Coolest Bike in Town!

Mike Ritchey of mountain bike fame is helping Rwandan coffee farmers cut the transport time (increasing their selling price) from the field to the washing stations by providing them with custom “Coffee Bikes” on a micro loan basis. These bikes replace the wooden bikes (including wheels) that they have been using. You can now own one of only 200 limited edition coffee bikes coming to the U.S. Be uber-cool when you ride down to the local java hole.

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Is Hunger Really a Problem in U.S.?

Given everything I hear about obesity stats in the U.S. and malnutrition in the developing world, the last thing I was expecting to find in my inbox this morning was a plea to join a Facebook cause to help end hunger in America.  Really?

I’m usually not skeptical in this way, and I’m loath to focus on the negative when it comes to philanthropy, but I can’t get these thoughts out of my head and I’d like some perspective from those who are better informed about the alleged U.S. hunger crisis.  In the mean time, here’s my food for thought:

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Paying Women to Not Get Pregnant

What’s fascinating to me about this is not that it works so well and or that there might actually be support in the Obama administration for doing it on a national scale, but rather that there has not been a backlash against it yet.  What are the odds that something like this will actually get implemented?  Is it actually a good thing?

hat tip: Annie Duke’s mom

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Two Sociology Books You Should Read

As you’ve probably figured out by now, I prefer to base decisions on statistically significant evidence.  However, in order to gather such evidence, you must have hypotheses in the form of testable models.  If the models you try to test are divorced from reality on the ground, your results will be useless no matter how statistically significant.

Therefore, if you’re interested in issues of poverty and race in the US, here are two ethnographies you should read.  Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh and Cop in the Hood by Peter Moskos.  As sociology PhD candidates, both went out and actually became actors in poor black neighborhoods.  Venkatesh hung out with a crack gang in a Chicago housing project and Moskos became a police officer in Baltimore’s roughest neighborhood.

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Eben Pagan’s Birthday Webinar

Vodpod videos no longer available.
This year for his birthday, Eben decided to host this webinar and invited all his contacts to join him online in lieu of a party and gifts.  What a brilliant concept and even more brilliant execution.  Eben (and Scott Brandon Hoffman, founder of CharityWater.org) truly epitomize the new philanthropy.

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Out of Poverty

One of the more inspiring talks at Pop!Tech this year was Paul Polak’s talk about serving the “other 90%” with life-saving and transformative products using a for-profit micro-franchise model that scales.  Paul’s vision and track-record speaks for itself, check it out.

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Band Aids and the Copenhagen Consensus

I recently alerted Rafe to the latest Copenhagen Consensus, which aims to set priorities for the most cost effective interventions to improve global welfare. Items (1) and (3) were micronutrient supplementation and fortification. Rafe expressed concern that these were a “band aid approach”. After pondering this characterization for a bit, I have some thoughts on when to apply a “band aid approach” and the conditions we should attach to such approaches.

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Water: The First Priority

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I hope you’ll pay particular attention to interventions where Rafe and I agree something should be done. Whenever such agreement emerges, we plan on letting you know. Hopefully, we’ll inspire you to support them as well. As it happens, we have just identified such an intervention, WaterAid. I stumbled across this worthy cause while researching a slightly different problem. What follows is the long version of the story. Please bear with me; it sets the stage for future posts.

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The Socioeconomics of Cancer

Pop Quiz: Which is a bigger determinant of cancer mortality in America, being poor or being black?

According to Dr. Harold Freeman of the National Cancer Institute, poverty is the bigger factor today, but it hasn’t always been so:

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Notes from TED

Here are some notes that I took at TED 2008.  I have a bunch more on each of the speakers individually which I may post as time permits.  Let me know if you want me to expand any of the notes below into a full post.

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TED Talks: Iqbal Quadir

Mobile phones fight poverty

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