Whenever your pie making blogger reads the Economist, he finds himself writing in the third person. The problem of urban and suburban requires quite more creative solutions than have been put forward so far, since hauling large amounts of metal for every person is more energy and space intensive than most cities can sustain in the long run. The best one put forward so far is electric bicycles. These have several advantages:
(1) Less energy used hauling unneeded structure (no trunk or backseat)
(2) Easier battery replacement/upgrade (since it's smaller and easier to access)
(3) Smaller parking lot requirements (also known as bike racks)
(4) Simpler recharging infrastructure (standard plugs run to the bike racks)
Most families will continue to need access to a chemical-fuelled car for longer trips or heavier loads than an electric vehicle can handle. Trying to deny this is foolhardy, but encouraging younger office workers and students to ditch their cars for electric bikes should be much easier.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Reinventing Foreign Aid Essay #3
This is the third summary and commentary on the essays in Reinventing Foriegn Aid
Use of Randomization in the Evaluation of Development Effectiveness
By: Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer
Like Banerjee and He, Duflo and Kremer advocate using randomized clinical trials to evaluate aid programs where ever possible. The reason they give is that this technique is the best choice for avoiding omitted variable bias. They compare the technique to other popular methods of generating the "counterfactual", or what would have happened had the program not been used, such as Difference-In-Difference (DD). They argue, using data taken from various education programs studied in Kenya, that these techniques tend to overestimate the benefit of aid programs.
As an example of how to properly evaluate programs, they examine the costs and benefits of three education interventions: teacher training, free textbooks and deworming treatments. These interventions where assigned randomly to schools throughout northern Kenya, and student test scores were used to evaluate the benefits. They found, counterintuitively, that the deworming treatments were both the cheapest to administer and had benefits that spread to other nearby schools, as breaking the chain of infections resulted in healthier students overall. They also cited the success of the PROGRESSA program in Mexico as an example of how to use randomized trials to evaluate a pilot program.
They conclude that if the goal of a pilot program is to test scalability and cost-effectiveness, then aid programs need to be treated more like prescription drugs. For these, randomized trials that use a sample of the entire likely recipient population have proven to be the most effective means of determining both safety and effectiveness. Instead of a systematic means of picking the recipients of aid programs, such as one per polity or "most needy", a random distribution across all eligible aid recipients guards against accidentally or intentionally omitting variables when evaluating programs.
The authors go on to discuss several factors required for effective randomized trails:
(1) A large pool of potential recipients, such as small villages or individual students.
(2) A politically acceptable means of randomly distributing the aid. This is often enabled by budget constraints and the need to "pilot" aid programs.
(3) An independent, or at least reputable, group with plenty of funding to perform the evaluations.
(4) Clear and believable metrics that define benefits and costs.
In other words, randomized trials are a good tool for development aid Planners, groups like the World Bank or CARE, to help them decide which new ideas they should roll out in a large way. They are not necessarily the right ones for "Seekers", to use Dr. Easterly's term, who generally aim to solve specific local problems that do not have a large potential recipient base. A criticism that can, the authors admit, be made against this approach is if it is so effective, why isn't it used to evaluate health and schooling programs designed to help the poor in developed countries? The answer lies partly in the implicit arrogance of development aid being something we can impose on other societies, while most forms of development and economic planning, as well as many forms of educational evaluation, are viewed askance in the developed world.
The next essay discusses the political economy of aid evaluations, which will explore this problem more deeply. Smaller aid programs with narrow scope also need some form of independent evaluation, and I think that's where a travelling pie-maker would fit in nicely. Now to work out the logistics of the Sustainable Baking Travel Blog.
Use of Randomization in the Evaluation of Development Effectiveness
By: Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer
Like Banerjee and He, Duflo and Kremer advocate using randomized clinical trials to evaluate aid programs where ever possible. The reason they give is that this technique is the best choice for avoiding omitted variable bias. They compare the technique to other popular methods of generating the "counterfactual", or what would have happened had the program not been used, such as Difference-In-Difference (DD). They argue, using data taken from various education programs studied in Kenya, that these techniques tend to overestimate the benefit of aid programs.
As an example of how to properly evaluate programs, they examine the costs and benefits of three education interventions: teacher training, free textbooks and deworming treatments. These interventions where assigned randomly to schools throughout northern Kenya, and student test scores were used to evaluate the benefits. They found, counterintuitively, that the deworming treatments were both the cheapest to administer and had benefits that spread to other nearby schools, as breaking the chain of infections resulted in healthier students overall. They also cited the success of the PROGRESSA program in Mexico as an example of how to use randomized trials to evaluate a pilot program.
They conclude that if the goal of a pilot program is to test scalability and cost-effectiveness, then aid programs need to be treated more like prescription drugs. For these, randomized trials that use a sample of the entire likely recipient population have proven to be the most effective means of determining both safety and effectiveness. Instead of a systematic means of picking the recipients of aid programs, such as one per polity or "most needy", a random distribution across all eligible aid recipients guards against accidentally or intentionally omitting variables when evaluating programs.
The authors go on to discuss several factors required for effective randomized trails:
(1) A large pool of potential recipients, such as small villages or individual students.
(2) A politically acceptable means of randomly distributing the aid. This is often enabled by budget constraints and the need to "pilot" aid programs.
(3) An independent, or at least reputable, group with plenty of funding to perform the evaluations.
(4) Clear and believable metrics that define benefits and costs.
In other words, randomized trials are a good tool for development aid Planners, groups like the World Bank or CARE, to help them decide which new ideas they should roll out in a large way. They are not necessarily the right ones for "Seekers", to use Dr. Easterly's term, who generally aim to solve specific local problems that do not have a large potential recipient base. A criticism that can, the authors admit, be made against this approach is if it is so effective, why isn't it used to evaluate health and schooling programs designed to help the poor in developed countries? The answer lies partly in the implicit arrogance of development aid being something we can impose on other societies, while most forms of development and economic planning, as well as many forms of educational evaluation, are viewed askance in the developed world.
The next essay discusses the political economy of aid evaluations, which will explore this problem more deeply. Smaller aid programs with narrow scope also need some form of independent evaluation, and I think that's where a travelling pie-maker would fit in nicely. Now to work out the logistics of the Sustainable Baking Travel Blog.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
More bicycle poetry
Twenty three millimeters
One two five PSI
A pain to put on
But pure joy to ride
The cold rain does sting
My hands start to burn
Seems no effort needed
to make the wheels turn
Each bump I can feel
But friction, good bye
Twenty three millimeters
One two five PSI
I recently replaced the rear tire on my Trek 700 with the smaller, higher pressure "racing" tire. The effect is poetry in motion.
One two five PSI
A pain to put on
But pure joy to ride
The cold rain does sting
My hands start to burn
Seems no effort needed
to make the wheels turn
Each bump I can feel
But friction, good bye
Twenty three millimeters
One two five PSI
I recently replaced the rear tire on my Trek 700 with the smaller, higher pressure "racing" tire. The effect is poetry in motion.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
The 1 Page Development Report
[I'll get back to the Reinventing Foreign Aid commentaries soon, the third essay requires me to do some extra background reading on statistical methods.]
I attended a memorial yesterday for the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide held by the local Rwandan diaspora. It was a beautiful, touching and long service to help both the healing of the survivors and to ensure that no one, least of all the children of the diaspora, ever forgets. The keynote speaker was Steven Kinzer, author of A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It.
"The Man Who Dreamed It" is the very intelligent, charismatic and controversial Paul Kagame. Kinzer reported some 30hrs of interviews with the new President of Rwanda, including asking him why, of the all the millions of pages of reports written on how to develop Africa and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, the place was still such a mess. In typical Kagame fashion, he replied "I reject the premise of your question. Everyone knows how to develop Africa, but no one has been willing to do it. You don't need reports that could circle the continent, you just need one page."
Kinzer: "Okay, what, in your opinion, should go on that one page?"
Kagame: "It all starts with one fundamental thing. Without this nothing else matters, so don't even try."
Kinzer: "And that is?"
Kagame: "Security, internal and external. If people are not safe they will not leave. What good is building a school if the army is going to come steal the windows and doors? You must have security to start, otherwise the rest is meaningless."
Kinzer: "Once you have security, what comes next?"
Kagame: "First health, because if people are unhealthy they can do nothing. After that is education, because we live in a knowledge economy. Next is infrastructure, good roads, airports, internet so people can do business. After that you must have a good business environment because it is your entrepreneurs who will bring prosperity. And all of this must be administered by a government that is honest and not corrupt. There, one page, but no one has had the will to implement it before now."
The "now", of course, is Rwanda itself. The ethnic tensions tracing back to the Belgian practice of clearly defining Hutu and Tutsi are still there, simmering under the surface. Among the diaspora, anger at those who participated in or did not intervene in 1994 and before then is palpable, as well it should be. In Rwanda, these feelings are directed not at abstract concepts like "countries" and far-away people, but rather at their neighbors. Paul Kagame, and most everyone in Rwanda today, knows that it is only the advancing prosperity of the country that keeps everyone looking towards the future rather than looking to settle the scores of the past.
Can this development be sustained? Only time will tell, and the sharp reductions in global trade we're seeing today can't help. The history of "Jewels of Africa" in the 20th century is not good, but here's to hoping that the lessons of history can be learned and, more importantly, implemented.
I attended a memorial yesterday for the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide held by the local Rwandan diaspora. It was a beautiful, touching and long service to help both the healing of the survivors and to ensure that no one, least of all the children of the diaspora, ever forgets. The keynote speaker was Steven Kinzer, author of A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It.
"The Man Who Dreamed It" is the very intelligent, charismatic and controversial Paul Kagame. Kinzer reported some 30hrs of interviews with the new President of Rwanda, including asking him why, of the all the millions of pages of reports written on how to develop Africa and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, the place was still such a mess. In typical Kagame fashion, he replied "I reject the premise of your question. Everyone knows how to develop Africa, but no one has been willing to do it. You don't need reports that could circle the continent, you just need one page."
Kinzer: "Okay, what, in your opinion, should go on that one page?"
Kagame: "It all starts with one fundamental thing. Without this nothing else matters, so don't even try."
Kinzer: "And that is?"
Kagame: "Security, internal and external. If people are not safe they will not leave. What good is building a school if the army is going to come steal the windows and doors? You must have security to start, otherwise the rest is meaningless."
Kinzer: "Once you have security, what comes next?"
Kagame: "First health, because if people are unhealthy they can do nothing. After that is education, because we live in a knowledge economy. Next is infrastructure, good roads, airports, internet so people can do business. After that you must have a good business environment because it is your entrepreneurs who will bring prosperity. And all of this must be administered by a government that is honest and not corrupt. There, one page, but no one has had the will to implement it before now."
The "now", of course, is Rwanda itself. The ethnic tensions tracing back to the Belgian practice of clearly defining Hutu and Tutsi are still there, simmering under the surface. Among the diaspora, anger at those who participated in or did not intervene in 1994 and before then is palpable, as well it should be. In Rwanda, these feelings are directed not at abstract concepts like "countries" and far-away people, but rather at their neighbors. Paul Kagame, and most everyone in Rwanda today, knows that it is only the advancing prosperity of the country that keeps everyone looking towards the future rather than looking to settle the scores of the past.
Can this development be sustained? Only time will tell, and the sharp reductions in global trade we're seeing today can't help. The history of "Jewels of Africa" in the 20th century is not good, but here's to hoping that the lessons of history can be learned and, more importantly, implemented.
Friday, April 17, 2009
A couple good CNN commentaries
I really appreciate this commentary by John Feehery. David M. Walker suggests one means by which we'll see everyone's slice of the pie get smaller.
I subscribe to the GOPUSA listserve. Not exactly sure how that happened, but it's any interesting source of news and commentary that I don't see elsewhere. Occasionally, it's even intelligent. The big topic over the last couple weeks has been the "T.E.A. Parties" going on around the country. Decried by many left-leaning sources as "astroturf", fake grass roots, I think these are very real local efforts and exactly the sort of consequence one expects from Capitalism Hitting the Fan. Let me explain, via personal narrative:
[rant]
I was offered a job recently that would more than double my household intake. In addition, the work is awesome, practically the definition thereof. In terms of my long term career goals, it's hard to imagine a better place to spend 3-5yrs. But I can't responsibly take it. It would involve moving to a higher-cost of living area with a much higher state income tax. Between the high taxes on income, food and transportation and the high rents, I would actually lose money my first year, break even the second and maybe be able to start saving in the third. Sure, rents are high, but mortgage rates are down to 4.75% or lower, so clearly it's the time to buy. Sure, if I could save the money required for a down payment on one of the overpriced houses in the region, but I can't realistically think of saving substantial amounts for another couple years, longer if kids end up in the mix. But now, despite forking over about 60% of my enlarged income to the government directly or through rental payments to cover property taxes (plus any landlord's income/corporate tax), there's a huge deficit that will hurt me and my kids for the rest of our lives in higher taxes, inflation and less private capital available. Worse than that, a huge chunk of that money is going to prop up housing prices and thus keep me from increasing my disposable income by buying one. Meanwhile, the Fed is taking steps to inflate away my meager current savings, just as the collapse of equity markets means my expectation of future expenses grows to include family members who have or will be retired soon. Even now, what's my biggest expense: taxes. And what do I get from them? A steadily declining sense of prosperity as roads crumble, schools fail and our unsustainable energy, food and water infrastructure start to show cracks.
[/rant]
All this from me, a pretty reasonable guy. I get a very strong "third century Rome" feel from these discussions. The infrastructure required to maintain the core of the empire has become more of a burden than the people (me included) are willing or able to bear. I have a lot of hope that the burden can be lessened by a steady reduction in consumption, and a slow but steady decentralization of things like energy and food production. But I'm still going to miss the chance to work on the really cool stuff.
Politicians who can address the feeling that we're living in a collapsing house of cards ought to do well in 2010.
I subscribe to the GOPUSA listserve. Not exactly sure how that happened, but it's any interesting source of news and commentary that I don't see elsewhere. Occasionally, it's even intelligent. The big topic over the last couple weeks has been the "T.E.A. Parties" going on around the country. Decried by many left-leaning sources as "astroturf", fake grass roots, I think these are very real local efforts and exactly the sort of consequence one expects from Capitalism Hitting the Fan. Let me explain, via personal narrative:
[rant]
I was offered a job recently that would more than double my household intake. In addition, the work is awesome, practically the definition thereof. In terms of my long term career goals, it's hard to imagine a better place to spend 3-5yrs. But I can't responsibly take it. It would involve moving to a higher-cost of living area with a much higher state income tax. Between the high taxes on income, food and transportation and the high rents, I would actually lose money my first year, break even the second and maybe be able to start saving in the third. Sure, rents are high, but mortgage rates are down to 4.75% or lower, so clearly it's the time to buy. Sure, if I could save the money required for a down payment on one of the overpriced houses in the region, but I can't realistically think of saving substantial amounts for another couple years, longer if kids end up in the mix. But now, despite forking over about 60% of my enlarged income to the government directly or through rental payments to cover property taxes (plus any landlord's income/corporate tax), there's a huge deficit that will hurt me and my kids for the rest of our lives in higher taxes, inflation and less private capital available. Worse than that, a huge chunk of that money is going to prop up housing prices and thus keep me from increasing my disposable income by buying one. Meanwhile, the Fed is taking steps to inflate away my meager current savings, just as the collapse of equity markets means my expectation of future expenses grows to include family members who have or will be retired soon. Even now, what's my biggest expense: taxes. And what do I get from them? A steadily declining sense of prosperity as roads crumble, schools fail and our unsustainable energy, food and water infrastructure start to show cracks.
[/rant]
All this from me, a pretty reasonable guy. I get a very strong "third century Rome" feel from these discussions. The infrastructure required to maintain the core of the empire has become more of a burden than the people (me included) are willing or able to bear. I have a lot of hope that the burden can be lessened by a steady reduction in consumption, and a slow but steady decentralization of things like energy and food production. But I'm still going to miss the chance to work on the really cool stuff.
Politicians who can address the feeling that we're living in a collapsing house of cards ought to do well in 2010.
Pineapple Strawberry Pie
It couldn't please me more than to bring you this recipe (in High Level Cooking Language):
Ingredients:
group 1:
2Cups pineapple
2C strawberries, hulled and halved
1/2 C sugar
2 after-dinner mints, crushed
1T lemon juice
group 2:
2T cornstarch
2T sugar
maybe some nutmeg
other stuff:
Crumb topping (pick any from this site)
Whole wheat crust
Proceedure:
preheat oven to 400
combine group 1 in a bowl
roll out the crust and place in a deep dish pie pan
mix group 2 in a small bowl and add to the fruit mixture
place in the pan, smooth
place pan in oven for 30min
add crumb topping
bake another 30min
let cool overnight
Enjoy!
Ingredients:
group 1:
2Cups pineapple
2C strawberries, hulled and halved
1/2 C sugar
2 after-dinner mints, crushed
1T lemon juice
group 2:
2T cornstarch
2T sugar
maybe some nutmeg
other stuff:
Crumb topping (pick any from this site)
Whole wheat crust
Proceedure:
preheat oven to 400
combine group 1 in a bowl
roll out the crust and place in a deep dish pie pan
mix group 2 in a small bowl and add to the fruit mixture
place in the pan, smooth
place pan in oven for 30min
add crumb topping
bake another 30min
let cool overnight
Enjoy!
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Of bread and recipes
I take cooking seriously. I was raised to believe that all should be welcome at my table, nursed on stories of rivals meeting at the chuck wagons in the old west, the story of the unending milk jug, the numerous stories of angels and deities testing the ancients by visiting the huts, tents and manors to see if the occupants were willing to give their best for strangers. It is an act of love, and I try to always treat it with the respect it deserves.
This is doubly true of bread. The staff of life has been around as long as civilization. To bake it is to step into that stream of history. It is also the only food that lives in our kitchen and dies in our oven to feed us and our guests. The kindest thing ever said to me came from a friend who waved a piece of wheat bread I'd baked at us and said, "This is you." I was touched. I still am.
So, when two friends of mine sent me a loaf of Cozonac at Christmas, I had to ask for the recipe. The idea of cross-country bread breaking is too rich a symbol to pass. What they sent, however, was more of a lesson than I anticipated.
The recipes on this blog follow a style common in American texts on cooking (at least that's as far as I've read). Recipes are precise, to be parsed, lexed and assembled by the user, who is admonished in the introduction to follow the recipe exactly, at least the first time. I consider a recipe on this blog successful if it is so clear and easy to follow that you do not need to contact me to make something exactly as delicious as I did. Food, according to this method, is at its best as exact reproduction. Each recipe is discreet, a self contained particle of information that need not interact with the world, a concept with a finite basis of support.
My friends opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about the transformation of dead grains, sterile eggs and milk that will not nourish a young creature. By first inspiring me to make Philo-crusted Pear Apple Pie, they started the hunger that lead me to this recipe. Try to parse it. The ingredients list doesn't map perfectly to the instructions, which themselves are not easy to follow. I had thought this was a translation error. The grammar of the piece wasn't very good, and clearly reflected that English is the author's second language. I appreciated the knowledge that was conveyed, albeit imperfectly, and posted my own version in High Level Cooking Language (HLCL).
But I was wrong. The cozonac recipe they sent had the same structure. The grammar was perfect and both of them, especially Magda, are fabulous writers (if they give me permission I'll post the recipe here). The ingredients did not map perfectly to the directions. The directions could not be parsed into distinct steps "from wheat to eat." I could not bake that bread without engaging creatively with the recipe. Had I not been making it close to midnight on Good Friday (Gegorian calender), I would have engaged with them by calling and asking what the "missing" steps were, and the conversation would certainly have flowed beyond that. Better still would have been to be in the kitchen learning directly, and thus be able to hold their baby, seen their Church, entered their world. Cooking is not compiling. The recipe is not "perfect" because it is not meant to be a distinct particle of information, available for exact reproduction. It should connect people, be an analog process with infinite support, a wave (maybe a cosine wave since the loaf kind of collapsed in the middle).
Happy Easter!
This is doubly true of bread. The staff of life has been around as long as civilization. To bake it is to step into that stream of history. It is also the only food that lives in our kitchen and dies in our oven to feed us and our guests. The kindest thing ever said to me came from a friend who waved a piece of wheat bread I'd baked at us and said, "This is you." I was touched. I still am.
So, when two friends of mine sent me a loaf of Cozonac at Christmas, I had to ask for the recipe. The idea of cross-country bread breaking is too rich a symbol to pass. What they sent, however, was more of a lesson than I anticipated.
The recipes on this blog follow a style common in American texts on cooking (at least that's as far as I've read). Recipes are precise, to be parsed, lexed and assembled by the user, who is admonished in the introduction to follow the recipe exactly, at least the first time. I consider a recipe on this blog successful if it is so clear and easy to follow that you do not need to contact me to make something exactly as delicious as I did. Food, according to this method, is at its best as exact reproduction. Each recipe is discreet, a self contained particle of information that need not interact with the world, a concept with a finite basis of support.
My friends opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about the transformation of dead grains, sterile eggs and milk that will not nourish a young creature. By first inspiring me to make Philo-crusted Pear Apple Pie, they started the hunger that lead me to this recipe. Try to parse it. The ingredients list doesn't map perfectly to the instructions, which themselves are not easy to follow. I had thought this was a translation error. The grammar of the piece wasn't very good, and clearly reflected that English is the author's second language. I appreciated the knowledge that was conveyed, albeit imperfectly, and posted my own version in High Level Cooking Language (HLCL).
But I was wrong. The cozonac recipe they sent had the same structure. The grammar was perfect and both of them, especially Magda, are fabulous writers (if they give me permission I'll post the recipe here). The ingredients did not map perfectly to the directions. The directions could not be parsed into distinct steps "from wheat to eat." I could not bake that bread without engaging creatively with the recipe. Had I not been making it close to midnight on Good Friday (Gegorian calender), I would have engaged with them by calling and asking what the "missing" steps were, and the conversation would certainly have flowed beyond that. Better still would have been to be in the kitchen learning directly, and thus be able to hold their baby, seen their Church, entered their world. Cooking is not compiling. The recipe is not "perfect" because it is not meant to be a distinct particle of information, available for exact reproduction. It should connect people, be an analog process with infinite support, a wave (maybe a cosine wave since the loaf kind of collapsed in the middle).
Happy Easter!
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