Rav Casley Gera

The Observer has brief, but broad, list of 15 technological innovations with development impacts in Africa. These are my favourites:

The ‘Hippo’ Water Roller:

Two out of every five people in Africa have no nearby water facilities and are forced to walk long distances to reach water sources. Traditional methods of balancing heavy loads of water on the head limit the amount people can carry, and cause long-term spinal injuries…

The Hippo roller can be filled with water which is then pushed or pulled using a handle. The weight of the water is spread evenly so a full drum carries almost five times more than traditional containers, but weighs in at half the usual 20kg, allowing it to be transported faster…

Around 42,000 Hippo rollers have been sold in 21 African countries and demand exceeds supply. Costing $125 each, they are distributed through NGOs… Nelson Mandela has made a “personal appeal” for supporting for the project, saying it “will positively change the lives of millions of our fellow South Africans”. 

They could have added that fetching water prevents thousands of children going to school.

The ‘iCow’ App:

Small-scale dairy farmers often living in remote areas don’t have access to valuable information about latest prices of milk or cattle, and they may not keep accurate records of important details such as their cows’ gestation periods or their livestock’s lineage – often resulting in inbreeding and disease.

Created by Kenyan farmer Su Kahumbu, iCow is an app that works on the type of basic mobile phones farmers own. Each animal is registered with the service, which then sends SMS reminders to the farmer about milking schedules, immunisation dates and tips about nutrition and breeding or information about local vets or artificial insemination providers…

“By the time you have used the app and adhered to all the instructions, your cows end up healthier, bigger and stronger. They can easily fetch you more money in the marketplace,” a small-scale farmer based in the cental highlands of Kenya told Forbes magazine.

I’ve heard of farmers receiving price information by SMS, but actually helping people to farm better seems ambitious and - given that the app was generated by a rival farmer - altruistic all at once.

Portable water pumps:

Only 6% of Africa’s cultivated land is irrigated, limiting the volume of crops that can be grown out of season, but increased access to irrigation systems stands to increase food productivity by up to 50%. Kick Start, a not-for-profit organisation that specialises in irrigation technology, is making portable water pumps accessible to farming communities across Africa – most significantly in Kenya, Tanzania and Mali. These cost anything from $35 to $95 but… 

Kick Start told The Atlantic that, since 1991, their pumps have lifted 667,000 people out of poverty, helping to “create an entrepreneurial middle class, starting with the family farm”. They have pumped new revenues equivalent to 0.6% of the GDP in Kenya alone.

I don’t know if I buy that figure, but nonetheless, Kick Start’s pump seems effective and not overpriced (though it would be great to get the price down). In the long run, of course, improved irrigation will just accelerate the depletion of the water table unless declining rainfall is addressed.

Orange Sweet Potato:

More than 3 million children in Africa suffer from blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency; in Uganda it is estimated that 28% of children are deficient. Currently aid agencies combat this problem by giving children vitamin A supplements, but addressing this issue with a locally grown food would be more sustainable.

A new strain of sweet potato was conventionally bred which contains between four and six times as much betacarotene as a regular sweet potato – betacarotene is converted by the body into vitamin A. The OSP (orange sweet potato) was distributed to 10,000 farming households in Uganda; at the end of the two-year study vitamin A deficiency in non-breastfeeding children aged between 12 and 35 months fell from nearly 50% to 12%. 

Nutritional breeding is an idea whose time has come. And on the subject of growing things:

Ethanol cooking oil:

Forests in Africa are being cut down at a rate of 4m hectares a year, more than twice the worldwide average rate. Some of this is fuelled by demand for wood and charcoal, which the UN estimates is still used in almost 80% of African homes as a cheaper option to gas. The smoke from cooking using these solid fuels also triggers respiratory problems that cause nearly 2 million deaths in the developing world each year.

CleanStar Mozambique, a partnership between CleanStar and Danish industrial enzymes producer Novozymes, has opened the world’s first sustainable cooking-fuel plant in Mozambique…One-sixth of the final yield comes from locally harvested cassava, which requires farmers to plant in rotation with other edible crops to keep the soil fertile. A Sofala Province-based plant transforms the products into ethanol, which is sold on the local market along with adapted cooking stoves also produced by the company.

The plant aims to produce 2m litres of fuel annually, and reach 120,000 households within three years. 

Locally produced, sustainable, low-carbon cooking oil with public health benefits? There’s got to be a catch.

Perhaps the innovation with the most potential, though, is the least high-tech by far.

Farmer-managed natural regeneration (or “careful farming”):

Senegal is suffering its third drought of the decade, resulting in reduced crops and inflated food prices. The World Food Programme assisted more than 9 million people in the Sahel region of West Africa this year, including 800,000 in Senegal.

Attempts to tackle the resulting problem of soil fertility have largely flopped so far. Trees planted as part of reforestation schemes have seen only a 5% success rate and fallowing is not an option, with 80% of African farmers owning under two hectares of land, which need to be utilised year in, year out. This puts the emphasis on reinvigorating the stumps of nitrogen-fixing trees, which were formerly cleared to maximise crop space. Farmers are thus encouraged to prune the stems and branches of trees like Faidherbia albida, giving new life to the vegetation already there.

FMNR is an inexpensive way for farmers to make improvements with the resources they already have, increasing millet harvests from 430kg to 750kg a hectare, and saving money on fertilisers, with restored trees producing leaf litter (forming humus) and giving shade to livestock (for manure).

Agricultural yields on small family plots are the technical development challenge of the next few decades. A simple, chemical-free success story is something to be celebrated.

The Guardian has a great deep-dive on the persistence of Cholera in West Africa and the problems, primarily with sanitation, underlying it.

Sanitation is an increasingly rare example of an area where pretty much everyone agrees well-placed aid investment can reap dividends. But making it work is complex, and the piece does a great job of illustrating the myriad political and cultural obstacles standing between West Africa and universal sanitation.

But there’s good news too, and the piece gives a useful profile of an effective UNICEF intervention in Sierra Leone:

The key is to get communities across west Africa to want to use and maintain clean toilets. In Sierra Leone, Unicef is pushing community-driven total sanitation, in which communities move away from open defecation once they understand its consequences, and go on to build and maintain clean toilets themselves.

In this model, Unilever, which manufactures cleaning products, has worked with Unicef and local partners in Gambia, and with Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor, a non-profit group, in Ghana to form the Clean Team. The process is: trigger a demand for toilets through behaviour change; arrive at a price that works for everyone; make clean toilets available.

A project in Kumasi, in south-central Ghana, targeted 100 families, most of whom were sharing dirty latrines. Each was given a free chemical toilet with a sealed waste container that was exchanged two to three times per week. A family of five pays about $15 per month for the service, which is less than it costs to use the public toilets.

The waste is processed in the city’s septic tank system, but the municipality hopes to use it to produce biofuel. So far the scheme has improved hygiene, lowered household costs and reduced the use of plastic bags for defecation, said Clean Team manager Asantewa Gyamfi. The plan is to expand it to 1,500 families.

Oddly, this ‘get the community on board’ approach is the same that, at the exact opposite end of the technological spectrum, Google is using to recruit neighbourhoods to its high-speed fiber-optic internet experiment in Kansas City. It’s a classic example of tortoise & hare intervention - rather than expensively installing free chemical toilets everywhere, only for maintenance to inevitably fall behind, you ensure the demand and willingness to pay is there before you install. The disadvantage is you can only scale up slowly.

One other observation: I still hear a lot of knee-jerk opposition to public-private partnerships in development. And one must be wary of offering large companies de facto monopolies, or trapping people in indentured service to multinationals - the GM crops problem. But it’s worth also pointing out examples of when a multinational’s involvement seems small-scale and helpful.

The Economist doesn’t seem to quite fairly represent the case for splitting up retail and investment banking in its new leader:

Bashers of universal banks have three sticks with which to beat them. The first is based on the idea that there something rotten about investment banking, a cultural miasma that infects the “good” bits of the banks where companies and individuals get loans and place deposits. The second is that they are a threat to financial stability, because universal banks tend to be bigger and more complex than more focused peers. And the third is that universal banks are a dreadful deal for investors. Mr Weill’s former bank has lost 94% of its value in the past five years; RBS is down by a regal 96%.

But the argument isn’t that ‘universal’ banks are a threat to stability because they are complex; it’s because they are complex and engage in high-risk activity on the one hand, but also perform vital utility function such as holding people’s savings, and are insured by governments as a result.

Because they are diversified, universal banks spread their risks. During the crisis, for example, banks such as JPMorgan Chase saw a sudden slump in investment banking offset by their retail-banking income, and vice versa. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns had no such hedge—and imploded.

There’s some truth in this - although if the chips had fallen the other way and Barclays, not RBS, had bought ABN Amro, we’d have seen just how stable a highly diversified universal bank is. But this is to miss the point: the aim of dividing investment and retail banking is not to reduce the chances of banking collapses. It’s to reduce the chances of retail banking collapses. These are the kind to be avoided: because they’re insured by government, and because they mean the spectre of the ATMs shutting down.

Investment banks, in a post-split world, could go to the wall without any regular person having to care.

Of course, two words provide the best counterpoint to this argument: Lehman Brothers. The disastrous effects of that collapse demonstrate clearly that even a standalone investment bank can easily grow too big to fail.

So splitting retail and investment banks alone won’t be enough to prevent systemic risk, and other safeguards such as increased capital requirements are all called for. But let’s at least have the debate about the split on the right terms, shall we?

Last week I approvingly quoted a piece by Bradley Jay Strawser, a US-based philosopher, arguing that remote-controlled mechanical drones are the most humane and therefore, just way of prosecuting whatever we’re calling the War on Terror these days. But a friend drew my attention to a piece on Al Jazeera by Mark LeVine, professor of Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine, which attempts to excoriate Strawser. It’s only partially successful.

Irvine argues out that evidence for Strawser’s central factual claim - that drones kill fewer civilians than human-in-plane air attacks - is pretty thin. 

Shockingly, it consists of a since deleted web brochure by an Israeli drone-maker, Rafael Armament Development Authority, a quote by an Israeli pilot about how the drones help him avoid civilian casualties contained in the document (one might wonder why this didn’t set off at least a few alarm bells) and an unpublished conference presentation that uses a “database combining reports from a variety of sources” to argue that drones in fact produce a far lower civilian casualty ratio than other methods of attacking militants. 

We need to see that unpublished database, I guess. But if Strawser’s evidence for the thesis that drones kill fewer civilians than planes - which seems intuitive - is no weaker than LeVine’s evidence the the contrary.

Strawser doesn’t bother addressing the numerous studies that have shown the opposite, whether it’s a Brookings Institution report that “suggests that for every militant killed, ten or so civilians also died”, or the New American Foundation study which argues that approximately 32 per cent of casualties are civilians. 

Perhaps he doesn’t address them because they don’t contradict his point? Drones can be be horribly prone to killing civilians and still be less prone than traditional manned aircraft.

Things get more shaky, I think, when LeVine attempts to broaden the debate to “the much larger issue of international law and whether the United States can legally kill people outside of recognised battle fields in conflicts that have not been authorised by the United Nations Security Council.” Strawser’s conception that 

The warrior fighting for a just cause is morally justified to take the life of the enemy combatant, whereas the unjust fighter is not justified, even if they follow the traditional principles of jus in bello such as only targeting combatants and the like, to kill the justified fighter.

This, LeVine points out, runs contrary to Just War Theory, “which has long refused to adjudicate the morality or permissibility of an action based on a judgment as to which of the parties to a conflict is “just” or “unjust”.

I’m not familiar with Just War Theory in detail, so I’m loathe to go into detail as to why I think it’s a bad fit here - principally the fact that the prosecution of whatever we’re now calling the war on terror in Pakistan is not recognisably a “war”, though it does resemble “combat.” 

More importantly, though, this isn’t really central to Strawser’s thesis. Ethically, it’s easy to argue that an approach which kills enemy fighters and not very many civilians is preferable to one which kills more civilians and lets enemy soldiers get away - regardless of the justice or otherwise of the conflict. I’m not sure why Strawser let himself get sidetracked into this apparent side-issue, but LeVine pouncing on it feels a bit like trying to undermine Strawser’s personal credibility rather than addressing the central plank of his argument.

As much becomes clear towards the end, when LeVine drifts into slippery-slope territory:

Thankfully, the use of drones - whether based on facts or merely evidence of supposed wrong-doing (or thinking about wrong-doing, or just playing the wrong first-person shooter video game, which the NSA apparently determines is evidence enough that you want to harm the US) is, at least for now, not an option for most people. But soon enough, the same people who refuse to leave their homes unarmed will be travelling around with armed drones hovering over them or their cars, ready to attack anyone who unexpectedly comes to close to or raises its owner’s pulse or blood pressure. Think George Zimmerman versus Trayvon Martin in the outer ring of the seventh circle of Hell, and you will have an idea of what life will be like, not in Afghanistan or Yemen, but in Texas or Colorado, once weaponised drones become only slightly more expensive than the remote controlled helicopter your child keeps bothering you to buy. 

Hellish indeed. Except, of course, that Strawser’s argument is based entirely on an already militarised environment where killing is sanctioned; it seems unlikely that personal drones will be allowed on the streets under the 2nd Amendment. Furthermore, the kind of ubiquity LeVine is threatening would only be possible with drones that were not remote-controlled by a human, but merely automated. That kind of auto-kill Strawser explicitly says in his Guardian piece is not justified.

Lest anyone be left in any doubt as to the seriousness of LeVine’s - who is not a philosopher - engagement with philosophy, he ends like this:

If philosophers are going to join the kill chain and help formulate policies for the use of violence by their countries’ militaries, it would be nice if they spent a little less time thinking about how things work on Beta-world-Zandar where “just warfighters” can ply their trade with complete moral confidence, and more time helping to figure out…

OK, where’s this going to go? “The real-world consequences of endorsing automated warfare outside the context of international law?” No, he goes with:

…how to transform the fundamental policies of governments on this planet towards supporting a global political economy that encourages peace, democracy and sustainable development.

Wait, what? You’re saying, “If philosophers are going to join the kill chain and help formulate policies for the use of violence by their countries’ militaries, it would be nice if they spent less time formulating policies for the use of violence by their countries’ militaries”?

Because if you just find the whole idea of trying to make the messy business of war a little less messy to be inherently distasteful, Mark, you could have said so in a tweet and saved me the time to read your article.

Ultimately, though, despite his article’s flaws, LeVine makes two valid points. One is the shakiness of the evidence for drones’ lower civilian kill rate. (Though he rather undermines the strength of that point by arguing that “if it is true that drone strikes are improving their civilian kill rate… this fact could nevertheless lead to an increase in the frequency of strikes, which would ultimately produce more civilian deaths than other methods of attacks which, because they are more indiscriminate, are used more infrequently.” Bring back carpet-bombing, precision strikes are too easy.)

The second is the hard-to-measure other effects of drones on the local populace:

How the drones impact affected populations - what it feels like to live with the terror of the constant buzzing of drones, never knowing when one of its “precision” missiles might hit your house or car just because it contains a few adult men with beards - along with children and the elderly - is, at least in the intellectual context he’s operating in, irrelevant. 

Clearly, this shouldn’t be irrelevant. But if drones strikes do kill fewer civilians, it seems hard to argue that they shouldn’t be used because the fear they induce in civilians is greater.

Ultimately, what Strawser argues is simple and small: if we believe a good outcome of a military technology to be “the death of lots of enemy fighters and few of civilians or friendly fighters”; and if drone strikes do, in fact, kill more enemies and fewer civilians, and protect their ‘pilots’ from danger; then they’re a good thing. LeVine raises some questions about the latter; he doesn’t really land a specific blow on the former.

I wrote recently about The Limits to Growth, the seminal 1970s book that predicted economic and population collapse by the mid-21st Century because of environmental stresses. I’ve now had a chance to peruse”A Comparison of The Limits to Growth with thirty years of reality,” by Autralian academic Graham Turner. Most of the detailed statistical mapping is well above my pay-grade, but the basic observations are clear: much-maligned at the time of publication, The Limits to Growth’s predictions are well on course so far. Population, industrial pollution, economic services per capita and a host of other measures are all smack in line with the book’s “standard run” scenario - the one where the world ends around 2050.

No shocker there. But one of the book’s other models, the “comprehensive technology” scenario, caught my eye when Turner explained it:

The “comprehensive technology” approach attempts to solve sustainability issues with a broad range of purely technological solutions. This scenario incorporates levels of resources that are effectively unlimited, 75% of materials are recycled, pollution generation is reduced to 25% of its 1970 value, agricultural land yields are doubled, and birth control is available worldwide.

This sounds a lot like the traditional set of solutions offered to climate change by the so-called ‘bright green’ lobby, those who believe climate crisis can be averted without significant changes in rich-country lifestyles. Hold down world population, go hard for green power, and we can continue to live in what anyone from any previous period of world history would call luxury. Or, as a former employer of mine put it, “they’ll build a bunch of nuclear power stations and sort the whole thing out.”

(This is a view I’ve had some sympathies with in the past.)

So given that The Limits to Growth seems to be doing a pretty good job of predicting the results of our current course, what did it predict if humanity took the ‘bright green’ approach?

These efforts delay the collapse of the global system to the latter part of the 21st Century, when the growth in economic activity has outstripped the gains in efficiency and pollution control.

Uh-oh. 

This is depressing, but surely correct. Already the carbon footprint of the average EU and Chinese citizen is so great that if everyone matched it we’d need, what is it now, three Earths to support us all? Even if world population were held down to its current level and huge efficiencies were made in clean energy, the sheer multiplying factor of large chunks of the rest of the world catching up to us would surely overwhelm our scramble for efficiency. I suppose if technology could reduce 99% of pollution, not 75%, there might be a chance, but reductions of that sort without changes in lifestyle are surely impossible.

“Both technological solutions and deliberate social policies”

So are we doomed? Well, not exactly. The Limits to Growth does contain one scenario in which humanity manages to get through the 21st Century without collapse. It’s called, appropriately enough, ‘Stabilized World.’

For the “stabilized world” scenario, both technological solutions and deliberate social policies are implemented to achieve equilibrium states for key factors including population, material wealth, food and services per capita. Examples of actions implemented in the World3 model [the model used by The Limits to Growth] include: perfect birth control and desired family size of two children; preference for consumption of services and health facilities and less toward material goods; pollution control technology; maintenance of agricultural land through diversion of capital from industrial use; and increased lifetime of industrial capital.

This sounds a lot like the charge of the ‘prosperity without growth’ advocates, who argue that continuing economic growth is impossible without unacceptable carbon costs.

I’ve been tempted in the past to see the ‘prosperity without growth’ argument as complacent, bourgeois hippy nonsense, and there certainly is something distasteful about the idea of doing away with growth in a world where so many are still desperately poor. (In reality, of course, few ‘zero-growth advocates extend their prescriptions to the poor; their focus is developed countries with our ludicrous carbon footprints.)

But it’s hard not to be struck by the reliability so far of The Limits to Growth’s models, and I’m minded to look more closely at the numbers to see if, in fact, we really can afford economic growth to continue. Of course, if we can’t, that doesn’t mean ‘prosperity without growth’ is possible. It may just mean that we are, in fact, all doomed.

Dieter Bohn (@backlon) has written the most sensible thing I’ve read about the ongoing panic over Twitter’s changes to its relationships with developers. The cutting-off of Tumblr from the ability to search who a user ‘follows’, he argues, shows that Twitter is serious about monetising its ‘social graph’ - not as the basis to a giant, web-eating platform, like Facebook, but as a unique selling point of its own website.

But one thing Bohn said, in particular, got me thinking:

Who you follow on Twitter says a lot about you, it’s the kind of demographic data that’s could actually be insanely valuable. Dustin Curtis explains the reasoning behind why this follow graph is so important. Compare it to who you friend on Facebook, for example. I’m friends with old high school classmates with whom I have little in common and I’m frankly much less likely to follow a brand page on Facebook than I am a Twitter account: the barrier is lower. I’m also constantly tweaking who I do and don’t follow on Twitter, providing the company with near real-time analytics on what my interests are on any given day. With Facebook, it’s more about aggregation of friends than day-to-day culling. Twitter’s follow graph contains the kind of information that Twitter could use to help advertisers better target me and it could potentially have “great value” if Twitter could find a way to fully monetize it.

I’ve been planning to write a post arguing that Twitter’s biggest remaining feature gap is a Facebook-style importance algorithm. Logging onto Facebook shows you the most important stories from your contacts since you last looked. Twitter still shows you all the tweets from everyone you follow, and if you haven’t logged in for a couple of days you can spend an hour or more scrolling through to where you last left off.

Now, though, I wonder if Twitter might see this feature gap as a crucial part of their business plan. Facebook built its importance algorithms in response to the fact that people were adding large numbers of Facebook friends, particularly old friends and acquaintances, who they didn’t really care about getting updates from. That’s because Facebook’s real-life identities and ‘friend’ structure creates a lot of social obligation.

On Twitter, with its anonymous accounts and one-way following, it’s more socially acceptable to curate your ‘friend’ list. As Bohn argues, that maybe makes your Twitter social graph, if not more valuable, at least valuable in a different way. (When I re-created my Tumblr account recently to launch this blog, I used the ‘find your Twitter friends’ function to find blogs to follow. I’d never have used the Facebook or Gmail one. Why would I want to follow the Tumblr of someone I met at a party?)

But importance filters would reduce the incentive to indulge in this kind of culling, and according to Bohn’s theory, reduce the value of Twitter’s social graph.

Of course, I could just resolve that there’s really no need to scroll all the way back to see every unread tweet. It’s not like I’m going to miss anything that interesting, right? Right?

Back in 2009, The New Republic editor Richard Just published a long, thorough takedown of academic Mahmood Mamdani ’s argument - articulated in his book Saviors and Survivors - that calls for humanitarian intervention in Darfur stem from neo-imperialism rather than a concern for human rights. It’s an enjoyable and, for the most part, entirely convincing piece. But one section also has relevance to a development question, that of the way journalists write about Africa.

Ever since the publication of Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay ‘How to Write About Africa’ in 2005, which pooped the Make Poverty History party by excoriating coverage which he argued focused on misery rather than reasons for optimism, there’s been a consistent refrain of grumbling about the generally depressing tone of Africa coverage in the Western media. It’s an issue obliquely referred to by Mamdani, and neatly dispatched by Just.

Perhaps Mamdani’s most annoying rhetorical tic is his repeated condescension toward the world of journalism. “Africa is usually the entry point for a novice reporter on the international desk, a learning laboratory where he or she is expected to gain experience,” he writes, more or less implying that journalists are too young or too stupid to understand the stories they are covering. Later he accuses journalists such as Philip Gourevitch of having sketched a “pornography of violence” in their coverage of Africa, and of reducing “a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart.”

There is something reality-averse about Mamdani’s attack on journalism that reminds me of the way right-wingers used to carp about mainstream media coverage of Iraq during the dark, violence-filled days of 2006. Where in our media is the good news from Iraq? conservatives would howl. But the news from Iraq was bad not because the press turned away from good news, but because for a long time people were dying there in large numbers. The same goes for Darfur, especially during the early days of the genocide. When Reuters reports that a village has been attacked and dozens of people are dead, is that the “pornography of violence”? Or is it simply an empirical account of what just happened in Darfur?

Now, the situation in Africa as a whole is obviously not as dire as the situation in mid-noughties Darfur, or, for that matter, mid-noughties Iraq. Nevertheless, Just’s basic point is just as relevant when it comes to development. Sub-Saharan Africa is a place where millions of children die of preventable diseases each year; conflict in Congo and elsewhere claims tens of thousands more lives.  The world needs to be reminded of these facts more, not less.

Yes, there are positive stories in Africa as well, stories of entrepreneurship and peacemaking and social change and civic engagement. But getting the press to cover those things is difficult anywhere, because good news doesn’t sell newspapers. That’s a problem, but it’s not an Africa-specific problem or even a development-specific problem.

It’s hard not to feel that critics of the ‘pornography of poverty’ - which is a term which Bob Geldof, of all people, cheerfully admits has resonance - aren’t allowing their concern about Africa’s image to get in the way of concern about Africa’s reality.

Unlike when the mouse was introduced—before desktop publishing programs came along there were few use cases for the mouse other than early paint programs—today we are surrounded by touch screens—at the airport, the gas station, the movie theater, every cash register, and of course, on our phones. The one place touch has not yet become mainstream is on the most capable of all the devices you use. Just like the introduction of the mouse, innovations like this do not happen without new OS support, new apps, and new hardware. We believe that, as with the mouse, we will see touch augmenting, but not replacing, most every aspect of the PC experience over time. Achieving this starts with the Windows 8 Developer Preview.

Microsoft claims that Windows 8 is designed to work just as well with a keyboard and mouse as with a touchscreen. But if you look at the way they’ve actually talked about their reasoning with design decisions, it’s clear that’s not the case.

Economic & Political Weekly:

“While the Bolivian conceptualisation of the environmental question based on the rights of Mother Earth is a noteworthy alternative, it appears somewhat implausible as a conceptual basis for pushing back the Northern agenda.”

Ya think?

In 2008, I was at the height of my phase of printing off endless magazine articles from the internet and never getting round to reading them. As a result, I have a lot of printed magazine articles sitting around about Barack Obama, the credit crunch, and the 40th anniversary of the disturbances of 1968.

Prospect’s giant symposium on that latter topic (£) is thoroughly enjoyable. Although a wide range of views are presented, from philosophers, musicians, economists and all sorts, something approaching a consensus does emerge. Pretty much everyone agrees that the protests of 1968 themselves achieved little and may have been harmful, but the wider societal changes that happened in ‘the sixties’ - the pill, the legalisation of homosexuality, and so on - mattered a great deal.

That consensus, though, lurks behind a hundred marvellous details. Take Roger Scruton’s dismissal of the critical theorist Louis Althusser, one of those fabulously esoteric-sounding european thinkers who I always felt deeply inadequate for not being able to really fathom the work of. Scruton reassures me that Althusser’s writing “reads as if composed by someone who knows no French.” 

Or take Jean Seaton’s lovely memoir of a decade of tentative feminism, a movement which she recalls “sprung from interminable meetings where chaps autistically disagreed about the minutiae of revolutionary struggle while we roneod their damned magazines.” At one memorable 1968 conference, Seaton recalls,

someone plonked a luridly colourful plastic model of an erect penis on the table. ‘This’, she declared, ‘is the problem we face!’ It was a bit alarming, but as the leggy girls from Oxford were clearly all more familiar with the problem than I was (and all had marvellosuly romantic names and were very eloquent), I kept quiet.

Lesley Chamberlain provides the revelation/dubious assertion that the German Protestant church was “openly sympathetic” to the Baader-Meinhof gang. Author Geoff Dyer provides a love song to post-sixties San Francisco, saying “to travel there with England is to have a glimpse of what life is like several rungs up the evolutionary ladder;” this, of course, is true as long as you stay away from the large parts of the city that are full of the most appalling (and visible) deprivation.

Eric Kaufmann points out that the spread of the pill has led to below-replacement fertility in most wealthy countries, something which he seems to think is a bad thing but which sounds like manna from heaven to me.

Vernon Bogdanor and my old tutor Dominic Sandbrook play the role of naysayers, pointing out that what we call ‘the sixties’ only happened to a small minority of middle-class students. Both are right, of course, but you could say the same about the reformation. There’s something slightly irritating about the determination of Sandbrook - who has written two books about the sixties - to insist that there was nothing at all remarkable about them.

The most thoughtful passages, though, relate to the question to which I devoted by undergraduate dissertation - the odd, complex interplay between the cultural and political manifestations of what became loosely known as ‘the movement.’ Long hair and bell-bottoms were supposed to be revolutionary, and in some ways, they were - the opening up of a more flexible model of masculinity was more important than it’s given credit for. But for the most part, those trying to build a better world and those trying to turn on and drop out really had little in common.

As Bryan Appleyard cheerfully puts it, “I, you see, came from the aesthete/lotus-eating side of soixante-huitardism. This movement didn’t realy want to overthrow stuff; we just wanted to eject anything that got in the way of our super-refined delectations.” ‘International media commentator’ (hmm) Jonathan Power argues that the majority, the demonstrations of 1968 were “a charged celebration of the power of sexual, not political, freedom.”

Most damningly, several contributors argue that the ‘liberation’ aspect of the sixties - the driving force, perhaps, of the cultural side of things - was somewhat at odds, in ways which only became obvious later, with the underlying principle of the political side. Philosopher Onora O’Neill argues:

The social and political movements of the 1960s - the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the green movement, the anti-war movement and the incipient human rights movement - all insisted on the importance of solidarity. Yet their legacy has been a culture that is pretty indifferent to solidarity, and in which the claims of self-expression extend far beyond sex and drugs and rock and roll.

Academic Anne-Marie Slaughter concurs, saying, “the worst legacy of the 1960s in the US is the identification of the term ‘liberal’ with countercultural mores - long hair, free sex, permissiveness in every domain of life - rather than the solidarity with the less fortunate that should be the bedrock of every great society.”

Hmm. We’ll ignore “permissiveness in every domain of life,” which is surely flatly inaccurate - the hippies were not exactly permissive in terms of speech, angrily stamping on any view deemed racist or imperialist, for example. There is, clearly, some truth in the idea that fighting for your right - to anything - is different to fighting for someone else’s.

But this handy distinction oversimplifies a complicated picture. The civil rights movement was ambivalent towards - and, later, explicitly rejected - the ‘solidarity’ of liberal whites. The incipient women’s and gay movements adopted a ‘liberation struggle’ philosophy which sought to place the members of the groups to be ‘liberated’ in total control of their liberation. The idea of sympathy towards the struggles of others was not ignored, of course, but the sense was that the authentic struggle was the one against your own oppressor, not anyone else’s.

This even bled into the more traditional, ‘political’ left movements. The relationship between labour movements, seeking to actually represent working-class people, and wealthy liberals seeking to aid them, came under unique pressure in the 1960s. At a time when people on both the political and cultural sides of the movement were quoting Marx, the idea of support for the workers’s struggle from well-meaning bourgeoisie was often loudly dismissed, although their money was obviously cheerfully taken.

Still, perhaps I’m nit-picking. Few can deny that when people felt they had no oppressors left to fight, the spirit of self-determination quickly gave way to self-gratification and stayed in that state for several decades. Of course, by the time 2018 rolls around, our interpretation of the events of 1968 may well have shifted again.

Best known as Keynes’ biographer, Robert Skidelsky has reinvented himself since the financial crisis as a sort of Keynesian St. Paul, doggedly reminding us how the great man would have seen the chaos of the last five years and how his prescriptions would advise us to deal with it.

One of his first pieces in this vein, from Prospect in 2009, is well worth a read - it’s full of wit & wisdom of a sort one doesn’t usually glean from an economics article. Skidelsky deftly navigates the tricky waters of criticising materialism without sounding too like a member of Occupy:

The theological language which would have recognised the collapse of the credit bubble as the “wages of sin,” the come-uppance for prodigious profligacy, has become unusable. But the come-uppance has come, nevertheless.

He shows a knack for nuance:

In his Cycles of American History (1986) Arthur Schlesinger Jr defined a political economy cycle as “a continuing shift in national involvement between public purpose and private interest.” The swing he identified was between “liberal” (what we would call social democratic) and “conservative” epochs…

This idea fits the American historical narrative tolerably well.

What a lovely phrase. And, measured in his endorsements, he’s sardonic in his criticisms.

 The financial crisis has brought to a head a growing dissatisfaction with the corruption of money. Neo-conservatism has sought to justify fabulous rewards to a financial plutocracy while median incomes stagnate or even fall; in the name of efficiency it has promoted the off-shoring of millions of jobs, the undermining of national communities, and the rape of nature.

Such a system needs to be fabulously successful to command allegiance. Spectacular failure is bound to discredit it.

Skidelsky quickly dispenses with two of the main arguments made by those who claim the financial crisis does not constitute a crisis of capitalism. “Free-marketers claim that the crisis is the fault of governments,” he notes.

US money was kept too cheap for too long after the technology bubble burst in 2000 and the attacks of 11th September 2001. The market was temporarily fooled by the government.

This is a shaky defence, to say the least: if the market is so easily fooled, it cannot be very efficient.

Others, he tells us, argue that the crisis occured not because markets were overdeveloped, but because they were underdeveloped - that in a truly free market, new forms of ever-more-complex financial instruments really would do away with the risk of systemic collapse. Bunkum, Skidelsky says.

To my mind, this is an example of trying to cure a state of inebriation by having another whiskey… if financial innovation is, in fact, the route to greater market efficiency, the financial system would have been getting more stable in the last 25 years of explosive financial engineering. Instead it has become more volatile. 

One area where Skidelsky’s argument is weaker, though, is in the charge that the market pre-crisis was severely distorted by China’s undervaluing of its curency, fuelling the US debt boom. Skidelsky retorts that the assumption that without such interference currencies would be appropriately priced depends on the same ‘efficient market hypotheses’ that the crisis discredited elsewhere. But this is circular logic: if China’s interference created the bubble, the efficient market hypothesis is not debunked by the crisis at all.

Nevertheless, Skidelsky’s argument is bolstered by the skill of his writing, making for an entertaining and persuasive essay.

Of course, when those on the other side get it as spectacularly wrong as the monetarists did before the crisis, it does make for something of an easy target. As Skidelsky observes: 

Contrary to the belief of some recent economic theories, the future is just as unknowable as Keynes thought it was. The mathematical “quants” who set up the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1994 worked to a risk model which showed that the kind of financial meltdown which, in fact, bankrupted them four years later, could occur only once every four million years.