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What the British empire did for global development

July 23rd, 2009 11:53am

What have the Romans ever done for us? is the rhetorical question posed by the rabble-rouser Reg in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, to which the reply comes from his audience: aqueducts, roads, education, wine, peace etc.

Colonial occupiers do not get a good press, rightly in many ways, but they often bring infrastructure and other benefits such as the rule of law to colonised countries.

Paul Romer, a Stanford economist, wants to bring back some of the benefits of colonisation without the nasty aspects. He believes developing countries should partner with developed ones to create special economic zones - or “charter cities” - as a means of boosting local economic development.

Prof Romer made the argument at TED Global this morning that developing countries should create their own equivalents of Hong Kong, the city state run for a time by the British and then assumed into China.

Hong Kong, with its free market system, independent courts and efficient administration became a model for economic development across China, he argued.

“Britain inadvertently through its actions in Hong Kong did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programmes we have seen throughout the world,” he said.

Prof Romer’s first suggestion for a zone which could be developed on behalf of, or in partnership with, a poor country? Guantanamo Bay, which he suggests Cuba could charter Canada to develop on its behalf, assuming it would not want the United States to do so.

July 23rd, 2009 11:53am in TED | Permalink | Comment

Why a big magnet makes you less empathetic

July 22nd, 2009 5:22pm

Listening to a bunch of neuroscientists talking, as I did at the TED Global conference in Oxford is, ahem, challenging. But it was also gripping, even if my brain is not fully up to neuroscience.

I particularly liked a talk by Rebecca Saxe, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies a portion of the adult brain devoted to understanding others’ feelings.

Ms Saxe showed films of how children gradually acquire the ability to interpret other people’s motives, and how that affects their moral judgments of them.

A bit disturbingly, she also showed how, by using a magnetic device, you can confuse that part of the brain - the right temporo-parietal junction - and reduce the activity in it while asking people to make judgments about others’ behaviour.

When you do so, you can change those judgments. More exactly, someone whose RTPJ is being affected is less likely to regard someone else sympathetically by taking their feelings into account.

It sounds Orwellian, although she pointed out that an sinister government agency using big magnets could not use the technology to make people amoral because the RTPJ affects interpretation of other’s feelings, rather changing one’s own.

“I think of what we are doing as not so much studying the defendant as studying the jury,” she said.

On the other hand, what if someone found another part of the brain susceptible to magnetism that does control our own morality?

Photo: TED/Duncan Davidson

July 22nd, 2009 5:22pm in TED | Permalink | Comment

Alain de Botton on unfortunates and losers

July 21st, 2009 7:07pm

I am in Oxford at the TED Global conference, a melange of all sorts of talented people people making short and provocative presentations over four days. The surprise attraction at the opening session this afternoon was Gordon Brown, the British prime minister.

Although I agreed with some of what he said, I thought Mr Brown suffered from making a politician’s speech to an event where you get points for being entertaining and off the wall (he was later followed by a man who makes micro-sculptures of houses on the heads of pins).

In my view, the most thought-provoking presentation was Alain de Botton’s, which was a critique of the drive towards meritocracy in modern society on the grounds that it is a) impossible to achieve and b) implies that many people deserve to be at the bottom of the pile.

As Mr de Botton pointed out, we have come to expect that any of us can succeed if we work hard and have talent, whereas there in fact is a lot of chance and arbitrariness involved.

He noted that the poor in medieval times were known as “unfortunates”, a recognition that they were simply stuck with their social status, whereas we now talk about “losers” as if they deserve it.

He drew a comparison with the moral framework of literature, in which a hero’s tragic fate does not require an audience to look down upon him: “It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser. He is not a loser, although he has lost.”

It reminded me of some of the deconstruction of individual success in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, in which he points out the importance of collective influence and random factors such as birth date.

Photo: TED/Duncan Davidson

July 21st, 2009 7:07pm in TED | Permalink | Comment

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