Owen abroad

The Economist has a stupid article, Managing the Facebookers which claims that the net generation will suffer int he recession:

Once again, the touchy-feely management fads that always spring up in years of plenty (remember the guff about “the search for meaning” and “the importance of brand me”) are being ditched in favour of more brutal command-and-control methods. Having grown up in good times, Net Geners have laboured under the illusion that the world owed them a living. But hopping between jobs to find one that meets your inner spiritual needs is not so easy when there are no jobs to hop to. And as for that sabbatical: here’s a permanent one, sunshine.

The article is unencumbered by evidence: it reads more like wishful thinking by some curmudgeonly old hack who resents the rise of younger, smarter, better connected and more self-confident rivals.

It is quite plausible that the exact opposite might happen and that the economic upheaval will accelerate trends in the workplace towards the tools and attitudes of the Net Generation.  It seems to be the industry dinosaurs that are going bust (think General Motors and Woolworths) not the new economy (Amazon is doing well).  At a time of belt-tightening and rapid change, there will be a premium for people who can collaborate effectively, are comfortable working in teams and multi-tasking, and able to adapt rapidly to new ways of working. 

Maybe the cosh is actually hovering over the gnarly old bosses who have resisted change for the last decade, not the facebook generation?

Spare a thought for those of us trying to use the internet in Ethiopia.

It isn’t great at the best of times.  When it went down during the rainy season I rang technical support and was told that “the firewall has flooded”.  Apparently there is a single computer through which the entire nation’s traffic passes (or, that day, doesn’t pass).  The authorities block some websites (including blogspot.com, nazret.com, and skype.com) though they say they don’t, and they block Skype.  The bandwidth is always limited, but it is also frustrtingly unpredictable. Some days it will be OK, others terrible.  

According to internet world statistics, there are just 300 broadband internet users (as of March 2008) in Ethiopia; and fewer than 300,000 internet subscribers in total.

And now this:

Internet and telephone traffic between the Middle East and Europe will continue to be disrupted until Jan. 4 after a repaired submarine cable in the Mediterranean Sea suffered more damage, France Telecom SA said.

We’ve had very limited internet since December 19th, when the three underwater cables linking Egypt to Europe were cut by an ship’s anchor.  Apparently it was working on December 24th and 25th (I was away from Addis) when it was damaged again by an underwater earthquake.  

Let’s hope that things get better from January 4th.

Jeremy Gould, one of the few civil servants who “gets” the internet, is leaving to spend more time with his family.

I’ve been scouting around for a new challenge in Whitehall for a long time now but the truth is that beyond building and managing corporate websites, those roles don’t exist. There’s been a lot of talk over the last four years of how more senior strategic web roles are inevitable, but in that time its been just talk. So there was no next move for me.

It isn’t a good sign that people leave the civil service partly because it is so frustrating to be an advocate of change.  On the positive side, things are starting to change - mainly in local government rather than central government - but the UK Government is miles behind where we could be.  Jeremy also describes the way that he was discouraged from blogging, which is worrying.

Dave and Simon both highlight the significance of Jeremy’s departure.

Nicholas Kristof mused on Christmas Day in the New York Times on whether NGOs should pay high salaries.  He seems to come down - though equivocally - on the side of saying that sometimes they should:

In the war on poverty, there is room for all kinds of organizations. Mr. Pallotta may be right that by frowning on aid groups that pay high salaries, advertise extensively and even turn a profit, we end up hurting the world’s neediest.

“People continue to die as a result,” he says bluntly. “This we call morality.”

I think there is a dilemma here only if you retain the mindset that aid agencies and NGOs are providing charity to the world’s neediest.  If this is charity, then perhaps there is something incongruous about “profiting” from charity.  (One of the commenters on the New York Times forum calls it “a moral repugnance”.)  Today this is charity; and even so, the utilitarian in me thinks we should pay higher salaries whenever the return - in terms of higher output from securing better staff - exceed the costs.

But there is much less of a problem if we see development assistance as social justice.  In the 20th Century, most of Europe turned its backs in the  on Victorian concepts of charity and workhouses to deal with poverty in their midst in favour of building social institutions to protect all their citizens.  In the 21st Century, our view of foreign assistance will, I believe, undergo a similar change: we will see foreign assistance as an act of solidarity and social justice, as part of what it means to live together as part of the same society.  The world’s poor will have rights, not depend on charity, and there will be institutions whose job it is to protect those rights. When development assistance is not charity but justice, we will not think it strange to provide a decent income to those who deliver it, any more than we think it strange to pay our judges well.

Update: Wronging Rights has a discussion of this too.

Willem Buiter on the Christmas message from the Pope

What is it about the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious tradition that leads so many of its most prominent spokespersons to make hateful, bigoted, life-diminishing and personal security-endangering statements when it comes to human sexuality?

The internet has been running very slowly in Ethiopia for most of the past week. This may be caused by congestion, or possibly by the cable that was severed near Egypt on Thursday.

But I’ve been able to get online this morning, so I took the opportunity to upgrade my website. I’m now using WordPress 2.7 for all the pages (instead of using PHP pages for static pages and WordPress for this blog).  That means, for example, that it is possible to add comments to almost any page on the website, and that site-wide search works.

I’ve also changed the design of the site in the hope that it looks more modern.  (I see now that the graphics which look good in Firefox look pretty ropey in Internet Explorer, so I’ll try to fix that later).

I encountered one technical problem during the updated.  When I tried to log in to the upgraded site, I got this message:

You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.

If you get this problem, the solution is below the fold.

(more…)

If you read this blog you might have a passing interest in development and in technology. So you just might be interested (or know someone who would be interested) in joining our team.

We are hiring a Web 2.0 specialist to help us to make data about aid and poverty more accessible and useful in the fight against poverty. Here is the advert. More information about the team is here.

We can promise a great team, highly motivated, with lots of flexibility; and you’ll have a chance to do something really important. If you know anyone who might be interested, please pass this on.

Update: thanks to those who pointed out that they couldn’t access the file. I’ve uploaded it again - let me know in the comments if there is still a problem with it.

Phil in Afghanistan writes about what it is like living in a country in which there are many very poor people:

On the way back to the car, the girl, with the unerring accuracy of the terminally poor, spots me again, and comes running. I give her 10 Afs. Wordlessly, she takes it and turns away.

I have just spent more than 20 times that amount on food she will likely never eat.

I thought about this as I drove home. She will never eat a fruit tart, nor lychees with cream.

… Poor people are real. I met one, gave her next to nothing and drove on. I drove on to my lychees and walnut bread.

It means nothing and it means everything. Poverty is the sum of a lot of big things, but it is also the sum of a lot of little decisions that I make every day. And because we all make such decisions, poverty has long ago become a permanent fixture on the unreachable horizon, a cause we strive to but never seriously expect to reach.

I think that girl has a right to better than that.

Phil’s right: the girl has a right to better than that. We can do better than that.

In the fight against global poverty, we live still in an era of Victoria charity - throwing a few spare pennies to the poor in the workhouse.  We seem to assume, unthinkingly, that the poor (a) are in that condition partly as a consequence of their own fecklessness and (b) that there is nothing much we can do about it.  Neither of these assumptions is remotely close to the truth.

There is still no news of Robert Fowler, the UN special envoy to Niger:

The Niger government is still without news of the top UN official in the country, Canadian Robert Fowler, who disappeared three days ago west of the capital, the government spokesman said Wednesday.

I met Bob Fowler when he was the representative of Canda’s Prime Minister preparing for G-8 summits (the so-called “Sherpa”); and subsequently the personal representative for Africa (”APR” in the jargon).  The Kananaskis G-8 summit, which he helped to prepare (in which I was much more marginally involved) adopted the G-8 Africa Action Plan, which was a breakthrough in raising the commitment of the richest countries to doing more for Africa.

Bob Fowler is a remarkable man with a profound commitment to the people of Africa.  He is always willing to push the boundaries - he played a pivotal role in negotiating the end of “blood diamond” sales which financed the civil war in Angola, and so helped bring about the end of that war.

I don’t know who is holding Bob now, or what they want.  But he deserves to be a hero in Africa, not a kidnap victim.   Fingers crossed for his early and safe release.

Serious flaw in Internet Explorer not fixed yet (according to AP):

Users of all current versions of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser might be vulnerable to having their computers hijacked because of a serious security hole in the software that had yet to be fixed Monday.

Seriously, people: if you are still using internet explorer, please take a moment right now to install firefox instead, for your sake as well as all of ours.

One key problem with Microsoft Internet Explorer is that it is “closed” - only Microsoft employees can see the code.  Firefox is open source - so any mistakes like these can be identified and fixed long before they do any harm.

Update (Tuesday afternoon): Microsoft, to its credit, is going to issue a patch tomorrow.