Social Strata Recycling: It's the Recycling Economy Stupid

 While I'm certainly not a fan of communism or any system that concentrates authority in a smaller number of bullyboy hands, I do respect Karl Marx's economic theories. Compound interest rewards those who save - who tend to be those ABLE to save.  If you are born to slaves or paupers, and have no choice but to lift your bucket where it is and lift as you climb, you are extremely unlikely to become self-made in a single generation.

It's the Recycling Economy Stupid.

That said, teaching people that it is hopeless to lift their buckets as they climb is cruel and unusual, historically speaking. The empowerment of resentment - Marx's elixer for proletariat revolution - has little evidence of building wealth in society at large. Most people benefit from a smaller slice of a bigger pie than taking away another person's piece and re-distributing it among sharp elbowed bullies.

Why No Place's Industrialization Looks Like Any Other Place

Corporate conquests, raw materials, industrialization and economic development... I'm beginning to think that African classrooms should be receiving USA 1970s high school history textbooks.

Histories differ, context differs, trade relationships differ, languages differ, currency differs.  The development of Western Guangdong Province looks nothing like the development of coastal Shenzhen. The WSJ reported last week that Viet Nam would not instantly replace China as an outsource.  In Harvard Business Review this month, author Ndubuisi Ekekwe of the African Institution of Technology and Fasmicro Group published an essay with the headline "Why Africa's Industrialization Won't Look Like China's".

It's not a bad short essay, but it could have been even shorter. If the western edge of one Chinese Province looks nothing like the eastern edge, why on earth would we expect a whole continent to develop by the pattern of eastern Shenzhen?

Connecting Traffic in Los Angeles, EWaste in Agbogbloshie

There are two really good things about Twitter.  The First One is the "search" box on the top right.  It allows you to research an obscure topic (like "Why is Taney County Missouri named after the Dred Scott Case Supreme Court justice Roger B. Taney, and why are they pronounced differently?") and meet someone across the globe who is also tweeting about the subject.  You might have found the same article through a Google search, but it is very hard for a recent article to move up Google's ranking, and virtually impossible to pass Wikipedia etc.  But enter "Roger Taney County Missouri" in Twitter search, and you'll get some very recent and current insight and thinking on the matter.

The second good thing about Twitter is it forces you to be brief.  It rewards "pithy"

(Blogger does not, evidently).

So most of the "facts" about African e-waste and Agbogbloshie that you find on Twitter are just retweeted BS.  But add some other key words, like "Dagbani", and you can meet someone through the smoke and fog who also sees what you know about the place.

Most of the photos on the web of traffic in Los Angeles are actors in colorful wardrobe, dancing on the tops of their cars in @LaLaLand.

When Formal Market is Criminal, is Informal more Moral?

Quick thanks for a tip from a pal via Tweet, here's a thought-provoking article on Informal Trade in East Africa.  Kate Douglas writes in HowWeMadeItInAfrica.com

Wheelbarrows of dollars: Understanding informal trade in East Africa 

I'll leave you to read it, it's about the underestimation of the power and importance of "informal" markets in Africa, and how "off the books" trade makes African commerce look smaller than it really is.  That's not a huge surprise - how much of the growth in China's economy came from record-keeping of trade previously off the record?

The thoughts provoked here are based on my sadness and disgust at the levels of corruption I witnessed while living in Africa in the mid-80s.  I remember going through checkpoints in East Zaire (Dem Republic of Congo) which were set up by soldiers on dirt roads in the jungle.  Using a fallen tree to block the road, the soldiers would stop taxivans and demand bribes, while waving machine guns.

When "formal" is run by criminals, the moral market may be the informal.

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets 9: Deliverance from Comics

"Dueling Banjos" composer Arthur Smith passed away this week, at the age of 93.  If you call me on my cell phone, the (originally titled "Fueding Banjos") song slowly erupts, and builds crescendo the longer I wait to answer.  When Arthur Smith was born, few Americans lived in cities.  When I was born, more than half of Americans lived in cities, and my Ozarks family was already in the minority.

I grew up very aware of the "cultural gulf" between USA's urban and rural families, at a time too many of us got our news about the world from comic books.   My future wife studied "Snuffy Smith" and "L'il Abner" from her home in Paris (Rosny was considered a kind of ghetto), and I learned about urban life from "The Cross and the Switchblade" comic, and "learned about" Europe from Richard Scarry, and about Africa by reading "Tintin".



Today, you no longer need to go to a college library to find out about what the world is really like.   But many of us hold onto our simplified stereotypes the way we hold onto comic books, hoping they'll become vintage collectibles.

The term "lesser developed country" or "LDC" was retired, and "emerging economy" is much more in vogue.  The same transition which occured in the richest nation on earth, the USA, is occuring everywhere.

"The world is undergoing a sustained urbanization process that's pulling more people into city centers and turning more places from rural outposts into denser urban organisms. A new report [PDF] from the United Nations projects that the world's urban population – roughly 3.6 billion in 2011 – will grow by about 72 percent between now and 2050, bringing the urban population up to 6.3 billion. That's about the same amount of people on the entire planet in 2002." - Nate Berg, The Atlantic Cities Blog

Those of us who see the world first hand, who travel from city to city, comparing Kinshasa, Cairo, Paris, Singapore, Kansas City, New Orleans, Paris, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Lima, notice more similarity than differences....  we see the world is melding and growing and culturally merging and mingling.   The internet, stoves, and the city traffic have more in common.  The music is in a state of free exchange, Soukous has rap lyrics, rap has sampled bluegrass.  African, Asian and European visitors to my home in the Ozarks are sometimes a little disappointed how similar it is to Vermont.  Having spent all that money on travel, they want to point their cameras at a hillbilly, the same as I was tempted to take snapshots of 'poverty porn' in city scrap markets in Asia, Africa and South America.

Comic books and photos are not substitutes for policy data.  Fortunately, there are far more people studying cities and urbanization than there are studying "e-waste".  Electronic scrap is an intellectual policy backwater compared to projects like NYU Stern Urbanization Project.   Billions of people are consuming and discarding in ways which make Annie's Story of Stuff seem oversimplified to an almost Biblical degree.

NYU SUP has produced 4 short Youtube videos to show the growth of cities, like modern art ink spots bleeding onto a white canvas.  Paris, Chicago, Sao Paulo, and Los Angeles... from space, they grow like fungus in the fingerprint of a petri dish.  Cities as they would be visible from space.



Cities recycle, and cities finance extraction of metals from rain forests and coral islands.  Cities repair and reuse, and cities discard.

Africa: The Secret of Happiness Continent

The past month I've spent a lot of time talking about Africa and Africans.  I lived there, and like pal Martijn van Engelen (Netherlands) found people in Africa to be - follow me here - happier than Americans and Europeans, on average.

Mon frere

Some speculate that "Stuff" and "Belongings" make people unhappy.  Many religions teach or preach happiness with sacrifice (which has been depicted, cynically by Marxists, as "opium of the people").  But capitalists marketing that "stuff" will make you happy have even less credibility, in my humble opinion.  Happiness is not related very directly to possessions.

As I describe in my Facebook status yesterday (bottom), I think that defining your happiness according to what someone else has that you are taught (through marketing and advertising) to covet is a major mistake.  Happiness is a skill.  When babies laugh and giggle, their brains are wired to smile for the rest of their lives.

Africa's secret to happiness, perhaps, is people.  Commonly it's a culture of smiles.  People in harsh situations tend to be polite, and friendly, and to help out.  In Cameroon, no matter HOW poor a family was, they fed me (even if I wasn't hungry, they insisted).

I don't think that it is the "stuff" that makes people unhappy.  I think it starts out with how we are raised, with a sense of humor.  And I'm not saying every African has the same sense of humor, or smiles the same.  But the preponderance of unhappy, unsmiling, pouty faces from Africa in BAN's Pieter Hugo poster child campaign is unnatural.

"Bazaaristan" or "Bizarrestan": $10 Trillion Per Year Generated by Poor

"There is nothing 'underground' about it.  It is our preconception that says it is 'underground'".

FINALLY someone else is explaining what I've been screaming, via this TED Talk.  Thanks very much to our 2012 intern from Univ. Paul Cezanne in France, Adelaide (author of the French blog at right).



This is what I took away from my time in Peace Corps.  The defamation of 1.8M people is way off base, and the fact it is primarily coming from non-profits in Seattle should be a big wake up call to liberals.

Biography of speaker Robert Neuwirth, Author of "Stealth of Nations", below.

In his 2012 book Stealth of Nations, Robert Neuwirth challenges conventional thinking by examining the world's informal economy close up. To do so, he spent four years living and working with street vendors and gray marketers, to capture its scope, its vigor--and its lessons. He calls it “System D” and argues that it is not a hidden economy, but a very visible, growing, effective one, fostering entrepreneurship and representing 1.8 billion jobs worldwide.

Basel Convention vs. OECD Convergence: Export Facts

WE ARE THE 17 PERCENT.


The worst recycling practices in the world need to be cleaned up.  R2 and E-Stewards, along with different state and federal stewardship laws, create a space which Moral Recyclers need when there are tough choices to be made on recycling price points.

I agree with Basel Action Network and Computer Takeback, at least half the time.   We agree about the situation of the poorest three billion people, or half of the six billion people who do not live in OECD countries.  Lead poisoning of children is not a myth, it's a heartbreaking environmental crime.

This is why I'm so upset to see my friends falsely accused of causing it.  Good exports are different than bad exports.

Rationally, let's look at the numbers.

"Non-OECD" does not mean "primitive". It's 83% of the world, and 50% of the world economy.  I am a staunch defender of geeks and technicians who happen to live in "non-OECD" nations, who operate impressive repair, refurbish, contract manufacturing, elective upgrade, white-box manufacturing facilities, which create sustainable economies and internet access.

1. Half (50%) of the Global Economy is in Non-OECD countries.
2. Of OECD raw material exports, about half (50%) are mined ore and timber.  Half are recycled.
3. Of the recycled portion (including e-waste), it is alleged that 80% of sales are to 83% of the world's population.
4. During the past decade, growth of internet access in the non-OECD nations grew at ten times the rate as OECD nations.  They need the monitors, even used ones, for video display.

So OECD exports 80 percent of its used monitors (either shredded as raw material, or for reuse) to this 83 percent of the world.   The surprising thing would be ...anything else.  The non-OECD nations are growing, projected to be 60% of the world economy by 2030.   They are younger economies, which have less scrap and more virgin land.  Internet there is exploding.  The older economies have more scrap, and less mining and forestry as a percent of their economy.

Poisoned children in Guiyu China is not a scam or a hoax.  The hoax is that E-Stewards lends them a dime or does anything to help those children.  This is not a beauty contest, where the NGO with the most heartfelt answer gets the contract.  Fair trade recycling means locating the people doing fantastic things, like IFIXIT and WR3A members, and giving them incentives and compensation to create sustainable comfort and prosperity.  Boycotting 83% of the world because the worst 30% of the world is so, so, so sad... It's not a final answer.

And the worst recycling, even in Guiyu, beats beats lead mining in Kabwe. We have to let the developing world reuse and recycle, while giving them the financial incentives to do so in a safe and clean manner.

Fair trade is a real methodology for dealing with e-waste, based on data, trade. We don’t address “primitive” recycling practices in one area of China by boycotting the best recycling practices in the world in another part of China, or another country.

One man’s opportunity for exploitation is another person’s chance for cooperation. The ban on interracial marriage was also a bad idea,no matter how many pictures of unhappy marriages the opponents take. Love will conquer all. And I love the geeks of color in the converging economies of the rapidly developing world.

(Reprinted in Motherboard.tv   More stats below)