Pondering

On Unintended Consequences – giving away consumer goods and banning plastic bottles doesn’t do what you would expect

 

consequences facing facts and accept consequence of acts take and face responsibilities
Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com

One frustrating feature of life is that things are so complex. Doing something to help people or make things better can have unrelated impacts that offset any benefit.  Sometimes doing good stuff can make things worse.

That is called unintended consequences. Here are two more examples.

Giving away free consumer goods may not make life better for poor people…

7/23 – Vox – Buying TOMS shoes is a terrible way to help poor people – Add this article to the vast and growing body of articles explaining that the buy-one-give-one-to-poor-people way to end poverty is doing little to help and might be doing a lot of harm.

Amongst the many points made: (more…)

Jim Ulvog

Does the mere size of the infrastructure in large foundations create an issue in itself?

Here is an issue I’ve not seen before: Is the size of the infrastructure at humongous foundations a problematic issue just by itself?

David Callahan, writing at Inside Philanthropy on April 10, stretches my brain:  Ford Sinks Over $1 Billion a Decade Into Overhead. Is That Money Well Spent? – First, adjust that decade cost figure to annual.  That would be $100M a year.

In 2013, the Ford Foundation spent $146M on G&A out of $685M total expenses, according to the article.  That is 21.3%, which would usually be considered respectable.

The issue, according to the author, is their overall approach of making programmatic grants. That means the foundation chooses this study, that new effort, and another ongoing project. Which in turn means they drive the programs of their grant recipients. That heavy control approach requires a lot of staff.

Therein lies the rub, according to the author. With that approach, foundations gather power and authority unto themselves. At that scale, the agendas of the grant officers are driving the funding of lots of charities.

The author’s perspective: (more…)

Jim Ulvog

Good stuff for the nonprofit world – 2/15

I use the “good stuff” description on my other blogs for groups of articles I find of interest that might be of interest to my readers. Typically the articles don’t have much in common with each other. Think I’ll start doing the “good stuff” update here as well.

Here’s a few articles I’ve enjoyed over the last few weeks on nonprofit issues: burnout in helping others, good news for dissidents in denominational doctrine disputes, unintended consequences of free malaria nets. Three very different articles, but a common thread seems to be that life is complicated.

2/1 – The Guardian – The cost of caring – why I had to leave the charity sector – (more…)

Jim Ulvog

At $15.62 an hour you are in the top 1% of earners

Admit It: You’re Rich is a discussion from Megan McArdle.

If you are making more than about $16 an hour, you are in the top 1% of income earners in the world. If your time horizon is the last few thousand years of history, sitting in the lower end of middle class or perhaps working poor, you would be in the very tip-top of the 1% for all of history.

(Cross-posted from my other blog, Outrun Change, because I think it may be of interest to readers of this blog.)

She is on the story of why people living on either coast are complaining they can barely get by on $350,000 a year.

I’m on it. So is David Sirota. And if your personal income is higher than $32,500, so are you. The global elite to which you and I belong enjoys fantastic wealth compared to the rest of the world: We have more food, clothes, comfortable housing, electronic gadgets, health care, travel and leisure than almost every other living person, not to mention virtually every human being who has ever lived. We are also mostly privileged to live in societies that offer quite a lot in the way of public amenities, from well-policed streets and clean water, to museums and libraries, to public officials who do their jobs without requiring a hefty bribe. And I haven’t even mentioned the social safety nets our governments provide.

So how is it that everyone who is making more than $33K a year doesn’t feel like they are incredibly, wonderfully, amazingly blessed to live a live of such luxury and comfort and ease?

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Jim Ulvog

Case study of collapse of Mars Hill, home church of Mark Driscoll. What lessons can you learn?

The people at 15 separate locations that make up Mars Hill are leaving, to stand or fall on their own. Mars Hill is where Mark Driscoll was senior pastor. The corporate ‘parent’ will end its existence in a few weeks, on New Years Day 2015.

The dramatic implosion of the megachurch is the subject of a 3,600 word case study at Leadership Journal: The Painful Lessons of Mars Hill.

The article points us to a very sobering teaching.  In Proverbs 24:32 we read

I applied my heart to what I observed

And learned a lesson from what I saw.

Perhaps we ought to apply ourselves and learn from this rapid collapse. As a far-away observer, this was a fast and unexpected disintegration.

I will only mention a few lessons that jump out at me. I still need to process the article more, so my comments are incomplete and likely confused. Putting my ideas into words pushes me to sort this out.

Please check out the article and ponder it yourself. What can you learn out of this sad event?

What got you here may bring your downfall

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Jim Ulvog

The world is messy and there is no silver bullet for development

That headline is my feeble summary of a superb 6,000 word article at the New Republic by Michael Hobbes: Stop Trying to Save the World – Big ideas are destroying international development.

In the last year he has read all the books on the shortfalls in development he can find.

The article covers a lot of ground. Here are the three biggest points for me:

There is no silver bullet that will fix all problems or work in all situations.

and

We need to modify our expectations that we can find a silver bullet.

and

Projects that work splendidly in one specific location in one set of circumstances won’t scale up by a factor of a thousand and might not do any good if you roll it out across the country.

I often talk of unintended consequences.

New phrase for today is “complex adaptive systems.”

(more…)

Jim Ulvog

“If you only write one book in your whole life … (it) will be someone’s absolutely favorite book of all time”

That is the encouragement from John C. Wright in his post “Your Book of Gold.”

The beautiful, full sentence:

If you only write one book in your whole life, and only sell 600 copies or less, nonetheless, I assure you, I solemnly assure you, that this book will be someone’s absolutely favorite book of all time, and it will come to him on some dark day and give him sunlight, and open his eyes and fill his heart and make him see things in life even you never suspected, and will be his most precious tale, and it will live in his heart like the Book of Gold.

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Jim Ulvog

The world’s oldest profession? Fraudster.

Last week I listened to a continuing education class by Sam Antar (Crazy Eddie CFO and ex-CPA Sam Antar Shows You How He Cooked the Books).

He suggested that unlike what has been said for a long time, prostitution is not the world’s oldest profession.

Instead, he suggested that committing fraud is the world’s oldest profession.

How can that be?

Go back to the garden of Eden. The serpent deceived Eve through a knowing misrepresentation of the truth in order to deceive her and take something from her. His intent was to harm her.

Definition of fraud

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Jim Ulvog

Can you live with mission critical applications disappearing for a week?

Consider your vulnerabilities to a software vendor disappearing overnight.

I changed RSS readers for a third time this week. They keep shutting down on me.

As an active blogger, reading a lot of blogs and news sources is mission critical. Well, I suppose I choose to make it mission critical – it’s a big deal for me.

Substitute your mission critical applications for my reliance on RSS feed and you can think through an assessment of how vulnerable you are to vendors just going away.

On Monday Bloglines disappeared. That has been my RSS feed for quite a while. Might be a server problem. Maybe a software upgrade that failed. Down lines somewhere. I can live with that for a little bit.

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Jim Ulvog

Don’t compare your messy backstage to someone’s presentable front stage

Things behind the scene are invisible to others. That’s the backstage. The ready-to-go portion shown to the world is the only part others see. That’s the front stage.

The ol’ sage advice is don’t compare your backstage to the front stage you see of others.

This applies in so many areas.

You know how your children behave at home or on a long vacation or how much effort it takes to get homework done. What you see in other families is the on-your-best-behavior public face and the brag-ready list of accomplishments that were oh so easy to achieve.

Compare the backstage of your family to someone else’s front stage as if that was actually a valid comparison and you will be distressed with either your children or your parenting skills. The most likely outcome is wondering why you are a failure as a parent.

Jeff Walker has a great video about that idea. He uses a messily hand-tailored shirt as a great contrast of the slick front stage and the messy, sloppy, slap-dash back stage.

Check this out:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Herruzu4HYY&feature=player_embedded]

 

Literally the difference between (more…)

Jim Ulvog

Arguments in favor of harmful aid

Blogger “J” writing at AidSpeak recently experienced another round of lousy arguments in favor of harmful aid. He developed an inventory of the bad arguments in play.

I’ve mentioned “J” a number of times on my blog. He has helped me stretch my understanding in general and especially on the difference between doing aid well and causing harm & hurt by doing aid poorly. We rarely consider the risk of unintended consequences when helping others. Check out some of my articles:

His detailed explanation of great reasons to do aid that hurts is A Taxonomy of Arguments in Favor of Bad Aid.

What does he include in the population of harmful aid?

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Jim Ulvog

Before you get too far in planning that short term mission trip….

….read Once more, from the top at AidSpeak. The author, “J”, wrote the article It’s a Crappy World, that I mentioned here.

The article discusses, then demolishes, a number of the arguments for volunteers going overseas to help.

Here’s just a few thoughts for your consideration:

Aid and development are professions, not hobbies. It takes specific knowledge, skill and experience to get this right.

(more…)

Jim Ulvog

It’s complicated. Evaluating charities and doing business in China version. Part 2

First post in this series looked at another illustration of the complexity of doing business or ministry in China.

This blog has looked several times at the issue of how complicated life is.

This post ponders complexity in terms of how to evaluate and compare charities that have vastly different operating circumstances.

Complexity of evaluating charities

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Jim Ulvog

It’s complicated. Evaluating charities and doing business in China version. Part 1

Several posts on this site have looked at the issue of how complicated life is. Some may look at my pondering and think ‘bout time you caught on. For the rest of us, journey with me as I ponder some more.

In the next post, I’ll come back to what got me thinking about this. Wednesday evening I read two articles from ChinaSource Blog that pointed out yet one more time how incredibly complex China is, especially coming from my background as an American.  Full disclosure: I am currently providing professional services to ChinaSource.

The first article, Some Common Mistakes, points to a longer article.

Consider just one common mistake made by people trying to do business in China:

Do not underestimate China’s up-front time commitment.

You cannot just make one or two trips to China and think you are ready to go. No. The attorneys say you will need to send several high level staff to the country for years before you can really get started.

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Jim Ulvog

Trying to make the world less miserable is complicated and messy

One of the big reasons I blog is to help me sort out this big, complicated, messy world.

“J”, an anonymous blogger and novelist at AidSpeak, helps in general and especially with his recent post It’s a Crappy World.

He points out 5 of the tensions and paradoxes of the aid and development world. Lots to ponder.

(more…)

Jim Ulvog