How Many Lives Could You Save by Fixing Potholes in Zanzibar?

Last weekend I was in Zanzibar, riding in a taxi through a rural part of the island, and noticed that there were a lot of potholes. I remembered a study overview I had read that showed that reducing the number of cars idling on a road has significant positive health impacts on the people who live nearby (1).

This made me think: Paving over these potholes would allow cars to travel faster on this road, which would reduce the pollution exposure of people living nearby. I wondered if it would be cost-effective for a charity to pave these potholes, in order to improve the health of people living nearby (not even counting the other benefits of having well-functioning roads).

I decided to do a back-of-the-envelop calculation to answer the question: Would it be cost-effective, purely from the standpoint of reducing low-birth-weight births via pollution reduction, for a charity to take on the task of paving these potholes?

In short, the answer is probably no - it would not be cost-effective. I think it’s still worth sharing my process, because I think this practice of doing these types of calculations is a good habit, and because knowledge about what health interventions don’t work can still be valuable (2).

Here’s an overview of my calculation (detailed calculation at the Google Sheets worksheet here if you’re super interested):

• $500 to fix 1km of road’s potholes, based on cost to fix a pothole in the US and assuming 10 potholes per km

• 1 low birth weight eliminated per 10km of road patched, based on the birth rate and population density of Zanzibar, plus some wild assumptions about the equivalence of Zanzibarian Potholes to Pennsylvanian EZ Pass systems

• 7 years of life saved per low birth weight eliminated based on a study from Mozambique

So if we count a “life saved” if we save 57 years of life (57 being the life expectancy in Zanzibar), that gives us an estimated cost per life saved of ~$40k ($50k = $500 x 10 x 57 / 7).

This is not great compared to  the most effective charities (charity evaluator GiveWell estimates it costs $2k-$3k to save a life by distributing anti-malarial bednets). But my estimate was very rough - maybe fixing potholes is way cheaper in Zanzibar than in the US. And I only estimated lives saved due to low birth weight deaths - reducing pollution also has health benefits to people other than newborns that I’m not taking into account. On the other hand, maybe there’s way less traffic in Zanzibar than in Pennsylvania, so that pollution reduction effect is way lower than I estimated.

Another consideration is that maybe fixing potholes isn’t the kind of thing a charitable organization should get into - local governments should fix potholes and if a charity came in it would create a harmful cycle of dependency.

In any case, the potholes should probably be filled, even if the cost can’t be justified purely on the terms of reducing low-weight births. And the case isn’t totally closed against fixing potholes as a charitable opportunity. It may be worth a deeper dive more if you run an asphalt company and are interested in social impact, or if you’re just someone else who is bored some weeknight.

1. The study overview is only three pages and worth reading if you don’t often think about how harmful pollution is. The main takeaway is this: EZ-pass toll booths were installed on expressways in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. This meant that cars did not slow down and idle near the toll station. This reduced the amount of exhaust pollution that pregnant mothers who lived within 1km of the toll station were exposed to, which improved their health and caused the number of low-weight births to fall by 9%.

2. We all know what Edison said about lightbulbs or something

Some of the most striking things to me from my first 3.58 months in Nairobi

I was lucky enough to attend the koito for a friend. A koito is a traditional engagement ceremony for the Kalenjin people in Kenya, hosted by the bride’s family. Here are a few details I found very interesting:

• The groom has to pick the bride out of a group of veiled figures. If he picks incorrectly he’s supposed to marry the girl he picks instead of the girl he actually wants to marry. But this is usually avoided by the bride and groom agreeing on a particular signal beforehand (e.g., I’ll wear these shoes), so the groom doesn’t have much of a chance to mess things up

• The ceremony involves a standoff between the bride and groom’s families to symbolize the groom’s family whisking the bride away as she leaves her birth family and joins her husband’s family

• The negotiation for a bride price is also involved - traditionally paid in goats and cows, but now cash or M-PESA is acceptable (1) 

• The ceremony does not involve the groom in a major way after the veiled-bride-picking (my term, not an official term) and agreement on bride price. Compared to American weddings, the ceremony was far more about the families coming together rather than the two individuals marrying each other

• The middle-aged Kenyan men in the ceremony seemed extremely reserved

• The bride and groom have not been officially married in the eyes of the state or the church yet. But as far as the older members of their families are concerned, the koito is more important than the actual wedding

• It seems that most tribes in Kenya have a similar ceremony to the Kalenjin koito, though the detail vary

Another less-fun wedding-related fact: Apparently it can be extremely difficult to get married in Kenya. I anecdotally heard of a friend of a friend having to wait over a year for the government to approve their marriage application (marriage involved a Kenyan and a non-Kenyan, though I’m not sure if that’s relevant to the delay). Quick Googling indicates that maybe this kind of delay was because of COVID. But even so I found that shocking.

My church in Nairobi sports one of the more fair-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed depictions of Our Lord I’ve seen. This seems like a pattern based on the other churches I’ve been to in the city, though it’s possible I’m just noticing it more than I do elsewhere since the images are so incongruous here.

Church is basically the same as in the US because Catholic Mass is the same everywhere (and because I go to the English-language service). The only significant differences are:

• Offertory occurs at the end of Mass rather than in the middle

• The music involves lots more clapping and swaying, and sometimes Swahili words

• The Communion line is a self-assembling chaotic system rather than an orderly, row-by-row process. It’s not particularly chaotic, or messy, but there’s no pattern that I can tell. You just get up and add yourself to the line when you feel like it, regardless of whether you’re in the front of the church or the back, and regardless if everyone else in your row has gone already or if none of them have

The key to good haggling for non-essential items (especially knick-knacks for tourists) is to remember that they are non-essential. You don’t need them, and the seller wants to sell far more than you want to buy. So if they don’t want to sell at your best offer (meaning the amount you actually value the product at), just leave. There’s a decent chance that they will follow you and agree to sell at your best offer (2).

Also don’t buy from the first shop in the market until you’ve compared prices with the shops in the back — that first shopowner really doesn’t want you to compare prices between shops (3).

1. One of my favorite facts in economics is that women tend to be higher-educated in cultures with bride prices because (simplifying drastically here) parents have clear economic motivation to education their daughters: My daughter  will fetch a higher bride price if she’s more highly educated

2. On my coffee table sit a set of animal coasters that I didn’t want, paid $20 for, and never use. They remind me of this lesson

3. If I bring you back a gift from Kenya, you can be comforted by the fact that I learned some great lessons in buying it, and likely didn’t pay very much for it (unless it’s an animal coaster)

Paul McCartney is Cool

Paul McCartney is probably the greatest living artist, of any kind.

I do think the value of art is totally subjective. But if you wanted to try to create a definition of what makes an artist “objectively great”, I think Paul would have to rank near the top on most metrics:

• The level of greatness of his best work as judged by the most people

• Quantity of his work that is good, as judged by the most people

• Overall popularity

• Artistic influence

• Cultural influence

• Level of technical “sophistication” of his best work

Who would even come close? Maybe Bob Dylan? I can’t think of any authors, or film-makers who would be close (I don’t know of any visual artists who would be in the running either, and I think that the popularity of music vs visual art among most people is also a point in Paul’s favor).

He released an album last year called McCartney III. It’s pretty good. Then, this month, he released McCartney III Imagined, which contains all the songs from McCartney III remixed by or featuring contemporary artists.

And his choice of artists to feature is what keyed me into the fact that, in addition to being the greatest, Paul is also the coolest. (In 2021 I was still on the fence about him being cool, because while Sgt. Pepper’s is cool, and Back in the USSR is cool, he also wrote a song about being handy and mending fuses, which while good is less cool).

For a project like this it would be easy to imagine him turning to old greats who he has collaborated with in the past: Stevie Wonder, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Brian Wilson, maybe even Ringo. Or you could see him enlisting today’s biggest stars: Surely Taylor Swift or Lil Nas X would be happy to be featured on a Paul McCartney album.

But instead he (or maybe his manager, in which case he’s cool for having that manager) chose group of slightly outside-the-mainstream artists. Phoebe Bridgers. Anderson .Paak. Ed O’Brien of Radiohead. Beck. Popular enough that they might be recognizable (though it may take a Google to learn that Damon Albarn is the guy from Blur and Gorillaz). But fringe enough to be cool.

I was introduced to Fats Domino through music Paul released over half a century ago, and to Khruangbin through music he released 3 days ago. And that’s what makes Paul cool.

Labor is Very Cheap in Kenya

One of the most significant mental adjustments I’ve had to make in living in Nairobi is internalizing how incredibly cheap labor is (1). There aren’t lots of high-paying job opportunities here, so tons of people are willing to do low-skilled labor for very low costs (2). Here are some of the ways that the cheapness of labor manifests itself:

• A 15-minute Uber costs ~$2-3

• Food delivery is cheap (~50 cents for an UberEats order)

• Most apartments have maids / house managers who come in frequently to clean and do laundry. In my apartment we pay $100 per month for someone who came three times a week (this was excessive so we recently asked her to switch to twice a week, but are paying the same amount. We also had to explicitly ask her to stop cleaning the guest bathroom every week because we never have guests)

• My friend who works at a e-commerce company said that when they need new deliverymen (3) they don’t put out formal applications because “guys just materialize”. If you need an extra guy you just let your current deliverymen know, and one (or all) of them will have friends who are happy to take that spot (4)

• Many many buildings have multiple security guards who apparently do very little. Security is more of an issue here than in the US, but I feel like at very least a lot of these offices/apartments/houses would have only one security guard if guards were more expensive

• When staying in a hotel in Amboseli National Park, people cut the grass lawn by hand with a machete instead of with a lawn mower. It must take them at least 5 times as long to cut by hand as it would with a machine, but because the grass cutters are probably being paid less than $10 per day, management is fine if it takes them 3 days to cut all the grass by hand to avoid disturbing guests with a loud lawnmower

• People work long hours to make enough money. General working hours are 45-52 hours w week according to Kenyan labor law. Today a worker at a food mentioned how “we have to work so hard here - we can’t work just 8 hour days like people do in the US”

In the US I was always averse to paying for things like food delivery, Ubers, or cleaning. I felt that I was being lazy and wasteful by paying to avoid getting my food myself, biking to wherever I was going, or cleaning my own stuff. When I moved here I told my flatmate that I would probably do all the dishes, because I like doing them and I often did them for my family, housemates in college, and roommates in Chicago. But I’ve found that my enjoyment in doing the dishes has decreased dramatically now that I know that I always know our maid is coming sometime in the next few days.

1. The median income in Kenya is only ~$1,000 per year (compared to $30,000 in the US)

2. People can also survive on low incomes, because things are cheap (and the main reason things are cheap is because labor is cheap)

3. I have yet to see a deliverywoman, and have had only 1 woman Uber driver in 2 months

4. Another factor allowing this to happen is the low degree of formal employment (5 times as many people in informal employment as in formal). Since most of these delivery people didn’t have formal jobs, switching costs are very low. It’s easy for them to just start doing deliveries tomorrow, instead of having to decide if they’re burning bridges by leaving, giving 2 weeks notice, etc.

Back of the envelope math on pausing AstraZeneca vaccinations

European countries, led by Germany, have paused administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The US has not even begun to administer it yet.

There are 7 instances of blood clotting in 1.6M AstraZeneca shots in Germany. IF that’s causal ,which it looks like it isn’t, that means you have a .0004% chance of getting blood clotting if you get the AstraZeneca vaccine

Extremely conservatively, let’s say AstraZeneca reduces your chances of dying by 60%.  Currently 74K people  have died in Germany from COVID, out of a population of 80M. So getting the shot can reduce your chance of COVID death by 0.05%.

Given that we know COVID is killing people, and it looks like you’re 100 times more likely to die of COVID if you don’t get the vaccine than you are to get blood clotting if you do get the vaccine (which does not necessarily even kill you), it makes far more sense to err on the side of continuing (or beginning @USA) administration of the vaccine. By all means investigate the blood clots, but don’t stop administration of something we know will protect us from the virus until we get convincing evidence that halting vaccinations is safer than continuing them.

On American Identity

I’ve found that leaving the US has made me think a lot about what it means to be American (1).

• The sense I have in reading the news and talking to people in the US is that America is in decline. This made me unprepared for the volume and influence of American culture I would find in Kenya. I feel just a bit proud every time I see someone in a Spiderman shirt, watch an American movie with my friends, or hear Michael Jackson on the radio.

• I appreciate the melting-pot nature of the US much more now after realizing that I could live for 20 years in Kenya and never really be Kenyan. I don’t think the same thing is true in the US. From my perspective, as a native-born American, immigrants to the US strike a balance between assimilation into American culture and maintenance of the culture of their motherland. This allows the people in the US to have an identity as “American” while maintaining part of where they came from. I think on balance this is a very good thing for American culture, creativity, and innovation, though there are also downsides (e.g., immigrants feeling that they are forced to assimilate to some degree, and native-born Americans feeling that their country is being taken away from them).

• The fact that there’s such a constant and robust debate within the US about what it means to be American is itself, I think, very American.

• The fact that most people here know so much about my county’s politics, history, and culture makes me feel bad because I know so little about their countries. But also better because the fact that they know so much about my country must mean that my country is actually really important, right?

• I feel at ease talking to other young Americans here because I don’t have to mentally translate to the metric system, wonder “should I say math or maths?”, or question “do we both love ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’?” These three things make conversations much more natural (though sometimes less interesting)

Finally, living outside the country has made me more proud to be American. I love America more than any country in the world because it’s mine — something I appreciate much more with distance.

1. These traits might not be unique to the US, but they are characteristic.

We don’t expect people to have good reasons for their beliefs; or, a Footnote that got Out of Hand

Originally, the text of this blog post was going to be a footnote for another blog post. This that’s just context so the title — which was unavoidable — makes sense.

One way people (including me!) often give reasonable-sounding-but-not-actually-that-convincing arguments for their views is by what I like to call Appeal Without Evidence to a Hard-to-verify Outcome” (AWEHO). An AWEHO is a red flag that someone might be simply giving a justification for a view they want to believe instead of engaging in a pure and honest intellectual search for the truth.

Here’s an example of an AWEHO in action: The other day my flatmate asked me if I thought hate speech should be illegal. As a good, red-blooded, American I immediately said that it should not (without even clarifying what he meant by “hate speech”!).

I could have given a principled reason for this response, such as “I think that freedom of speech is an unalienable right that governments should not take away.” That could just be a core value that I hold which might have led to an interesting metaphysical debate about whether certain aspects of individual freedom are ends in themselves, how my views as a Christian and his as a Bahai’i affect our views on rights of communities, whether objective morality exists, etc.

But I didn’t make that kind of argument, because I don’t think freedom of speech should be an unalienable right. What I said instead was that making hate speech illegal would drive hateful ideas underground where they would fester and spread amongst hateful people. And since they were not being combated in the open marketplace of ideas, these hateful ideas would take deeper root and give rise to violence and vitriol that could have been avoided if those ideas were allowed to be debated in the open (I wasn’t this poetic when I was answering hastily and rashly).

In doing this, I’ve made an AWEHO. I’ve tied my support for the legality of hate speech to an empirical prediction: Allowing hate speech will lead to less hate in the long run. 

But I don’t really know if this prediction is true! It could just as easily be the case that banning hate speech in some circumstances decreases hate in the long run. I haven’t done any research to back up my empirical prediction. I’m sure there are lots of smart people on the internet with evidence of bans on speech leading to better outcomes, and I didn’t even do a cursory Google. The theoretical mechanism I described is compelling, but many beautiful theories are false.

And my flatmate did not challenge me on this defense of the legality of hate speech. Using an AWEHO as a rhetorical move is commonly accepted among people, like myself, who like to think we have good reasons for believing the things we believe.

I think that when I make an AWEHO — when I make a prediction like “making hate speech legal will lead to less hate” — most people don’t really expect me to back that up. When someone retreats to an AWEHO, it’s often taken as a conversation-ender — the point at which people simply agree to disagree. I make my AWEHO (allowing hate speech leads to less hate in the long term), you make yours (allowing hate speech leads to more hate in the long term) and we move on with neither of us intending to follow up either via conversation or via Googling.

Ending the conversation at an AWEHO is fine if the debate isn’t really about discovering the truth — and most conversations aren’t. We talk about stuff like this to get to know each other, or because it’s fun, or to feel superior to other people.

But if we actually care about arriving at the truth it’s crazy to end an argument at an AWEHO! That’s where the argument should just be beginning! That’s where people really have an opportunity to teach each other! If the two of us have different empirical predictions, then probably one of us has some information that the other doesn’t have, and we can exchange that information and eventually arrive at something closer to agreement (in fact, maybe we should always arrive at agreement if we’re being really intellectually honest).

If we care about arriving at the truth, a reasonable area to “agree to disagree” would be if we have different values. And this often happens. In fact, part of the reason that abortion is taboo to discuss is because it’s obvious that different values drive different opinions, and discussion isn’t likely to change those values. If I had simply asserted that I held the value that the freedom to hate speech was important in itself, that could have been a point at which my flatmate might have more reasonably agreed to disagree with me.

But the fact that we accept AWEHOs in arguments means that we really don’t expect people to have good reasons for having the opinions they do. We’re happy to end an argument when they say something that sounds like it could be a good reason, even if they give no evidence to support it.

I think it’s important to be aware of these tendencies, both to give AWEHOs and to accept it when others give them, so that you don’t accidently think that they are actually grounds for reasonable disagreements between two people searching for the truth.

The entrepreneurship culture in Nairobi

I’ve been astounded by the amount of entrepreneurship in the Kenya. It feels like every Kenyan I meet has their own company, at least as a side-hustle (and checking the stats it looks like ~60% of Kenyans are self-employed). I admire how much people trust in their ability to get out there and build something new.

Some examples from people I’ve met are: Making lotions and skin creams by hand, electric car rental service for hotels, online fashion curation store, self-employed realtor, family company giving technical assistance on setting up corporate software, making and selling toys online (1).

A high level of self employment is typical in low- and middle-income countries. It’s a necessity, because types of well-defined, predictable jobs that Americans tend to wander into (whether a white-collar job at a big corporation, or a cashiering job at Wal-Mart) simply aren’t available in the same volume in poorer countries. There aren’t that many large companies (2).

I imagine some of it also comes from a cultural, though I don’t know enough about Kenyan culture to say where exactly it comes from.

In the US many more people have the option to take a job that doesn’t require them to innovate and create. These jobs have a lot going for them from the individual perspective – stability, health insurance, often higher pay. But at a societal level, the existence of these jobs lowers the number of people who are engaged in trying to create new and valuable things, which is probably a dampening effect on growth.

It’s been inspiring to see how widespread the belief is here – especially among people in their 20s – that they can just get out there and get things done.

1.     Lots of them are retail sales and feel like a digital evolution of the self-employed people running outdoor food stalls.

2.     As an illustration: The largest company in Kenya (by market cap) is Safaricom which makes up over half of the value on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. It has a market capitalization $11B (total NSE value is $19B) and ~5k full-time employees (though Safaricom has many part-time workers – see footnote 2). This is very small by US standards where the 50th largest company (Honeywell) has a market cap of $140M and ~113k employees.

For reference, Kenya has ~1/7 the population of the US (50M vs. 330M).

On being more idealistic

I don’t want to work in global health or global development. I want global poverty to end.

I’ve noticed over the past few years a bunch of ways in which people have subtly encouraged not to give voice to big dreams. I think the cumulative effect of all this is bad for me, and probably also bad for other people who are in similar circles to me. 

—

For the most part, the people I work with in consulting are either people fresh out of college who don’t know what they want to do with their lives, or people fresh out of MBAs/PhDs who are doing a mid-career pivot. Neither of these groups of people are (broadly speaking) full of individuals who are single-mindedly pursuing a dream. They’re people who want to figure out what kind of career they want to have.

Friends, both from work and not from work, don’t love their jobs but continue at them because they think they will lead to something better, or because they’re fine spending a large amount of their time working for something they don’t love.

Partially as a result of not liking their jobs, they put a heavy importance on work-life balance. This encourages me to think “this time that I’m not being productive is good for me, and actually I shouldn’t want to work so hard.” It’s understood that you have to sacrifice if you want to achieve something great. But because many of us at our core aren’t driven to actually achieve whatever it is we’re working for (in my case, bringing value to the client), we don’t want to sacrifice too much.

Lots of people I talk to speak about entertainment as a passion. They get extremely excited when talking about a great restaurant they’ve been to or a great weekend trip they’ve taken. There’s an assumption that everyone is binging Netflix during quarantine, and people say things like “Ah I haven’t seen ‘Westworld’ yet — I should really watch it,” as if they’re missing out on life by having not seen it.

People apply to MBA programs because it’s the next step, buy a Peloton with their bonus, and refine their wine palates because they want to expand the horizons of the pleasures they can experience (1). 

—

Each of these things are fine and maybe even good in themselves! It’s fine to not know what your life’s work is, work life balance is important (especially if you don’t love your job), and I love watching movies. But the cumulative effect of all of this, combined with a lack of most people in my circles truly pursuing passions, discourages me from being idealistic about what I live and work, and work hard, for. And so I say things like “I’d like to try working in global development or global health” because that makes it sound like the next logical career step. 

Phrasing my goals this way makes sense. Maybe that’s the kind of work that I will find satisfying or impactful, so that I will like my job. Maybe development work will help me build some skills that will serve me well later in my career. Or maybe living in a foreign country will expose me to great natural beauty, and what non-American lives and cultures are like, which will be an enriching experience.

And honestly, all those things will be nice. But at my core — or at least what I hope and act like is my core — I really don’t care about what experiences or skills I have, and my goal isn’t to feel that my career is satisfying or impactful.

What I care about is that 600+ million people in the world live on less than $1.90 / day and that 5 million children per year die before the age of 5. And my goal is for that to stop. 

That’s ~8% of people and ~4% of births. Based on UN projections, by the time I die at the ripe old age of 103, the extreme poverty rate could be far below 5%, and the under-five mortality rate could be 1%. My life’s work is to accelerate the downward slope of those lines as much as I can. I hope I am willing to work hard and sacrifice to make that happen.

I think this kind of idealism is important in order to get things done that matter. We should be excited at the opportunity we have in living to make a difference, both because it makes life more enjoyable, and because it will make you better at what you do.

I want to move closer to Neal Stephenson’s ideal of the business founder: “After taking vows of celibacy and abstinence and foregoing all of our material possessions for homespun robes, we (viz. appended resumes) will move into a modest complex of scavenged refrigerator boxes in the central Gobi Desert...On a daily ration consisting of a handful of uncooked rice and a ladleful of water, we will [begin to do stuff].”

I probably won’t be able to work as hard as I should, or be willing to sacrifice as much as is demanded of me. But I’m at least going to stop pretending that the main thing driving me is to have a nice career when there is real stuff to do in the world — real problems that I can devote myself to solving.

1. Sorry for the super bougie examples — there are definitely less expensive ways to make the next step or broaden the horizons of pleasure you can experience. But I find it especially demoralizing when people spend a lot of money on these things.

Some of the most striking things to me from my first two weeks in Nairobi

The security guard at my apartment expressed a more nuanced understanding of American politics than 95% of people I’ve talked to in the US:

• He asked what I thought of Donald Trump, and seemed surprised when I said I didn’t like him, because  “Trump speaks to young men like you.” 

• Then he said that the most important thing is to unite people, and that Trump doesn’t unite people.

• Later he was talking about how corrupt the Kenyan government was, and said he understands why Trump doesn’t want to send money to foreign countries anymore, because it doesn’t end up helping the people.

Relatedly, I know next to nothing about non-American politics, nor am I expected to. A Kenyan was impressed that I even knew the name of Kenya’s first president.

The relative lack of rules is so freeing! There are no sidewalks so you just walk wherever you want! The management of my apartment doesn’t forbid bringing bikes through the lobby, swimming at night, or drinking on the roofdeck!

There is a sense of activity about the city that I don’t feel in Chicago or Boston. Part of it is the construction that is going on all over the city, driven by the twin needs to reduce traffic and to clean dirty money (1). Part of it is the visibility of cooks outside food stalls and salespeople inside Safaricom huts (2) on the side of the road — you can’t help but see people at work when you walk down the street. Part of it is my impression (possibly only existing in my head) that the median person here has larger and more meaningful goals they’re dreaming about and working towards than the median person in the US.

There are wild monkeys in my neighborhood (vervets as near as I can tell).

There’s not a clear distinction “inside” and “outside” because the temperature is perfect and bugs are not a problem. Windows are always and doors are often left open.

What seem like crazy low prices to me have forced me to understand how low the cost of labor is here. A full lunch today cost me ~$1.10 (3). A 20-minute Uber ride is ~$2. Because the cook and the Uber driver don’t have some other job option they could take for $7.25 an hour, their time is very cheap in economic terms.

1. Nairobi is full of in-progress and newly-constructed high-rises which are themselves full of vacancies. These high-rises are kept deliberately empty. The “rents” that the owners collect from these empty units serve as a legitimate-looking source of cash. If my co-worker is to be believed, this money laundering is used to cover four types of illicit activity: mining from Sudan, drug trade from South America, corrupt government activity in Kenya, and oil production from the DRC.

2. Safaricom is a phone network and the largest company in Kenya (worth ~$11B and making up ~60% of the Nairobi Stock Exchange (to be fair, a pretty small stock exchange as far as stock exchanges go)). Safaricom runs M-PESA, the widely-used Kenyan digital payment system, and on what feels like every street you can find a green food shack that has a Safaricom sign. These are the equivalence of convenience stores, selling snacks, water, juice, and the ability to upload money to M-PESA via cash or credit card. Safaricom doesn’t own these stores, the store-workers are simply Safaricom agents in addition to being store-owners.

There are ~160k M-PESA agents in Kenya, many at stores like these. There are around 50M people in Kenya, so that’s 3 in every 1000 people, similar to Walmart’s employing ~5 out of every 1000 people in the US (though Safaricom agents are not full-time employees).

3. “today” being a word which here means “the day of writing, not the day of posting”

I've Moved to Nairobi!

This week I moved to Nairobi, Kenya, where I will live for a year while working at BCG’s office here. I’ve been surprised by the amount of interest people have had in my decision to make this move, so I thought it would be worth it to write up my thought process at the outset of this trip. I’ll also be writing blog posts throughout the next year documenting what I see, learn, and do, and how I use this experience to decide what the next step in my life will be (1).

So why am I moving to Kenya? Basically to see if working in global development / global development is the best way for me to improve others’ lives, which is what I see as my life’s purpose.

My main purpose in life is to improve the lives of others as much as I can, and not necessarily to be happy. I think the call to help others is a strong moral obligation, and while it’s possible that I would be happier or more satisfied pursuing some other purpose, I would not be living the best life I could (2). But I generally do feel happy and satisfied by helping people anyways, so it works out great!

My thinking about my life’s purpose has been influenced strongly by the ideas of the philosophical movement Effective Altruism, and has lead me to two core driving ideas:

• I ought to push myself to help people as much as I can rather than settling into a career that does a moderate amount of good and remaining satisfied with that.

• I ought to look for opportunities where I will be doing work that would otherwise not be done. For example, I wouldn’t want to work at a nonprofit, even a super effective one, if I was just filling a job that would otherwise be filled by someone just as capable as me. Because if I do that, I’d simply be displacing good that someone else would be doing rather than making sure that more good gets done in the world. Instead I want to find a job that nobody else would do if I wasn’t doing it, or that I would do far better than the next person (3).

So what’s the work that will help me help others as much as possible in a manner that would not be done without me? As best as I can tell, for me that work is in global development / global health. And working in that space often requires living in or at least having had experience living in a low-middle-income country. So since we do a lot of that kind of work in BCG’s Nairobi office, living and working here seemed like the best way for me to find out if this is the type of work that I want to do longer-term (in addition to being a lot of fun)!

So my goals in moving to Nairobi are to:

• Gain experience and credibility working and living in a low-middle income country

• Decide if I would be comfortable living abroad for longer than a year

  • maybe I’ll want to live abroad for 3 years? 5 years? I’m not sure

• Discover if I actually like and do well at global development / global health type work

• If I like it, find out where in the global development/health space I think I can make the greatest contribution

• There are a lot of types of work I could see myself in (working as a development economist in academia, working as a consultant, working in a for-profit or non-profit startup, working for a government agency, etc.) and I want to narrow that list down

• Learn about the different ideas and actors in global development / global health

• Refine my views on what the world - and in particular Americans - should do differently from what we’re doing now in order to improve life for everyone on the planet

I’ll be blogging throughout the year as my thoughts evolve and move towards some kind of resolution on these topics. On 31 January 2022 I’ll write up my conclusions, which I hope might be useful for other people thinking about similar kinds of questions.

I’ll also hopefully be blogging about other fun and interesting things that happen while I’m here. So if any of this interests you, stay tuned!

1. Given the level of interest people have shown in my thought process about moving to Kenya, it seems like in this case people want to hear my thoughts about myself. So in my blog posts for the coming year I’m going to allow myself a higher-than-normal level of introspection in the hopes that my analysis of my own personal circumstances might give you some kind of insight into yours. If it’s boring, you’ve been warned!

2. I don’t feel this obligation from the fact that I was lucky to be born in a wealthy country, get a great education, have people help me in my life, etc. (though all that’s true). I think that just being a person means being called to help others.

3. As a concrete example, at BCG a lot of the people at my tenure want to be put on social impact cases, and there aren’t enough social impact cases to go around. And people at my tenure at BCG are pretty interchangeable from a work capability perspective. So that means if I was being put on a social impact project, I’m simply replacing an equally capable other consultant. 

This is a problem to me. If my goal is to feel good about helping other people, then being put on a social impact case would be great for me. But if my goal is to actually improve other people’s lives through social impact, being put on a social impact project doesn’t help at all, because I’m just taking the place of someone else who probably have basically the same amount of impact and learning as me. So if my goal is to improve other’s lives, why should I try to be put on a social impact project?

I raised this question to several people at BCG, but the only person who gave me an answer that seemed reasonable to me was the person who said “I actually don’t care about improving the world through social impact. I just like the feeling of working on those projects.”

Some Suggestions for Myself about How to Read

A person who wants to have a well-informed view of the world faces the trouble that there are a LOT of sources of information and ideas out there. Some of those sources are good (i.e., will help your opinion get closer to something truth or useful), and some are bad. In this post I want to offer some suggestions about how to decide what to read to get exposed to new information and ideas.

This problem of a deluge of content is not new. The British philosopher John Stuart Mill observed in the 1800s: “When there were few books... A book of sterling merit, when it came out, was sure to be heard of, and might hope to be read, by the whole reading class...But when almost every person who can spell, can and will write, what is to be done? It is difficult to know what to read, except by reading everything” (1).We may take issue with Mill’s ideas of what qualifies a book to be “of sterling merit” (2), but his general point is truer today than it was then: People don’t have time to read all the best books, articles, blog posts, etc. that exist.

So how should we decide what to read, or to consume more generally? I’m going to make a couple of assumptions about the reader in answering this question:

1. We are talking about a topic on which you want to have a well-formed opinion. As I talked about in a previous blog post, there are probably lots of topics on which you don’t have time to become well-informed. On those topics you should not have a strong opinion (3)

2. The purpose of your reading is to become more knowledgeable or to have better ideas. You might also read for entertainment, aesthetic pleasure, or social purposes, but in those cases your approach to reading will probably be different (4). Also I’m going to use the verb “to read” but my points also apply to other ways of learning (e.g., podcasts, videos)

For this kind of reader I have two suggestions (5):

#1: Find trustworthy experts and rely on them as a starting point. By “experts” I mean people who are knowledgeable and ideally thoughtful about the thing you want to learn about. It might seem obvious to rely on these people, but there is a tendency in the US now to be suspicious of those called “ experts” for one of two reasons: 

1. They’re an elite group who live in ivory towers and don’t actually understand the real problems of the world.

2. They are too condescending/self-interested to use their expertise to actually help people. 

I think that the people who are referred to in and deferred to by society as “experts” often are fair targets of both of these critiques. But:

1. The person is not really an expert if they don’t understand what they’re talking about, academic titles or societal position notwithstanding.

2. An intelligent reader can read past condescension and self-interest if the claims being made are backed up with actual knowledge. Every person you read is biased, and you’re not going to agree with everything they say. But if someone has knowledge and experiences relevant to what you want to learn about, you can benefit from their expertise as long as you understand the biases they are likely to have.

Depending on what it is you want to learn about, the people society calls experts may or may not be reliable. For example, when it comes to questions “is this food from the store safe to eat?” I don’t even think to fact-check the FDA — I trust that those experts are doing what’s right. But when it’s a question of “what is the most effective way to fight global poverty” I might think that academic experts don’t have the full story, so I need to also seek out perspectives from the poorest individuals in the world who are experts about their own lives.

On the importance of seeking out multiple perspectives...

#2: Read and engage with a diversity of views. Diversity of views means really meaningfully engaging with ideas from people unlike you, ideas you don’t even know that you don’t know, or ideas you find instinctively repulsive (6). Here are some ideas about how to do that practically do that:

1. Rely less on recommendations from your friends. Your friends are probably like you. And even if they aren’t, you get to hear their views when you talk to them. If you want to obtain a new insight, you need to read perspectives that you aren’t already exposed to via your friends.

2. Rely less on algorithms. If you want to be surprised by a new insight, you probably need to read something that an algorithm would find surprising based on your past reading history.

3. Read more old things. People in olden times had a lot of the same general problems that we do. But they lived in a totally different time, so they automatically have a different perspective on them than we do.

4. Read more things originally written in other languages. You’re automatically an outsider when reading something written in a foreign language. The author was not writing for you. This makes it more likely that they will express different ideas, or express the same ideas differently, than would the authors out there who are writing for people like you.

5. Read things that aren’t designed to be entertaining or fun. By restricting yourself only to ideas that are expressed in light and easy-to-swallow writing, you’re erecting a barrier between yourself and all those who have great ideas but aren’t great communicators. Plus your idea of what’s entertaining may exclude ideas that challenge you. And finally, reading something difficult forces you to recreate the author’s argument and think harder about what you actually believe, rather than just quickly reading, nodding your head, and moving along.

You probably don’t want to go to the extreme on all these dimensions at once. I don’t mean to say that you should go read a dry analysis of French waterways from the 1700s. But if your goal is to be more informed on some topic, particularly a contentious social or political topic, it might be helpful to try to push yourself in some of these ways to read things that you wouldn’t naturally come across.

I’ll end with another quote from Mill, who I find incredibly inspiring on the topic of arriving at the truth by comparing conflicting ideas. People tend to, he says,

 place the same unbounded reliance only on such of their opinions as are shared by all who surround them, or to whom they habitually defer: for in proportion to a man's want of confidence in his own solitary judgment, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of "the world" in general. And the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society

We have a higher ability than anyone who lived before us to expand our “world” beyond those who live near, live like, or believe the same things as us. We have also greater access to the knowledge of experts, both those recognized as such by society and those not. Let’s avail ourselves of as much of humanity’s experience as we can rather than remaining inert in our current beliefs and perspectives.

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1. The Mill experts that roam my blog will know that Mill was here curmudgeonedly making the point that people just read too darn quickly in his day, and that the quality of books wasn’t what it used to be. To which I say that there are probably more bad books now than there were in his day, but also more good books because there are just more books. And also get off my lawn.

2. E.g., J.S. Mill had a very positive view of his father’s A History of British India in which he wrote things like “under the glosing exterior of the Hindu, lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy” and dismissed out of hand claims that ancient Indian scholars made the advances in astronomy and that they did in fact make. 

3. Here’s a rough equation showing how strongly I should be allowed to have an opinion (I’m saying “I” but I really mean “you”):

For example, without great factual knowledge and only a vague understanding of why someone would oppose my view, I would be comfortable having the strong but rather vague opinion that “the government should do more to fight climate change.” My general beliefs about the role of government and the importance of the environment (i.e., my ideology) are enough to bring me to this opinion.

But if I want to be more specific about my opinion (say I believe strongly that “the federal government should fight climate change by mandating that all new cars must meet XX emission thresholds”), I should have a strong understanding of what exactly the economic and political effects of such a policy are likely to be, what the alternative policy options are, and what the arguments for those alternative policy options are. Ideology itself isn’t enough when you get down to brass tacks.

4. Though my points probably do apply if your goal is to experience and appreciate a variety artistic expressions (e.g., expand your taste in music or novels or movies).

5. I say “this kind of reader” but I really mean “me.” This post is largely a way for me to answer these questions for myself.

6. A lot of times when people say “I want to read more diverse books” they mean “I want to read more woke books”. That’s not what I’m suggesting here (though I’m also not discouraging it). I’m talking about diversity of ideas. Diversity along the dimensions of race, gender, and sexual orientation is valuable, but by focusing on these dimensions it’s easy to limit your consumption of ideas about racial and gender dynamics to a particular worldview that’s very popular on coastal college campuses. Diversity of ideology, temperament, historical period, etc. are also important as far as arriving at good ideas is concerned.

Using percentages in the face of uncertainty

In this post I talk about how historians could potentially improve their efforts to ensure their audience understands the level of uncertainty we have about historical events. I use examples from James C. Scott’s book Against the Grain, but these problems aren’t specific to him or this book.

There are many unknowns in history, from the exact dates and details of events to the major causes of historical trends. Filling in gaps in our understanding with educated guesswork is the job of a historian. But I think these theories would be even more useful if historians were very clear about the level of uncertainty in their theories, preferably by putting percentages on their estimates for how likely they think their theories are to be true.

For example, Scott offers several explanations for why there are so many abandoned settlements in Mesopotamia dating to ~2000-700 BCE: disease, environmental degradation, bad harvests leading to abandonment by the working class, war. All these answers are compelling, but he doesn’t offer any way to think about which is most important. Do we think disease explains 20% of the abandoned settlements? Or 80%? How much more important is abandonment by working class vs. war? The explanations are all plausible, but “plausibility” is not “100% correct,” and the problem is that I don’t know if in this case “plausible” means 90% or 10% likely to be correct.

Here’s another example: We aren’t certain why people started planting crops in the first place (around ~10,000 BCE). Scott considers two commonly-given explanations (people wanted to be able to store their food longer, and people wanted to be able to do work now and reap the benefits later) and says “neither … are remotely plausible” due to the large amount of work agriculture takes. But he argues people might have taken up agriculture because it was extremely easy in floodplains — this is the type of work that a hunter-gatherer “might take up.” 

Should we take this to mean that the floodplain explanation is 100% of the reason that people start agriculture? Probably not. But we aren’t sure if 1) other explanations aren’t given because Scott thinks that floodplain agriculture is ~90% likely to be the reason that people started agriculture and so the other options aren’t worth mentioning since they only make up 10%, or 2) floodplain agriculture is actually only 30% likely to explain the adoption of agriculture, but the others aren’t relevant to the discussion at this point in the book.

I’m fine with either explanation 1) or 2), but it’s not knowing which is the case that bothers me. And I don’t mean this as a critique of James C. Scott in particular — Against the Grain is a very good book. But I think historians (definitely popular historians) often do their audience a disservice by not providing a framework to understand how much confidence we should put in their theories.

This applies to things outside of history too (e.g., see the Good Judgement Project, and apparently the economist Larry Summers required that people give numbers to their uncertainty when in the White House), and you can catch me starting to put percentages on my uncertainties going forward.

Debunking claims of electoral fraud by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai

In this post, I learned that someone on the internet was wrong, and decided to spend a good chunk of my weekend working, in the name of Democracy, to make some graphs proving him so.

I will debunk claims of evidence for electoral fraud made by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai. I’m not going to dive too deep into details, and want to just make some quick hopefully clear points to show why Dr. Ayyadurai’s graphs aren’t really evidence of anything suspicious happening, for anyone who saw his video.

This is the graph Dr. Ayyadurai shows as evidence that an algorithm is stealing votes from Trump:

Each dot is a precinct in Oakland County Michigan. The x-axis is the % of straight ticket votes for Republicans.  The y-axis is % of votes for Trump - % straight ticket Republican. The claim is that because the lines have a downward trend, this indicates that votes are being stolen from Trump and handed to Biden in the precincts that have a high percentage of straight-ticket Republican voter (1, <— see below if you want details. I’m incompetent and can’t find out how to use superscripts).

I’ve recreated the data using Macomb county, another county given as an example of fraud in his video (2):

According to Dr. Ayyadurai, the fact that this line slopes downwards is evidence that Biden is stealing votes from Trump.

But! Here’s another graph though, using the same county’s data:

Woah! It’s also sloped down. Those points in the bottom right are precincts that are mostly Democrats where it looks like Biden is doing way worse than Dr. Ayyudarai would expect. By his logic, that must mean that Trump is also stealing votes from Biden!

In fact, you can just hold a mirror up to all of Dr. Ayyudarai’s graphs to see a new graph that makes it look like Trump is stealing votes from Biden. Because a downward sloping line on these graphs is nothing suspicious — it’s just an artifact of the way Dr. Ayyudarai’s decided to display the data (3). 

This kind of slope is just not that weird of a slope to see. We see the same trend in the 2016 election, where Trump won Michigan:

And we see the same thing again in 2012, when Obama carried Michigan over Romney:

So at the very least, if you think that Dr. Ayyadurai’s video is evidence of voter fraud, then you’d also have to believe that the same voter fraud happened in both 2012 and 2016 (4). 

But there’s no reason to believe voter fraud of the type Dr. Ayyadurai claims is happening, or that widespread voter fraud is an issue in US national elections. If widespread voter fraud is happening, that would be a huge problem, and it’s not impossible that data would come to light that shows that it is happening. But for now the evidence shows that voter fraud was not a problem in any state this year. If you learn of any evidence making you think that widespread voter fraud is an issue, I’d love to hear it.

I don’t know anything about Dr. Ayyadurai, besides what I’ve seen in this video so can’t really say if he’s being deliberately deceptive here, or just foolish in his use of data. But please don’t believe stuff people post online just because they use graphs and have a degree from MIT (5).

1. As an aside, this is a very confusing way to make a graph. If he really wanted to communicate clearly, he would just show % of votes for Trump on the y-axis. The fact that he subtracts out  % straight ticket Republican is what gives us a downward sloping line that makes it look like something is fishy. He could be less confusing by showing the data like this:

This is the exact same data as shown in my first graph. Now it doesn’t look like much is wrong. More people vote for Trump in the precincts that have more straight ticket Republican votes. Just as we would expect.

2. Note that my y-axis doesn’t exactly match the one used in the video — I’m not sure exactly what the difference is — Dr. Ayyudarai isn’t the most clear with exactly what is plotted on the y-axis. But the overall point is the same.

3. See 1

4. But what about that “flat line” that Dr. Ayyaduri draws in the 0-20% zone? Why don’t we see that in the 80-100% zone? Isn’t that an indication that something different is happening in precincts with tons of Republican straight ticket voters? No. Because we just don’t see that many precincts at all that have 80% or more straight ticket Republican voters. If there were, I’d expect the points to flatten out just as they do in the 0-20% zone.

The reason it slopes downwards is because in every district, the people who don’t vote straight ticket are going to be more moderate than the people who vote straight ticket. So in a super Republican precinct, you will expect that the people who bubble in each candidate themselves are going to vote for Biden more often than the people who vote straight ticket, putting you in the bottom right of Dr. Ayyudarai’s charts. And in a super Democratic district, the people who want to bubble in each candidate probably vote for Trump more often than the straight ticket voters, putting you in the top left of Dr. Ayyudarai’s charts.

5. Macomb data source (and 2016). Oakland data source. I’m happy to share my analysis if anyone in the world is interested. I pick the years and counties I do because those were the countries and years for which data was available that allowed the most direct comparison with Dr. Ayyudarai’s graphs. Thanks to my roommates for your help thinking this through!

If you aren’t convinced by me, or are interested in learning more, this good Medium post, written by Naim Kabir has some more detail on the mistake Dr. Ayyadurai is making. Kabir makes points using simulations rather than election data.

Edit: The original version of this post said that those who didn’t vote straight-party must have voted split ticket. This is not correct, and the text has been updated. Thanks to Jeff Brewster for pointing this out.

What can the US do about Xinjiang?

The US can and should take more steps to curb the human rights abuses being committed by the People’s Republic of China in Xinjiang (up to 1.8 million people being detained and subject to forced labor and torture). This is an opportunity for the US to act as the leader of the free world that we imagine ourselves to be.

This ChinaTalk article has a great overview of what we should do to pressure the PRC into reducing its actions in Xinjiang (see also Vox). In summary:

• The executive branch could instruct Customs and Border Patrol to issue a Withhold Release Orders against products like cotton and tomatoes produced in Xinjiang. This would prevent these products, created using forced labor, from entering the US

• Congress could increase the budget for CBP to give it more capacity to do the above (current budget is only $2M)

• The senate could pass H. R. 6210 which requires companies to disclose ties with Xinjiang. Congress could go further by introducing and passing a bill requiring companies that have ties with Xinjiang to be fined or to be delisted from US stock exchanges

• The US could file a complaint against the PRC in the International Labor Organization (a UN agency), or raise it in the UN general assembly or Security Council

Working with other countries is likely essential to success here, both in leading by example and in coordinated efforts. The point of all of these measures would be both to embarrass the PRC into halting their actions, or else provide economic incentives to do so. If only the US is criticizing and sanctioning you, it’s relatively easy to simply point out the US’s flaws and find other trading partners. You can’t do this if many of the world’s most powerful countries are pointing their fingers at you to hold you accountable.

What can you personally do ? As far as I can tell the best action an individual can take is to spend 5 minutes and call (or email) your senator and/or congressperson, expressing your concern about what’s happening in Xinjiang. For talking points you could say you’d like them to:

• Give more budget to the Customs and Border Patrol so they can increase enforcement on imports from Xinjiang

• Pass H. R. 6210, and introduce a new bill to require sanctions against companies with ties to Xinjiang

• Call for complaints by US representatives to the UN against the PRC’s actions in Xinjiang 

If you have other ideas about effective ways an individual could help on this issue, let me know!

What I Think About When I Think About Music

I haven’t posted in two months mostly because of laziness, and partially because I haven’t been able to think of anything worth saying. 3 minutes ago I decided that I’ll write a post about something that doesn’t matter so that I stop using my lack of anything important to say to justify my laziness. I’ll just write about something that I like talking about anyways but that I suspect that people don’t want to hear me talk about. Then best case scenario, somebody reads this and actually does want to hear it. Worst case, nobody reads it (well I guess the real worst case scenario would be that this blog post somehow causes a chain of events leading to something so bad I can’t even imagine it. But the odds of that are probably less than 5%).

So here’s what I’m going to do: Write about the music I like that I imagine I have interesting opinions on. And then maybe ponder about why it is that I feel like my music tastes somehow give me identity as a person.

First things first: Klein Four was an A Capella group made up of Northwestern math grad students. I love everything their song “Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)” represents. It’s about love and math, which are contenders for the two most important things in the universe. It’s about multidisciplinarity — the dropping of math metaphor after math metaphor is only possible because the songwriter(s) really know(s) math in addition to being able to write great lyrics. It’s also a great example of a song where the lack of perfection in recording and performance only adds to the beauty of the song (a trait epitomized by The Mountain Goats near-perfect album All Hail West Texas, consisting only of single takes recorded on a tape recorder). It’s also mad catchy. Its opening line is “The path of love is never smooth/But mine's continuous for you” and it only gets better. They have an entire album called Musical Fruitcake that’s worth checking out if you like math.

Taylor Swift’s album folklore rules. It’s definitely too long for my taste, but cut out the 30% of songs that aren’t great and you’re left with an amazing 40-minute album. Songs like “seven”, “epiphany”, and “mirrorball” are unlike any we’ve gotten from her before, and “betty” is her best narrative storytelling since “Love Story”. Sometimes I think of how cool it would have been to be around when some of my favorite musicians were consistently at the top of their game creatively and also massively popular — Paul Simon releasing Graceland or Led Zeppelin releasing Houses of the Holy. it’s fun to feel like the art that affects you personally is also culturally and socially relevant. Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar I think are the two artists I love who are at that level right now, so I am truly grateful to be around at a time when T-Swift is writing music.

I’ve been listening to lots of Chicago hip-hop recently, and feel a strange connection to these rappers from the city I only moved to a year ago. They live in very different areas of the city than I do, and I don’t see much of my personal life experience reflected in their lyrics outside of the occasional mention of a part of the city I know. But rightly or wrongly, there is something powerful about just knowing that I live in the city they live in, that we are part of the same community in a large sense. This makes me somehow feel closer to Noname than to Ms. Lauryn Hill. And when a song like “PTSD” (G Herbo, Juice WRLD, non-Chicagoan Lil Uzi Vert (Philadelphia), and Chance the Rapper) discusses violence in the city, I feel like I get a perspective that is more valuable to me than when Kendrick raps about violence in Compton.

I want to say something about ambient music but don’t have the words right now. Songs like “Teenage Birdsong” by Four Tet and “Xtal” by Aphex Twin both capture emotions that no other music does for me, and I feel that music like this brings me to a part of myself that is deeply important to who I am.

So let me try to step back and analyze myself: Why do I want to talk about my music tastes? Why do I desire other people to know what music I listen to when I’m by myself? I think a lot of it is just wanting people to be impressed by my taste. It’s not an accident that the four types of music I wanted most to write about were so different. Because not only do I get to show off that I have diverse tastes (hear me scream “I’m a cultivated and complicated person!”), but each of them helps signal something different and positive. Obscure math A Capella group: I’m a nerd. Taylor Swift: I’m unafraid to be sentimental. Chicago Hip Hop: I’m hip and woke. Ambient: I’m weird and introspective. Whether any of those things for true is up for debate (metaphorically. I doubt anyone actually wants to debate anything related to my music taste — even any poor soul who’s made it this far in this post), but some part of me wants people to think of me in those ways based on the music I like.

To some extent, I at least define myself by the art I consume. I think this is common. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I won’t try to answer that here though, because this post was supposed to be about something that didn’t matter. Looking back on it, it seems to be all about me. So let’s call it an unqualified success.

Goodreads review of The Complacent Class

Today I wrote a Goodreads review that was long enough to make me feel satisfied with my “amount of time spent thinking critically and writing” for this weekend, so I’m just posting it here.

If you’re reading this and use Goodreads, I’d love to add you!

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cowen makes a compelling case that technological innovation and social innovation and political competency have slowed down dramatically over the past 3 years, that individuals are largely okay with this, and that our institutions make it difficult to change this. This complacency has benefits such as increased safety and increased ability to satisfy certain kinds of preferences (like cheap access to nearly unlimited movies, books, and music), and makes sense for individuals in the short-term. But in the long-term it means that we will improve less as a society, making life worse for people down the line.

Cowen makes some of his points by leaning on his own intuition for how society has changed (e.g., when he says that the U.S. is more segregated in terms of “overall feel”). But these intuitive judgement are important to making his arguments mentally sticky, and I believe that he has both the statistics and the credentials as a generally open-minded devourer of cultural information to back up these sorts of claims. In fact I think that what is jarring is not that he leans on intuition when making arguments, but that he is so much more open about the cases where he does this than are other social science authors.

The book was published in 2016, and two 2020 issues jumped out to me after reading the book:
1. If you accept this account of complacency, it's very predictable that we would be terribly-prepared for something like COVID-19. Cowen writes “At some point this country will face an immediate crisis, and there won’t quite be the resources or more fundamentally the flexibility, to handle it...Building good institutions and capabilities very quickly is no longer something the American public sector is very good at.” And “As soon as Americans have to rely on their government to do something new and concrete — whether at home or in the realm of foreign policy or public health or the environment — low levels of trust will make that more difficult.” All this, unfortunately, checks out as we've seen.
2. Cowen calls out the civil unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore as potential signs that change is coming - that people are truly acting out their frustration instead of simply voicing it online. The protests and riots we’ve seen this summer in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing are a stronger sign that at the very least complacency with racial injustice may be on its way out.

View all my reviews

Additional facts from the book that might be of interest:

• The crime rate hasn’t gone down as much since the 90s as people often think, because internet crime became possible during the 90s, and there is a lot of internet crime as people think because a lot of it moved online

• Greater inequality is correlated with reduced protest participation

• Segregation is up by race and income And distressingly, the most segregated cities (in terms of working class/non-working class) are often those seen as the very trendy cities: LA, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, DC, Raleigh, SF. Even though people say they don’t like segregation by race or class, they vote with their feet by moving to very segregated cities

Mencius on how morality isn’t just following rules

Morality tells us what things we should do, and what things that we should not do. Much of western philosophy is concerned with describing morality similarly to how we describe the natural world: using reason to determine the “rules” of morality that we should follow strictly. For example, utilitarianism says “always maximize utility”. Kantian deontology says “there are certain things you can never do”.

Mengzi, the Chinese Confucian sage (also known by the latinized name “Mencius”), approaches this effort of becoming more moral very differently. He’s not concerned with providing an overarching moral framework for his teachings, or in laying out hard-and-fast rules. He acknowledges the importance of the moral rules of ritual priority, implying that one should be willing to die for the sake of being treated with the proper respect (Mengzi, 3B1). But it is important to abandon what is ritually proper when the ritual would cause you to deviate from the Way: “It is the ritual that men and women should not touch… but if your sister-in-law is drowning, to pull her out with your hand is a matter of discretion” (4A17).

So according to Mengzi, becoming an honorable person means developing our faculties of discretion, which will help us to make decisions (and, importantly, to form our motivations) in accordance with the Way. Mengzi’s teachings in themselves don’t correspond with the Way, and neither does ritual propriety. Both are methods to help his students cultivate the discretion needed to see what’s truly right.

The takeaway from this for me is that you can have a coherent system of morality without requiring that every action you take be backed up by rational reasoning. If moral obligations exist outside the natural world, then perhaps they’re things that can’t be well-described through a system of rules the same way physical laws can. And maybe utilitarianism and deontology are mistaken in assuming there is a set of abstract rules that describe morality, and what each of us should truly aim for is becoming wise enough that we no longer need hard-and-fast rules to guide us.

Have high expectations for yourself!

In this post I want to explore how the standards we hold ourselves to affect the way we view other people. So I’m going to write about the standards that I hold myself to because I have better insight into my own standards and viewpoints than I do into anyone else’s. The particular standards I mention may not be right, but I am pretty confident that there is a universal obligation to push ourselves out of our comfort zones in order to do good.

Also, I believe there is such a thing that there is objective goodness in the world. Bu if you don’t I think my reasoning will be applicable to you as long you have some standards that you wish everybody would follow (e.g., if you believe that “setting aside 30 minutes every afternoon for tea and biscuits” is a standard that everyone in your life should follow, then replace the words “do good” in the rest of this post with “set aside 30 minutes every day for tea and biscuits”).

Claim #1: We should all strive all our lives to do good more perfectly, and doing that requires holding ourselves to high standards

Holding myself to high standards means being kind of nitpicky with myself — being vigilant about times when I may not be doing as much good as I could be, and pushing myself to do better. I’m causing animals to be tortured by eating meat, so I’ll be vegetarian. I’ve been quiet about how the way we live our lives contributes to systemic racism, so I’m trying to speak out more. I waste too much time on YouTube so I should stop watching Jake Gyllenhaal interviews — I haven’t been as successful on this front (my favorite).

Once I’ve identified a standard I want to hold myself to, I can motivate myself by thinking about how this standard really ought to be followed by everyone and isn’t just some arbitrary rule I’ve decided to follow — this isn’t the case with all the standards I try to hold myself too, but it is with a lot of them. If I’m at a restaurant and there’s a great-looking steak on the menu, I can convince myself to not order it because I think it would be wrong for anyone in my position to contribute to cows being tortured, and would be disappointed in myself if I did something I thought was wrong.

Claim #2: It’s not reasonable nor good to expect others to be perfectly good all the time, and other people will often fail to meet the high standards we try to hold ourselves to

This leads to a problem: If I’m disappointed in myself when I don’t meet my own standards, and I believe the standards I hold myself too are common standards (i.e., they’re not just unique to me; other people should follow them too), then there’s danger in me constantly being disappointed in other people when they don’t meet these common standards.

So what do I do when other people don’t meet these standards that I set for myself? If I know that I would look down on myself if I ordered a meat dish, does that mean I should look down on other people when they order meat dishes?

Basically, in trying to improve myself, I’m in danger of slipping into judgement of others. I propose five rules of thumb to help keep this at bay:

• Hold yourself to high standards

  • Consistently push yourself out of your comfort zone to be a better person

• Recognize that not every standard you hold yourself to is a common standard

  • e.g., I limit the amount of TV I watch because I generally don’t get very much out of it for the time I put in, but that’s not the case for everyone

• Recognize that other people have life struggles that you don’t, which may make it harder for them to meet even those standards that are common

  • e.g., I think that everyone should do as much as they can to help other people, and that I and many others struggle with not being selfless enough. But I know that there are also people who struggle with making sure to take care of themselves enough (not to imply that being selfless and self-care are opposites, but they can appear to be in conflict sometimes). So I shouldn’t tell someone “be more selfless” unless I was reasonably sure that self-care wasn't something they struggled with (and even so I probably wouldn’t phrase it like that)

  • It helps to remember that you don’t always meet the ideal standards either

• If you are in the appropriate position to do so, encourage others as best you can to act better

  • What the most effective way of  “encouraging others to be better” looks like varies depending on the situation and your relationship to the other people:

    • It may mean saying nothing and leading by example

    • It may mean having a conversation with them about their actions and/or motivations and really listening to them

    • It may mean encouraging them to do better

    • It may mean calling people out explicitly and telling them to be better (especially if behavior is particularly egregious or you are in a position of authority like a teacher or a boss or a parent)

  • You also need to be open to others encouraging you to be better

• Be open about your beliefs, but focus your attention on where your attention can make the largest positive impact

  • Here’s an example of me trying to live this out: I think that both looting and the perpetuation of systemic racism are evil acts. But when I have conversations with people recently I always tried to focus on systemic racism, because that is the bigger problem, and the one that I’m more likely to be able to contribute to progress on. If I were in the position of the people who had the opportunity to loot during recent protests, I would hope I would hold myself to the standard of “don’t steal”. But I was not in that position, and as it is it would be wrong to focus on the fact that people looting weren’t meeting the moral standard of not stealing while ignoring the way society fails to meet the moral standard of not being racist

Articulating these rules of thumb has helped me resolve the cognitive dissonance I hold myself to higher standards than others (though I’m sure there are areas where I hold others to higher standards than I hold myself, which is wrong to do). Maybe it will help you too! Or maybe this cognitive dissonance was just a problem for me and all I’ve done is climbed out of a hole I dug myself in the first place.

The value of virtue signalling

Terminology alert: “Virtue signalling” is a phrase which here means “demonstrations that you hold values or behave in ways that people should approve of”

“Your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds” - Matthew 5:16

“Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them” - Matthew 6:1

Virtue signalling gets a bad reputation. It’s easy to look around cynically and have a view like “the people on Facebook who are posting about how black lives matter are doing that mostly to show off to their friends that they are good people, not because they really care about black lives.”

I think this is sometimes a fair critique. But virtue signaling can also be useful because it helps set communal norms. Speaking out about your values and talking about the good things that you do is good if it inspires others to be better, but is reduced to “mere virtue signaling” if all it accomplishes is convincing others that you are a good person.

So when discussing honorable views that we have or actions we’ve taken, we want to make sure we’re helping to change people’s minds, and not just yelling about how good we are. I think there are two criteria that together make virtue signalling valuable from a norm-setting perspective:

1. The view you are signalling is at least somewhat contentious in your community. Sending out signals like, “people shouldn’t use racial slurs”, or “police shouldn’t kill people in custody”, or “I once had the opportunity to steal this thing but then I didn’t” is not useful. Nearly everyone agrees that explicit racism, police killings, and theft are bad, so by signalling your agreement you aren’t changing anyone’s mind, just demonstrating that you eat the recommended daily dose of moral fiber.

   And this contentiousness is context-specific. The extent to which signalling “I think people ought to do something about climate change” is useful from a norm-setting perspective depends on whether the people around you already think it’s obvious that we should do something about climate change. If they all agree, then it’s useful. If they don’t, it’s not. 

   Similarly, “I think de jure racial segregation is wrong” would have been a useful thing to signal in 1940s America, when this was not the prevailing view. But if you said that now, people would do things like roll their eyes, or call you names like “Sherlock,” or suspect that you might have some pretty alarming views if you think that the evil of government-supported explicit segregation needs to be stated as if it’s up for discussion.

2. You seek the ear of those who don’t already agree with you rather than the approbation of those who do. This means understanding where the people within range of your signal are coming from, and framing your view in a way that will make sense to those who don’t already agree with you. 

   If I were to tell people “I wear a mask in public because I believe in science and am not selfish”, I won’t convince anyone to wear a mask who is not already inclined to do so. All I’m doing is showing to the people that agree with me that I’m a good person. Posting political memes that make me and my friends laugh at the stupidity/lack of moral fiber/sheep-like following of those who disagree with us doesn’t do anything to set better communal norms.

   (Note that while as a speaker you should always try to frame your views in a manner that your interlocutors will be receptive to, as a listener you should not disregard an argument because you don’t like the way it’s presented. Hold yourself to a higher standard than others, both as a speaker and a listener)

There’s certainly a lot of non-useful virtue signalling out there. But what looks like virtue signalling may actually just be an expression of values in a good-faith attempt to change people’s views or make them consider perspectives that they wouldn’t have otherwise. We often go along with the crowd and do things that are wrong. Let’s speak up in the few instances where we’re able to do what’s right, so that we might inspire others to do the same.