken in a non-commercial spirit. At the same time, in the background one needs to recognize that funding came from the public purse (in the U.S.) and private philanthropy (the Wellcome Trust in England). Behind each of these lies “money” and “business” (a pharmaceutical empire behind Wellcome, for example).
That said, the Internet has produced modes of production we could not have imagined 25 years ago. Yochai Benkler seems to me to be doing some of the best work on tracking these and suggesting future possibilities. We should keep ourselves open to surprise.
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The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest Yochai Benkler
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23204

WEEK 2
Extreme Poverty
Prof. Michael Roth
President, Wesleyan University
Introduction
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/21
The relationship of poverty to philanthropy, foreign aid, how do we mitigate the effects of extreme poverty. For some people, that is not enough. They are talking of eradicating poverty.
Clip form Social Good Summit. Clip from President of the World Bank, Dr. Jim Yong Kim.
The problem of extreme poverty is closely tied to the problem of inequality. Extreme poverty is more glaring for those who are not living in it. As inequality grows, as it has over the last 200 years, and in an extreme way in the last decades, the persistence of extreme poverty becomes morally reprehensible , economically poisonous, and politically unacceptable.
In the US, occupy Wall Street, resulting from the outrage over the accumulation of wealth by a fraction of the population while while even greater number of people fall into poverty.
Inequality is growing ion the developed world in a significant way in the recent decades. The inequality between the developed world and the developing world has become more obviously persistent a problem.
These are cycles of deprivations we are dealing with. there is the shcol of finding [eople that are living in conditions that are morally reprehensible, who are living stunted lives because of disease and they lack access to basic material conditions, lives that continue a cycle of lack of development.
The persistence of poverty is the cutting off of potentials in the world. There are people who are dying too young, who have no access to education.
“The persistence of poverty is also the robbing of human potential. Poverty is not joust a lack of money - it is not having the capability to realise one’s full potential as a human being.” Amartya Sen
It’s contagious. Because we don’t have the benefit of alive fully lived. Same with a person whose life is full of suffering because of poverty.
Even though there have been important points of progress in the last decades. Characteristics of poverty: unemployment, hopelessness, little economic growth. Definition of poverty, per the world bank: Living on less than a $1.25 a day.
21% of the world’s population is extremely poor.
75% of the world’s extremely poor live in South Asia and Africa. About 3/4 of the poor live in rural areas.
Their important problems are:

Sanitation

Sanitation
Clean water
Access to decent transportation
Access to markets. Creation of markets is important to us in this course. Without access to markets, you don’t have access to economic development. Access for things to allow economic growth, not just for things to reduce suffering.,
Interview Mike Nelson, Assistant Professor of Government, Wesleyan University
Most of the poor live in middle income countries increasingly.
The top three countries where most of the poor live are in: China
India Nigeria
Deep Poverty line in the US is around $8.50 per day per person. if we consider $2 per day, around 1.5 million may be having that experience in the US. But in the US, it may be transitional while it is permanent in other countries.
Why should non-poor people pay attention to this problem? There’s a world view that those who are better off have a moral responsibility. This animates discourse on the concept of aid. But there;s a world view to take care of our won community, that’s it may be easier for people to donate to research on cancer than to malaria.
Internet helping in making people more connected to the other side of the world and see and feel their suffering.
Prof. Nelson’s experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana. There is supposed to be a connection between wealth and happiness but he saw instances of happiness without wealth. he worked on water and sanitation. Well and latrines. Education: incentives aren’t aligned to bringing good teachers to the affected communities. It’s been a hard slow growth for them.
Varieties of Poverty and Development
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/23
Contnue interview of Prof. Nelson.
Ghana: Improvements due to discovery of oil in 2008, sustained economic growth:
Better institutions
Functioning democracy, more responsive Rising middle class in the cities Campaign issue was education
Role of government. What is the connection between prosperity and decent government?
Good institutions can provide underpinnings for development in many countries
Governments may not necessarily have the same interests. Aid may be used for patronage politics. Aid is as much problem as resource curse. Aid can as bad as an oil curse. Aid can be an incentive for corruption. But we can also see governments becoming more responsive.
What are some of the factors that move a government from that track of corruption to a more responsive one? it’s hard to make external actors have an impact on governments in that area.
The World Bank takes the position that sustainable development means inclusive development meaning
democracy and participation. is there as an example that shows that transitions can happen in a positive direction? Developmemt fosters middle class and that starts a virtuous circle.

direction? Developmemt fosters middle class and that starts a virtuous circle.

Book: Aid on the Edge of Chaos. Author looks at fine complexity to the world of aid. Example of agricultural development in Bali. Some of what we need to consider is that we need to really pay attention to local knowledge and we don’t do that, don’t pay attention to local systems that have developed on their own, we can actually disrupt systems that work. what is better is to expand the space, for the system,s to continue to evolve.
Must determine what programs work, like using mosquito nets.
The students who attend your class, are they mostly interested in economics or in politics? one are interested in poverty overall Link their concerns to various things like poaching, climate change.. We can’t separate the economics from politics, from environmental concerns, social concerns, HIV, AIDS, contraception,
Roth: We have seen in the last 50 years pretty significant reduction in poverty. World Bank target reducing poverty in the next 10-25 years. How optimistic are you about these targets?
I am optimistic. I know the World Bank targeting eradicating extreme poverty by 2030. Rather ambitious. I know we have the millennium development goals by 2015. We’re not meeting those goals but there has been progress. I am sceptical about completely eliminating poverty. We are talking not just of aid but about the global economy. Whether China will continue importing raw materials from Africa. Whether Africa will stop exporting raw material and sited process them for more value added.
Roth: Education is part of the dynamics of addressing poverty. Any suggestions on how students can get involved?
Facility. We should find ways to facilitate economic growth. We should think about not only how to give aid but also about policies and behaviour that begin at home. The role that America’s trade policies have. Think about the economic potential of developing countries. role on how to solve problem of climate change. If we are thinking of new institutions, we should have a good reason. One problem is that there are too many people doing this. Ethiopia’s ministry of health - problem is that half their time is spent talking to donors. Fragmented aid system, with lots of people give small aid.
If you are going to give, there is a book on Reinventing Philanthropy. One of his subjects is about the do gooder and the do bester. the do gooder is for personal satisfaction. The do besters are more focused on outcomes. They want to know where they can make the greatest impact. Often it’s in public health and education.
Listening to the poor to find out what works
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture
Kennedy Odede of Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO), social entrepreneur learning from the community
Nelson: We must listen to what they think are their needs. One of the keys to their success, have their ears on the ground, understand what will work in that context. Expanding to other spheres. Providing clean water. Health facilities.. make sure it’s something sustainable. he learned a pst method of providing aid did not work. Like they drilled bore holes without consulting the community. People didn’t use them cause they didn’t know how. You have to have local ownership of concepts.
To include local knowledge in the planning of projects. Without doing that, projects become unsustainable. He formed committees that last. After ten years, the committees still existed and they were discussing a new piped water system. Those little institutions can play a big role.
Roth: More successful when there’s inclusion and its owned by the people who will be responsible for
this economic development.
Local knowledge can generate all sorts of unforeseen dynamics

Local knowledge can generate all sorts of unforeseen dynamics

Jan Eliasson, Deputy Secretary General, UN - talked about toilets in the Socials goods Summit opened with peace, development and human rights
water is development, is human rights, is peace
this glass of water is a luxury, a dream for 768 million people around the world
2.5 billion people don’t have sanitation or toilets
1.1 b practice open defecation
2,000 children under age of 5 dying every day , diarrhoea, dysentery, dehydration, cholera
We’d like to focus on this campaign on sanitation
if we do sanitation right, we will have great progress on extreme poverty, child mortality, maternal health, general equality, education. it has a tremendous multiplication effect. Its the most lagging.
60% of the people will live in the cities in the next 5 years. they will create slums, no infrastructure, no sanitation facilities
80% of water form industries is not clean
In Darfur, dead animals thrown into wells, water is a reason for conflict or a reason for cooperation. We have to develop methods of sharing our waters and making sure we are not causing conflict about water. Problem with dam in Ethiopia that would have an effect on the water for agriculture in Egypt
Very important for human dignity, for peace
Please help us remove this taboo about toilet and sanitation
By 2030 we should finish extreme poverty in the world
Roth:
40% of extreme poor are illiterate, they have trouble communicating except orally, will restrict their access to market and trade, compared to 16% generally illiterate worldwide
17% of children under 5 in developing countries are malnourished
1.8 million die every year of diseases linked to diarrhoea, 90% under 5 years old and brat majority of deaths preventable.
We know how to prevent these diseases but our knowledge is not translated into action
we know how to solve these problems but we don’t know how to connect with those places that suffer the most
in 2010 in Asia Pacific, around 12.5% lived in extreme poverty; less than 1% in Europe and Central Asia; 5.5% in Latin America and Caribbean; MENA 2.5%; 31% in South Asia; 48/5% in sub Saharan Africa.L:icing on less than $1.25 a day
Why should we care? They are suffering. They cannot reach their potential. It’s morally offensive.
9 million children every year die before their 5th birthday
a woman in SubSaharan Africa has a 1 of 30 chance of dying while giving birth. In the developed world, its 1 out of 5-5,500.
We will not have peace, we will not get rid of terrorism, social unrest, as long as you have the persistence of extreme poverty. breeding ground for violence that seems to have no political direction There is an enormous energy behind the movement to end poverty
We must help create conditions for economic growth
Multipronged effort: private enterprise, government and inclusive growth
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/27
#zerohunger Discussion of Hunger
World Food Program:
Fed 99 million in 88 countries, 100 % voluntarily funded
need to give families sustainable tools that would allow families to feed themselves we can’t do that without innovation and that innovation comes in different forms communications to raise 4 billion dollars
2 billion devices all over the world. May 1.6 billion consumers.Using technology to manage, The concept of digital food, enabling folks to buy locally, what they need , is very empowering.

The concept of digital food, enabling folks to buy locally, what they need , is very empowering. Social media is helping in an enormous way, Like tweet to build awareness. to tell stories, donate 60 million school meals
Roth: We need economic growth. Some will be initiated by government, Some spurred by outside agencies. Some by private initiative. What we need to know is what works in what context.
Growth means jobs. We need to create jobs for young people, for women. It will be more successful if its more inclusive.
“The main problem, is not the absence of reasonable and low-cost solutions, but the difficulty of implementing global cooperation to put those solutions in place.”
Jeffrey Sachs Sachs:
Four hurdles to economic development:
1. Adequate domestic savings - to accumulate capital that they need for growth
2. Export sector
3. Viable government with financial capacity - corruption and ineptitude get in the way 4. Adapting technology to local needs and local requirements
Sachs: 4 stages of economic development 1. Subsistence
2. Commercial
3. Emerging markets
4. Technology
In each of these stages, you get a higher level of capital per person. They have more accumulated wealth that they can deploy for more development. You need a multi pronged effort to have this kind of economic development.
A sound development strategy has to pay attention to: Geography
Relationship of the urban and the rural environment
creation of infrastructure that allows for communication and trade - here, mobile technology is helping a lot because it has become ubiquitous even in developing countries. Tools for facilitating market exchanges. Market exchanges and exchange of information are so important for people to move out of the subsistence condition and to the condition of commerce and trade that create growth. Economic growth that is not inclusive is fundamentally unstable.
70% of the world’s poor are women. Development plans that don’t target women are bound to fail.
We cannot have a growth that enables the top 2% to get richer and richer and hope it will trickle down. That is not sustainable.
Systematic efforts to find out what works best
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/29
Inclusion makes economic sense and sometimes this is dope by government intervention or other entities What you need is a jumpstart, To escape form the poverty trap. And this needs outside intervention. Its not just economic aid. But real home grown economic development.
William Easterly, Sachs, Dambisa Moyo — in spite of trillions of dollars of aid, there is a persistence of poverty.
Moyo says that aid causes poverty by encouraging corruption and dependence.
There is proof that people who received aid in education do seem to not want to stay in levels of poverty Easterly makes the point that local initiatives make advances in development. Home grown economic

development is more sustainable.

Is there a poverty trap?

“There will be a ;overt trap whenever the scope for growing income or wealth at a very fast rate is limited for those who have too little to incest. That is a trap. it expands dramatically for those who can invest a bit more.”
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics
“If the potential for fast growth is high among the poor, and tapers off as people get richer, then there is no poverty trap.”
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics
At MIT. Randomized Control Trials RCT - Implementing through small steps along the way. According to Duflo, it;s not a big answer to a big problem but small answers to seemingly intractable problems. Example: Bednets. Used to combat malaria. Use of this cuts the rate of malaria dramatically .What’s the best way to give nets to people.
if you give the nets free, they will value it and they would want other people to get them. So this used RCT to see what really works.
Education: What works best? If you deworm children, you get more benefits from education. RCT enables us to know what works best in a given situation.
“Getting the poorest people in the world such obvious things as vaccines, antibiotics, food supplements, improved seeds, fertilisers, roads, water pipes, bore holes, text books, nurses... these are ,obvious things. “
“Those things will not make the poor dependent on handouts, its giving the poorest people on earth a chance to enter the economic system.”
William Easterly
“Capitalism is not a fragile reed that will collapse with the slightest investment in social insurance. Capitlaism kid robust. it is possible to combine a high level lf income, growth, and innovation with a high degree of social protection. “ Jeffrey Sachs
“Economists and other experts seem to have very little to say about why some countries grow and others do not. The truth is, we are largely incapable of predicting where growth will happen and we don’t understand very well why things sometimes just suddenly fire up.”
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics
key lessons how to improve the lives of the poor:
education/information - the poor often lack critical pieces of information and information matters, make a gbig difference for the poor. they often believe things that are not true.
Reduction of survival based decisions
markets are often missing for the poor
poor countries are not doomed to failure . there are certain features that get replicated that replicate poverty
Expectations are not self-fulfilling
Ubiquitous three I’s: by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Ignorance, attack through education
Ideology, attack by testing, testing, testing...
Inertia, fight inertia, change is possible
Breaking out cycles of suffering
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/31

Debate on aid, dependence. Poverty trap.

Poverty trap - some parts of the world and some groups of people are not just on the path of economic growth.
One school would say you need a kind of aid that would help them break out of the cycle of suffering, stagnation, diseases, and by doing that you give people the opportunity to initiate economic growth and start a virtuous cycle of development.
On the other hand, one group would say that precisely by intervening, we create and expectation of intervention that diminishes the capacity of the recipients of aid to help themselves.
Following RCT, you treat effectiveness of certain forms of interventions. What we want in these interventions are small steps that judiciously implemented make a difference on the lives of the recipients so that they can initiate their own changes.
Critics of aid do acknowledge that some people need some kind of assistance.
Sachs and world bank: it is possible to create economic growth and innovation with social protection.
Dr. Jim Yong Kim President
World Bank Group
Somalia is a country where 43% live in extreme poverty. He said UN Sec Gen said:” In every country that I’ve been to, the key to peace is development. “ Sec Gen was correct. Unless we address the 43 % in somalia, the prospect for peace won’t be very good.
What will it take to actually end poverty? three things
We do need economic growth; Create good jobs
Those jobs have to include young people, women, the extreme poor people who have been left out of the job market before; Even those in middle class want health care, a future for their children
Begin a social movement, global movements. the global movement around AIDS was one of the most successful movements in history
We now need a global movement to end poverty: we need NGOs, especially the smaller ones. if we can have a movement and make it clear to every leader in the world that we care about poverty. We can do something unprecedented.
It was only in 1990 when 43% of the people in this planet were living in extreme poverty. by 20101 thats down to 21%. WB has fund called AIDA, they put 1 B in a place that had not yet coalesced on there peace agreement. Peace and development now go together. We know the key to space is ending poverty.
Interview with Dr. Kim: Relationship and extreme poverty:
Experimented with chances of white child and black child both born in South Africa and then assume both born in Denmark. There was a huge difference between the two children born in SA and also huge difference if the two born in Denmark as against born in SA.
Proves the critical importance pif equality and opportunity, ranges from health to education,
The countries need to commit to building equality and opportunities
IMF studies show that countries with inequality have periods of growth that are shorter and would eventually lead to lore growth
Inequalities are barriers to prosperity
inequality limits growth
if you look at Arab Spring, there was economic growth. But young people, marginalised women were not participating. Unemployment rates were very high.
Example, inequality in Brazil led to protests last summer.
Things have changed for leaders,. everyone has access to cellphones, twitters,
I was part of a movement called 50 years is enough, for closing of WB.
the world bank was focused too much on growth
you got to get your growth strategy right but you have to invest in your people. You cannot undervalue investment in people. you cannot approach this from the ideological point of view.
Need to develop Science of Delivery:
Let’s be specific about what worked, why and where? And talk about how that can be taken to other

Let’s be specific about what worked, why and where? And talk about how that can be taken to other places. and scaled up.
Example Korea: WB poured money. But Korea didn’t actually listen to the WB,. We invested in health, in education even before they thought we could afford to. Japan invested in universal health care before everybody thought Japan could afford. Gender equality is one of our big issues.
Inclusive economic growth
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture
This idea of Science of Delivery, here was the spark to it:
I was working fro 25 years and for the first 19 years there was no money for global health. And Sachs said, don’t use the M word, use the B word. Billions. Then all of a sudden we were looking at 10B a year for global health.
Social goals: Health, Education , Social Protection.
A wise man once said: vision without execution is hallucination. So much of aid had been about the aid giver. Look at me, look at how generous I am.
Roth: learn from all the executions and make it better over time
Who would have guessed that some of the most outstanding movements would come out of the Arab world.
There are many things that I don’t understand:
2.5 B people don’t have access to financial services. No savings account. Cant rent an apartment. So In established a new target: for every human being to have access to financial services by 2020.
you are going to lose points on economic growth if you don’t include women. Japan has lost significant GDP growth as a result of non participation of women. Korea the same thing.
Your efforts to be inclusive are smart economics. You’re truly drawing from the brilliance of the entire population, Not just the upper echelon
Roth what can students do to make a positiver difference for your Movement To End Poverty
Kim: I got involved in a real movement. Movement against HIV AIDS.
Social movements that have huge impact are often led buy small group of people. HIV AIDS mOvement was no more than 20-30 people.
First, need for more basic science research - so a bunch went around 5 to basic science research.. to NIH
Then they started moving money to NIH, President Reagan supported
They tested drugs and put their own bodies on the line to test those drugs
Then last stage was to get it to the market
One guy worked on shrinking the time from th molecule to the FDA
you’d think that in 1996 when they had a real treatment they would stop. then somebody said, damn if we will allow this drug to be used only by those who can afford.
So next thing they did was work with us in the WB so that everybody will have access.
For them, the social movement was not about a feel good rally.
The students should never doubt their ability to change the world. Being part of a social movement will be exhilarating
We need artists, engineers, writers, etc.
Ubiquitous three I’s: by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo,
Ignorance, attack through education
Ideology, attack by testing, testing, testing... don’t let ideology dictate the kind of intervention you’ll use. Let experimentation dictate the aid program. Do experiments. Rapid prototyping. Refine your program with randomized trials to determine if the aid is making a difference
Inertia, fight inertia, change is possible
Begin a Social Movement. a social starts with a perception that IT DOESNT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.

THIS WAY.

Target 1.A:
Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1.25 a day
The target of reducing extreme poverty rates by half was met five years ahead of the 2015 deadline.
The global poverty rate at $1.25 a day fell in 2010 to less than half the 1990 rate. 700 million fewer people lived in conditions of extreme poverty in 2010 than in 1990. However, at the global level 1.2 billion people are still living in extreme poverty.
Target 1.B:
Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people
Globally, 384 million workers lived below the $1.25 a day poverty line in 2011—a reduction of 294 million since 2001.
The gender gap in employment persists, with a 24.8 percentage point difference between men and women in the employment-to-population ratio in 2012.
WEEK 3
Climate change and sustainability
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/35
There is an enormous body of evidence that shows the planet is getting warmer and human activity has contributed significantly to the warming of the planet. National Academy of Sciences and climatologists all over the world agree.
Human activity is mainly the release of greenhouse gases due to the burning of fossil fuels. Great contributor to climate change.
We believe that its between 1.4 to 6.4 Celsius is the range of increase over the coming century. And that’s on top of the increase in the last century of .8C.
“This is not something that is dramatic now, that;s why people don’t really react, but if you can convey the message that it would be dramatic for ou children and our grandchildren, then the risk is too big not to care.” Elizabeth Colbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe
“Right now it’s already five minutes past midnight.” Elizabeth Colbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe
We are in a catastrophe that is unrolling. Government action considered inadequate given the scale of the problem.
But the reaction seems muted compared to the scale of the problem. human beings bin nature find it hard to think long-term, They can’t delay gratification, They want gratification now. Scientists say the reason for that is that our brain is designed for shorter term responsiveness.
Six major things that will happen because of climate change: 1. Rising sea levels
2. Increase in intense rainfall
3. Decrease in snow and ice cover
4. Increase in heat waves
5. Change in the growing seasons in many parts of the world

5. Change in the growing seasons in many parts of the world 6. Acidification of oceans
Interview of Barry Chernoff, Professor of Environmental Studies, Professor of Biology Director, College of the Environment, Wesleyan University
Climate change accentuated by people in rich countries. US and China. What we choose to do will determine the prosperity of the entire planet within the next 50-100 years.
if we don’t add even CO2 to the atmosphere, the world will still continue to warm because of the existing COs for the next 60 years. According to scientist it would continue to heat for 63 years because it would take 63 years for CO2 to disappear from the atmosphere.
For every 1C increase in nightie temperature, there will be a 10% diminution in productivity, that includes rice.
Frederique Apffel-Marglin
Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Smith College
Visiting Fellow, College of the Environment , Wesleyan University
We give workshops and tell them. Now its 400ppm. if we reach 600 ppm something cataclysmic is supposed to happen.If we continue doing what we are doping, this is going to happen in less than 100 years. We sequester co2 by not cutting trees. Agriculture is good because of the food and also because of sequestering CO2. grow more food without petroleum products or chemicals and it’s healthy.
Mentioned Biochar soil. good for agriculture and addressing climate change. Reading on Biochar:
Biochar – A Strategy to Adapt/Mitigate Climate Change?
Biochar is presented by some institutions, such as the UNCCD Secretariat, as a promising technology for reducing emissions from agriculture and energy supply in rural areas, while at the same time improving soil properties. This note examines the potential of its use in the context of the NENA region.
Biochar is a by-product of a cellulosic matter thermal treatment under an/low-oxygenic regime (Pyrolisis, Gasification or Hydrothermal Carbonization). The combustion process releases gas or oil that can be used for energy or heat supply, leaving about 25 percent of the carbon content under a non bio-degradable structure, the Biochar. Incorporated into the soil, it can remain under this stable form for hundreds to thousands of years. The feedstock should be from biomass waste material such as field residues and processing residues (nut shells, fruit pits, bagasse, etc), as well as yard, food, human and forestry wastes, and animal manures. The properties of the Biochar produced depend on the feedstock nature (N/C content) and the baking conditions. Production units vary in technologies, size, cost and mobility, which allow a wide scope of implementation. It can be produced directly from modified energy efficient stoves that provide heating and cooking supply at the same time that they reduce health problems and slow down deforestation.
Figure1. Biochar Carbon-balance (UNCCD)
Applied on low-fertility soils, Biochar would improve nutrients availability, the soil water retention capacity, and was also proven in some cases to absorb azote residues from chemical fertilizers and to lower soil NO2 and CH4 emissions. Thus this technology could have great mitigation potential in agriculture by: (i) sequestrating durably CO2 from atmosphere; (ii) reducing the NO2 emissions from fertilizer use; (iii) reducing soil NO2 and CH4 emissions and; (iv) and potentially reducing emissions from deforestation and household emissions. According to the UNCCD Secretariat, about 20 percent of the original matter carbon could be sequestrated in the soil (see figure 1). However, precise estimates of carbon amounts sequestered as a result of biochar application are scarce.
In the NENA region, Biochar projects and research programmes are just emerging. In Egypt, researchers from the University of Mansura and the University of Copenhagen are working on a rice straw gasifier project involving five villages. The gas will power flatbread baking ovens and the biochar will be returned to the fields
to increase soil fertility and water retention.

Although Biochar may appear as an opportunity for the region to restore soil fertility and fight ongoing land degradation, two cautions must be borne in mind. First, the behavior of Biochar once incorporated into the soil and its interaction with the soil organic matter (SOM) are still poorly understood. A study suggests that Biochar can accelerate the depletion of SOM in some cases, partially offsetting its benefit as a long-term carbon sink and its effect on doping soil fertility. The soil moisture and aeration would be two factors involved in that reaction. Secondly, to respect the carbon-balance and avoid trade-offs with food or other productions, feedstock should be chosen carefully. This is particularly true in the region, where crop residues can be used for practices, such as mulching, that have a significant potential of adaptation to climate change.
Whether to use or not to use Biochar in a specific location requires adopting an integrated approach to the current socio-economic system (see figure 2) in order to ensure its sustainability. Since the environmental and socio-economic benefits of this technology highly rely on the soil and feedstock properties, it should involve numerous field-tests on a batch-by-batch basis.
Energy Supply Source Needs
Feedstock Soil properties
Moisture Pre-treatment Field Areation Stockage Testing SOM Opprotunity cost Use Integration in the socio-economic system
Figure2. Fields to take into consideration in a biochar project
Used carefully, Biochar could represent a real opportunity for the NENA region, both for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change. One methodology already allows Biochar projects to access carbon credits from the Voluntary Market - General Methodology for Quantifying the Greenhouse Gas Emission Reductions from the Production and Incorporation of Soil of Biochar in Agricultural and Forest Management Systems – Carbon Gold. Research on this technology potential in the region should be emphasized to fully include it in countries adaptation and mitigation strategies.
References and further reading about Biochar:
The International Biochar Initiative, www.biochar-international.org/projectsandprograms/9countryprojects.html UNCCD - Sustainable land management for adaptation to climate change
UNCCD - Charcoal as Soil Amendment: Research and Prospects
Ernsting A, Smolker R. Feb., 2009. Biochar for Climate Change Mitigation: Fact or Fiction?
Global challenges and local responses
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture
Interview of Barry Chernoff, Professor of Environmental Studies, Professor of Biology Director, College of the Environment, Wesleyan University

There will be winners and osiers in climate change.

Climate is a measure of 30 years of daily weather. Weather is what happens today and tomorrow. We see from the industrial revolution of the 1870s, as the temperature increased, the variability of the climate at each place has increased. In the northeast you will see higher highs and lower lows and lots of storms.
Central Africa will get much drier and much hotter. Parts of the Amazon will get much hotter and much drier. In North America, the wet climate of the Midwest will shift north to Canada.
There’s a cycle. As the air temperature warms, surface water temperature warms. It will be easier for water to be evaporated to the atmosphere. For water, what goes up comes down.
Why will some places get drier? That’s because they’re predicting that water will rain out into the ocean and will be lost to continental systems for quite a while.
The warmer sea temperatures are melting ice caps. Happening with Greenland ice sheets. Big pieces of Antarctic sheets breaking. 55 glaciers are in retreat worldwide. In the Tibetan plateau, we have this enormous tragedy with enormous water coming down flooding out villages. What’s that doing is elevating sea surfaces particularly out in the tropical pacific, many homelands are being washed, like Vanuatu and parts of Micronesia, people will not only be displaced but their homeland will go entirely.
The relationship between climate change and evolution is fascinating. Planet has not been stable in its climate throughout history. The environmental surface have changed through time. We are actually driving the climate when it actually should be cooler. We are driving it in an artificial way. Looking at patterns, position in relation to the sun, we should accrual be cooling. We are driving evolutions in organisms. Pant crops related to humans are diminishing.
Through climatic catastrophes, we’ve had these mass extinctions. We are driving these more quickly. We might be going through the 6th mass extinction stage. The heating oceans, the demising coral reefs
Roth: Talked to engineers who are thinking of methods to mitigate. They have enormous faith in technology.There will be a technological fix.
It’s gonna be complex. We need to cool the planet., One of the technical solutions is to seed the atmosphere with dust. Following the observation that web recent volcanos erupted, like Pinatubo, the earth’s temperature dropped. But there are side effects. We need mis of mitigation and adaptation. Can we change how we use cars? Avoid higher density living? Change our energy strategy. How can developed countries who use up 1/4 of the world’s resources with only 10% of the area adjust? Can we look a the planet as a social good? the problem is our politics are too short term.
Yale survey in the US: Most people believe in climate change. but when asked, do you think it will hurt you and your family? The answer is largely NO. How about the other people you know. The answer is YES.
Frederique Apffel-Marglin
Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Smith College
Visiting Fellow, College of the Environment , Wesleyan University
In Peru, i am amazed at how little people are aware. They say the rains have come crazy. The driest part of the year, it was pouring every day.
What amazes me is how poorly the educational system,m and media is addressing the issue.
Roth interjected abut need for environmental literacy. Why do you think media hasn’t been more effective?

I don’t know. But the indigenous people seem to be more aware. Like the Cogi of Colombia. They read the

I don’t know. But the indigenous people seem to be more aware. Like the Cogi of Colombia. They read the landscape. they are aware of what is happening. They are extremely affected there and they know it. the ones who are most aware are the ones with no power.
Roth: Book Focus by Daniel Goldman. Evolution made human beings focus on short term danger. We are not wired for looking at long term systemic issues. That its much easier to worry about how many jobs will be created in constructing a pipeline. Whats the price of gas next week?
The book I love: “The Master and his emissary.” He is a neurosurgeon. Wrote about the left brain. We have a hypertrophied left brain and an atrophied right brain. The right brain is linear. There’s an imbalance. Those indigenous people are responding to right brain messages.
I believe in the theory of the Tipping Point. We have to take things into our hands. We have to do direct action. What we are confronting is gigantic. greening is better but its not going to solve the problem.
Making a difference and varied challenges.
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture
Interview of Barry Chernoff, Professor of Environmental Studies, Professor of Biology Director, College of the Environment, Wesleyan University
Roth: where can people make a positive difference?
If you are living outside the US, you can encourage your government to keep the pressure on China and the US to reduce their carbon emissions. If you live in the US or China, you should (1) reduce your individual carbon emissions, more so in the US because China has a lower per capita carbon footprint. We can ll have a very righ lifestyle without emitting large carbon. Pressure our leaders to take the long view.
Frederique Apffel-Marglin
Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Smith College
Visiting Fellow, College of the Environment , Wesleyan University
What people can do is in the field of education. All schools should integrate climate change in their curriculum. Not as an extra curriculum but must be integrated. Experiential and intellectual approach. Work on new ideas, new sources of energy. Use agricultural residue for energy, totally clean. Start small.
Roth lecture:
Climate change showing accelerating pattern. Many species have responded to these changes, Certain species of mosquitos are moving farther north. Plants are changing where they distribute their seeds. Natural selection will favour species that can adapt to the natural environment. We are aware of the just and unjust dimensions of those changes and we can react to these changes in ways that can change the evolutionary dynamic consciously and purposefully.
Rising sea level:
Many cities are built near coastlines. they will have too make dramatic adjustments. Places with no financial capacity to adjust will be destroyed. Over the last century, seas have risen 8 inches, in the next century somewhere between 1 to 4 feet.
Increases in intense rainfalls:
When you warm the planet, you have more moisture in the atmosphere. More evaporations when warmer. In some parts of the world, there will be greater droughts. Areas that are experiencing decertification are going to be drier.

Decrease in snow and ice cover: Greenland, Antarctic. Glaciers melting.

Increase in heat waves:
Dramatic increase in number of heat waves since the 1950s. And they last longer. the hottest days and nights have become hotter. Hottest days and nights are more frequent than they were before. Inn the past several years, the global are hit by extremely hot summertime increase 50 fold. Resulting in increased wildfires. Droughts occurring in greater frequency and they last longer. We are seeing the intensification of the extremes and making it harder for agriculture and urban life.
Grassroots politics and climate change
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/41
Interview
Alice Haddad
Asso. Professor of Government
Environmental Studies, And East Asian Studies Wesleyan University
Climate change, pollution issues, particularly in China, are globe threatening. Interested in how citizens can make positive change.
Civil society. organized citizens activities that are not part of there government. Not part of a for profit organization. Example: Institute for Policy and Environmental Affairs in China. Published official measurements of pollution on accessible website. Started as a small concern, to take the environmental status report of the Chinese government. Some multinational organizations get in the picture because they are interested in greening their supply chains.Like Walmart. use the database to audit their supply chains. To create a social and a market incentive for these large corporations. There’s a problem about people caring about the climate change problem. So one way is to use the artists. Film makers, writers. Artists can make people feel and become emotionally connected. It’s not just a number in their brain but a number in their heart.
How does one research about the politics of engaging in sustainability issues? She visited Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China to see how organized groups are moving, observe how groups try to work on positive change in difficult situations.Tried to get people from the government, those working in ngos, local ngos , artists, visual and performance artists, tried to get business people, business associations dealing or not dealing with environmental issues, get as many kinds go angle on the question, interview techniques tend to be around central theme but I asked open-ended questions.
Roth: Did you have a sense of what stories grabbed the heart of the people?
I asked, what’s effective? What effective strategies can citizens use to make change happen. The answer I got was from the artists in that you have to connect... connect to people on a personal level.
make people really care even if it’s not the story of child dying in China because of our consumption of IT products that involves dumping of heavy metals into rivers, etc.
Privileged group consuming much more than ordinary people, at non-sustainable level, they are the ones who tend to ignore calls.
The vulnerable populations, they feel it every day, they don’t need to be motivated. What’s happening is that an environment issue hits everybody. Like air pollution.
Her students.. she assigned in actual environment cases involving their own countries. had a social media.

Politics and the disruption of Ecosystems;
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture
Interview
Alice Haddad
Asso. Professor of Government
Environmental Studies, And East Asian Studies Wesleyan University
Her students played games, got points for taking short shower, walking to class, points for reusable mug instead of new one. A way to cue you to make the world more sustainable, with the idea that you can change the culture of the place.
An environmental project, when her students took all the trash generated by a weekend of partying. And constructed a guy called Wasted Man made out of the trash, in front of the campus center.
We even had a social media related activist project. It made people realize that their party culture is very wasteful. You can bring your own container to a party, instead of new solo cups which are not recycled and thrown as trash.
Tried parties with zero waste. Used reusable plates and cups. The rest were composted.
Roth: People have become more conscious of their food and waste and this made changes. So how would your students find other people, like minded?
In this day and age, it’s very easy to find outer people. In my class, the objective is to finish the class feeling empowered. Research shows it doesn’t matter what political system you are in. it doesn’t matter how rich or how poor you are, who you are, where you live. You can make really positive and important changes. And one of the most important is making it work locally. You can find a small thing in your own community and get it to work. It can magnify. Other communities follow you. And if it can magnify enough, it can become national policy.
In Beijing. There was a group that launched campaign to control aircon temperature in hotels. Not cold, not warm.It worked. it became national policy. Some of her students went home and started get rid of plastic bag campaign. Went to very outlet and asked why are hyou using plastic bags? Many were successful. Some were not and they learned from it.
Lots of low hanging fruits there.
She was in Tokyo during Fukushima disaster. There was worry about brownouts. So the people of Tokyo adjusted and there was no brownout. Tokyo reduced their power consumption by 25% overnight. If all the big cities in the world could do that, we would have climate change problem. Example, they took every third light bulb out in the subway station. turned off warm toilet seats.
Roth: Coursera students can share information, experiences. And have a Sense of Empowerment.
Alice Haddad: In my research also, one of the strongest things is networking. It’s amazing with the technology now, with the peer to peer learning.
Roth lecture continues:
So we see that precipitation has increased in some parts of the world and decreased in other parts. Drought increased in some parts, decreased in other parts. Intensification of extremes. Extreme weather getting more

increased in some parts, decreased in other parts. Intensification of extremes. Extreme weather getting more hazardous a d disruptive. Disrupting ecosystems on which we are dependent. Disrupting thousands of species.
In peril is food production. UN projects that 1/4 of food production could be lost by 2050 tom the combined impact of climate change, land degradation and water scarcity. At the same time, global population is expected to increase from 7 B to 9.5 B by 2050.
Some parts of the globe will be affected more than others. So this can become a political issue. There are countries that can protect themselves more than the others and the ones that can protect themselves are those that may have contributed the most to climate change.
Ocean acidification: Acidification has increased by around 30% because of human contributions to carbon in the atmosphere..

1. Natural and anhropogenic emissions from the earth (CH4, CO4, CO2, VOCs, Sulfate, Black Carbon, Dust, N2O, CFCs, NOs, O2) lead to
   
2. Chemical transformation
   
3. Sulfur emissions from oceans
   
4. Evaporation and convection
   

This will affect everything from coral reefs to shellfish and then to the entire constellation of species, fish and plants.
What we must be aware of is that everyone in the planet will have to cope with these changes over time,
the most vulnerable people of the world will be most at risk to climate change. And the social justice issues here are very important and will have a moral and political claim on us even if we think they are remote from us. Those living in poverty will be the ones to suffer most from climate change.
Developed countries have put the most carbon into the atmosphere. And they continue to do so. There’s a political issue in that economic growth has been linked to carbon production. Industrialization and carbon production go hand and hand.
the developed world is protecting itself to sustain their development.
“No nations will be immune to the impacts of climate change. However, the distribution of impacts is likely to be inherently unequal and tilted against many of the world’s poorest regions; which have the least economic, institutional, scientific and technical ability to react.”
The World Bank
Poverty and climate change get intertwined.
Conversation with a Climate Economist on Risk Management
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/45
Gary Yohe
Huffington Professor of Economics & Environment Studies Wesleyan University
What do we know now about climate change?
The earth has warmed almost 1 C since preindustrial level. We know that it’s very unlikely that the present
climate and the past climate were generated by the same climate system. The old normal was broken. We don’t know what the new normal is.

This one has happened more quickly than previous ones.The driver of the warming has been human influenced.
The 1 degree warming has another 1 degree coming and there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s an enormous amount of inertia in the climate system. If we eliminate all the GHG tomorrow, we are still committed to another degree of warming.
We are already in 450 ppm in CO 2 equivalent. Going back to 350ppm won’t buy us a thing, What we are facing is a risk problem. it’s not a cost benefit problem. Modelling of risk.
it is probability based. It is quantitative but it can be subjective.
What do you say to people whose local perception is different from what they teach about climate change or global warming?
We are 95& sure that humans cause global warming, Once you accept climate change as a risk problem, people are more familiar to dealing with risks through insurance. What you are facing are risks of extreme events happening: extreme precipitation over short period of time, or extremes of no precipitation at all.
Roth: The fear mongering is based on science.
Probabilities:
look at the infrastructure. look at the probabilities of various climate change events. The look at the risks faced by those infrastructures. Get a group to study and have separate reports. So you will have subjective views on what’s likely and what’s not likely. Consider the different adaptation and mitigation ideas.
Issue of adaptation:For a while there was strong resistance about adaptation cause it seems like giving up, A hallmark of climate change is extreme precipitation. Rains in summer. Snow in winter.
Risk, assessment and reducing likelihood of disaster
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture
Gary Yohe
Huffington Professor of Economics & Environment Studies Wesleyan University
What have you learned about prospects of different groups and different cultures working together?
on the adaptation side, we look at the determinants of adaptive capacity. There are 8 of them. One of them is access to resources. Funds from UN. Some willing to underwrite incremental costs of adaptation. Bangladesh device they can’t wait for help. So they allocated $100M a year of their own money to invest in adaptation.
It helps to put a value to carbon saving.
Consider risk of an investment working or nor working.,
For developing countries, thinking about mitigation may be 20-30 years too soon.
There are some benefits to climate change. food production in some parts. Some studies indicate that mass warming for as long you have m=water will increase yield,

WEEK 5
Disease and global health
Disease and global health - Introduction
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/53
Basic facts:
The top ten causes of death in the world: 1. Heart and circulatory diseases
2. Stroke
3. Lower reparatory infections
4. Lung diseases
5. Diarrheal disease
6. HIV/AIDS
7. Lung and lung related cancers
8. Diabetes
9. Injuries, often due to road accidents
10. Premature births
Different income groups will be variously affected
In wealthier countries:
1. Heart and circulatory diseases 2. Stroke
3. Respiratory diseases
4. Alzheimer related diseases
Poorer countries:
1. HIV/AIDS
2. Lower respiratory diseases 3. Diarrheal diseases
In high income countries:
7 out of 10 deaths occur among persons 70 years old or over.
People predominantly die of chronic diseases like cardiovascular, cancer, chronic obstructive ling diseases,
Only 1 in every 100 deaths are among children under 15
In low income countries:
4 in every 10 deaths occur among children under 15 years old.
Only 2 in every 10 deaths among people 70 years old or older
People predonantly die of infectious diseases: Lower respiratory infection, HIV/AIDS, diarrheal diseases, malaria, tuberculosis, and they account for more than 1/3 of the deaths in low income countries.
Deaths during childbirth remain high. Childbirths and prematurity are very significant causes of deaths.
How the social construction of our environment. How the political construction of our societies. How the human impact on our environment. All these affect the course of life and death for hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
We can affect nature with extraordinary results through that use of timely, tested and resourceful interventions. But we don’t do so consistently in many parts of the globe. And so the life trajectory of
people around the planet is so different. Experience of nature is so different. The capacity to live a full life is so different, spending on geography, income and politics.

WHO estimates:
23% of global disease burden is attributable to the environment. Almost a quarter come from environmental factors.
1/3 of the disease burden among children is die to environmental factors that can be changed. That we can change. What is frightening is that we have created conditions for more and more disease.
Child death toll:
4 million children die a year due to environmental factors Infant death toll is 12 times higher in developing countries.
Interview
Prof. Jim McGuire
Professor and Chair, Department of Government Member, Latin American Studies Program Wesleyan University
Authored book: Wealth, Health and Democracy in East Asia
How are wealth and health connected?
McGuire:
Wealth is health hypothesis. Wealthier countries, sub sectors are healthier using such indicators as mortality, life expectancy and infant mortality. Countries with higher levels of economic affluence have lower levels of infant mortality and higher levels of life expectancy.
In 2010, studies indicate that there was a close correlation between level of affluence like GDP and GDP per capita and infant mortality. However if you look at progress in achieving economic growth over a 50- year period, and progress in improving infant mortality, the relation is much weaker.
Some think that by aiming at economic growth, the health objectives will take care of themselves. but that is not the case. Some countries that did well economically didn’t do well in reducing infant morality, On the other hand, some countries that didn’t do well economically did well in infant morality.
Example Chile: During Pinochet’s time, economy did poorly, even went down, poverty went from 20% to 30% of the population, but he was able to reduce infant mortality. In 1974, infant mortality was 65 per 1000. In 1983, it was 19 per 1000. Pinochet introduced this inexpensive maternal health care services
I view the capability approach as basically: The expansion of human capabilities expansion equals the expansion of a person’s capability to lead a thoughtfully chosen life.
lecture:
Democracy, health and engagement
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/55
Prof. Jim McGuire
Professor and Chair, Department of Government Member, Latin American Studies Program Wesleyan University
The people whom adopt the capabilities approach don’t do it as a way of explaining h=why some countries do better than others at improving well being.
It’s oftener contrasted to two other types of approaches: One focused on resources and one focused on preferences or the satisfaction of preferences or happiness.
There are many ideas about how to maximize the life of a poor person to improve everybody’s well being. One hypothesis, you improve their freedom. That’s the capabilities approach

Mentioned book Development as Freedom.

Resource based approach will basically say that the basic goal of development is that everybody should have a minimum amount of food, clothing. Basic needs approach. From the capabilities approach, that’s really inadequate because the problem is even if you have the resources, people have different capacity to translate those resources into well being. Freedom to choose, not just freedom to choose haphazardly but freedom to choose thoughtfully. Freedom to satisfy the preferences that they already hold.
From a capabilities perspective, happiness is greatly overrated.
Roth: Is education a significant element in this capabilities framework? Yes. Education is the route to freedom. Education doesn’t necessarily make you happy. But it enriches your life,.
Feeding keys a good breakfast greatly improves his school performance.
With regard to child mortality, it’s been proved that female education is much more important than male education. Health education costs virtually nothing. Immunization is very inexpensive. Rehydration therapy for children with diarrhea, that’s very cheap. Others are more expensive like safe water, sanitation, certain types of education. Cheaper that fuel subsidy, etc.
Roth: Is it because a child has no vote compared to the one receiving gas subsidy?
In the US, people prefer curative health services that preventive health services. Politicians view what majority wants. In some surveys, people appear to be more interested in income generation than health facilities.,
There is a robust positive relation between more democracy and better health.
Sophisticated ways but not expensive to deal with issues of health in poor countries:
Example in Mississippi Delta: 1990 to 2005, the infant mortality rate for non whites went up. 15 per 1000 to 17. In Brazil its 13 per 1000. But there was one country in Mississippi where one inspired doctor collaborated with a Christian Center which subsisted exclusively on private donations. the doctor, with 3 Center members, found a scheme to find out who were the pregnant women in the county and visit them, once very month, bring them in a bus to have classes, pre natal and post natal classes for new mothers. and rom 1990 to 2005, while the infant mortality in Mississippi for non whites went up from15 to 17, for this county (Sharkey), it went down to 5 per 1000, even though Sharkey county is much poorer than the state as a whole.They just helped look for the pregnant women. Did just did organizing work, organizing education.
How can students help:
If they live in a country that is not democratic, try to establish and deepen democracy. From the Capabilities perspective, development is freedom. To some extent, freedom does cause development. Apart from that, people should do what they are trained to do. I am a political science professor and what I do is analyze why some countries have good health policies and why doe don’t. then extract lessons for institution building. For others, they can train themselves to be front-line health providers. Try to make their politicians more responsive. From Development is Freedom: Democracy doesn’t work of human development like quinine works on malaria. Democracy only creates opportunities. The citizens and politicians should take advantage of these opportunities that democracy creates. We should use the freedoms that democracy permits to push our politicians to enact policies that will improve the well being of the less fortunate members of our society.
A lot of things start with education and education is freedom.
Major health challenges and responses (1)
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/57
When we learn about the disparities in child mortality and life expectancy between wealthy and developing countries, it allows us to actually focus on what we can do to create healthy environments to reduce the rate

countries, it allows us to actually focus on what we can do to create healthy environments to reduce the rate of premature death among children.
Works of the Gates Foundation and what they’ve been doing and works they’ve inspired and supported directly. We are talking of interventions that significantly reduce vulnerability.
Things we can change:

1. Gastrointestinal and diarrheal diseases. Nearly 1 million children under five die from this. this who
   survive are often marked for life. Spread through poor sanitation and lack of clean water. Education matters, Clean water matters. Help A Child Reach 5 in India - promoted by Kajol, Indian Actress, Handwashing Ambassador. Teach children to wash their hands with soap.
   
2. HIV/AID: More than 3 million around the world living with AIDS. More than 30 million have died from HIV since the 1980s. There’s a big debate on how to get the drug to those who need the drugs the most, regardless of their ability to pay.
   

Roundtable on AIDS. Mark Dybul, Executive Director, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis.
In the last two years, we have so many scientific events that we can now see the end of the AIDS epidemic. Ending as a public health threat. Last ten years, massive investments of billions of dollars. We have the experience to take that science and go village by village and see how we end this epidemic.Focusing where the epidemic is highly transmitting, get then interventions to people.
Who are the most at risk right now? We have to bring them in to the human family.
Young women
Gay men, Transgender
People who inject drugs
Prisoners
People left behind by society. Sex workers.
We have to bring them in to the human family. We have to welcome them. Make them feel like they are who they are. And change the human family.
We need support. Resources. We need people to understand that this is not getting people on treatment only. Or getting condoms out. It’s actually about ending an epidemic. You start dedicating your resources. You find out where the most infections are. You find out who is most at risk. You get them the services. You bring them in. And we all collectively and globally make a movement out of that and make everyone do it. it’s a tough time. It’s not easy financial times. But too bad. Diseases don’t follow financial cycles. We need people in Africa to do the same things that advocates in America are doing: Drive people in the government. What’s happening in Africa in last ten years is breathtaking, but we need the resources.
Cong. Barbara Lee: I am confident that we will have an AIDS free generation in our lifetime. Need $15 B for the next 3 years. This morning the UK announced a 1B pound commitment to the Global Fund. anti retroviral drug. Working on discriminatory laws, have them repealed. Remove the stigma. We make sure that we understand, they understand that they are part of the human family.
Maranda Pleasant, Editor, Origin Magazine
How affordable it is to treat people. What can we do now to help?
Dybul: Get in the game. What changed is that we have hope. there are orphan run villages because there was no one left. Hope is there now. Show you care, Get online. Get out there and get in the game. Join the movement. Believe in the movement.
Lee: Civil society should join in. Congs and parliamentarians must hear form their constituents. Get engaged politically.
Major challenges and responses (2)

1. HIV/AID: More than 3 million around the world living with AIDS. More than 30 million have died from HIV
   since the 1980s. There’s a big debate on how to get the drug to those who need the drugs the most,
   regardless of their ability to pay.
   
2. Malaria. Still occurs in nearly 100 countries. More than 200 million suffered from the disease in 2010.
   

2. Malaria. Still occurs in nearly 100 countries. More than 200 million suffered from the disease in 2010. 650,000 died of malaria a few years ago. Majority of those who died are children.You can live with malaria. Malaria is preventable. The combination of malaria and extreme poverty is a deadly combination today.
Roundtable on Malaria:
Bob Derrick
President
Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
25% reduction in mortality
Congressman Gregory Meeks
You can make a difference just by educating people.
Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen CEO
Vestergaard Frandsen
investing in malaria works
mosquito nets
The gains that we’ve made are fragile. As mosquitoes evolve and become mutants to the insecticides that we use today, we need to develop nets that are smarter. We have a new one that kills mosquitoes but safe to humans. Keeping pressure on the funding, the progress and the gains is so important. If we don’t keep the pressure on, malaria will resurge.
They have a target of raising a lot of money, 15B.
Moderator Derrick: She just went to Sri Lanka for a Fund meeting, where they had gone from around 260,000 cases a decade ago to around zero indigenous cases now.
Naomi Kodama
Nothing But Nets
Started working when she was 7 years old. Day of Tsunami in Indonesia. Instead of birthday gifts, she asked for money to be used to save lives. Nothing But Nets is a simple campaign. $10 per net.
If we need to eradicate malaria in Africa, all we need is $400 million.
Edson Kodama
Junior Chamber International
Nothing But Nets was one of the campaigns we embraced. Raised funds for Nothing But Nets. We’ve raised close to $2 million.
Roth:
Infectious diseases is neater front where we can make a difference.
elephantiasis roundworm hookworm whipworm trachoma
river blindness snail fever
Affecting one billion people in developing countries that attract little support for donors. With attention and funding , we know how to combat those diseases.
Interview of
Jessica Cohen
Assistant Professor of Global Health Department of Global Health & Population
Harvard University

Studied malaria in Kenya

Studied malaria in Kenya
a major cause of death for children under 5
In this part of Kenya, people can expect a few episodes at least a year
pregnant women are the oat vulnerable
We started an NGO, Together Against Malaria, where we distributed free mosquito nets through prenatal clinics. To also increase attendance to prenatal care. For women to come earlier, more frequently. Study indicated that it did increase prenatal care a lot.
A large NGO came. Population Services International which started working with the government of Kenya to distribute insecticide treated nets.This was once Africa wide and this is the main reason why malaria deaths dropped by a third over the last ten years.
Then difference is this organization was charging something, Representing the view that the you have to charge something in order that these nets will be valued. Nets were 6 to 7 dollars. Much more than a lot of people could afford. If given free, people wouldn’t value them. Anecdotes that people were using them for fishing, for wedding veil. If you charge 75 cents, people can still afford, but you eliminate cases of people taking them for free, but won’t use them. But when they started doing this, prenatal attendance went back to low levels.
So we studied. could it really be that important to them, 75 cents, against protecting themselves from malaria. We did an experiment. The effects of charging 75c relative to giving them for free. We look at a few prices in between. How many get a net when you charge something. How many get it when it’s free. How many using it and sleeping in it a month later when we make home visits.We saw a tremendous amount of price sensitivity. If a 100 women take a free net, 40 will pay 60 c. and 25 will pay that the government of Kenya was charging. We were losing a 75% coverage in order to get back a 10% of the cost of this net. On the other had, there was no difference whether she’s sleeping in the net of he got it for free or paid price. Implication was it makes no sense to charge a small user fee. Andd that was the beginning in the change in policy for free distribution of these nets. It became part of a mounting evidence that these small fees are counterproductive.
Testing our work to make it most effective
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/61
Continuation
Interview of
Jessica Cohen
Assistant Professor of Global Health Department of Global Health & Population Harvard University
My question is about education.
Cohen:
People have used forms of that het or ages. But the long lasting insecticide net is new. the nice thing about this was they getting it through prenatal visits. Is it really the nexus between public health and economics?
there is a two pronged approach in the public health and medical world.
Create a really effective product, oral rehydration therapy, diarrhea, water purification, mosquito nets, make it as chela as possible, and then educate people about life
What economists have found is that education piece may not be as effective as you might think. Telling people what’s good for them may not really be the most effective way.
Education, telling them to wear shoes, etc, may to be as effective as subsidizing the products, doing certain types of marketing, persuasive marketing,
But there are some effective means of information. Based on the “sugar daddy” experiment in Kenya. what they found is that in secondary schools in Kenya, women often have relationships with older men
in exchange for little amounts of money, not in a prostitution way. But the prevalence of HIV among these much older men was much higher than boys. What they did was an information capping about relative risk. It wasn’t an information campaign about abstaining, or condoms. It was telling them, the

relative risk. It wasn’t an information campaign about abstaining, or condoms. It was telling them, the men you are sleeping with have more HIV than the younger men. this was a very effective experiment. Results: reductions in child bearing, sexual behavior, and they substituted older men with boys their age.
In the case of malaria, information tends to be a barrier, just like in most diseases. People aren’t sure what the right medication is, where they can diagnose for the disease, not sure about the best way to prevent it. Telling people what’s good for them doesn’t seem to be effective.
Roth: Applying social science techniques is something new.
We can’t decide from anecdotal experience like what happened in pricing the nets. This is a more systematic approach to social services delivery.
Randomized control trials.It’s not a good idea to spend a lot of money on programs that we don’t know. Randomized control trials are transparent, very effective.
What economists call the distinction between internal validity and external validity. Randomized control trials have good internal validity it tells you what exactly to expect, but it doesn’t tell you what to expect in another place.
Randomized control trials tells you what happens in the absence of specific interventions.
What do we learn from these experiments?
To replicate it. but you don’t learn so much more from replication. But the bed net experiment has been relocated in several places. To build a behavioral model of human behavior
For a lot of preventive tools, people are very price sensitive
But for treatments, there is much less price sensitivity
There were several experiments around 2000:
Deworming
Fertilizer: did they fond out what it takes to get people to use fertilizer? Use of fertilizer increased their profits by 20-30%. but people weren’t using it. What they found was the time lapse between harvest and planting was killing it. the farmers weren’t able to save the money form the extra harvest to pay for the fertilizer. There were a ton of competing demand for expenses like school fees. there’s also the element of community insurance, so a farmer that doesn’t do well is helped by the other farmers.
so what they did was to offer the fertilizer in a pre commitment way, at the time of the harvest. they pre pay the fertilizer for the next season. Lock box principle. People like lockboxes setting aside money in advance.
maternal care. some postpone decision on where to deliver. there are so many choices. So what they did was a recommitment to go to a certain facility.
Roth: How do you get people to care and want to take some action?
Cohen: I think people respond to stories pretty well. We now have so many stories. Things that were done wrong in terms of reaching people. I think what resonates with a lot of people.is that we have the technology to improve people and save lives. 3/4 of the deaths of children under 5 in the world are from infectious diseases malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea. We have the tools to fight those diseases.What has been slower is delivery. Get them to people and get them to use them appropriately.
Roth: What can students do?
Care, organization and making a real difference
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/63
Roth:
When you pay attention to certain things, that’s when the resources will flow.
Gates Foundation and others are aware that a lot of people are suffering from diseases that we know how to combat but we don’t have the political or social will to do so. People talk about donor fatigue or compassion fatigue.
These are things we can change.
Things we can change:
Gastrointestinal and diarrheal diseases HIV/AIDS

HIV/AIDS
Malaria
Infectious diseases
Pneumonia: can be a death sentence in many parts of the world, especially for children under 5. In the last 20 years, we have cut the death rate from pneumonia in half. Vaccines against pneumonia are proven to work and they’re not expensive and can be a key tool to protect the vulnerable.Getting the vaccines to people who are likely to succumb is a challenge because in the poorest countries where the problem is the worst, the del;ivory systems either through the government or private sector are the weakest. But that we can change! We can change delivery systems.
Tuberculosis: The global TB rate 1999 to 2009 fell by 35%. But TB remains one of the leading causes of death around the world. There are almost 9 million TB cases every year. TB is a sad partner of HIV. those countries with high HIV rates also have nigh TB rates. In 2010, around 200,000 died from co infection of TB and HIV. We know how to diagnose, how to treat and how to prevent TB. What we now need is a political commitment to create and infrastructure of delivery system to put the vaccines in the hands of people who need it the most
Roundtable discussion:
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel for economics. Has book called Thinking Fast and Slow In it he describes two ways in which people think.
Think fast, it’s an immediate, emotive reaction, guttural and we know how we feel about it immediately
Think slow, we think rationally, we put all the figures together, cacluate the decisions about how we want to act, etc.
Neglected tropical diseases:
Not too many people know about it, because they affect the bottom most people in the world. People living on less than a $1.25 a day. Live in far, rural, and remote places. No access top water, sanitation, electrification. They are more prone to infections.
The most common of these diseases are:
Roundworm Hookworm Whipworm Trachoma
River blindness Elephantiasis Schistosomiasis
It only costs 50 cents per person per year to cure these disease.
it’s a wonderful public private partnership with the pharmaceutical industry who are donating all the drugs who have technical experts to ensure that these drugs get to people that require them.
Now we need to create a movement to ensure that it’s seeded in the public consciousness and that will enable us to influence policy and get more money for the poor, essentially a voiceless community. Video: End 7 diseases by 2020
elephantiasis
roundworm
hookworm
whipworm
trachoma
river blindness
snail fever
These diseases live in the bodies of more than one billion people. With your help we can see the end of all of seven of them.
David Harris DraftFCB London on video design:
make sure video won’t recoil people, noir repulsive
have an emotional engagement with our audience, create suspense
get audience attention
create empathy with celebrities we use. Filmed the celebrities while watching video and see their candid reaction. Shocking thing is there is a cure and its such a small a month of money

candid reaction. Shocking thing is there is a cure and its such a small a month of money
An important thing is that there is an endpoint. Make people feel: Wow! In 7 years we can make a difference! It’s a short time frame. And then donations started coming in.
Peter Koechly, Co Founder, Upworthy
make a video that would draw attention to the most important concern of the world
what we found is that emotion really matters. the type of emotion matters as well. it’s active emotion that will make people share. Emotions that get you to sit forward and do something.
How can we make it viral? Peter:
How do you build an audience and build it over time.
The good video is just the starting point
We focused a lot on just generating curiosity
Need to catch them and draw their attention, then give them the emotional message
Emcee:
it’s economically the most cost effective intervention. Linked to all the MDGs. It enhances the programs for water & sanitation, nutrition, maternal health. When we talk of the neglected tropical diseases, we are talk of basically the same communities needing sanitation, nutrition, electrification, water, micro enterprises. So we see the N7 campaign as directed to the same communities.
Roth: How can we change?
1. Creating a social consensus: Dr. Kim of the World Bank mentioned this. Creating a social movement that builds concern at the global level for eradicating extreme poverty. We need the will of people who are not living in places of extreme poverty. We need their care, their will, their resources, political commitment to fight these horrible but preventable diseases. We should be concerned because we have moral ties to our fellow creatures in the planet. We should be concerned because the places of high poverty and disease are places of social unrest, breeding grounds for violence, that are contagious of political anti social movements that undermine the world structure and can infect all of our lives. I prefer to emphasise the moral commitment when we see a fellow human being suffering and we should feel that suffering, a moral imperative to do something about it. Participating in building social consensus to bring resources to bear on the things we know how to change already. Changing the course of human health by changing the science 7 technology already in our disposal.
2. Provoke care: to tell stories about the fate of a child born in Africa who is actually robust and running around and playing and beginning to read and suddenly because of improper sanitation, some water that has microbes that cause an infection, suddenly this kid has diarrhea, cause stomach problems, suddenly this minor problem can start off a chain of reactions that make it more and more likely that he won’t survive on his 5th birthday. These are the stories that we need to tell people so as to provoke their care. 3. Marshall resources: Wealthy nations and world organizations can work together with private enterprise.to bring resources to bear for those who need them the most. Sanitation, preventive care and basic nourishment, not that expensive, if we can find ways to bring them to countries that need them the most, then we can systematically reduce the rate of morbidity
Interview
Dr. Jerry Sachs
Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, Health Policy and Management Director of the Earth Institute
Columbia University
The world moves at very different speeds. some poor countries are achieving rapid economic development, their using new technology, maybe favorable geography, new industries. Other very poor countries in a desperate situation are a actually worsening.
In general , I believe that we have the capacity, the tools, the global wealth to help all parts of the world not only to place extreme poverty under control but basically down to zero in this generation. On the other hand, we have to say that won’t happen by itself. there has to be a deliberate and chose path in order to achieve that.
Roth: Debate ongoing as regards the chosen path which has supposedly pernicious consequences
creating dependency. A poverty trap, a dependency morass. And the responsibility of wealthy countries to do something about poverty.
Sachs: the evidence that i take into account is history. Then long term and recent. Evrry one of us at

some time needed some help. Wheh we’re young and dependent, we needed help to become independent.
Headed 13 years ago a mission for the WHO. HELP for HEALTH. For malaria.Results: Malaria has come down sharply and can link it to specific initiatives of the global community working together with low income countries.
The critics of aid are also right in that adding money to a situation doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. Its a process that requires expertise, good diagnosis, transparency, accountability, rigor. I view the aid process as a contractual relationship, it’s the right thing to do morally, it is also the right thing to do for the kind of world we want. The recipients cannot just say, we are poor, leave us alone. There is a strong need for conditionality: We are hoping you, you have to demonstrate good performance, transparency, credilbity, to ability to monitor what’s happening, It is a mutual responsible relationship in my opinion.
Random control trial for new vaccines, other interventions, can be useful. However, i have learned that in a messy environment, that’s not the best tool. There truth is there are many ways to design and develop new approaches. I urge a multiplicity of methods. people should get out there and do things. it’s not enough to theorize.
Theory without the practice has two problems: One, it doesn’t produce results and two, it’s noir even good theory. then implementation phase is a vital part of learning, trial and error, less formal, it should be learning by doing, it’s building multidisciplinary teams to try different approaches
The world did change the policy on distribution of ,mosquito nets. 300 million nets were distributed 2008-2010.
There are many kinds of knowledge. There’s formal knowledge. There’s demonstrated trial. leading malarialogists had been saying nets should be given out.
Motivating change and responses to poverty
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/65
Continuation, Interview
Dr. Jerry Sachs
Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, Health Policy and Management Director of the Earth Institute
Columbia University
One of the fascinating kinds of knowledge is the knowledge of deeply experienced practitioners who had been on the field, doing work for years or even decades. Sometimes called tacit knowledge, sometimes called an art, sometimes professional experience.
Context is extraordinarily important. Evaluations and decisions are not simply statistical tests. I learned a long time ago to ask other professions. Understand that we have a web of knowledge. And we have to ouse that effectively when we think hard about what our options are to a policy choice.
Roth: Is that the reason why you have been the subject of some controversy? The debate between data analysis as opposed to contextual consideration?
Many economists do these randomized trials. My approach is different. Knowledge from working on 134 countries. Knowldege of 30 years of experience dealing with agronomists, climatologists, etc. and it builds up over time. i find it less persuasive to do one day of trial than depend on world of data. All of the prior experience, all of the risk assessment., etc.
I believe we need to live in a moral framework. Ethics as defined by Aristotle as the kind of behavior consistent with living in a city state. We live in a world where we have to behave in certain ways so that we act decently and so on. I find certain moral teachings to be very important. I am a fan of the Buddhist idea that all the glitter is not one that you would throw your life after. Aristotle’s notion that we are social animals and have to behave. Am a believer in Jesus’s teaching that he who feeds the least among us feeds me. Morals are about how we treat each other decently. Not just the do nots. that’s its about what Pope Francis said that “the highest value is mercy.” I believe in the Catholic teaching on the Universal
destination of goods: You can have private property; but if you come to a situation where private property leads the rich person to say I don’t have to help a starving poor person, private property claim is overwhelmed by a moral claim.
Property rights are bound by a moral frame. We are human beings in a society of others. it is our moral

Property rights are bound by a moral frame. We are human beings in a society of others. it is our moral responsibility to tank e cognizance of humanity
If you are too dogmatic, you can say goodbye to the chance to solve a problem
The bottom line is making progress
Advice to Coursera students:
Never lose that basic motivation when solving a problem. Listen carefully to others, take your bruises sustainable development. A holistic view of society. Always take into account economic, social and environmental consideration.
Keep learning. the issue of sustainable development requires a lifelong learning. We have huge problems: climate change, extreme poverty, big environmental crisis, pollution, big social crisis, inequality in our society, indigenous populations deeply deprived of even their basic rights and access to public services. With eyes open, heart filled, mind foiled with lots of good ideas and tools, there’s no shortage of great things to do over the next thirty years. the world is very l;likely to have sustainable development goals or SDGs, guideposts after 2015.
Roth: Back to How Can We change? 1. Creating a social consensus
2. Provoke care
3. Marshall resources
4. Design patterns of intervention: We need to create, design patterns of interventions that we test so as to find the ones that are best. Here technology can play a very important role. There is a great faith in mobile devices, to new vaccine delivery. Technmology can rrealy play a very important role in this regard. Technology is crucial for adding to our resources for clean water, education and easier delivery of preventive care. These things are already in our grasp. The thing that I find so remarkable is that we already know how to make these changes. We want to be energized. We know how to make the change. We need the political will and social consensus to make the change happen.
Amartya Sen: “With adequate social opportunities, individuals can effectively shape their own destiny and help each other. Individuals don’t have to be seen as passive recipients of then benefits, or of th chinning development programs.”
“There is indeed a strong rationale for recognizing the positive role of free and sustainable agency among people who are the most vulnerable.”
Our job is to put together the social will to bring our knowledge, our care and our resources to bear on some of the world’s most dramatic problems that together we can being to address.
WEEK 6
Introduction and quiet violence against girls and women
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/67
Roth:
Gender matters.Disease, Poverty, Climate change.
Gender is a category that makes an enormous difference whenever we are talking about any of the major global challenges.
Literacy:
80% of men achieve literacy, but only 2/3 for women
In low human development countries, it’s 50% for men, 34% for women
GDP:
In medium development countries, men control twice as much as the women

Interview: Host: Maz Kessler, Senior Creative Director, Founder at Catapult

Interview: Host: Maz Kessler, Senior Creative Director, Founder at Catapult
Only 6% of all funding went to girls and women
Mariane Pearl, Managing Editor, Chime for Change Journalism Platform
The way, we’ve been taught history, women were not part of history
We were not taught history from the perspective of women
Telling stories to explain decisions in history. Men dominate. women have no stories to tell Women’s right is about sharing power.
Kessler:
We have the tool. We think of the internet as the greatest blank cheque ever written . so we decided to take matters into our hands and to build a crowd forming platform which we will really energise by three principles:
The first principle is it’s all about listening to women. they are agents of change in their own lines. But they need funds to do that.
We want to build something that really engages with men. Frankly, we’r e not going to make progress if men are not going to stand with us.
We want to be able to choose exactly where our money went. Nobody should make those decisions for us anymore. 100 % of our donations should go straight to the ground, straight to women.
So we launched Catapult, with some wonderful grassroots partners. And this is Routes of Health in the Philippines. And they provide family planning services where everyone was pregnant. They teach sex education. Stories of success. Raised $1,800. In 90 days:
17 educational sessions
20 received contraceptions
57 check ups
11 pregnant women cared for
Small project, but achieved very measurable impact on their community.
Chime for Change: 210 projects, 81 countries. 84 nonprofits.The first coincert ever where you decided what to fund.
50k concert goers
1B viewers worldwide. Real impact:
$4.3M donated, thanks to Gucci underwriting the concert. Donated direct to girls and women’s orb[ganizations.
280 projects
84 organizations
Top ten issues:
Education and training: 116 projects health 66
advocacy 51
leadership 52
maternal health 45
violence against women 44 reproductive rights 40
rights 37
economic security 32
gender discrimination 28
Voice over: Together, we’ve crowd funded more than 250 projects in 81 countries One of the chief goals of Catapult is to allow women and girls to tell their own stories
Roth:
Amartya Sen: economist, philosopher, critic
Wrote an essay on “The Missing Women”
Sinc eth survival rate for women is greater than for men, when you see that a society has significantly more men than women, that is the result of actions that cut the lives short of girls and women. we don’t
see these actions except in the demographics.
In developed countries, you would have 101 women for every 100 men.
But in developing worlds like South Asia and China, it’s 93 women for every 100 men. The cause according to Zen, is that female foetuses are being aborted, and girl were not cared for the same way

according to Zen, is that female foetuses are being aborted, and girl were not cared for the same way boys were cared for. So they die off more often and never reach adulthood because of prejudice.
This amounts to 100 million missing women in Asia. A dramatic concretisation of the effects of prejudice. “A distressing aspect of gender bias in India that shows little sign of going away is the preference for boys over girls.” Amartya Sen
“One of the most pernicious manifestations of this pro-male bias is the relatively higher mortality rates of girls compared with boys, not because girls are killed, but mainly because of the quiet violence of the neglect of their health and illness in comparison with the attention that male children receive.” Sen “Studies have shown that male priority in care continues for adults as well as children, raising the mortality rates of adult women above those of men.” Sen
Social entrepreneurship and gender lens investing
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/69
Interview Joy Anderson Founder of Criterion Visting Professor Wesleyan University
Believe in training market activists who believe they can change the rules of political systems
There’s something intrinsically evil in competitive forces of the market. They are just made up. We can chane the rules of finance and business.
How do you cane how things work
We have a program right now for churches to invest in micro enterprises
We can rethink products in the emerging markets
Use all the tools available from various economic sectors
Roth: Now, there so much focus on entrepreneurship. and now social entrepreneurship has developed. Anderson: We celebrate the hero entrepreneur. Not the system,Not the eco system.
Do we come from a culture that actual promote that individual? Do we come fro culture where the entrepreneur needs that arrogant confidence to survive?
I have no money, So I built relationships with people who have. I’m not gonna wait to be invited to a table. i am going to se that table.
Inventors are not just those inventig products. But also those inventing organisations.
The entrepreneur creates an organisation through which inventions happen
Social entrepreneur will say: the way the world is running right now is not acceptable. so I’m taking the risk to invent new organisations. so I’m gonna do it to create a different world. the line between I’m in it for the profit and those not has become blurred.
Gender lens : reducing your ability to do business and do good in the world.
Education and risk taking
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/71
Roth: To do good in a world while running a sustainable organization. Joy Anderson:
A JP Morgan officer told her to wake up and join the real world.
Roth: Typical image of an entrepreneur being male. For social entrepreneurs, the greatest investment in change is investing in women.How is gender factor into your work?
Anderson: In big meeting, I was the only woman in the room.
Microfinancing led by women. But as it becomes SME, it becomes less predominantly women.
You find a lot of women in poverty. Questions of access to capital. Women still at 3% of access to capital. Impact inventing and social entrepreneurs have gone wrong when they play by old rules while trying to change the world.

change the world.

roundtable : Nnenna Nwakanwa, Co-Founder, The Free Software and Open Source Foundation of Africa
Education is one key factor in innovation. Opportunity is another way of educating a person. We need to talk abut mentoring
Funding is no. 2, not no. 1. Mentoring is no.1
Next is internationalization. Given a louder voice to what people are doing.
We cannot be innovative enough unless we have openness.Openness in technology standards. Openness in procurement, level playing grounds. Open governments. Open data, open software. Internet. We cannot do anything today without the robust internet./
Anderson:
How do you use knowledge about gender to come up with a better solution. Women’s participation in the national economy is growing, equal to India Only 3% of the asset managers in the world are women.
It is risky to try to create change
Malala and the courage of education
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/73
Roth:
Three sources of vulnerability fir women and girls:
Child marriage
Child labor
Gender based violence
Above and beyond what Sen mentioned:
Selective cafe for men over women
Selective abortion
Education - one of the tools we have. Giving them the opportunity for secondary education is a major tool for dealing with these sources of vulnerability. Improving their retention rates in school. Improving the performance of their teachers. Improving the rates at which the families invest in their girls giving them the opportunity to attend school. Education also helps in regard to the delay in having children. A major source of discrimination against girls is marrying them off at a very young age. According to a UNICEF report, by the time they turn 18, nearly half of the women are married and a quarter have given birth.One of the most important things we can do for women is delaying marriage and delaying the time they have a child. This will result in a dramatic improvement in their health and economic status.
Sandra Keats
Co-Producer
Storyhead Productions/Third Rail Films
Given the resources, women tend toward smaller families.
Story of Gladys Kalibbala of Kampala, Uganda. A journalist at New Vision paper.I have a column for lost and abandoned children. There are many everyday. Some are just lost. But many are abandoned.
Dr. Peter Ibembe, Reproductive Health Uganda:
Uganda has the third highest growth rate in the world.
The average woman has six children
Many women want to control their fertility but access to services is quite difficult.
How many women need it and how many get it? 26%, one in four.
Having fewer children should improve the chances of our children having a better life.
Aaron Sherinian, Vice President, Communications & Public Relations, The UN Foundation
Kenneth Weiss, Investigative Journalist, LA Times - if women want it, why can’t they get it? If they want to plan their family, let them have it.
Sandra Keats: It’s personal. To talk about population and reproductive health, better to let others tell their stories.To tell women stories.

their stories.To tell women stories.
The core advice of the panel on family planning at the Social Good Summit is litem to what women say they want.
Roth: For example, at first they thought that first time menstruation was a social problem for girls, that they were embarrassed so they miss school.But it turned kurt the reason was they had cramps, they were in pain. So treating pain improved their school attendance during menstruation.
Best for improving education rates for women is scholarships. CCT, Paying families to send their kids to school. Providing cash incentives for girls improves attendance dramatically. CCT seems to be more effective than some elaborate means to induce kids to go to school.
Scholarship is also an effective way of delaying the first child. While in school, she is likely to be married and have a baby. Scholarships have an effect on the age of marriage because the family is getting money through their daughter, through education.
Child labor, or female servitude: Once again, scholarships, cash to the family are very effective ways of reducing a young girl’s participation in the labor market. The family gets paid for sending a girl to school, thus reducing the likelihood of her entering the labor market while still a teenager.
What social scientists are finding in many parts of the world is that Conditional Cash Transfer changed the incentives for families in regard to girls.They get economic benefits in new ways. it changes behavior. Education can make a difference.
“There is a definitive empirical evidence that women’s literacy and schooling cut down child mortality and work against the selective neglect off the health of girls. They are also the strongest influence, among all relevant causal factors, in cutting down fertility rates.” Amrtya Sen
Education for girls have all these secondary and tertiary benefits.
Roundtable with Malala
I want education for every child. In Pakistan, In India. Afghanistan.
Childen are suffering from child labor. terrorism. We need too stand up for them. We whole not wait for someone else. We should not wait for the government to do it.We should do it by ourselves., It is our duty.
Malala started as a blogger. We want her to return to the internet, to sue that as much as possible. “Extremists are afraid of books and pens.”
A thief loves dark. A terrorist loves ignorance. Because education is light,
What do you hoopoe the Malala Fund will achieve: My dream is to see every girl to be educated. in every country. To motivate parents, children to go into education.
Shiza Shahid
Malala Fund CEO:
Solutions to education must be rooted in culture. Education should not only be about literacy. But about giving girls power, a more fulfilled life, sand to help give positive change in their community. The fund is not just to give girls a better life, bit to be able to help humanity inn terms of unleashing the potential of girls across the world. To create more Malalas, to have more young girls have their voice.
Malala Yousafzai
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Malala" redirects here. For the village in India, see Malala (village).
It has been suggested that some content from this article or section be split
into a separate article titled Assassination attempt of Malala Yousafzai. (Discuss)

Malala Yousafzai

Yousafzai at Girl Summit 2014
م له یوسفزۍ Native name

Born
Residence
Nationality Occupation Known for Religion Relatives
Awards

12 July 1997 (age 17)
Mingora, North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan
Birmingham, England
Pakistani
Blogger, activist for rights to education and for women Activism, Taliban assassination attempt
Islam
Tor Pekai Yousafzai (mother),Ziauddin Yousafzai (father)
Honorary Canadian citizenship[1] National Youth Peace Prize Sakharov Prize
Simone de Beauvoir Prize

Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai (Pashto: م له یوسفزۍ [mə ˈlaː lə . ju səf ˈzəj];[2] Urdu: م لہ یوسف زئی Malālah Yūsafzay,
born 12 July 1997)[3] is a Pakistani school pupil and education activist from the town of Mingora in the Swat District of Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. She is known for her activism for rights to education and for women, especially in the Swat Valley, where the Talibanhad at times banned girls from attending school. In early 2009, at the age of 11–12, Yousafzai wrote a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC detailing her life under Taliban rule, their attempts to take control of the valley, and her views on promoting education for 22 girls. The following summer, a New York Times documentary by journalist Adam B. Ellick was filmed about her life as the Pakistani military intervened in the region, culminating in the Second Battle of Swat. Yousafzai rose in prominence, giving
interviews in print and on television, and she was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize by South African activist Desmond Tutu.

In the afternoon of Tuesday, 9 October 2012, Malala boarded her school bus in the northwest

In the afternoon of Tuesday, 9 October 2012, Malala boarded her school bus in the northwest Pakistani district of Swat. A gunman asked for Malala by name, then pointed a Colt 45 at her and fired three shots. One bullet hit the left side of Malala's forehead, traveled under her skin the length of her
face and then into her shoulder.[4]
In the days immediately following the attack, she remained unconscious and in critical condition, but later her condition improved enough for her to be sent to theQueen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England, for intensive rehabilitation. On 12 October, a group of 50 Islamic clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwā against those who tried to kill her, but the Taliban reiterated its intent to kill Yousafzai and her father.
The assassination attempt sparked a national and international outpouring of support for Yousafzai. Deutsche Welle wrote in January 2013 that Yousafzai may have become "the most famous teenager in
the world."[5] United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown launched a UN petition in Yousafzai's name, using the slogan "I am Malala" and demanding that all children worldwide be in school by the end of 2015 – a petition which helped lead to the ratification of Pakistan's first Right
to Education Bill.[6] In 29 April 2013 issue of Time magazine, Yousafzai was featured on the magazine's front cover and as one of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World". She was the winner of Pakistan's first National Youth Peace Prize. Although Yousafzai was widely tipped to win the
Nobel Peace Prize,[7] it was awarded to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons[8] On 12 July 2013, Yousafzai spoke at the UN to call for worldwide access to education, and in
September 2013 she officially opened the Library of Birmingham.[9] Yousafzai is the recipient of the Sakharov Prize for 2013. On 16 October 2013 the Government of Canada announced its intention that
theParliament of Canada confer Honorary Canadian citizenship upon Yousafzai.[10] In February 2014,
she was nominated for the World Children's prize in Sweden.[11] In April 2014 it was announced that Yousafzai will be granted an honorary degree by theUniversity of King's College in Halifax on May 15, 2014.[12]

Roth: “Women’s education, which has been a powerful force in reducing mortality discrimination against women and also in achieving other important social objectives such as the reduction of fertility rates, has not been able to eliminate - at least not yet - natality discrimination.” Amartya Sen
- It seems from the demographics that many families are choosing to abort female fetuses at much higher rates than they abort male fetuses. so there is this quiet violence which skews the population of the world because of prejudice
Interview, co founders of Shining Hope for Communities. Kennedy Odede ’12, President CEO, Shining Hope for Communities; Jessica Posner ’09, Co Founder and COO, Shining Hope for Communities
Our Innovation

Our Innovation
Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO) combats gender inequality and extreme poverty in urban slums by linking tuition free schools for girls to accessible social services for all.
Girls
The innovation in SHOFCO’s model holds that girls’ education is the key to improving gender equality, which, in turn, is the key to breaking the cycles of urban poverty. Linking a school for girls to integrated social services for all connects the ideas of women and girls’ rights with community progress and invites both genders to participate in the solution.
Grassroots
A grassroots movement is one in which a community is invested and takes a leadership role in its own future. Kennedy Odede’s experience growing up in Kibera imparted a deep, organic understanding of the realities facing urban slum dwellers. He witnessed the ingenuity and industriousness of the people of Kibera amidst incredible hardships. SHOFCO deeply believes in empowering a community by giving it tools and opportunities to build their own bright futures.
With over 100 local employees who lead and implement all of SHFOCO’s programs, SHOFCO is the largest employer in Kibera. From teachers at the Kibera School for Girls, to doctors and nurses at the Johanna Justin-Jinich Community Clinic, to gender-based violence case workers, to the youth who collect our robust community data, the people of Kibera are drivers of their own community development and empowerment.
Holistic Approach
One categorical development initiative (e.g. a free clinic, a clean water project) cannot singlehandedly lift a community out of poverty. SHOFCO’s model is holistic and integrated, addressing the complexities of urban realities. While our school for girls nurtures the next generation of female leaders able to enact systemic change, our economic empowerment programs increase investment in education, and gender violence eradication initiatives ensure women are protected and valued. Mothers of our students enroll in group savings and loans; husbands attend adult literacy classes; older brothers play on our youth soccer teams; acquaintances bring their infants to our free clinic. In a virtuous circle, SHOFCO elevates entire communities.
The Fight Against Urban Poverty Begins With a Girl
Odede: Everybody loves their mother. That’s his opening to convince people to support movement for girls. Roth: What effects do you see happening because you are vine girls a chance for primary education? Jessica: creating next generation of leaders. access too clean water through a girls school. Mortality dropped. Income increase.
What kind of social services you decided top connect to the school: People dying because there is no health care. so they set up health clinic. Set up library. Water services. Community bank - Community coming together in groups, Pool their money together.
The Fight Against Urban Poverty Begins With a Girl

The Fight Against Urban Poverty Begins With a Girl
The Fight Against Urban Poverty Begins With a Girl
Education and building human capacity
https://class.coursera.org/changetheworld-002/lecture/77
Obstacles to community bank:
Odede: The challenge is that maybe some people might perceive politics. Another challenge. We are not big. We are not small.
Some say: you are too small. Four years ago, we were nothing. Now we have over 124 employees.
Roth: there are people who would like to use you as a model for other places.
Jessica: we are about to go top another community in Kenya, aside from Kibera. We are going to the second biggest slum in Kenya, Mathare, with 82,000 people. a group of young people went to Kennedy and asked, we know what you did, how do we do that? so we gave them, technical support, lending them, our staff, but they’ve been self supporting on the funds. And after two years, we are saying, we are ready to build a school for girls.
What are the most effective things you find to get other people to care?
Odede: You must say that you believe 100% in what you are doing. When people see the passion we have. Then work with smart people. It’s not about lone person. It’s about the cause. Be passionate, believe in your cause and you transform others. We have invested significantly into our evaluation infrastructure. Use storytelling, make it personal. People connect better that way. Be passionate.
Advice to students: You have to really believe in the cause. You have to identify what you want to do. What is the connection? The world a big place. You have to find a small patch. You just know that the little thing you are doing has an impact. You are changing people’s lives. Thousands. But I believe it should be one at a time. Start small. it will grow. There is much buzz about social entrepreneurship, there should also be social interpreneeurship, You can be that doctor who cares about the patients.
Roth: To find ways to raise awareness. To make a difference. To raise funds. To make a difference either in their own backyards or across the globe.
Roth:
I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the ways that social scientists have found that we can change incentive structures in families and in neighborhoods and even in regions. You see that there are ways in which you can begin to change the expectations that families have about girls, kind of force in some way. But the n once you’ve done that, the changes seem to take root. In some parts of the world, there are established quotas where a certain percentage have to be women. The expectation changes that women can be leaders, can get the job done.
Poverty action labs in changing incentives:
Robert Jensen. he is interested . When families become aware that women can hold high paying jobs. Once they become aware that they girls they are taking care of can grow to earn a lot of money, from Jensen’s experiment, that they begin to value girls differently, they will invest in their girls because the girls will not only be able to sustain themselves economically bout also contribute to the well being of

girls will not only be able to sustain themselves economically bout also contribute to the well being of their families.
Jensen’s experiment shows that when girls are kept in schools longer, they have better health, better nutrition because the expectation of the families changed that.
“While deeper social and cultural factors may be responsible for women’s low status, some parents are not investing in their daughters becsue they do not see an economic value in doing so.” Jasmine Shah The work of social scientists today is to convince people that investing in girls is a sound economic decision.
Martha Nussbaum: She’s interested in identifying cross-culturally, what human capabilities are, and she lists ten of them in the reading for this week with some subdivisions. And how it is a violation of human dignity that some people and many of them, girls and women, some people are not allowed to have their human capacities flourish. ?She’s not interested inn changing the incentives but I’m changing the mindset.Gneder discrimination as a violation of human dignity. It lowers economic growth, it erodes human capital, but she wants to think more broadly than that:
“All too often, women are not treated as ends in there own right, persons with a dignity that deserves respect from laws and institutions. Instead, they are treated as mere instruments of the ends of others - reproduces, caregivers, sexual outiets, agents of a family;s general prosperity.” Martha Nussbaum Nussbaum says we should not treat any person as a means to something else but as ends by themselves.
Nussbaum wants us to think not only of economic development but also of human development. “Women lack essential support for easing lives that are fully human. This lack of support is frequently caused by their being women.” Martha Nussbaum
We should not want to live in a world where in order to get basic respect and sign ity, you have to be able to make more money for your family. We want to olive i a world where we identify capabilities that all human beings share, And we ensure that people have the opportunity to exercise their capacities to flourish. so we have here one commonality between the social scientist and the philosopher. That commonality is that women are suffering differentially. They are suffering much more than men, and second, that at identifying the sources of that suffering and fixing it, it has widespread reverberations around the globe. Nussbaum wants us to know what it means to exercise our humanity and to energize us to create social movements, to create educational structures and social structures and economic structures through which we help others around the world exercise their human capabilities.
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