"Africa risk"

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I’ve heard from some founders fundraising in Africa that the one hurdle to get over with VCs is a general sentiment that “Africa is a risky place to invest”, that isn’t grounded in any actual fundamentals about the company or the market.

At first it might not seem rational for an investor to feel this way if it’s not based on company or market fundamentals. But general sentiment about a market can be self-fulfilling.

An early-stage investor in a company will only make money if the that company survives long enough to have a good exit. The company will only survive this long if other investors can be persuaded to invest at later rounds (1).

So an early-stage investor must believe that later-stage investors will believe invest in this company. If the early-stage investor knows that most investors won’t believe in the company because they are worried about “Africa risk”, then she won’t want to invest.

She has to behave as if she believes in “Africa risk” - even if she herself believes that there is no fundamental Africa risk (2).

The value of impact investors is to break this negative cycle. To put money into an ecosystem (be it a geographical ecosystem like African startups, or a cause-oriented ecosystem like climate-tech or immigration) until it becomes an attractive investment destination for purely profit-seeking investors.

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  1. Or if the company can become profitable without having to raise another round of funding. A good option for many African startups

  2. This is the same fundamental dynamic that leads to speculative bubbles

What are human smugglers really like?

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“These people are not only my customers: they are my brothers. I help them because they are on the wrong side of the world.” -Abu Hamza, a human smuggler

Luigi Achilli is a anthropologist who studies migrants and refugees, and the smugglers who help them move across borders. For many people, the image that comes to mind when we think of human smuggling is a ruthless criminal who preys on vulnerable people. This was certainly my image of a human smuggler. But his fascinating research reveals a far more positive picture of human smugglers.

I did a quick run-through of some of his papers. Here were the main things I learned:

  • Migrants like the individual smugglers they work with, rather than thinking of them as exploitative. “Remarkably, accounts about the callousness of smugglers were often dismissed by those very people who risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean. The majority of migrants with whom I spoke did not perceive their smugglers as exploitative.” And the smugglers themselves emphasize the “importance of being morally respectable and kind.” Smuggling is a business, and as in any business your reputation is extremely important.

  • But when both migrants and smugglers think of “smugglers” in the abstract, they think of someone predatory. "[T]he degree of consensus was surprising: smugglers were fundamentally evil.” So in the abstract, they think about human smuggling basically the same way as we all do. They just don’t think of themselves as engaged in that sort of activity. (”Waiting for the Smuggler”)

  • There is not a strict dichotomy between smugglers and migrants. A lot of smugglers are migrants themselves, and migrants assist in smuggling activities (e.g., piloting boats, recruiting migrants, serving as lookouts) (”Waiting for the Smuggler”)

  • Smugglers often share ethnic ties with the people they transport, which helps them establish solidarity with them. At times they will even transport the elderly, infirm, or children for lower than their typical costs. The unfortunate converse to this ethnic solidarity is that when when smugglers and migrants do not share the same ethnic background, abuse is more likely to occur. (”Irregular Migration”)

  • Migrants underestimate the risks - at least those migrating from Africa to Italy. Many say that if they had known the risks, they never would have left (page 5).

He also has a few points that counter common narratives about how smuggling is organized For example:

  • There is this idea of extremely organized criminal organizations who organize the smuggling of people from, say, Nigeria all the way to Europe. This is not the case. Instead, the people who move from Africa to Europe typically make their way piecemeal. They don’t even have a final destination in mind when they set out - much less have their entire journey planned for them by a centralized crime organization.

    • “Indeed, it would hardly be possible for a single centralized organization to carry out all services alone along a route that comprises journeys of several thousand kilometres and in a market characterized by high levels of instability and unpredictability.” (from Irregular Migration)

  • Similarly, sometimes you might hear that terrorist organizations participate in migrant smuggling as a source of revenue. He finds that this is not really true.

One of my overarching takeaways from his work is that the “smugglers are predators, migrants are victims” narrative is far too simple. It is a way of thinking that lets you avoid blaming illegal immigrants, while still allowing you to view illegal migration as a moralistic issue. The reality is much more complicated than that.

I’m very glad there are people like Luigi Achilli in the world - helping the rest of us understand this area of human activity that is important, often misunderstood, and fascinating.

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Some interesting works from Achilli:

The cyclical pattern of Bangladesh -> Malaysia migration

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Migration from Bangladesh to Malaysia has followed an interesting pattern over the past 25 years.

Malaysia is a significantly richer country that Bangladesh. In Bangladesh 90% of people live on less than $10 per day, compared to only 9% in Malaysia. Bangladeshis who are able to migrate to Malaysia to work on palm-oil plantations are able to double their wages - so demand is extremely high from Bangladeshis for the opportunity to migrate to Malaysia to work.

Malaysian palm-oil companies need labor, so it would seem there is a clear win-win here. But every 5-10 years, Malaysia halts immigration from Bangladesh to Malaysia. this has happened in1996, 2001, 2008, 2018, and most recently in 2024.

It turns out that a cyclical pattern has emerged:

  • The governments of Bangladesh and Malaysia reach an agreement to allow Bangladeshi workers to migrate to Malaysia on temporary visas

  • The supply of Bangladeshi workers wanting to move overwhelms the capacity of the government to match them to jobs

  • Middlemen assist migrants to go outside the system. Sometimes they actually matching people to jobs (just without proper paperwork), and sometimes they invent fictitious jobs. And to do this higher-risk migration, migrants are actually willing to pay at least 5x the normal migration cost

  • In response to abuse of the system, Malaysia blocks immigration from Bangladesh

  • The Bangladeshi and Malaysian governments enter talks, and the cycle repeats

In general across the world, demand to immigrate is wildly higher than the supply for immigration slots allowed. Over a billion people worldwide would like to move internationally for work. Any American who has ever taken a taxi in Kenya can attest to this: You are always being asked "Can you help me get to America?"

Governments in destination countries do not always want to promote in-migration. But my takeaway here is that even when governments want to encourage migration, they don’t properly account for how much demand there is.

The willingness of migrants to pay 5x sticker price to migrate shows that migrants value the opportunity to move at a value far greater than the government thinks is fair to charge (1). Regardless of whether you think that the costs to migration should be determined by market forces or not, the fact that migrants are WILLING to pay so much shows how much people value the opportunity to move.

—

1. By the way, the International Organization for Migration says that labor migrants should not be charged any recruitment fees or related costs. There seems to me to be an oversensitivity here - an equation of “charging money” with “exploitation”.

Luigi Achilli provides evidence that even in the case of illegal migration, we should not equate “charging a high price for an illegal service” with “exploitation”. In general, if someone understands the risks of a service and is willing to pay the price, then there is something more interesting going on than simple exploitation.

Similarities between Beyonce's COWBOY CARTER and the Beach Boys' Smile

COWBOY CARTER is Beyonce’s latest album. Smile is an unfinished Beach Boy’s album from the 60s (1).

  • Both open with prayer: The first track of Smile is called "Our Prayer”, and CC’s opening “AMERIICAN REQUIEM” ends with the word “amen”. The religious themes continue throughout both albums

  • Both feature Good Vibrations (2)

  • Both feature prominent covers / interpolations collaged together with original material. This is pretty typical in modern hip-hop and pop pop, but was much more unusual in the 60s. On CC are “Blackbird”, “Jolene”, “Good Vibrations”, and “Oh Louisiana” among many others. On Smile you have most notably “Gee” and “You Are My Sunshine”

  • Both are symphonic concept albums. On both, one track often flows directly into the next. Alongside traditional 3-5-minute pop songs, both also contain a lot of short song segments stitched together (e.g., “MY ROSE”, the last 40 seconds of “SPAGHETTII”, “I’m in Great Shape”, the bridge of “Heroes and Villains”)

  • Both are a sort of reclaiming and mythologizing of Americana. Smile was explicitly meant to act a “riposte to the British sensibilities that had dominated rock music of the era”. COWBOY CARTER is, among other things, a “journey through a reinvention of Americana, spotlighting the overlooked contributions of Black pioneers to American musical and cultural history.”

  • And both have a specific interest in westerns: Smile has the western-set “Heroes and Villains”, and Beyonce has described watching hundreds of westerns as inspiration for CC

  • Both feature performances from notable non-American Paul McCartney: Beyonce’s cover of “Blackbird” uses his guitar and foot-tapping from the original. On “Vega-Tables” it is rumored that he is the one percussively chewing celery

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  1. The album was never officially finished or released, but an approximation of the album - titled The Smile Sessions - was released in 2011. That is what I am referring to when talk about Smile throughout.

  2. On CC it is interpolated into the song “YA YA”

High-level thoughts on having the most impact with a company

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I decided over December that at some point during my life, I want to start a company.

How should I think about “return on investment” from an EA perspective when starting a company? Here is my thinking, very quickly sketched out.

  • What matters is how much “good” the company achieves achieved per “input”

  • The main sources of “good achieved” are:

    • direct impact on customers and suppliers

    • potential for profits of company to be donated

    • contributing to economic development via

      • job creation

      • skill building of employees

      • ecosystem development (e.g., building a startup ecosystem in a place like Kenya, building expertise in chip manufacturing in a place like the US)

      • bringing in foreign exchange

    • potentially other externalities (e.g., a green company having positive environmental impact)

  • The main “inputs” are:

    • My own time and energy relative to whatever else I could be doing

    • time and energy of my coworkers

      • → not too worried about this. The supply of talent is elastic

    • any capital the company takes

      • → supply of capital is elastic too. so don’t worry about this

My conclusion: Go for the company that does the absolute most good possible. Don’t worry hogging talent or capital because those are elastic, and more will be generated.

This means one of two things:

  • If your main source of impact will be making money that you donate, then your goal should be maximizing shareholder value (2)

  • Otherwise, your goal should be to make the biggest company you can (3), so you positively effect the most customers/employees/partners

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  1. both very squishy but useful concepts for the purpose of this exercise

  2. this also applies if you are taking a profit for good approach

  3. with the caveat that you don’t drift away from whatever it is that is driving the impact

I donated $35 to offset my carbon footprint for this year

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I want to start donating annually to offset my carbon footprint. I don’t really think of this as a charitable cost - instead it’s internalizing my externalities.

This is the first time I am systematically deciding to make an annual donation - I wanted to walk through my thinking in case it’s useful for anyone else! This post also serves as pro-Effective Altruism propaganda.

  • How much carbon do I need to offset?

    • The average American seems to emit about 15-20T of CO2 per year (source, source, source). I’ll assume 20T.

    • But I travel a lot. A round-trip flight from London to New York emits ~1T of CO2. This year I took 5 international flights - most had multiple legs, so I’ll assume I emitted 15T more than the average American.

    • So let’s say I have to offset 35T of CO2 each year.

  • Where should I donate?

  • How much should I donate?

    • I’ll use the top recommended climate charity from Vox’s Future Perfect as a benchmark. As of December 2023, this is the Clean Air Task Force

    • Founder’s Pledge estimates that a donation to CATF can avert 1T of CO2 emissions for $0.1-$1

    • So that would put the amount I have to donate to offset all my emissions at $3.50-$35 per year

    • I’ll be on the safe side and assume I should donate $35

Conclusion: I just donated $35 to the Climate Fund from Founder’s Pledge to offset my yearly carbon footprint. I intend to make this donation annually going forward, and encourage you to as well!

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Effective Altruism has been under some heat lately - with the collapse of FTX, and the drama around the OpenAI board ousting Sam Altman.

EA is both a philosophy and a community. I think the above exercise illustrates why both are really good, despite recent drama.

  • The philosophy of Effective Altruism gave me the intellectual motivation to donate in the first place. And it informs my decision about where to donate: I should not just donate to what feels the best - I should donate where my dollar will have the highest impact in terms of tons of CO2-eq averted.

  • The community of EA has created institutions (in this case Vox’s Future Perfect, and Founder’s Pledge) that help me quickly (1) identify a good donation opportunity, and direct my funds effectively. Also, a post on the the EA Forum provided extra social motivation to make this donation

Is this system perfect? No. Perhaps I could have spent more time finding a better charity to donate to. Perhaps I should be doing more in my lifestyle or in political activism to be addressing the problem of climate change.

But I think my actions here are a lot better than they would be if Effective Altruism did not exist (2). So overall I remain proud of Effective Altruism - both the philosophy and the community.

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  1. It only took 1 hour to do the research and decide to donate!

  2. For what it’s worth, the philosophy and community of EA were also key motivators in my decision to become vegetarian

On infrastructure challenges in Kenya

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“Infrastructure challenges” are often cited as a barrier to doing business in emerging economies. I thought it might be interesting for people to see very concretely how infrastructure challenges do and don’t affect our work at Kapu (1).

Roughly in order from least challenging to most challenging:

  • Water access issues don’t affect us. We have fine running water at our offices/warehouse. Water access is a bigger challenge in the countryside

  • Power outages: doesn’t affect our office or warehouse directly. But sometimes when power goes out for a night in a poorer neighbourhood, our agents can’t place orders the next day because their phones are all dead

    • power outages are a significant issue for businesses like manufacturing though

  • Cell network / internet issues: We have significant but not huge problems here

    • Cell and internet connection can be patchy. Lots of “can you hear me?” “sorry, there’s lots of lag”

    • Internet periodically just goes down - hurts our customer service response time most of all

    • Sometimes Safaricom - the biggest cell and payments network - goes down for a few hours, leading to failed payments, OTPs that don’t send properly, and lots of hassle

  • Low level corruption: Cops sometimes stop or impound our trucks and want bribes. They let us go after we show the proper paperwork for the 7th time, but it can make our deliveries late

  • No comprehensive street address system: You describe where something is by saying “it is next to House of God Church” or “it’s in the Mumbi area” (2). We rely on GPS pins (which are not always correct) rather than addresses to make deliveries. This slows down deliveries

  • The roads aren’t great: In Nairobi some roads are concrete, and some are dirt. When it rains hard, some of the dirt roads become impassable. This happens every couple weeks or so and then we are unable to make deliveries in a few neighbourhoods for that day

Collecting payment from customers and agents who - because of lack of trust and lack of liquidity - don’t want to pay in advance for a product that will arrive until tomorrow is also a huge challenge that you don’t face so much in the US. I wouldn’t consider this strictly an “infrastructure challenge” - but it is another type of challenge that also tends to go away as a country’s economy develops.

Overall these issues aren’t huge for us. I think these types of problems matter much more in industries like manufacturing, or in countries where infrastructure is worse.

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  1. ofc this is all my own views, not any kind of official view from Kapu

  2. My friend was once asked to draw a map of where he lived for an official document

How I use ChatGPT

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I came across a couple of studies on Twitter recently about the effects that AI chatbots have on productivity.

This matches with my personal experience using ChatGPT (which I’ve been doing increasingly over the past week or so).

ChatGPT does not make me great at the things I am good at. It makes me ok at the things I am bad at.

I basically use ChatGPT to teach me about things that I don’t know much about. It’s a much faster version and personalized version of Google. Here are some examples:

  • Explain to me what a fiber bodied truck is

  • Explain how instant coffee is made

    • Google could have gotten me the first-level answer here, but ChatGPT was great because I had lots of specific follow up questions that it could answer

  • Explain how a contextual bandit algorithm works from first principles, how it is distinct from other types of recommendation algorithms, and why it is called “contextual banditry”

  • Are personalized recommendation algorithms more relevant in developed countries vs developing countries? If so, why?

  • Analyze the macro-economic risk of investing into a company in Pakistan. How do the risks differ vs investing in Kenya? Vs Nigeria?

All of these are things I don’t know that much about. ChatGPT is great at getting me to an ok level of knowledge. But it is not useful for helping me at the core parts of my job - creating a sales pitch for Kapu agents, or understanding the issues that Kapu customers face.

I personally find this very enriching - I’m able to learn random things much more quickly and in a personalized way. It’s like having a generally knowledgeable person I can just constantly ask random questions and get informed (though not perfectly accurate) answers.

If there is a more general trend I draw from this, it is that tools like ChatGPT are enabling a lot of people to become passable at a wide variety of things. This is very exciting!

My long-awaited opinion on US-Uganda international relations

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The US recently suspended Uganda from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade program that gives aid and preferential trade privileges to African countries.

It seems to be because Uganda has recently passed a law “calling for life imprisonment for anyone who engages in gay sex”.

I think this is a bad idea by the US. It’s not likely to make Ugandans treat gay people any better. It makes it harder for Uganda to develop economically. And will drive Uganda closer to the US’s geopolitical rivals.

About the only thing the suspension accomplishes is to make some nice people with consciences feel good that the US is standing up to bigotry (which is good politics for Biden, so it makes sense that he did it).

Obviously I think the Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill is bigoted, and awful, and causes tons of pain for LGBT people in Uganda. But it’s not like the US can really do something about this. Because this is not a case of an authoritarian regime doing something against the interest of most of its citizens.

The reality is that the Ugandan public really does not like gay people. 94% of Ugandans say they would “report a family member, close friend, or co-worker to the police if they were involved in a same-sex relationship.” 94% also say they would dislike having a gay person as a neighbor.

Are Ugandan politicians going to change their laws because of what a (important) foreign country says? Or are they going to do what the vast majority of their citizens want?

As I recently read in a book on American foreign policy: “Washington’s ability to force smaller and weaker countries to take steps against the wishes of their leaders is much less extensive than most Americans appreciate.”

So I don’t know how interesting that is to any of you. But at least this lets me feel smug that the history and foreign policy books I’m reading are actually helping me have some concrete opinions on current events.

My conclusions from learning about the Cold War

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I’ve read a couple books on the Cold War recently to see what lessons we can learn from this time to apply to the politics of today (1).

Here are my tentative conclusions - if you disagree with these points or think I am missing something important please let me know!

We need to avoid “missionary zeal” in our beliefs about the best way to organize society. Conflict during the Cold War was largely enabled by ideology. Americans thinking that everyone in the world needed to live under American-style democracy with free market capitalism. Soviets thinking that it was their duty to help the rest of the world undergo communist revolution. And then the rise of revolutionary Islam - especially starting with the Iran revolution in 1975 - which aimed at freeing Muslims worldwide from capitalist and communist domination.

I do care about American values and think more countries should have freedom of the type we have in the US. But giving the US government the sacred mandate to spread freedom and the American way across the world - through violence and espionage - leads to more harm than good.

We should avoid zero-sum, us vs. them thinking.

  • “We can’t allow Vietnam to become communist because then the Soviets will be stronger” leads to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Americans, Cambodians dead

  • “We have to retain nuclear superiority over the Soviets” leads to the institutionalized insanity of the nuclear arms race

  • “We can’t let Middle Eastern governments ally themselves with the other side” leads to Middle Eastern instability and terrorism that makes the world less safe for everyone

Sometimes American politicians are politically rewarded for taking advantage of and inflaming missionary zeal and zero-sum thinking…

  • The strong anti-Soviet stances of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan is part of what made all of them very popular presidents

  • In Kennedy’s campaign he continuously slammed Eisenhower for letting the USSR build more missiles than the US. This “missle gap” turned out to be untrue, but the narrative helped Kennedy’s campaign

  • The US under LBJ supported Indonesian dictator Suharto in purging millions of suspected communists. This resulted in Indonesia being an important US ally in Southeast Asia, and there was little to no resulting domestic backlash against LBJ

…but sometimes sometimes they are not

  • LBJ did not seek re-election largely due to the US’s failures in Vietnam

  • Aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion was disastrous for the Kennedy administration, both domestically and internationally

  • Reagan’s popularity took a huge dive after the Iran-Contra affair

  • Nixon’s decision to eschew 0-sum thinking and open US relations with communist China was received very well by the American public

So it’s up to us to punish our government officials when they make foreign policy based on missionary zeal and zero-sum thinking.

Sometimes intervening in other countries really does help your security. So it’s not realistic to say “the US should just leave all other countries alone.” But there are lots of different ways to influence the behavior of other countries, and the methods the US used during the Cold War were often both immoral and harmful to US security.

The US and China in 2023 are not in a “new cold war”

  • The US and Chinese economies are deeply intertwined in a way that the US and USSR’s were not

  • China is not engaged in a mission to manifest communism around the world in the same way the USSR was. And the US public has much less appetite for foreign interventions then they did during the Cold War

  • Thinking of the US and China as being engaged in a “New Cold War” tempts us towards the missionary zeal and zero sum thinking that we should be avoiding

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1. The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad, and The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace by Paul Thomas Chamberlain. I highly recommend both

Going to the beach while the sales team is working

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Last weekend while my sales team was working I was flying to the beach.

On Saturday morning while they were in the market, walking from agent to agent, convincing them to register more customers for Kapu, I was jumping around in the waves, playing cards with my friends, and going to a fancy beach-side restaurant.

A typical sales team member in Kenya makes about $500 per month. My round-trip flight from Nairobi to Diani - leave Saturday come back Sunday - cost over $100.

—

There’s no good reason why I should get to fly to the beach while the people on my sales team don’t. I am just incredibly, unfairly, undeservedly lucky.

What do I do in the face of this unfairness? There are different voices in my head that tell me different things:

Voice #1: “You deserve this. You work really hard, you have cultivated the right virtues in yourself, and you have taken advantage of the opportunities you have. So you deserve to fly to the beach when others can’t.” Despite the best efforts of voice #1, he hasn’t yet been able to convince me that I deserve the incredible luck I’ve had.

Voice #2: “Just forget about it. Don’t worry about people who have such different lives than you. Ignore it.” Voice #2 was much more compelling before I had never moved to Kenya - now that I live here and am confronted with how hard people work for such little pay, he’s quieted down a bit.

Voice #3: “You are so self-indulgent. You have so much when others have so little. Didn’t Jesus tell you to sell all that you have and give to the poor? There are some people within the Effective Altruism movement who live on like $10,000 a year and give everything else away. Why don’t you do that?” For right now at least, I’m principled enough to follow this advice.

Voice #4: “It’s good to go to the beach. But it is sad that not everyone can do it. So in your leisure, be grateful for what you have. Don’t let your spending on luxuries get out of hand. And in your work, work hard to help other people in the world have the same material abundance you enjoy.”

I try not to listen to voice #1 and voice #2. I’m not strong enough to do what voice #3 tells me. So I’m left trying to follow the advice of voice #4 as best I can.

I get stressed about my job sometimes. But I don’t work weekends, I have job security, and I fly to the beach. What do I have to be worried about?

Traveling in China - the most interesting things

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A follow up post to the most amusing things I saw in China and my views on the Chinese government.

Here are the most interesting and thought-provoking things I saw while I was in China

  • Seeing the scale of infrastructure and industry made me appreciate the power of economic protectionism. Chinese construction companies built all the roads in China. They build up institutional capacity and know-how. So they can build the roads in Kenya, instead of Kenyan companies. So Kenyan construction companies do not get that good.

  • At one point a driver asked Jia (my girlfriend who is Chinese but has lived in the US for ~8 years) if she was American. He said she didn’t seem like she was from China “because you act and talk like you have individualism and freedom”

Just a normal book of the Chairman’s sayings…

…but actually it’s a way to learn the tongue of the foreign devils

  • I bought a book that has the cover of a Little Red Book, but inside is a English-Chinese dictionary. So you can look like you are dutifully studying the Chairman’s words, when really you are learning the language of the foreign devils! Apparently this was a common during the Cultural Revolution (not anymore). They also had a similarly disguised Chinese-Japanese dictionary.

  • Jia’s dad had a stack of about 20 classical Chinese texts as the most prominent books in the living room. I was impressed with how many of them were pretty well known in the US (1) - seems like the books that make it over to the west are decently representative.

  • The cultural tourism in China is pretty hilarious. A couple towns I visited were full of “ethnic clothing” rental stores where tourists (95% ethnic Han) could rent “traditional clothes” of the local ethnic minorities (e.g., Tibetan or Daxi) and go take pictures. This would be the equivalent of an white American dressing up as an American Indian and taking pictures by a teepee (2).

A coffee table set of classic books

  • It was also an interesting case study in how a government “sanitizes” a culture. By commercializing the tourism, the CCP can make a show of celebrating China’s diversity and culture while getting rid of any elements that it finds potentially threatening. We want you to show off your flags and prayer wheels to tourists, but we don’t want you to actually follow the Dalai Llama.

  • The propaganda is very high production and entertainment value. On digital billboards I kept seeing what I thought were trailers for action movies but were actually celebrations of the local fire department or successful businesses. There were very cool anime-style posters exhorting you to keep the city clean.

  • Government work is prestigious and hard work. Met one guy who works in the foreign investment office and works 14 hours days. Reinforced to me how complacent Americans are.

—

  1. e.g., Sun Tzu’s Art of War, several books by Confucius, the Dao De Jing and I Qing

  2. This still happens to some extent in the US, but it seems to be getting more and more frowned upon. It is alive and well in China.

Traveling in China - How good is the Chinese government?

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About a month ago, I took a 2 week vacation trip to China.

One question I wanted to answer for myself during the trip was “how good is the Chinese government?”

I think that learning about how other countries organize their societies and governments is valuable to do when traveling. Especially when, like me, you are an American who is proud of the American way, and deeply baffled that other countries get along any differently than the US.

I think it’s especially valuable in China because it’s a communist (1) country of over a billion people that is American’s biggest political rival. And China also gets lot of very biased coverage in the US (especially along the lines of “the Chinese Communist Party is evil”) so I was excited to see what things looked like for myself. Here’s what I learned! (2)

—

There are two big glaring facts about China that have to form the backdrop of understanding “is the government good?”:

On this second point, government satisfaction is definitely inflated a bit by propaganda. But it’s hard to underestimate how much better things have gotten in China over the lifetime of many of its citizens.

I think that’s uncontroversial so I won’t go through too many stats to belabor the point. Here’s just one: The share of people living in extreme poverty went from 70% to under 1% over the past 30 years.

More qualitatively, here’s what I saw when traveling: Cities are clean. The infrastructure for things like electricity, transportation, internet, education are all quite good. Food and clothes are very cheap. It is so easy to rent a bike to ride around Shanghai and Beijing.

On most of the things that affect your day to day life - the concrete things that make a difference in your day to day happiness - the Chinese government has done a great job. A greater job in a shorter period of time than any government in history.

But there are issues. To my mind there are three big ones:

People can just be disappeared. One friend in China told a story about how a coworker of his had been linked to protests happening in China last year, and she simply disappeared from work. She had been arrested, no telling when she would be let out. After a few months she appeared back for a week or two - and did not want to talk about what happened - before disappearing again.

There’s not much you can say in defense of this.

People cannot access information. The internet is entirely censored. You can’t learn about things like the Tianamen Square massacre or the A4 movement. You can’t use Google products. You can’t use ChatGPT.

Now you can get around these with a VPN, but it takes a little bit of work. Two thirds of people don’t bother (3).

Religions are oppressed. The CCP tries to control religious organizations - such as the Catholic Church and Tibetan Budhists - by appointing religious leaders itself. If you are in certain government jobs and are religious, you have to be quiet about your faith (4). And of course there are the terrible things going on against Muslim Uighers in Xinjiang.

—

These issues are super important in terms of the American ideal of civil liberties. But they are relatively small in terms of how they affect most peoples lives day to day. You might argue - as many Chinese do - that they are worth trading off for the more tangible life improvements people have gotten (5).

Ultimately I think this idea of “trading off” civil liberties for material comfort is a false dichotomy. You can have both material success and not have to worry about vanishing for having unpopular political opinions. The CCP perpetuates the idea that it is a tradeoff to justify its hold on power.

So I don’t want to minimize the terrible things that happen in China. But they are definitely overemphasized in American media coverage of China. And it’s not like the US has a spotless record on civil liberties.

So overall is Chinese government good? Overall my answer is “it’s ok.” I definitely think the “China is evil, US is not” framing in popular discourse is unhelpful (6)

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  1. Well, you know, at least it has communist characteristics

  2. Caveat that obviously “How good is the Chinese government?” is a super big and complex question, and of course I do not have a definitive answer. I think for people interested in how humans organize themselves, it’s useful to have a “working theory” for questions like this. These are views I’ve thought a lot about over the past few years and built up mostly from discussions with friends, reading a few books, and taking this two week trip, but I am nothing like an expert on political theory or Chinese politics.

  3. Sometimes people make arguments to the effect that the media landscape in the US is not just as biased - even if we have access to information in theory, what we actually get is biased by the interests of small groups of people. I agree this is a big problem (and this is something I have changed my view on within the past year or so). But state control in China is way worse.

  4. It’s not like I ever felt in danger or anything being there. When it came up, people were very respectful of my faith. My girlfriend’s dad even found it important to explain to extended family that there were important distinctions between Catholics and Protestants - alas that it was in Mandarin and I could not understand

  5. One friend I talked to said that the younger generation - especially those educated abroad - care more about civil liberties. Whereas their parents - growing up in the Cultural Revolution and seeing how bad things can be as well as how much better things have gotten since then - tend to not worry about rights and are more grateful for the concrete improvements that have happened

  6. Here is an example of what I mean by that: In discussions about how the US should approach AI regulation, people sometimes make an argument like “The US has to stay ahead of China. Even if moving fast leads to some bad outcomes, those outcomes won’t be as bad as if China is ahead.” I think this argument uses a caricature of “big evil China” to argue for something reckless.

    After my trip I’m also much more open to

    • Government exerting more power over companies to make them promote the public good

    • Trade protectionism - seeing Chinese industry really drove home how well this has worked

Why the US dropped atom bombs on Japan (more Oppenheimer context)

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Since watching Oppenheimer I’ve been thinking a lot about the factors that went into the US dropping two atomic bombs on Japan.

The official reason given by President Truman and Secretary of War Stimson is that doing so saved hundreds of thousands - maybe millions - of US lives that would have been spent in making a land invasion of Japan.

In reality there there was no single decision made to drop the bomb based on the lives that would be saved (1). It’s simply that all the momentum of the wartime USA was pushing towards dropping the bomb.

Think of the various political factors going on:

  • The US had been calling for the unconditional surrender of Japan, and Truman felt the US public would not accept anything less - to an extent Americans felt angry and vengeful towards the Japanese. The bomb seemed that it would help convince Japan to unconditionally surrender

  • The US was eyeing post-war diplomacy and wanted to impress and shock the USSR with the weapon

  • The bomb had cost $2 billion to build. When an inevitable congressional inquiry into the project occured, everyone involved wanted to be able to show without a doubt that the money was well spent

  • As General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan project, said: “Knowing American politics…there would have been elections fought on the basis that every mother whose son was killed after [the date we could have dropped the bomb] the blood is on the head of the president”

Imagine you are a top decision-maker tasked with making decisions trying to win the worst war that has ever been fought. You are simply going to use every weapon you have. You would have to be a person of incredible moral conviction to say “we should not use this weapon because of the moral repercussions”.

Nobody in a decision-making position stood up like this - not Truman, not Secretary of War Stimson, not General Marshall.

The reason the US built and dropped and continued building bombs is because everything in the manner in which World War II was prosecuted, American sentiment towards Japan, and the way policymakers viewed the USSR, pushed towards dropping them.

For a lot of people who worked on the bomb, the original intention was to make sure the US built it before the Nazis did. But once the gears of government power-accumulation are kicked into motion, original intentions stop mattering. A chain reaction is started and is very difficult - maybe impossible - to stop (2).

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I do not consider myself a leftist or someone who generally thinks that we need to tear down and rebuild the entire structure of American society and government. But I wonder: Maybe it is worth tearing it all down if that’s the price we have to pay for a system of government where political pressure doesn’t lead to dropping atomic bombs.

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  1. In fact, Truman simply lied in his “estimate” of the number of lives that would have been lost. The actual estimate of lives lost given by the Joint War Planning Committee was 40,000.

  2. Ina similar vein, a major factor in the US building up its nuclear arsenal during the cold war was competition between different branches of the military for more influence and a larger share of the budget. Here is Richard Rhodes: "what the Air Force figured out by the late 1940s is that the more targets, the more bombs. The more bombs, the more planes. The more planes, the biggest share of the budget. So by the mid 1950s, the Air Force commanded 47% of the federal defense budget. So the Army discovered that it needed nuclear weapons, tactical weapons for field use, fired out of cannons. …And of course the Navy by then had been working hard with General Rickover on building a nuclear submarine that could carry ballistic missiles underwater in total security…We would be perfectly safe if we only had our nuclear submarines. And only one or two of those. One nuclear submarine can take out all of Europe or all of the Soviet Union.”

Some Oppenheimer context on science and the military (no spoilers)

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I’ve been learning a lot recently about the Manhattan project – such a fascinating and dramatic time. I thought some of this might be interesting to other people who recently saw or are thinking of seeing the movie Oppenheimer (1).

Most of what is below comes from the book A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and its Legacies (2).

  • The reason the bomb was developed under the Army and not the Navy was because Vannevar Bush – one of the top science advisors in Washington DC (3) found that the Navy officers he worked with tended to not want advice from scientists and to do things their own way, while the Army (especially Secretary of War Simson) were much more collaborative

  • Oppenheimer had to work hard to convince Bush that a lot of top scientists should be moved away from the Rad Lab at MIT (where they were developing RADAR technology that was obviously crucial to the war effort) and to the Manhattan project (where it wasn’t clear if a bomb would be built in time to be used during the war)

  • He then had to work hard again to convince those scientists to move to the middle of the desert where they were worried they would be under military control

  • In general, scientists working on the Manhattan project were very worried that they would have to be subject to military discipline. Eventually Oppenheimer was able to convince Leslie Groves that they would not get the best scientists unless Los Alamos remained under civilian control, which it did throughout the war

  • Scientists working on the Manhattan project felt that they were taking the project much more urgently than the military. They often felt that the army – with all its attempts to compartmentalize information by restricting communication between scientists – was slowing down their ability to build the bomb and potentially letting Hitler build the bomb first

  • Some people credit the scientist’s – including Oppenheimer’s – insistence on not following compartmentalization as one of the key factors in moving quickly enough to construct the bomb in time to use it against Japan

  • This sentiment was especially prominent in Chicago. After Fermi’s team in Chicago demonstrated the first nuclear chain reaction in December 1942, basic research was almost completely removed from Chicago and to the rest of the Manhattan project sites. Chicago scientists felt left behind, and became increasingly vocal against how the army was handling the administration of the project.

  • Towards the end of the war, the Chicago scientists tried to convince Washington not to drop the bomb on Japan. They had a strong sense that – since they had helped develop the bomb – they should have a strong voice in how the bomb be used

  • In retrospect this sentiment – expressed by other scientists before and after the war – seems pretty naïve. Contributing to building a weapon doesn’t mean you get to determine how it’s used. But before World War II, theoretical physicists were seen as pretty useless. There certainly wasn’t a lot of collaboration between theoretical physics and the military. Many of these scientists didn’t know at all how the military world worked.

  • From the perspective of the military, and from both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, there wasn’t much of a question of if the bomb should be used or not. From a political-military perspective, during an all-out war, you do not invest billions of dollars and the effort of top scientists to build a weapon and then not use that weapon

Also valuable to know that Edward Teller (the awkward arrogant Hungarian in the movie) was a very strong nuclear hawk and would go on to be “the father of the hydrogen bomb”.

Hopefully that helps you appreciate some the of the background of what is going on in the movie! I’m excited to watch the movie again knowing all this now (4) (5).

 

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1.       For the interested, here is a post I wrote that touched on my views of the morality of the Manhattan Project, as well as another post with my thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s movies (and physics!)

2.       The author is Martin J Sherwin who is also one of the authors of American Prometheus – the biography of Oppenheimer that the movie is based on

3.       And famous MIT professor and administrator – shout out. He is the tall spindly kindly-looking bespectacled high-up in the movie

4.       If I’m wrong about anything in this post, please let me know! I’m trying to form a more accurate view of everything that was going on in science and politics at this time and would love to be corrected

5. I also love what Leslie Groves (Matt Damon’s character) says about the decision not to travel by air:

Mr. Stimson [Secretary of War] told me that if I went, I could not go by air, because of the hazards involved. When I said, “Well I don’t see what difference that would make,” he replied, “You can’t be replaced.” I said, “You do it, and General Marshall does it; why shouldn’t I?” He repeated, “As I said before, you can’t be replaced and we can.” Harvey Bundy, who was also present, said he had heard that I had previously urged flying when air safety dictated otherwise and then asked, “Who would take your place if you were killed?” I replied, “That would be your problem, not mine, but I agree you might have a problem.”

From Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project.

Rapid fire of the most amusing things I saw in China

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I just traveled there for 2 weeks:

  • Lotso Huggin’ Bear, the (spoilers) villain from Toy Story 3, is omnipresent. T-shirts, backpacks, stickers on motorcycles. You cannot escape him

  • At dinners with my girlfriend’s family, my main method of communication was through drinking

  • Beijing is the best city I saw, and the people there have the best t-shirts of any city in the world

  • China is the worst food country in the world if you are vegetarian

  • Fewer foreigners than I expected. I learned to introduce myself as “a foreign devil”

  • Upon seeing me, one child said to her family “I just saw the funniest person I’ve ever seen”

  • My girlfriend - who is from China but has lived for ~8 years in the US - was told by a driver: “you act like you have freedom and individualism”

  • The ride-hailing app Didi has a preset message for “The pin is correct. Please follow the map.” Uber Kenya – take note

  • At one dinner, my girlfriend’s friends spent a lot of the conversation talking (in Mandarin) about how “it’s better to date a Chinese”. (apparently one friend was dating a Japanese but they broke up because “she was too polite”)

  • One Chinese friend said the part of America that surprised him most was that “you can’t drink on the street”

  • There was a billboard video ad giving motorists examples of tons of drivers who had gotten into accidents. In every case, the explanation of the accident concluded by saying “they died immediately on the spot”

I’ll do a follow up post with some of the most thought-provoking things from my trip.

Some thinking on charity interventions vs. direct cash donation

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I live every day knowing that I live such a comfortable life compared to most people alive now (and compared to almost everyone who lived in the past). It is extremely unfair.

Donating money to charity is truly one of the most meaningful things I do in my life. It’s a way for me to take advantage of the extremely lucky life I live and help other people. Every month I know that - even if other things aren’t going well - I made the world a little better that month by donating a little bit.

Since it’s so important to me, it’s a topic I think about a lot about. This post is about some thining I’ve been doing recently.

A note: You can help people in extreme poverty! If anyone reading is interested in talking more about topics like this please let me know.

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Sometimes when I talk to people about donations I hear an argument that charities are by nature paternalistic and that the best way to help others with your money is to give money directly to the poor.

There’s a lot to be said for this. I think direct cash transfers to the extreme poor (e.g., by GiveDirectly) are among the most effective charities out there, and I would love to see many many more people sending their charitable dollars directly to the extreme poor - or even directly to the poor in their own communities.

But I think it is a mistake to say that we should avoid other charitable interventions because they take agency away from the poor and that that they imply the poor don’t know what’s best for them. People don’t always do absolute the best thing for themself with the cash they are given. Sometimes it is better to give someone a $2 bednet than to give them $2 in cash.

I myself often benefit from such policy interventions. For example:

  • In undergrad, a group came to campus to give people free flu shots. I think this was more impactful than giving all the students $20 and the option to buy a flu shot

  • Similarly, during COVID the US government gave us free COVID vaccines rather than selling vaccines for $20 and giving everyone $20 cash and the option to buy the vaccine if they wanted

  • My company gives me health insurance rather than extra pay - I am glad they give me the insurance

I don’t feel I am being condescended to as a result of these policies. Neither should we think we are condescending to poor people if we donate to charities that provide malaria medicine or incentivize childhood vaccines (1).

I would never want to argue against people giving cash directly to extremely poor people - I think that it is an extremely good and generous way to help people. But I don’t buy that donating to another (highly effective) charity instead is automatically insulting and paternalistic.

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1. There are systemic questions to wrestle with about why it is necessary for charities to provide these health services rather than governments, but in the near term if governments do not provide such effective services than it is good for charities to step in

How did China's life expectancy increase?

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I was all ready to write a very different blog post than this one.

I recently learned that in the early 50s, the people of China and India had similar health outcomes, but now China is much much healthier. For example, China’s life expectancy is 78, compared to 70 in India. On the basis of this, I was ready to write a post saying “do you see how important economic development is? It’s not just about having nicer clothes and cares - it’s about saving lives!”

But it turns out that the evidence from the China-India case actually goes largely against that narrative. Because China’s biggest improvements in health outcomes came between 1950-1979 - before its economic growth, not as a result of it.

As Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen say in book I’m getting most of this information from:

“The Chinese level of average opulence judged in terms of GNP per head, or total consumption per capita, or food consumption per person, did not radically increase during the period in which China managed to take a gigantic step forward in matters of life and death, moving from a life expectancy at birth in the low 40s (like the poorest countries today) to one in the high 60s (getting within hitting distance of Europe and North America).”

So what did China do to make its people so much more healthy compared to India? To the best of my understanding from an hour of Googling, it was largely a result of:

  • Improved education: Apparently experts don’t know exactly how a population being better educated leads to being healthier, but it is accepted as a general trend. In 1949, Chinese primary school enrolment was 20%. It was up to 80% in 1958 and then 97% in 1975.

  • Relatively egalitarian distribution of food: This was possible because rural people had land and urban people had jobs. The work communes also seemed to help ensure the poorest people had access to food (1).

This is a corrective my general assumption that to drive the most important outcomes for a poor society (health, security, happiness), it’s best to just focus on economic growth. Turns out those commies did a great job improving health by focusing on health, education, and food.

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1. This access to food in China has the notable exception of the famine of 1958-61 where 17-30 Million people died. But for perspective, Drèze and Sen claim that that many people die in India every 8 or so years from malnutrition.

Democracy in India may have protected it from famine, but it does not protect it from chronic malnutrition:

“as India's experience shows, open journalism and adversarial politics provide much less protection against endemic undernutrition than they do against a dramatic famine. Starvation deaths and extreme deprivation are newsworthy in a way the quite persistence of regular hunger and non‐extreme deprivation are not.”

A restaurant in Lahore teaches me the importance of names

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Once I was in Lahore. I was jonesin’ for some Qawwali.

I had heard there was a part of town with one or two hopping Qawwali joints. My lovely lady friend and I stumbled into one place called 89 Taste. They had a swinging Qawwali ensemble. But the place was nearly empty.

Ah, well, I thought. What a pity that the young people don’t appreciate the fine arts any more.

We got the menu and were overwhelmed! There were indeed 89 different dishes. More options than any one man or woman could process. Paralyzed with choice, my lady love and I ordered a simple chai and sat back to enjoy the melding of voice, harmonium, and tablain praise of the Lord.

Having had our fill of chai and Qawwali (and having sampled none of the other 87 tastes on offer), we ventured over next door and saw another joint called simply: “Chai Qawwali”.

We chanced a look inside - and Lo! - immediately our faith in the current age was restored. For here were women and men of all ages joined together in enjoying fine chai and music performed by another fine Qawwali group.

Clearly the proprieter of this establishment had keenly seen that folks out and about Lahore at night would have exactly two things on their minds: chai and Qawwali. After acting on this insight, the wise proprietor had reaped their due reward: “Chai Qawwali” had 10 times as many customers as the unfortunately named “89 Taste”.

It was thus that I learned the importance of names.

It was thus that I learned the importance of core competencies.