Category: Property Rights

Let There Be Light

 

  One of Mark Bent’s solar flashlights stuck in a wall to illuminate a classroom in Africa.  Source of the photo:   http://bogolight.com/images/success6.jpg

 

What Africa most needs, to grow and prosper, is to eject kleptocratic war-lord governments, and to embrace property rights and the free market.  But in the meantime, maybe handing out some solar powered flashlights can make some modest improvements in how some people live.

The story excerpted below is an example of private, entrepreneur-donor-involved, give-while-you-live philanthropy that holds a greater promise of actually doing some good in the world, than other sorts of philanthropy, or than government foreign aid. 

 

FUGNIDO, Ethiopia — At 10 p.m. in a sweltering refugee camp here in western Ethiopia, a group of foreigners was making its way past thatch-roofed huts when a tall, rail-thin man approached a silver-haired American and took hold of his hands. 

The man, a Sudanese refugee, announced that his wife had just given birth, and the boy would be honored with the visitor’s name. After several awkward translation attempts of “Mark Bent,” it was settled. “Mar,” he said, will grow up hearing stories of his namesake, the man who handed out flashlights powered by the sun.

Since August 2005, when visits to an Eritrean village prompted him to research global access to artificial light, Mr. Bent, 49, a former foreign service officer and Houston oilman, has spent $250,000 to develop and manufacture a solar-powered flashlight.

His invention gives up to seven hours of light on a daily solar recharge and can last nearly three years between replacements of three AA batteries costing 80 cents.

Over the last year, he said, he and corporate benefactors like Exxon Mobil have donated 10,500 flashlights to United Nations refugee camps and African aid charities.

Another 10,000 have been provided through a sales program, and 10,000 more have just arrived in Houston awaiting distribution by his company, SunNight Solar.

“I find it hard sometimes to explain the scope of the problems in these camps with no light,” Mr. Bent said. “If you’re an environmentalist you think about it in terms of discarded batteries and coal and wood burning and kerosene smoke; if you’re a feminist you think of it in terms of security for women and preventing sexual abuse and violence; if you’re an educator you think about it in terms of helping children and adults study at night.”

Here at Fugnido, at one of six camps housing more than 21,000 refugees 550 miles west of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, Peter Gatkuoth, a Sudanese refugee, wrote on “the importance of Solor.”

“In case of thief, we open our solor and the thief ran away,” he wrote. “If there is a sick person at night we will took him with the solor to health center.”

A shurta, or guard, who called himself just John, said, “I used the light to scare away wild animals.” Others said lights were hung above school desks for children and adults to study after the day’s work.

 

For the full story, see:

Will Connors and Ralph Blumenthal.  "Letting Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poor."  The New York Times, Section 1  (Sun., May 20, 2007):  8.

(Note:  the title of the article on line was:  "Solar Flashlight Lets Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poorest Villages.")

 

 EthiopiaMap.gif   Source of map:  online version of the NYT article cited above.

 

Chinese Restaurant Entrepreneur: “A Citizen’s Legal Property Is Not to Be Encroached Upon”

 

CHONGQING, China, March 23 — For weeks the confrontation drew attention from people all across China, as a simple homeowner stared down the forces of large-scale redevelopment that are sweeping this country, blocking the preparation of a gigantic construction site by an act of sheer will.

Chinese bloggers were the first to spread the news, of a house perched atop a tall, thimble-shaped piece of land like Mont-Saint-Michel in northern France, in the middle of a vast excavation.

Newspapers dived in next, followed by national television. Then, in a way that is common in China whenever an event begins to take on hints of political overtones, the story virtually disappeared from the news media after the government, bloggers here said, decreed that the subject was suddenly out of bounds.

. . .

What drove interest in the Chongqing case was the uncanny ability of the homeowner to hold out for so long. Stories are legion in Chinese cities of the arrest or even beating of people who protest too vigorously against their eviction and relocation. In one often-heard twist, holdouts are summoned to the local police station and return home only to find their house already demolished. How did this owner, a woman no less, manage? Millions wondered.

Part of the answer, which on meeting her takes only a moment to discover, is that Wu Ping is anything but an ordinary woman. With her dramatic lock of hair precisely combed and pinned in the back, a form-flattering bright red coat, high cheekbones and wide, excited eyes, the tall, 49-year-old restaurant entrepreneur knows how to attract attention — a potent weapon in China’s new media age, in which people try to use public opinion and appeals to the national image to influence the authorities. 

. . .  

“I have more faith than others,” she began. “I believe that this is my legal property, and if I cannot protect my own rights, it makes a mockery of the property law just passed. In a democratic and lawful society a person has the legal right to manage one’s own property.”

Tian Yihang, a local college student, spoke glowingly of her in an interview at the monorail station. “This is a peculiar situation,” he said, with a bit of understatement. “I admire the owner for being so persistent in her principles. In China such things shock the common mind.”

. . .  

With the street so choked with onlookers that traffic began to back up, Ms. Wu’s brother, Wu Jian, began waving a newspaper above the crowd, pointing to pictures of Ms. Wu’s husband, a local martial arts champion, who was scheduled to appear in a highly publicized tournament that evening. “He’s going into our building and will plant a flag there,” Mr. Wu announced.

Moments later, as the crowd began to thin, a Chinese flag appeared on the roof with a hand-painted banner that read: “A citizen’s legal property is not to be encroached on.”

Asked how his brother-in-law had managed to get inside the locked site and climb the escarpment on which the house is perched, he said with a wink, “Magic.”  

 

For the full story, see: 

HOWARD W. FRENCH.  "CHONGQING JOURNAL; Homeowner Stares Down Wreckers, at Least for a While."  The New York Times  (Tues., March 27, 2007):  A4.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

 

ChinaHomeDefenderWuPing.jpg ChinaChonqingMap.jpg   On left, Wu Ping, with her tall brother in the background.  On right, a map showing the location of Chongqing in China.  Source of photo and map:  online version of the NYT article cited above.

 

“Under the Spell of a Theory”

 

Johnson’s wonderful book is part mystery, part history, part philosophy of science, and part musing on political philosophy.  The passage below warms the heart (and stimulates the brain) of the libertarian.  Against great odds, Dr. Snow persisted in presenting ever-more convincing evidence for his correct water-borne theory of cholera.  Meanwhile Chadwick, the main advocate of government public health activities, continued to direct policy on the basis of the mistaken theory that cholera was spread by foul vapors in the air. 

 

(p. 120) Herein lies the dominant irony of the state of British public health in the late 1840s.  Just as Snow was concocting his theory of cholera as a waterborne agent that had to be ingested to do harm, Chadwick was building an elaborate scheme that would deliver the cholera bacteria directly to the mouths of Londoners.  (A modern bioterrorist couldn’t have come up with a more ingenious and far-reaching scheme.)  Sure enough, the cholera returned with a vengeance in 1848-1849, the rising death toll neatly following the Sewer Commission’s cheerful data on the growing supply of waste deposited in the river.  By the end of the outbreak, nearly 15,000 Londoners would be dead.  The first defining act of a modern, centralized public-health authority was to poison an entire urban population.  (There is some precedent to Chadwick’s folly, however.  During the plague years of 1665-1666, popular lore had it that the disease was being spread by dogs and cats.  The Lord Mayor promptly called for a mass extermination of the city’s entire population of pets and strays, which was dutifully carried out by his minions.  Of course, the plague turned out to be (p. 121) transmitted via the rats, whose numbers grew exponentially after the sudden, state-sponsored demise of their only predators.)

Why would the authorities go to such lengths to destroy the Thames?  All the members of these various commissions were fully aware that the waste being flushed into the river was having disastrous effects on the quality of the water.  And they were equally aware that a significant percentage of the population was drinking the water.  Even without a waterborne theory of cholera’s origin, it seems like madness to celebrate the ever-increasing tonnage of human excrement being flushed into the water supply.  And, indeed, it was a kind of madness, the madness that comes from being under the spell of a Theory.  If all smell was disease, if London’s health crisis was entirely attributable to contaminated air, then any effort to rid the houses and streets of miasmatic vapors was worth the cost, even if it meant turning the Thames into a river of sewage.

 

Source: 

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.

 

Morales Slaughters Snow-White Llama to Celebrate Nationalization of Tin Smelter

   A snow-white llama that has not yet been symbolically sacrificed by Bolivian President Evo Morales.  Source of the photo:  http://www.staff.stir.ac.uk/f.r.wheater/images/25%20Llama%205_8_04.JPG

 

Picture it, in President Evo Morales’ Bolivia:  a peaceful, innocent-looking, snow-white llama slaughtered in homage to a barbaric mystical ritual, and in celebration of the slaughter, through nationalization, of private property and economic growth.  And afterwards, one imagines the visitng French brass band played on. 

 

VINTO, Bolivia: The ritual sacrifice of a snow-white llama provided a symbolic completion Friday to President Evo Morales’ nationalization of Bolivia’s lone operating tin smelter.

Swiss mining giant Glencore International AG owned the plant until last week and has threatened to seek compensation through international arbitration. Morales still says his government will not compensate Glencore for the Feb. 9 nationalization of the Vinto plant, located on a high Andean plain 180 kilometers (110 miles) southeast of the capital of La Paz.

. . .

After the ceremony, Morales hosted plant workers, a troupe of Andean pipers and a visiting French brass band to an outdoor supper of fried chicken and chuno, a traditional Bolivian dish of dehydrated potatoes.

While the nationalization retained all but a handful of smelter employees, workers remained divided over the change in management. Some rushed to greet "Companero Evo" as he toured the plant; others hung back and wondered about the future.

"Anywhere in the world they’ll tell you the government can’t be a good administrator," said plant employee Oscar Leyton. "But we’ll just have to wait and see how they do it. If they screw up here, they’ll screw up the whole country."

 

For the full story, see: 

"In Bolivia, llama sacrifice completes Morales’ tin smelter nationalization."  International Herald Tribune  February 16, 2007.

(Note:  ellipsis added.) 

 

Communists Import Giant Rabbits to End Starvation in North Korea

 

Apparently the North Korean Communist government’s plan to end starvation in North Korea, is to import and breed giant German rabbits.  If they were really serious, they would do better by respecting property rights, and embracing the free market.

 

EBERSWALDE, Germany — Few people raise bigger bunny rabbits than Karl Szmolinsky, who has been producing long-eared whoppers since 1964.  His favorite breed, German gray giants, are the size of a full-grown beagle and so fat they can barely hop.

Last year, after the retired chauffeur entered some of his monsters in an agricultural fair, word of his breeding skills spread to the North Korean Embassy in Berlin.  Diplomats looked past the cute, furry faces with the twitching noses and saw a possible solution to their nation’s endemic food shortage:  an enormous bunny in every Korean pot.

The North Koreans approached Szmolinsky in November and asked whether he’d advise them on how to start a rabbit breeding program to help "feed the population," the 67-year-old pensioner recalled in an interview at his home in Eberswalde, an eastern German town a few miles from the Polish border.  Sympathetic to the Koreans’ plight, he agreed to sell some of his best stock at a steep discount and volunteered to travel to the hermetic nation as a consultant.

. . .

In December, Szmolinsky stuffed six of his rabbits into modified dog carriers and took them to the airport in Berlin, where they boarded a flight for Pyongyang, via Frankfurt, Germany, and Beijing.  Robert, a 23-pounder, was the largest of the bunch, which included four female rabbits and one other male carefully selected for their breeding potential.

How, exactly, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea intends to parlay the small herd of German Flopsies into hunger relief for its 23 million citizens is unclear.

 

For the full story, see: 

Craig Whitlock.  "A Colossal Leap of Faith In Fight Against Famine North Koreans See Potential in German Breeder’s Giants."  The Washington Post  (Friday, February 2, 2007):  A10.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

 

 RabbitGiantGerman.jpg   A giant German rabbit.  Source of photo:  http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,774187,00.jpg

 

Middendorf “Studied Under Joseph Schumpeter”

GloriousDisasterBK.jpg   Source of book image:  http://basicbooks.com/perseus/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0465045731

 

William Middendorf was important in the Goldwater campaign for president.  Here is a brief excerpt from his recent book about the campaign:

 

(p. 8)  . . ., I became a disciple of the Austrian libertarian school of economics, having studied under Joseph Schumpeter (an odd-man-out at Harvard, later named by the Wall Street Journal as the most important economist of the twentieth century) and Ludwig Von Mises (at New York University).  Schumpeter and Von Mises saw entrepreneurship as a major driving force in economic development, considered private property—protected by an independent judiciary—essential to the efficient use of resources, and held that government intereference in market processes was usually counterproductive.

 

The reference to the book is: 

Middendorf, J. William, II. Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater’s Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

 

To Help Poor: “Allow Entrepreneurs to Flourish”

 

Of the three "views" discussed in Wessel’s original commentary, the following excerpt just includes the one that I share:

 

With the billions of dollars they are spending, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Bill Clinton and Bono are likely to make progress in their quest to prevent treatable diseases from killing millions of people.  Nearly all of these people live or will live in poor countries.

That worries economist Simon Johnson.  He doesn’t doubt the moral imperative to fight disease.  Still, he wonders:  "Do we really know how to help the poor people — the increasing number of poor people?  Do we really know how to help them out of poverty?"

Such questions haunt academics, governments, international institutions and global do-gooders.  They are impressed with China’s rapid modernization, though puzzled that it has done so well without following standard precepts.  They are disappointed and puzzled that Latin America nations haven’t done better, especially because so many did take the advice of the experts.  They are depressed and puzzled by the continued widespread misery in Africa.

With intellectual humility, Mr. Johnson, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, faced a roomful of peers at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association last weekend and said, "Public health had the germ theory of disease.  Economics has made great progress, but it’s still waiting for its ‘germ theory of disease.’"  That probably overstates the challenges remaining to public-health warriors — avian flu, AIDS/HIV, malaria and all — but not the shortcomings of economic understanding of what poor countries should do to achieve sustained growth.

. . .

A third view is that earlier economists focused on the wrong thing.  Mr. Johnson, among others, argues that what really matters is having solid political, legal and economic institutions — courts, central banks, honest bureaucrats, private-property rights — that allow entrepreneurs to flourish.  Imposing what seem to be sound economic policies on corrupt, incompetent or myopic governments is doomed.  Building strong institutions is a necessary prerequisite.  In this camp, there is a running side argument about which comes first:  the institutions or the educated people who create them.  Was the Constitution key to U.S. success, or was it Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton?

 

For the full commentary, see:

DAVID WESSEL.  "CAPITAL; Why Economists Are Still Grasping For Cure to Global Poverty."  The Wall Streeet Journal  (Thurs.,  January 11, 2007):  A7.

 

The Poignant Nobility of Katalimata

 

DefensibleSitesInCreteBk.jpg  Source of book image:  the web site cited below.

 

Years ago I saw a program on the History Channel that has stuck in my mind.  (But, alas, I do not remember the title.)  Near the end, I think, they discussed an ancient horde of invaders that created a dark age in the Mediterranean region.  An on-sight scholar discussed a tiny cliff-side settlement that a family of natives had retreated to, to defend what little they had.

Attacking the tiny enclave would have been difficult.  It was a long way up a treacherous and visible trail.  But for the same reasons, living there would have been difficult too.

How human these unknown ancients were who defended their family and property; how poignantly noble.

 

 

When I watched the program, I jotted down a single word, the name of the site:  Katalimata.

In doing a web search, I encountered the book (a monograph in the Aegean series), whose image appears above.  I’m guessing that the book discusses the site I saw in the program, since the book description says that its author participated in digs at Katalimata.

 

The reference to the book is:

Nowicki, Krzysztof.  "Defensible Sites in Crete C.1200 – 800 B.C."  Aegaeum Vol. 21, 2000.

 

For more information on the book, see:

http://www.ulg.ac.be/archgrec/aegaeum21.html

 

 

Intellectual Property Rights in Toilet

 

CHICAGO (AP) — The gun­man who fatally shot three peo­ple in a law firm’s high-rise office before he was killed by police felt cheated over an invention, au­thorities said Saturday.

  Joe Jackson forced a security guard at gunpoint to take him up to the 38th floor offices of Wood, Phillips, Katz, Clark & Mortimer, which specialized in intellectual property and patents.  He carried the revolver, a knife and a ham­mer in a large manila envelope and chained the office doors be­hind him, police said.

  Jackson, 59, told witnesses be­fore he was shot that he had been cheated over a toilet he had in­vented for use in trucks, Police Superintendent Phil Cline said.

 

For the full story, see:

"Shooter felt cheated over toilet, police say."  Omaha World-Herald  (Sun., 12/10/2006):   4A.

 

The Entrepreneur Versus the Government

A great story about Jim Clark, who founded Silicon Graphics:

(p. 46)  Just a few years back, before the Internet boom, Clark’s house in Atherton had been surrounded by empty fields.  Now he was surrounded by new houses, many of them bigger than his own.  One morning he looked up from his kitchen table and saw the neighbors looking (p. 47) back.  He requested, and was denied, a permit to build a fence tall enough to screen them from his view.  The city of Atherton, California, had strict rules about fences, and the fence Clark wanted to build was declared too high.  So Clark built a hill, and put the fence on top of the hill.  It did not occur to him that there was anything unusual about this.

(page numbers above are from the Norton hardback edition; the full quote is on p. 31 of the paperback edition) 

 

The reference to the hardback edition, is: 

Lewis, Michael.  The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story.  New York:  W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

 

Cheap, Easy, Transparent Property Rights Institutions Are Key to Developing Long Tail

Chris Anderson points out that the main thing currently holding back the long tail, are legal restrictions in the form of clearing copyrights.  This is somewhat analogous to how the legal restrictions to starting up a small business, end up protecting the larger incumbent companies, a la Hernando de Soto’s The Other Path. 

Figuring out how to quickly and cheaply process small intellectual property rights claims is the key.  The assumption that this could and would be done was an underpinning of Bill Gates’ prediction of the key importance of content in his The Road Ahead.

If Gates’ vision could be realized, it would provide the consumer much greater variety (and much closer matches between what is sought and what is found); and it would provide many more producers of content, the opportunity to support themselves through their productive activities.  (As opposed to the current situation where most such producers must produce as a part-time, labor-of-love, while they support themselves by their unrelated ‘day job.’)

 

Books mentioned:

Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail. New York: Hyperion, 2006.

Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995.

Soto, Hernando de. The Other Path. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.