Shift Your Weight
Over the last couple of months I've experienced a strange confluence of influences. Call it collective unconscious or determinism or blind stupid coincidence, some of it happens because of the things I surround myself with while trying to puzzle through the big game of life. For me this is indelibly entwined with writing (which, as I've said, for me is always driven from theme), or perhaps more broadly to anything creative. I have never been able to be creative without first knowing what I am being creative for.
So it was interesting to come across so many recent touchstones for another piece in my ongoing grokking of the world. Over the last couple of weeks I've been working on a short story called "Karma Ex Machina", which centers around a new kind of capitalism, and then for Christmas I received from my mother an audiobook of Bill Clinton's Giving.
It's difficult to talk about this without stirring up a political debate, so I'll just log here that I would rather not go there; I'm more interested in the contents of this book, which were very much a kind of invigorating sugar scrub spa treatment for the soul.
Giving is about the myriad good things going on in the world at any given moment. It is about incredibly smart, successful people coming to the inevitable realization that if we love life we must love our fellow man, and if we love our fellow man we should prevent their suffering where we are able to do so. And if we are smart and if we are looking for the sustainability of global happiness and prosperity we should also increase our own wealth through this process.
It is very much a part of the quality of life rhetoric that has been slowly fighting what often feels to be a losing battle against the insane overwork culture that has gripped the US over the past few decades: that doing what is right, doing what is good, doing what is healthy, leads to prosperity. And business should be about prosperity, so these two things do not come into conflict. When they do they inevitably lead to a self destruction situation.
The "old" capitalism, the capitalism of the 1980s and 90s, existed in a different world where survival was so recently an issue (all of this, probably contaminated by my exposure to thehollowbox, has greatly deepened my interest in the Cold War lately) that the concept of enlightened self interest seemed about as comprehensible as calculus to a chimpanzee. But that's what this is. It is calculus of the soul, an enlightenment where our self interest means the interest of humanity and of the planet, and we should not rest until all of those interests are singing together. This is a core critical thing to me that has only been thrown into greater relief over the last five years. A good job is not a good job unless it is doing good in the world.
But at any rate what I intended here was to highlight, out of the incredible panoply of charitable organizations presented in Giving, a few of my favorite charities. And this stuff is percolating -- jeffhowell posted recently about the high-powered Microsoft dude who left his job after visiting a deeply impoverished school in Nepal. John Wood's story appears in Giving, too. He sold everything he had to buy books for these kids halfway around the world. And now he has a foundation.
But that length is not necessary (though it's pretty cool). With the amount of wealth in the US, or in any civilized nation, the merest fraction of average monthly income makes a world of difference in a third world country. One of the most interesting charities in the book was Kiva.org, an organization that facilitates microloans to developing countries. For $25 you can go in for 1/7 of a business loan to a single individual in Afghanistan who will use that money to open a bakery, grocery, or other small business. And it is a loan -- they start the business, report on it, and you get your money back, to then invest back into the system or keep if you like. Loans like this are what make for genuine rebuilding. On the website you can look at all of the business proposals of these individuals all over the world and contribute directly at any denomination to their cause. And you can see your fellow lenders.
The other program that I found extremely interesting is Chess In the Schools, an initiative to start chess programs in second grade classes in New York. This group has field tested chess programs in second grade classes and demonstrated with raw data that teaching kids chess at this level improves their academic performance and confidence across the board in all subjects. Now they just need to implement it in as many schools as possible. An entire class program can be funded for $3000. They aren't currently open to new joinees, but I am going to be contacting them to see if there's a way Gamewatch can sponsor a particular class. Obviously my interest here is that it boosts math and science in the US, which are frighteningly behind other nations, and it's (yet another) way that shows that games are good for you.
Then there are groups I didn't know about like Ready4Work and Citizens Against Recidivism. It doesn't take much learning about the situation to realize that the revolving door prison systems across the US are destructive, inhumane, and huge cost sinks. I caught Ted Koppel's interview on the Daily Show several weeks ago on this subject, specifically with the breaking point that California is approaching with the intensely overloaded prison system, and the reasons why people who enter it have the odds stacked against them of breaking out. Ready4Work and CAR have proven track records of keeping people out of prison. This cycle has always struck me as one of the most harmful and unnecessary injustices currently in progress in the US, so these two programs really caught my ear.
Heifer International deserves a mention, even though they're one of my favorite charities and I knew well about them before. But they're an amazing and perfect example of a smart charity that perpetuates itself and generates wealth and stability at an astronomical rate.
That's just a tiny handful of the programs profiled in the book, and links to all of them and more are up at the Clinton Foundation website.
Listening to this book really was a kind of therapy. And it was exhilarating in its own way. Much of what Clinton talks about in the opening of the book is the way that things have changed, and the way that the information age has revolutionized charitable work in the US and across the world. We have been steeped in negativity for so long that it becomes easy to forget all of these people working quietly away to do amazing things in the world. The internet has actually changed a lot of that -- made this information easier to access, connected people across the world, allowed organizations to form around specific niche interests.
And that is how the change comes. You don't have to quit your job or starve yourself or do anything incredibly melodramatic to make a positive change in the world. You just have to lean a little bit. Look at the things you purchase, look at where your money goes, and shift it a little to a company that has committed to going carbon neutral or donates to local charities. My financial planning company has a 401k "ethical responsibility" profile ready-made -- yours probably does too. If we each leaned a little bit, the world would move.
I am making the same offer with this that I did with An Inconvenient Truth. If you're interested in reading or listening to Giving, leave me a comment and email me your address and I will have it sent to you in your format of choice (audio or print). All you have to do is pick one of the charities in it, kick them $10 or $20, and post about which one you donated to and why. Offered to the first to reply with interest.rogue_psion, who got there first in awesomeness! If you don't find it amazing, I'll buy the donation back from you.
The book is honestly full of hope. It really will make you feel better about the world. One of the complicated aspects about the internet and the "information age" is that it can be difficult to sort through it all, to get an algorithm that gets you the right information in the right dose at the right time. This is the right information. This is the stuff we ought to be thinking about. Give Britney Spears a break and invest in something good for the world.
So it was interesting to come across so many recent touchstones for another piece in my ongoing grokking of the world. Over the last couple of weeks I've been working on a short story called "Karma Ex Machina", which centers around a new kind of capitalism, and then for Christmas I received from my mother an audiobook of Bill Clinton's Giving.
It's difficult to talk about this without stirring up a political debate, so I'll just log here that I would rather not go there; I'm more interested in the contents of this book, which were very much a kind of invigorating sugar scrub spa treatment for the soul.
Giving is about the myriad good things going on in the world at any given moment. It is about incredibly smart, successful people coming to the inevitable realization that if we love life we must love our fellow man, and if we love our fellow man we should prevent their suffering where we are able to do so. And if we are smart and if we are looking for the sustainability of global happiness and prosperity we should also increase our own wealth through this process.
It is very much a part of the quality of life rhetoric that has been slowly fighting what often feels to be a losing battle against the insane overwork culture that has gripped the US over the past few decades: that doing what is right, doing what is good, doing what is healthy, leads to prosperity. And business should be about prosperity, so these two things do not come into conflict. When they do they inevitably lead to a self destruction situation.
The "old" capitalism, the capitalism of the 1980s and 90s, existed in a different world where survival was so recently an issue (all of this, probably contaminated by my exposure to thehollowbox, has greatly deepened my interest in the Cold War lately) that the concept of enlightened self interest seemed about as comprehensible as calculus to a chimpanzee. But that's what this is. It is calculus of the soul, an enlightenment where our self interest means the interest of humanity and of the planet, and we should not rest until all of those interests are singing together. This is a core critical thing to me that has only been thrown into greater relief over the last five years. A good job is not a good job unless it is doing good in the world.
But at any rate what I intended here was to highlight, out of the incredible panoply of charitable organizations presented in Giving, a few of my favorite charities. And this stuff is percolating -- jeffhowell posted recently about the high-powered Microsoft dude who left his job after visiting a deeply impoverished school in Nepal. John Wood's story appears in Giving, too. He sold everything he had to buy books for these kids halfway around the world. And now he has a foundation.
But that length is not necessary (though it's pretty cool). With the amount of wealth in the US, or in any civilized nation, the merest fraction of average monthly income makes a world of difference in a third world country. One of the most interesting charities in the book was Kiva.org, an organization that facilitates microloans to developing countries. For $25 you can go in for 1/7 of a business loan to a single individual in Afghanistan who will use that money to open a bakery, grocery, or other small business. And it is a loan -- they start the business, report on it, and you get your money back, to then invest back into the system or keep if you like. Loans like this are what make for genuine rebuilding. On the website you can look at all of the business proposals of these individuals all over the world and contribute directly at any denomination to their cause. And you can see your fellow lenders.
The other program that I found extremely interesting is Chess In the Schools, an initiative to start chess programs in second grade classes in New York. This group has field tested chess programs in second grade classes and demonstrated with raw data that teaching kids chess at this level improves their academic performance and confidence across the board in all subjects. Now they just need to implement it in as many schools as possible. An entire class program can be funded for $3000. They aren't currently open to new joinees, but I am going to be contacting them to see if there's a way Gamewatch can sponsor a particular class. Obviously my interest here is that it boosts math and science in the US, which are frighteningly behind other nations, and it's (yet another) way that shows that games are good for you.
Then there are groups I didn't know about like Ready4Work and Citizens Against Recidivism. It doesn't take much learning about the situation to realize that the revolving door prison systems across the US are destructive, inhumane, and huge cost sinks. I caught Ted Koppel's interview on the Daily Show several weeks ago on this subject, specifically with the breaking point that California is approaching with the intensely overloaded prison system, and the reasons why people who enter it have the odds stacked against them of breaking out. Ready4Work and CAR have proven track records of keeping people out of prison. This cycle has always struck me as one of the most harmful and unnecessary injustices currently in progress in the US, so these two programs really caught my ear.
Heifer International deserves a mention, even though they're one of my favorite charities and I knew well about them before. But they're an amazing and perfect example of a smart charity that perpetuates itself and generates wealth and stability at an astronomical rate.
That's just a tiny handful of the programs profiled in the book, and links to all of them and more are up at the Clinton Foundation website.
Listening to this book really was a kind of therapy. And it was exhilarating in its own way. Much of what Clinton talks about in the opening of the book is the way that things have changed, and the way that the information age has revolutionized charitable work in the US and across the world. We have been steeped in negativity for so long that it becomes easy to forget all of these people working quietly away to do amazing things in the world. The internet has actually changed a lot of that -- made this information easier to access, connected people across the world, allowed organizations to form around specific niche interests.
And that is how the change comes. You don't have to quit your job or starve yourself or do anything incredibly melodramatic to make a positive change in the world. You just have to lean a little bit. Look at the things you purchase, look at where your money goes, and shift it a little to a company that has committed to going carbon neutral or donates to local charities. My financial planning company has a 401k "ethical responsibility" profile ready-made -- yours probably does too. If we each leaned a little bit, the world would move.
I am making the same offer with this that I did with An Inconvenient Truth. If you're interested in reading or listening to Giving, leave me a comment and email me your address and I will have it sent to you in your format of choice (audio or print). All you have to do is pick one of the charities in it, kick them $10 or $20, and post about which one you donated to and why. Offered to the first to reply with interest.rogue_psion, who got there first in awesomeness! If you don't find it amazing, I'll buy the donation back from you.
The book is honestly full of hope. It really will make you feel better about the world. One of the complicated aspects about the internet and the "information age" is that it can be difficult to sort through it all, to get an algorithm that gets you the right information in the right dose at the right time. This is the right information. This is the stuff we ought to be thinking about. Give Britney Spears a break and invest in something good for the world.