Botswana

I was taking the World IQ quiz on Bill Gates’ blog. If you have seen Hans Rosling’s TED talk, you can guess the correct answers for most questions by cheating — just choose the most extremely positive outcome! However, one of the questions that threw me off was this one about Botswana:

Botswana’s economy is mostly driven by diamond mining – it accounts for 40 percent of the GDP. Paradoxically, many resource-rich countries fall into what’s called the resource curse:

In the 1970s, when oil was discovered in Venezuela, former Oil Minister and OPEC co-founder Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo said: “Ten years from now, 20 years from now, you will see, oil will bring us ruin.” His phrase for oil was: “the devil’s excrement.”

Why are resources a curse? In a country blessed with no natural resources (think Japan), the only way forward for the ruling elite is the slow hard work of building public goods, so that GDP builds up, which then feeds back into the power and importance and utility of the ruling elite. When the ruling elite gets their wealth for free, without having to do the hard work of building public goods and thus GDP of the country, the rulers emphasise the wrong issues. That’s how Venezuela ended up with Hugo Chavez.

This is generally true, but there are exceptions, as an IMF study notes:

Economic growth has not been high in some other resource-abundant countries, such as Indonesia, Venezuela, and Nigeria, partly because of inadequate governance. On the otherhand, resource-scarce countries have sometimes attained relatively high economic growth, like the Maldives, which has good governance.

There are other anomalies: While Malaysia has abundant natural resources and good governance, it has low economic growth for this sample period. Albania is a resource-scarce country with poor governance that has somehow achieved marked growth. Therefore, not only governance but also other macroeconomic elements must affect the relationship between natural resource wealth and economic growth.

Some time back, I had noticed that Botswana was one of the surprising places that Google Maps’ Street View was available (look at the southern part of Africa – just north of South Africa).

Street View is available mostly in high and middle income countries – US, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Eastern Europe, South America, and South-East Asia.

They got Street View before Argentina, Indonesia, Vietnam, and parts of Russia.

Street View (2013)

Street View (2015)

Botswana has achieved this by building sound institutions, and by having good governance, and low corruption. However, the flip side is that the diamond industry employs very few people (only 4 percent of the population), and Botswana has struggled to build other industries.

Being land-locked is a disadvantage for trade. Also it has been said that Botswana might suffer from something called the Dutch disease – once the currency becomes stronger due to growth in one industry’s exports, other industries might suffer because their exports are now more expensive. However, an IMF study found that this was not the case for Botswana.

Bogotá Change

These days we see initiatives like Cycle Day, Open Streets, Bus Rapid Transit (improved access and dedicated lanes for Buses) across Indian cities. Much of this originated in the capital of Colombia – Bogotá. (Note: The first BRT system was implemented in Curitiba, Brazil)

There were two maverick reformers who were mayors of Bogotá during the 1990s – Anatanas Mockus and Enrique Penalosa. Both of them won mayoral elections in the 90s as independents – although Penalosa had a more political background.

Penalosa seems more reasonable of the two – but he is very headstrong and antagonistic in his approach. Mockus, while being the crazier of the two, says that we must show that “morality is compatible with efficiency”.

Basically, there are two approaches to bring about change – one is to take on the world and turn it on its head (revolutionary), and the other is to slip in changes slowly and steadily (evolutionary).

The revolutionary approach is all or nothing – you get big changes or you get nothing, while the evolutionary approach ensures steady progress.

This documentary talks about how Penalosa and Mockus brought about change to Bogotá in the 90s in their different ways.

In the 1990s, Bogota was in urban decay – beset by drugs, cartels, and poverty. It was probably one of the worst major cities on earth.

In 1994 a political metamorphosis started to happen. Penalosa was a candidate for Mayor. He started a door to door campaign – a first for Colombia – while skipping televised debates with other candidates.

Meanwhile, Mockus was the chancellor of the University of Bogotá. During a university event, where the students were constantly booing him, he decided to turn around on the stage and moon the audience. Promptly, he was fired.

In doing this, he somehow became a symbol of honesty. Loco (“Crazy”) Antanas – as he was named – decided to run for Mayor as an Independent candidate. He soon emerged an a popular opponent to Penalosa.

He would campaign in the streets – sometimes dressing up as a superhero. He invited reporters to interview him at his mothers house – but his mother had none of it and threw the reporters out.

He would throw excrements in the face of candidates, and at an election event a student took away his microphone. He got into a fight with the students and a pandemonium broke out on stage.

Fighting dangerous chemicals in consumer products

Arlene Blum: “Breaking Trail: Peaks, Public Health, and Policy”

Arlene Blum is a researcher, mountaineer and founder of the Green Science Policy Institute. She talks about her work in this Talks at Google video. Here is a summary of the talk.

She attended Reed College in Portland where one of her teachers had a PhD in Chemistry from MIT. She (and the other three women in her class), went on to get PhDs in Chemistry.

Mt Hood, in Portland, was the first mountain she she climbed. She went on to climb Denali (in Alaska), and Annapurna (one of the 14 8000m tall peaks). She had a career in Chemistry in the 1970s, from which she took a 26 year break to climb mountains.

She published a paper in Science about the cancer-causing effects of Brominated Tris – a flame retardant added to children’s pajamas. This chemical was soon banned, but later manufacturers started using Chlorinated Tris which is also flame retardant that causes cancer.

The lesson here is that banning chemicals is incredibly hard – it takes a long time, and often a similar alternative emerges – which has similar health risks associated with it (Regrettable Substitution).

For example, asbestos has been known to cause cancer, but it is still not banned in US.

So, we know that it is hard to ban chemicals, and even after they are banned, a similar chemical might emerge. So how do we fight dangerous chemicals in consumer products?

The question we must ask is whether a chemical is even necessary, and if it is then is it worth it, and if so – are there alternatives?

The first one is an interesting one – Chlorinated Tris (first seen in childrens pajamas) soon found it’s way into foams used in couches. This was mostly due to a California law that mandated that the foam should be fire retardant. Since manufactures don’t want to have a separate process for California, this foam found it’s way across US. The chemicals in the couch are released by contact, and so babies and pets are especially affected.

It turns out that having fire retardant foam doesn’t help because the fabric catches fire first. Also, adding fire retardant makes the foam harder, so even the couch manufactures don’t want it. They introduced a bill in California to repeal the fire retardant regulation, but it was defeated due to advertising by the chemical manufactures. Chicago Tribune later did a investigation (which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize) into the tactics used by the flame-retardant manufactures

So fighting these tens of thousands of chemicals is hard – especially through the regulatory route.

This is the approach that the came up with. The dangerous chemicals are classified into six broad categories:

– Highly fluorinated chemicals (“stain-resistant, nonstick, waterproof and lethal”!)
– Anti-microbials (triclosan, triclocarban)
– flame retardants
– Bisphenols and pthalates (used in plastics)
– Organic Solvents
– Metals (used in paints)

They decided to reach reach manufactures ,large retailers ,big buyers, and consumers about the harmful effects and alternatives for these classes of chemicals.

As a result,
– IKEA has banned a lot of these chemicals in a number of their products
– Target decided to drop triclosan from all personal products.
– Brands like H&M, Levis, Puma, Adidas and others eliminated fluorinated chemicals

They have set a goal of reducing the use of these classes of chemicals by:
– 50% in five years
– 90% in ten years