book review

26 May 2017

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Megan Roberts’ “The state of the world: report card on international cooperation” summarizes the main findings of the Council of Councils’ 2017 Report Card. It is depressing. The data come from asking the heads of 25 think tanks across the world to grade international cooperation efforts on global challenges. The 2016 overall grade is C minus, down from previous years in the aggregate as well as throughout specific issues from climate change to global health to global trade and conflict. The main driver behind this poor score is the global wave of nationalism coupled with the declining trust in institutions. The report card also ranks global risks and opportunities. Top 3 risks: conflict between states, transnational terrorism, and internal conflicts. Interestingly they are all security-related while the WEF Global Risks Report 2017 had three environmental risks topping its list this year. Top 3 opportunities: combating international terrorism, promoting global health, and advancing development. I cannot draw any comparison with the WEF report as it only looks at risks, contributing to the overall depressing feeling.

Andrew Mayeda’s “World Bank’s star economist is sidelined over war on words” recounts how the World Bank’s Development Economics Group staff mutinied against chief economist Romer and his rough demands to make research more straightforward. Romer requested that researchers connect their work to public debates, define clear purpose for each publication, and make emails shorter. He also had strong views on style, asking for less convoluted wording and more use of active voice while tracking frequency of “and” in reports (which he would not clear if above 2.6%). From this story it seems that requests were conveyed in a painful way. This aside, the rules seem pretty good to me. Especially as I recalled this World Bank research showing that while the Bank spent one quarter of its country service budget on reports, one third were never downloaded and only 13% were downloaded more than 250 times in their shelf-times.

A little extra this week as it is a long week-end for some of us and Bill Gates just shared his summer reading picks. I read two. Homo Deus which I recommended here as a good cerebral trip. It was no surprise to see it in the list as Gates had loved the prequel. What was surprising to me was to see Maylis de Kerangal’s The heart which is more of an emotional trip. de Kerangal is a great writer who can make a page turner out of the science of building a bridge. In The heart, which was entitled “mending the living” in French, you follow a heart being extracted from the body of a young man killed in a car accident to its transplantation in the body of a middle age woman dying of a heart malfunction. It is about grief and how every person around these two protagonists deal with it. It is powerful. I enjoyed it.

My map this week is from Fred Stolle’s “We discovered 1.8 million square miles of forest in the desert”. Stolle and colleagues counted trees on satellite images and found the equivalent of a whole Amazon worth of trees hiding in drylands and deserts. This is good news for the planet. But it also good news for the 2 billion people, most of whom very poor, who live in drylands and depend on these trees for their livelihoods.

My quote this week is from Dame Helen Mirren’s “Tulane commencement speech“: “We do need you to fix things, to make things right, to answer the big and troubling questions of this extraordinary modern world. How is it that we have figured out how to put everything from our resting pulse rate to every book or song we’d ever want to read or listen to on our iPhones – and yet for six years we haven’t found a way to stop little children in Syria from being murdered by poisonous gas?”

5 May 2017

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The Financial Times Foreign Affairs chief Gideon Rachman published “Easternization: Asia’s rise and America’s decline from Obama to Trump and beyond”. I have not read the book but this interview gives the gist of the argument. It is not new, it strengthens the message around a trend that many have documented. What was interesting to me was Jessica Mathews saying that she was not convinced because (i) global leadership takes more than global economic (and even military) power; (ii) China has to balance between global, regional and national hot issues; and (iii) there are other forces in “the East”, such as the rise of India, that are still looking West. And what was equally interesting was to read, in parallel, Danny Quah’s (Eastern?) perspective. In “Can Asia lead the world?”, Quah agrees that it takes more than a growing economic, military and population footprint to lead globally. He argues that Asia’s leadership strategy should focus on soft power and that its driving values could be different from liberal democracy. Ultimately, he says that Asia will only be able to lead if it has a story. For him, that vision does not exist, yet.

Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson’s “Writing that works” is the book I recommended when a colleague asked me for guidance on improving writing skills. I love that book. It identifies the most common writing weaknesses and gives specific tips that you can use to practice, practice, and practice until you get it right. I don’t, so I go back to it regularly and am never disappointed. They give guidance on how to write memos that get things done, plans that make things happen, proposals that sell ideas, and resumes that get interviews. It is a good way to spend 11 dollars. At one point, I also had Josh Bernoff’s “10 top writing tips and the psychology behind them” pasted on the wall next to my desk so that I could check it from time to time. I should put it back.

My graph of the week is from NYU Center on International Cooperation’s Global Peace Operational Review which, among other things, tracks the new Secretary-General (SG)’s senior appointments (USG and ASG) throughout the system by gender and nationality. 17 male vs 14 female so far in 2017. That’s for his new appointees. Overall, at this level, the situation today is 71% male vs 29% female. Not great. The SG committed to reaching parity at senior level by 2021 and across the system before 2030 and he asked his Gender Parity Task Force to come up with a plan to get there. Let’s watch and see.

My quote this week is from 80-year old Nobel Prize Daniel Kahneman: “There are studies showing that when you present evidence to people they get very polarized even if they are highly educated. They find ways to interpret the evidence in conflicting ways. Our mind is constructed so that in many situations where we have beliefs and we have facts, the beliefs come first. That’s what makes people incapable of being convinced by evidence. So education by itself is not going to change the culture. Changing critical thinking through education is very slow and I’m not very optimistic about it.”

21 April 2017

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I enjoyed Yuval Harari’s “Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow”. You may have heard of its prequel “Sapiens: A brief history of humankind” which critics compared to Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” and which became an instant bestseller after Gates, Obama and other influentials put it on top of their lists. Sapiens focused on the history of mankind. Homo Deus looks forward, to the future of mankind. Harari’s thesis is that while “the great human projects of the 20^th century [focused on] overcoming famine, plague and war, the new projects of the 21^st century [will be about] gaining immortality, bliss and divinity”. The 20^th century agenda was to save humans from external afflictions while the 21^st century mission is to upgrade humans by engineering their bodies, brains and minds. The scenario he unfolds in the book is depressing. The upgrade is affordable only to a small elite becoming superhumans, while most people remain in an inferior human caste losing their value as machines take over. The new religion guiding this future is dataism – faith in the power of algorithms. At first, dataism serves humans’ aspirations and enhance their lifespans, happiness and power, but it later outsmarts them leading to their extinction. Harari draws a parallel between how humans have undervalued animals and progressively led to their extinction, and how algorithms will treat humans: “Dataism threatens to do to Homo Sapiens what Homo Sapiens has done to other animals.” Yes, it is intense and feels rather crazy as I am trying to summarize it here. But Harari is a very good storyteller. He packages knowledge and connects ideas in an exotic and punchy way. So, often I have found myself super absorbed in his arguments forgetting to question their foundations. And there are many instances where we should. His technology-optimism is a case in point. Early on in the book he sets the scene: “every technical problem has a technical solution”. And thereafter he never questions the progress of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence nor their ability to surpass human mortality and consciousness. But again it is a fun and captivating 400-page journey that will for sure kick your thinking out of the box. I’d recommend the read.

Meredith Bennett-Smith’s “The case for being grumpy at work” uses evidence to reject the correlation between positive attitude and productivity. And she highlights the gender dimension of her argument. Here are some of the research-supported facts: women do not make it to corner offices if they look too happy; faking happiness can lead to depression or heart attacks; mild grumpiness increases communication and critical thinking skills while anger can boost creativity; and overall controlling emotions in the workplace is a lose-lose for the firm and the staff, especially for women. A bon entendeur…

My visual this week is from Hootsuite + WeAreSocial’s “Q2 2017 Global digital statshot” which shows the continuing explosion – scale and pace – of social media usage. 2.9 billion people are now active on social media. This number is increasing at a rate of one million additional users a day! Wait, what?

My quote this week is from Richard Branson via Rufina Park’s “The Future of learning and education: children, educators, and creatives as co-creators”: “Children look at the world with wonder and inquisitiveness, and see opportunities where adults often see obstacles. I believe that we should not only listen to them more, but also act more like them.”

7 April 0217

Posted on April 7, 2017 Leave a Comment

The World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings are approaching and development finance conversations are buzzing in DC. In a CGDev Financing the future event Mark Suzman tells us that we are not good enough at telling the aid success story. It reminded me that when we brought Kevin Rudd to talk about the future of the UN 2 years ago, he also pointed to a similar PR failure. Suzman also flags the need to invest in (input, output and outcome) data that can speak about these success stories. Overall an interesting conversation on what the future mix of ODA, private contributions and domestic resources could look like. Another growing conversation, flagged a couple weeks ago, is on universal basic income (UBI) with an interesting perspective this week from Diane Coyle arguing for a shift from UBI, focusing on the individual, to universal basic services focusing on the collective. Finally, several of you pointed to the ongoing chicken vs cash conversation so I need to flag it here for the benefits of those who might have missed it.

This week, a friend mentioned that she wanted to buy Amy Cuddy’s Presence: bringing your boldest self to your biggest challenges. Here is where I tell her to save her money. This book was recommended to me by the coach who led my last 360-degree feedback exercise. She was a good coach. But it is not worth buying the book. You’ll get the gist of Cuddy’s thesis in her Ted talk which you have probably seen already as it is the second most viewed (40 million viewers). Her core argument is that mindsets can be changed by adopting specific body behaviors. A few minutes of “power pose” before an interview can increase your (non-verbal) performance. The book expands on this by harvesting evidence from large bodies of research and by distilling the millions of testimonies she received following her TED talk. But, in my view, it does add any substantive meat to the bone. Some, including her research partner, have questioned the validity of the science behind Cuddy’s argument. What I would like to question personally is the underlying assumption of her work that associates performance with confidence, and leadership with success. This made me think of this recent piece by Susan Cain “Not leadership material? Good. The world needs followers”. But then I am not very clear about my position as I also want to appear confident and like to see my kids display confidence. And while I am in full disclosure mode, I admit to have done power poses before recent interviews.

My graph of the week is from EBRD’s Transition 2016-2017. It shows that people born at the time of the transition from a planned to a market economy are on average 1 cm shorter than those born earlier or later. This is comparable to impact observed for babies born or turning one in a war zone! The rest of the report is super interesting due to new data coming from the third round of wellbeing surveys conducted with 51,000 households in 39 post-communist countries and giving a picture of what type of adults those born in the transition years have become.

My quote this week is from the Ellen Macarthur Foundation’s New Plastic Economy report “Each year, USD 80-120 billion plastic packaging material value is lost to the economy. Given projected growth in production, in a business-as-usual scenario, by 2050 oceans could contain more plastics than fish.”

31 March 2017

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I have not yet written about fiction books here. But here is an interesting trend: sales of dystopian novels are exploding. Orwell’s “1984” reached a 9,500 percent increase in sales in one week end of January. Rather than re-reading the classics, I started exploring those written for young people and finished M.T. Anderson’s “Feed”. It tells the story of two teenagers in a futuristic world ravaged by environmental degradation and driven by consumerism where news, games, advertisement, and chats feed people’s brains non-stop through electronic implants. As her parents decided to fight the feed, one of the main characters did not get her implant in the early days of her brain development and we observe the increasingly damaging consequences of this choice. The book, written 15 years ago before the smartphones and algorithm mania, feels surprisingly close to our “now” with its self-driving cars, occasional trips to the moon, hacking threats and over polluted air and water. It is a thought provoking read.

The Harvard Business Review ran a series on businesses and inequality this week. Interesting articles and powerful graphs, with two highlights for me. One, Nicholas Bloom’s “Corporations in the age of inequalities” calls for a shift of policymakers’ attention from gaps between rich and poor people, to gaps between high-paying and low-paying firms. He uses a growing body of evidence to show that wages gaps between companies is a huge driver of income inequality. And he argues that three trends widen this gap: “the rise of outsourcing, the adoption of IT, and the cumulative effects of winner-take-most competition”. Two, Melissa Kearney’s “Income inequality may harm upward mobility” illustrates how boys who grow up in poor homes are more likely to drop out of school if they live in places with high income inequalities than poor boys living in more equal ones. Her work shows that highly unequal environments lock young people, and especially boys, into “economic despair”.

My illustration this week is from Simon Maxwell’s “A new case should be made for aid. It rests on three legs“: 1. understand the problem; 2. match instruments to need; and 3. tell a story that convinces the public. Agreed. He then sorts out aid instruments according to public support and demonstrated effectiveness.

My quote this week is from Otherlab’s Mikell Taylor in “Cardboard gliders could revolutionize aid delivery in disaster zones“: “It’s a cross between a paper airplane and a pizza box. The plane lands right where it needs to be. You don’t want to have to account for a bunch of assumed [cargo drops] loss because the wind blew your parachutes into a lake.”

3 March 2017

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I am not sure I can speak rationally about Melissa Fleming’s “A hope more powerful than the sea: The journey of Doaa Al Zamel” given how much I cried reading it. Fleming walks us through Doaa’s life from the teenager in Daraa, Syria witnessing the Arab Spring and its violent repression; to the young woman who flees with her family to Egypt where they are first greeted with compassion but soon threatened daily; to the determined woman who tells her fiancé that “it is better to have a quick death in the sea than a slow death in Egypt”; to the amazingly strong and selfless human being who survives 4 days in the sea holding on to a plastic ring and two babies while 500 people drown around her. In a strange way, I was less shaken by Doaa’s own story than by the atrocities she witnesses. Maybe because I knew from the outset that she would survive or because it was not her own voice sharing the story? The worst parts of that story involve children. Their fate throughout the book is simply unbearable: from the small group of boys, as young as 12, who defy authorities and get arrested and tortured, igniting the revolution; to the unborn child whose pregnant mother wearing a fake life vest boards an unsafe dinghy desperate for a better future; to hundreds of horrified children being moved by smugglers from one boat to the next before all drowning. Fleming, UNHCR chief spokesperson, wanted to raise awareness about the global refugee crisis. She was searching for human stories that would “build bridges of empathy to the public” and give readers real insights into the Syrian war and the lives of refugees. She succeeded. It worked on me, but I was already on the right side of the crowd. Could this book change the perspective of someone who in principle opposes granting asylum, resettlement or work visa to refugees? How does individual storytelling lead to action beyond the life of the protagonist?

Will 2017 be the year of universal basic income (UBI)? As flagged over a year ago, a growing tech crowd argues that UBI is an effective response to the rise of robots, and could capture support from liberals and conservatives alike. In 2017, a good number of countries, from Finland to India, are piloting UBI schemes or considering replacing welfare programs with UBI. Last week end, Annie Lowrey’s “The future of not working” got the development crowd going on the web about the pros and cons for developing countries. World Bank quants said interesting-but-get-your-methodology-in-order, cash-transfer gurus said no-way, and development philanthropists said not-quite-yet. A fun debate to watch.

My graph this week is from the Varkey Foundation’s “What the world’s young people think and feel” and shows that on average young people are pessimistic about the future. Labelled “the most comprehensive and up-to-date attempt to understand the lives of Generation Z”, the paper presents results from a representative survey conducted with 20,000 15-21 year-olds in 20 countries in late 2016. It tells us that Indonesia’s youth is super happy while Japan’s is very unhappy; that young people do not think their leaders are doing enough to help refugees; or that young people are very supportive of the rights agenda in general but maybe not free speech (!).

My quote this week is from David Cameron’s “Even in an age of austerity, aid works. We have to keep giving”: “There are huge gaps in our understanding of what makes states fragile. That is why I am chairing the new Commission on State Fragility, Growth and Development. My co-chairs will be Donald Kaberuka, the special envoy of the African Union Peace Fund and the former president of the African Development Bank, and Adnan Khan, research and policy director of the International Growth Centre.”