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The Marketplace of Ideas
May 26, 2013

There is a marketplace of ideas, one in which the winners shape public policy, make funding decisions and launch programs that affect the lives of millions.  Not only that, but the more time I spend in this marketplace, the more I see that the ideas that spread do so because of the money and power behind them.  The consequences of this dynamic are profound: global warming deniers, deficit hawks and pugilistic lovers of war continue to drive the direction of this country.

In short, if we are to better the world, if we are to overcome injustice, we must ensure that good, just and righteous ideas spread.  But doing so is easier said than done.  If I had a million dollar budget, I could run a robust advertising campaign online, in print, radio, tv.  And If you don’t think a large advertising budget matters, remember that the first Gulf War started with an ad campaign, John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid failed, in part, because of the Swiftboat ad campaign, and on and on and on.

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Business  / philosophy

The Interwoven Strands of Justice
March 10, 2013

“We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.  And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

The thesis of this post is simple and, I hope, provocative: that if you care deeply about a particular social or environmental issue, then you must at least be familiar with many other social or environmental issues.  This is due to the increasingly unavoidable link between seemingly disparate challenges, be they economic growth and climate change, health care spending and hunger, or defense spending and education.

I was inspired to write this after reading a phenomenal article in the most recent edition of Time.  The article, titled ‘Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,’ is one of the best pieces of journalism I’ve read in a while.  But more importantly, it highlights the fact that the way in which medical products and services–hospital stays, prescription medications, etc.–are priced is egregiously, if not criminally, disconnected from the cost of providing them.  In fact, the content of the article is so galling that I found myself unable to read it more than a few paragraphs at a time before my stomach would begin churning and I had to take a break.

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Business  / environment

The DoubleGreen Loan and Superstorm Sandy
November 4, 2012

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I decided to start Capital Good Fund (CGF) in response to the 2008 financial collapse because I feel that, in the face of calamity, it is far better to take action than to lament.  From day one–indeed, from the time I moved to Providence, RI for a masters program in environmental studies at Brown–my interest has been the intersection of poverty and the environment (my masters thesis deals with this very topic–you can check it out here).  Why?  Because it turns out that the poor bear the brunt of environmental destruction.  Consider this: low-income Americans spend 17% of their income on energy, compared to 4% for the rest of the population.  This makes them far more vulnerable to energy price volatility.  At the same time, low-income families are more likely to live in neighborhoods with poor indoor and outdoor air quality.  What’s more, by virtue of more often living in low-lying areas, they are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change (something Hurricane Katrina clearly demonstrated) and less able to evacuate from and rebuild after a storm.

Unfortunately, for the first couple of years as Executive Director of CGF, I’ve had to focus my efforts on the more immediate challenges of fundraising, building infrastructure, developing policies and procedures, and so on.  In addition, I’ve had to accept that just tackling poverty is hard enough without incorporating an environmental justice component.  That said, I never gave up on the idea of using equitable financing in order to tackle poverty and redress environmental degradation.

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Business  / environment  / News  / Renewable Energy

The Role of Youth in Tackling Poverty
October 27, 2012

I’m currently in New Brunswick, New Jersey for the 4th annual Lend for America Summit, which is geared towards inspiring and guiding college students from across the country to start and expand organizations that serve America’s poor and create economic opportunity for them.  Part of the reason why I am here, giving a talk to dozens of enthusiastic, bright young people, is that we will never solve the endemic problems of poverty, injustice, etc., unless more people graduate college and go into government, social enterprise, or non-profit work.  This is not an opinion, but rather a fact: young people were one of the primary drivers of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement against Vietnam, and countless other initiatives that fostered a more just society in America.  What’s more, youth helped spur the recent Arab Spring, led to the downfall of the Shah of Iran, partook in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and so on.  These are just a few examples of the ways in which young, predominately educated people have made the world a better place.

But more needs to be done.  We now live in a country where, despite being the wealthiest in the planet, 1 out of 3 Americans are either in poverty (46 million) or at 150% of the poverty line or below (54 million).  That number is breathtaking, shocking, unimaginable.  We think of America as being the land of opportunity, but the sad fact is that if you are born in poverty here, you are likely going to die in poverty, and your children will live and die in poverty as well.  We focus on the few ‘rags-to-riches’ stories, and mistakenly assume that hard work alone is enough to move ahead.  That simply is no longer the case, in large part because the high-paying jobs of today require a college education (or more), and those living in poverty are far less likely to go to good public schools, and far less likely to be able to afford, or go to and graduate from, a four-year college.  As a result, America’s poor are stuck in low-wage, low-skill jobs with little-to-no upward mobility.

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Business  / philosophy

Spending on Elections: The Paradox of a Bad Investment
October 24, 2012

Every time we make a decision about how to spend or invest our money, one of the fundamental cost-benefit analyses we conduct is the following: for every increase in ‘unit’ of spending, what will be the expected increase in value?  At some point, our own budgets, the quality of the product we are seeking to purchase, the law of diminishing returns and other behavioral and psychological factors–marketing, social pressure, etc–lead us to a choice. Generally speaking, when we spend more we expect to get more.

Consider, for instance, the electric shaver I recently purchased.  After doing my homework, I narrowed the choice down to three (3) models of Braun shavers (and no, I’m not being paid to advertise for Braun!):  the Series 3, which costs $70, the Series 5, which costs ~$150 and the ~$200 Series 7.  Looking at the features and price of each, I decided that the Series 3 lacked some of the things I needed, and the Series 7 came with whiz-bang technology from which my face would never benefit.  Put another way, had I spent the extra $50 on the Series 7, the marginal return would not have justified the additional price.

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Business  / philosophy

See the Trees AND the Forest
April 29, 2012

I originally wrote this post for the Capital GREAT Blog.

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This morning, as I planted the above tree in my yard, I started thinking about the saying “you can’t see the forest for the trees,” which refers to someone who is so caught up with the details that they can’t see the larger picture.  The saying felt especially pertinent as I have spent last week working on how CGF is going to go from 3 loans a week, to three loans a day, to 300 hundred a day and, so on.  As I’ve pondered the challenges associated with achieving such significant scale, I have also kept my focus on those three loans a week–the loans to the low-income entrepreneur, to the disabled woman in need of a special chair, to the parent seeking to purchase a computer to help her child with homework–and so as I planted that beautiful little tree, as I showered it with water, with love with care…it occurred to me that when it comes to social good, you must see the both trees and the forest.

What I mean is that, when you plant a tree, or when you empower another human being, you are doing a wonderful thing.  However, if all you do is serve one tree, one person at a time, then you are ignoring the scope of the broader problems facing earth and society, and you are also ignoring the broader social conditions that have disenfranchised the person and damaged the forest to begin with.  In other words, even as you work, one gesture of kindness at a time, to better the world, you must also think about how to replicate, scale and increase the impact of your actions.

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brown  / Business  / micro credit  / philosophy

Addition vs. Duplication in Social Entrepreneurship
April 9, 2012

(I wrote this article for the Capital Good Fund blog)

I think that one of the most important things for any social entrepreneur to ask him or herself–and, by extension, any social venture, be it non-profit or for-profit–is whether the work they are doing is additive or duplicative.  There is no shortage of good-willed people, and organizations started by them, in this country; instead, what we lack are organizations that build upon the work of other players–governmental, for-profit, non-profit, community-based, faith-based, etc.–rather than duplicate that work.  In our case, when we started thinking about how to tackle the $100 billion/year predatory lending industry, we realized that we could never replicate the brick-and-mortar infrastructure of payday lenders, check cashers, pawn shows, auto title lenders and the rest of the gaggle the preys on the poor. 

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Business

Thoughts on a Book: “Where Good Ideas Come From”
December 9, 2010

It seems fitting that as all the controversy about Wikileaks is reaching a fever-pitch I just got done reading a book, called “Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation,” that is all about the extent to which open environments–be they natural, office, or other–are essential to innovation.  Two things have really stayed with me after reading the book.  The first is that when we tell the story of great inventors, we always like to think in terms of the “eureka” moment, of the lone genius in his garage; however, the author points that many of these innovations actually were developed over years and were built upon the platforms of other ideas.  This is not to deemphasize the role of the individual in innovation, but rather to emphasize the importance of collaboration and openness to those innovations–for the simple reason that if good ideas are not allowed to flow, then people can’t do anything with them.  The second thing that stuck in my mind from the book was that if we are to really solve social and environmental problems then we must be relentness–if not reckless–in our pursuit of giving away our secretes.  That is to say, if I have a hunch about a new way of doing microfinance in the US, it does no good to society if I hide it from others in the vain fear that the idea will be “stolen.” The book, of course, goes into great depths to refute the notion that the profit motive is the only way to stimulate and encourage new ideas; in fact, he has an entire chapter devoted to what he calls the “fourth quadrant,” which he defines as ideas that were derived from non-market, collective sources (such as academia or governemnt–think of things like GPS and the internet as great examples of ideas that were developed in this quadrant).  By mapping out 200 inventions over the last 600 years, he shows that the preponderence of good ideas have come from this quadrant, where the profit-motive is conspicuously absenst; indeed, most profitable ideas have built upon the platforms and ideas that came from here (think of Google, Facebook, satellite TV, etc.).

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Business  / philosophy

Visiting a Village--Part 1
February 8, 2010

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Andy and Jill with a Grameen Bank Center Manager and Borrowers

If you talk to anyone at Grameen Bank they will tell you that the real bank can only be found by going to the villages where Grameen operates.  Grameen, after all, means rural, and in fact by law Grameen can only operate its lending programs in the villages.  It is for this reason that on our third day in Bangladesh we–Jill, me, an Australian named Mark, our translator Matin and Mark’s translator Yunus–are all crammed into a mini-van barreling down the roads that lead to Rashahi, the zone that we will be visiting. Traffic here is an eclectic mix of motorcycles, bicycle rickshaws, cars, trucks hauling absurdly large loads and comically unstable buses all chaotically weaving and swerving, honking and narrowly avoiding catastrophe. 

After 6 hours of bouncing along these roads we are happy, if not relieved, to have arrived at the Branch that will be our home for the next 10 days.  It is a two-story building–the first occupied by Grameen–with two small rooms for guests.  In order to understand where branches fit into the Grameen hierarchy, I need to take a moment to explain how the bank is organized.  For in truth, Grameen is nothing short of an organizational miracle.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that while Dr. Muhammad Yunus is praised for recognizing that the poor can be credit worthy, his real, lasting achievement is in the details of how he goes about delivering that credit to them in a cost-effective manner.

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brown  / Business  / environment  / micro credit  / News  / philosophy

First Experiences With Bangladesh and Grameen
January 8, 2010

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This photo shows one of the Grameen center meetings

First Impressions of Bangladesh and Grameen Bank

When Jill and I landed in Dhaka on Sunday the city was shrouded in an intense fog that, we later learned, is quite common this time of year.  The scene when we walked outside the airport was pretty much what one would expect of a third world capital city: people everywhere; rickshaws competing for space with taxis and buses and all manner of other vehicles, human, animal and fossil-fuel powered; bustling markets; polluted air, etc.

We were taken to the Grand Prince Hotel and then immediately met up with our interpreter, Matin, who accompanied us to Grameen Bank’s head office.  Our first adventure took place when Muhaimeen hailed a bicycle rickshaw that, in just three chaotic minutes, brought us to the office.  Amazingly, Grameen, a Bank that exists for and is owned by the poor, has a 21 story head office, one of the tallest buildings in the area.  One can’t help but feel that Grameen is a kind of conglomerate for good: leveraging all the ingenuity, efficiency, scale and power of corporations while being driven entirely by the motive to eradicate the world of poverty, of pollution, of injustice.  The numbers are staggering: Grameen has 8 million borrowers, 97% of whom are women and all of whom are poor.  They have 20,000 employees, a staggeringly high repayment rate, 4 million bank accounts for non Grameen borrowers (all borrowers must open an account so that they can deposit their required weekly savings there), and have turned a profit all but three years of operation.  Lastly, they are 95% owned by the borrowers themselves–each borrower gets a share in the company–and 5% owned by the Bangladesh government.  In short, Grameen’s Nobel Peace Prize was well deserved.

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brown  / Business  / environment  / micro credit  / philosophy

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