A New Moral Code

"But if there's no hell, there are no consequences for our actions!"

I cannot count the number of times I have heard this argument or its variants. First off, there are consequences for your actions in this life: jail, pain, loss of property/reputation, and death to name but a few. There are plenty of reasons to be nice to other people without invoking the supernatural.

Nonetheless, many claim religion (well, not all of them- that would just be silly) as a source of morality. For a good rebuttal, see George Carlin's critique of the Ten Commandments. Our old friend Richard Dawkins also does a good job of demolishing the supernatural explanation for morality in this video. As for the other religions, if you're reading this, then you know how use the Internet, so find it yourself.

Here's my attempt at a new moral code:

1) Be nice other people. Not only is this prudent, but it also helps encourage nice behavior.

2) Do not let other people take advantage of you. Just being nice is not enough- you have to be on guard for not-nice-people.

3) Forgive people who wrong you, as everyone commits wrongs. Avoid holding grudges. Forgive people even if they do not ask for it.


A few months ago, I tried reading the Qu'ran. I read the first fourth and that is the reason I did not read the rest of it. I never thought I would read a book so bad that it makes Battlefield Earth look good but there is such a book. The fact that it is considered the most beautiful thing written in Arabic goes to show that the Arabs need some new books. I only hope no one translates Dianetics into Arabic. Then we'd have a billion Scientologists on our hands.

Here Arabs, try this:

The International Plane Ticket Fund

This is an idea which has been floating around in my head for a while.

Instead of spending billions of dollars trying to bring democracy by force, for a lot less money, every person who wants to leave could be relocated to a halfway decent country with plenty of room like the US, Canada, or Australia. The people interested in rescuing people from tyranny should just put a fund together for the sole purpose of evacuating people from horrible places. I call this idea "The International Plane Ticket Fund."

For example, There are about 18 million people in Iraq. At $10,000/person for travel and relocation costs, the total cost of evacuating everyone comes to $180 billion- quite a bit less than the approximately $500 bilion the US has spent so far in military operations in Iraq.

This is a simple, humane, and effective way of dealing with tyrants, who would probably jump at the chance to get rid of any potential dissidents. In fact they have. If any leader refused to let people flee, that leader would invite war upon himself. It would be the same thing as saying "my country is so terrible that the only way to keep people from leaving is to threaten to kill them."

If everyone who wanted to leave Zimbabwe could, the country would quickly empty and Mugabe would have no one to oppress. His government would collapse and then a new one could be established.

Many discussions of promoting peace revolve around democracy and capitalism. While it is true that capitalist democracies generally do not fight each other, this is not the only reason. The US has no love for North Korea but we do not fight them. Why is that? Well, it's because they have a large, well-equipped military. It's the same reason the US never fought Russia directly. When two groups are capable of hurting each other more or less equally, they quickly learn to compromise. Every genocide has one element in common: the people who got massacred were unarmed or armed poorly. The best way to promote peace would be to arm everyone equally. I call this idea "AK-47s for Everyone."

On a side note, I have always been puzzled by why many liberals oppose gun ownership. More guns means more power in the hands of the average Joe, doesn't it? "Political power springs forth from the barrel of a gun." And if it's about saving lives, they'd be better off trying to improve road safety, or convince people to stop smoking, or exercise more, or a dozen other things. In any case, as there are about 200 million firearms in the US and a gigantic black market, more regulations aren't going to keep them out of the hands of criminals and it would be just about impossible for the government to round up all the illegal guns in the US even if it wanted to.

Well, this post is all over the place, and since I have no inclination to tie it all together, I will leave it to the reader to assign relevance to this information.

Development

"Development" is the word used to describe the efforts of rich countries to help poor ones. I don't believe in using the words "developed" and "undeveloped" to describe countries. It doesn't fool anybody. The fact of the matter is most of the problems in those poor countries are due to the actions of well-meaning and not-so-well meaning foreigners. Whether by malevolence or incompetence, many of these efforts fail to help anyone. Peace Corps is generally an exception to this. Tanzania has requested math and science teachers and the Peace Corps is supplying them.
That's how it should be. Here are some examples that, unfortunately, are more typical.

1. Well-digging in Tabora (central Tanzania, Africa)

In the Tabora region, fetching water is done by women. As the well is several miles away from the village, the women spend most of the day fetching water and bringing it home. A foreign development agency got permission from the village elders to dig a new well closer to the village so the women wouldn't have to walk so far to get the water. The project was completed and the women began using the new well. After a few months, the women began complaining that the water was making their children sick, so they went back to using the distant well. A technician was sent to check the water from the new well and nothing was wrong with it. After a while, the truth got out. The women spread the rumors that the water was poisonous because fetching water from the distant well was an important part of their daily routine; it was their main time to socialize and main opportunity to get out of the house. The new well did nothing to help because they did not see fetching water over long distances as being a problem. Had the women been consulted instead the the village elders (all men), a more appropriate project could have been started.

2. Rice in the Phillipines

In a particular part of the Phillipines, aid workers introduced a new improved variety of rice. The rice was planted and the yield was 3 times higher than the local variety. However, the cash income of the villagers actually went down. What happened? In that area, the people grow rice for food and make baskets from the rice straw which they sold for cash. More rice meant more time was spent harvesting rice and less time making baskets, which was their main source of income.

3. Literacy in Singida (Tanzania, Africa)

In the last years of colonialism, the British instituted a voluntary literacy program in Singida, a dry region in central Tanzania. The program was a success; literacy was greatly increased. However, one villager was less enthusiatic about the results, saying

"Literacy does not help us with our most basic problem, which is the lack of rain."

These examples illustrate the problem of development. Even with the best of intentions, it is practically impossible for an outsider to know, let alone do, what is best for the people living there. These examples could be classified as incompetence. Malevolence has been much more common. Space does not permit me to mention all the examples. For a more thorough treatment, read Confessions of an Economic Hitman, The White Man's Burden, and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

I will give a brief synopsis of Confessions of an Economic Hitman: It tells the story of an American who has the job of convincing the governments poor nations to take loans by promising fantastic economic growth. When the growth doesn't occur (which is part of the plan), the debt is used to extract various concessions (what is really wanted) from the debtor. The Mafia refers to this business as loan-sharking.

Then there's the so-called World Bank. First of all, almost all positions of the authority at the World Bank are held by people from the world's wealthy nations. Can it honestly be expected that they will act in the interest of the world's poor nations? Most of the World Bank assistance is in the form of loans, to which all kinds of restrictions are attached. It is quite telling that no nation has achieved prosperity because of World Bank loans.

Then there's "foreign aid," most of which never leaves the donor country. It goes straight into the account of some contractor or corporation which is tasked with building a dam, electrical plant, or whatever fancy gadget that looks impressive but isn't really going to help the average person living there.

There are countries which have moved from poverty to prosperity: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Georgia, Costa Rica, among them. None of these countries got substantial IMF, World Bank, or other such assistance. They became wealthy through good governance, commerce, and most importantly, by not letting outsiders interfere with them.

Giving desired assistance to countries that request it is good, but very rarely can good can come from foreigners trying to impose change from the outside.

Education Reform

I complained about school pretty much nonstop while I was in it, and now that I am a teacher, I see even more that I dislike. Nonetheless, education is important and it is useless to criticize without proposing alternatives. Here are a few of my ideas:

1. Less grading

In real life, some things have to be properly almost all the time (e.g. landing an airplane) or they just need to be done well enough. Evaluating everything is not really necessary. Grading also wastes time and encourages cheating.

2. Fewer assignments

Matching, multiple choice, fill in the blank: these are objective and easy to grade but do not require much thought. A smaller number of meaningful assignments will be more instructive than a continual flood of busy work. All assignments should involve a tangible result: writing an essay, drawing a picture, building something, etc.

3. Exit test

It is completely possible to graduate from high school (in the US at least) without having learned much. You can't drive a car legally without passing a test; so a high school diploma should be issued until you can demonstrate a certain minimum set of skills. An exit test would clear out the ambitious students and give the underachievers a reason to study.

4. More opportunities vocational training

There are jobs beside doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc. All jobs are important and can be rewarding. So why all the emphasis on academics?


I teach upper-level math at a high school in Tanzania. The students are generally hard-working and motivated, and the administration are supportive. My only real complaint is the laser-like focus on academics when about 1% of the students who begin primary school here will make it to university. The first president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, chose education as one of the priorities of the new independent nation he lead. In regard to reform of the existing colonial education system, he said:

"We should not determine the types of things children are taught in primary schools by the things a doctor, engineer, teacher, economist, or administator need to know. Most of our pupils will never be any of these things."

"It [education] must not be aimed at university entrance."

And yet the current education system is largely geared toward university entrance. I would interested in finding out how much control donor agencies like the World Bank have in the content and structure of Tanzania's education system. I will try to teach math as best I can and encourage my students to pursue their ambitions.

Snobbery

Today's topic is snobbery.

Diamonds are a classic example of snobbery. Sure, they're pretty but the main reason people buy them is because they're expensive. It should be noted that the price of diamonds is artificially inflated because the majority of the supply is controlled by a handful of companies. Those companies buy up the excess to keep the prices high. See here for the history.
More details on the cartel here.

Diamonds are just solidified carbon. They can even be manufactured. It takes a microscope and a trained eye to tell the difference between a natural diamond and a manufactured one. Not surprisingly, passing off cheap diamonds as expensive ones is a popular con. Buying diamonds is a good way to get ripped off.

Another bastion of snobbery is college, or rather, a small number of certain colleges. To be fair, people do get into famous schools for being genuinely outstanding. The competition is very intense. However, many people get into famous schools because of money or family connections. Take George W. Bush for example. It is plain as day to anyone who has listened to him talk for more than five minutes that he is not the sharpest tool in the shed, and yet somehow, he got into Harvard and Yale- two of the best schools in the US. Well, I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that he came from a wealthy family with a history of attending those two schools. Does anyone honestly think he got into those schools because of his SAT score? If a window-licker like Dubya can get into the Ivy League, what is so impressive about them?

Besides, there have been plenty of people with little formal education who have done quite well (Edison, the Wright brothers, Poe, Mark Twain, Vanderbilt, Carnegie . . .) and just as many who got the best education imaginable and never achieved wild success.

The final area I will consider is practically synonymous with snobbery: wine. People will fork over thousands of dollars for fermented grape juice. Why? Well, it's so expensive. It must be good! The official line is that wine which has aged for a certain length of time undergoes all kinds of magical cchanges that make it worth a thousand times the plonk available to plebeians like you and me. This might be my clown college education talking, but I can't think of many chemical reactions that can occur in the absence of heat, light, or oxygen. Once the fermentation stops, no more alcohol gets made, so ageing the wine won't change that. As for other reactions, all chemical reactions either proceed rapidly to completion (fast reactions) or they reach equilibrium after at most, a few weeks. But no matter. Is it even possible to tell a vintage wine from a cheap one? Not through chemistry. In this article, chemical analyses are not even mentioned. There are plenty of techniques for detecting minute chemical changes, so why is this technology never touted on wine bottles? My guess would be that they are not done because there is no difference to detect.

I could go on: fancy cars, clothes, cigars, etc, but the point is made. Everyone wants to feel special but having certain items does not elevate you. The Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest competed for status by giving stuff away. If the competition was really heated, a chief might set his house on fire to display his wealth. It's the same with diamonds, diplomas, or wine. You might as well light a pile of money on fire.

It's all Monopoly money. Sooner or later, the game ends and everyone forgets who won.