"I am an Entrepreneur" photo contest

Go check out the fabulous photos in SEVEN's photo contest for "I am an entrepreneur"--and vote for the one you think best.

I first came across SEVEN last year when I googled for sites using the term "morality of profit." At the time, the organization had just finished accepting essays for its contest, What is "The Morality of Profit." A winner was chosen in August.

Belief in the evil of profit is rooted in belief in the evil of mankind...Love for others will never come from old ideas about hatred of ourselves...Mankind is not evil. Ergo a man or a woman’s interest in his or herself is not evil.

You can read a longer except of the wining essay here.

I am hoping they will publish a compendium of the top essays, as they did with a previous competition, In the River They Swim: Essays from Around the World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty.

I love the way this organization both celebrates and supports entrepreneurial efforts throughout the world as the best way to end poverty. We need to create MORE wealth, improving the condition of the poorest, not level things out to an equal but poorer world.

To celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit in the world is to celebrate man's lust for life.

Poverty is the problem. Wealth is the solution.

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The True Wealth of our Nation

It's citizens.

Dr. Jane Orient writes on the on the recent tragedy in Arizona:

Aside from the names of the fallen, the names that should be remembered are those of the citizens who acted as Americans should, to protect and help themselves and their neighbors in the event of danger. Roger Salzgeber and 74-year-old retired Army National Guard Colonel Bill Badger, who was slightly injured, tackled the shooter. Joe Zamudio helped pin him to the ground. [Zamudio told MSNBC that he sprinted from a store toward the scene when he heard the shots. He has a concealed carry permit, and had his hand on his pistol, prepared to down the shooter if necessary. He said he was very glad that it proved to be unnecessary.] A 61-year old woman, Patricia Maisch, grabbed the magazine the shooter had dropped while trying to reload, and then knelt on his ankles. Daniel Hernandez, Jr., rushed to the side of his new boss, Congresswoman Giffords, applying pressure to her wound, and keeping her from choking on her own blood. Let us commend and thank all of them, and resolve to act as they did if we are ever in such a situation.

Reminiscent of the heroes of Flight 93.

Thank you Roger Salzgeber, Joe Zamudio, Patricia Maisch, Daniel Hernandez --and any other unnamed heroes of the day.

Read the rest of Dr. Orient's commentary here.

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Hungry for Freedom

"The jovial forty-three-year-old leaves us a painful but effective lesson, because although we have no elections to vote directly for those who govern us, nor courts to accept claims of police abuse, much less means by which a citizen can denounce the immigration restrictions holding the national territory in their grip, we still have our bones, our skin, our stomach walls, to reclaim, by way of the fragile terrain of our bodies, the rights they have taken from us."

From Generation Y, the blog of Cuban, Yoani Sanchez, winner of International Press Institutes's (IPI) 60th World Press Freedom Hero, and the Prince Claus Award, discussing a friend who has gone on a hunger strike to protest the political oppression in Cuba.

HT Mark Perry at the Enterprise Blog where he states:

"When the history of Cuba’s freedom movement is written, it’s likely that Yoani Sanchez will be recognized as a national hero and freedom fighter, the equivalent of Lech Walesa in Poland or Vaclav Klaus in the Czech Republic. Yoani Sanchez demonstrates that we should never underestimate the power of one courageous individual with a computer, a blog, and intermittent access to the Internet (Sanchez says she has not actually been able to see her own blog since 2007), or the individual’s power to change the world in the Information Age, especially with a message of freedom and individual liberty. Intellectual figures like Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and Thomas Jefferson would be proud of Yoani and her powerful message of individual freedom in one of the only remaining regimes of totalitarianism left in the world."

Heroes

For a less formal post in honor of a few personal heroes, click over to today's entry on AisA Academy.

Christopher Columbus--Cause to Celebrate

Thomas Bowden has written several articles to help us celebrate Columbus Day by understanding the great achievement which occurred, as well as how and why.

Let's Take Back Columbus Day (and another one here)
"Columbus Day Celebrates Western Civilization"
The Enemies of Christopher Columbus
by Thomas Bowden

Scott Powell has put together a gallery of great art with the same purpose.


Columbus at Salamanca by William Powell




Landing of Columbus by John Vanderlyn


Happy Columbus Day!

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A Real Winner

If I were on the Nobel Prize committee, I'd vote for William Kamkwamba.



Or see his TED Talk here.
Or read his autobiography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

Poverty is the problem. Wealth is the solution.
But it takes a mind to envision the possibilities and to bring them to fruition.


HT: Gus Van Horn.
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Heroes of Capitalism

I would like to introduce you to a blog I just discovered:

Here is their blog description.

The Heroes

What is a hero of capitalism?
Someone who used private property to produce wealth.

Everyday there will be a featured hero. Though many of the heroes had far more than one accomplishment, only one will be highlighted at a time.

Capitalism

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

Each entry is a brief celebration and tribute to an individual who has made a significant contribution to improving the quality of our lives. This site is a wonderful antidote to the daily vilification of businessmen by politicians and mainstream media. I especially like the stories of Silly Putty and of WD-40, the invention of the bar code, Glad trash bags and Google search.

What's your favorite?


PS Another great site to learn about the blessings brought to us by capitalism and division of labor is the magazine Invention and Technology. Enjoy!
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The Scandinavian Myth-Busters

"I know of no time which is lost more thoroughly than that devoted to arguing on matters of fact with a disputant who has no facts, but only very strong convictions."

--James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, pub. 1901; quoted in Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource 2, pub. 1996


For twenty minutes of your most precious and scarce resource (time) and with the express goal of testing your convictions against the facts, check out the lecture Hans Rosling presented at the 2006 TED talks. He is one of three prominent Scandinavians currently presenting essential data and analysis on the true state of the world. Their completed works and on-going research effectively show the immense gains the world has made and provide a foundation of principles, thoroughly backed by empirical evidence, for how to promote continued improvement.

Here is a chart from Rosling's Gapminder site illustrating the correlation between wealth and health:

The chart is great, but really, take the time to listen to his talk. He's entertaining, funny and inspiring! Rosling has developed software that gives his presentation of statistics the excitement of the 100 yard dash.

The other two Scandinavians worth reading are Bjorn Lomberg and Johan Norberg. I don't agree with them on all their points, but what they bring to the discussion is superb and much needed.

Here is a sample from Lomberg in The Skeptical Environmentalist:

I will…challenge our usual conception of the collapse of ecosystems, because this conception is simply not in keeping with reality.

We are not running out of energy or natural resources. There will be more and more food per head of the world’s population. Fewer and fewer people are starving. In 1900 we lived for an average of 30 years; today we live for 67. According to the UN we have reduced poverty more in the last 50 years than we did in the preceding 500…

[E]ver fewer people in the world are starving. In 1970, 35 percent of all people in developing countries were starving. In 1996 the figure was 18 percent…

The constant repetition of …often heard environmental exaggerations has serious consequences. It makes us scared and it makes us more likely to spend our resources and attention solving phantom problems while ignoring real and pressing…issues…

The point here is to give us the best evidence to allow us to make the most informed decision as to where we need to place our efforts. What I will show throughout the book is that our problems are often getting smaller not bigger, and that frequently the offered solutions are grossly inefficient.¹

Lomberg then follows with 500 pages of data on trends in key areas of human well-being: health, hunger, education, pollution, crowding, environmental quality. Knowing the true state of the world and the direction of trends is a crucial. Setting priorities and choosing which problems to tackle requires a debate over values. That entails an entirely different conversation, but first, we must get the facts right.

And here's a recent one from Norberg:

MORE POVERTY - THE SAME POVERTY REDUCTION:

It took some time, but now the World Bank’s revised poverty figures 1981-2005 have been published, taking better purchasing power statistics into consideration - and introducing a new and higher poverty line, $1.25 a day instead of $1.

The bad news is that the world is poorer than we thought, but the good news is that the world has been no less successful in reducing poverty than we thought. In other words, we had more people in poverty in 1981 than previously estimated but that number has been reduced by as much as previously estimated. Another way of putting this is that the decades before the 1980s were worse than we thought, but the decades since were just as good as we thought - and that’s important to keep in mind since at least Swedish radio presented this as if the number of poor increased dramatically right now.

The proportion in absolute poverty in developing countries 1981-2005 was reduced by half, from 52% to 26%. And despite an increase in world population by 2 billion, the number in absolute poverty was reduced by 500 million, from 1.9 to 1.4 billion. This means that 57,000 people have left extreme poverty every day since 1981. And the last decade has been the best one.

One word of warning though: This study does not cover the last two years when food prices increased dramatically, and poverty probably increased. We’ll have to wait for those figures. Just like before, we see dramatic regional differences. In globalised East Asia, poverty was reduced from 79 to 17 percent, in marginalised Sub-Saharan Africa it stayed around 50 percent the whole period (even though it has come down from 57.5% in 2006).

Here is the study, and here is a summary. ²

What is the state of the world? It isn't perfect. There is still too much suffering because of poverty, war and tyranny. But it is improving, especially when you consider the long-term trends. Humanity is still in its adolescence, stumbling with fits and stops toward maturity. Mistakes are bound to occur. It's all a part of the learning process. Yet, the task is hard enough without shackling ourselves with misinformation. I hope the above scholars find a wide and receptive audience in their efforts to dispel error and correct misconceptions.

As another key myth-buster, Julian Simon, so poignantly wrote:

"Untruth is the ugliest and most dangerous pollution that humans face today. It is just about the only pollution that cannot somehow be transformed into a product of value.”³

“The common assertions that resources are growing more scarce, that environmental conditions are worsening and that the poor suffer from economic freedom are the gravest danger to the poor and the environment.” ⁴

Let the facts roll in!

1. Lomborg, Bjorn, The Skeptical Environmentalist, pg 4-5
2. from Norberg's blog entry Aug. 28, 2008: 14:07
3. Ultimate Resource 2, pg 527
4. Ultimate Resource 2, xxxvii

A Hero of Capitalism

Just a quick post. This is a letter-to-the-editor published 5-8-08 in The Intellectual Activist Daily, a subscription daily news and analysis publication. I wrote it in response to a reference to by the editor, Robert Trasinksi, to The Other Path, a book by Peruvian economist, Hernando deSoto.

Letters to the Editor

In yesterday's TIA Daily ("Latin America's 'Other Path'"), you wrote:

"A lot of the credit for Peru's free-market reforms goes to a man not mentioned
in this article but referred to in its title. 'Peru Takes the Other Path' is a reference to Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto, whose 1987 book El Otro Sendero, 'The Other Path,' made the case for free markets, property rights, and the rule of law as the path to prosperity. (De Soto's title, in turn, was his answer to the Sendero Luminoso, or 'Shining Path,' a Marxist terrorist group.)"

If you haven't read De Soto's other book, The Mystery of Capital, it is very worth reading. De Soto asks the question, why hasn't capitalism brought wealth to Latin America? His answer is fascinating: the inability to produce capital. He points out that capital has two separate meanings: the actual physical assets and the potential of that physical asset to generate surplus value. It is the latter meaning of capital which is missing in Latin America, many former communist countries, and much of the Third World.

The key wealth-creating aspect of capital lies in the existence of formal property systems. Property is an abstraction, a relationship of a person to an asset. In order to be traded, used as credit, shared, and held securely (both against legal and illegal assaults), property must be converted into something concrete. This concrete form of property is generated through the multitude of precise legal rules governing title. Until formalized, property cannot become capital, cannot be securely used as collateral for a loan or equity exchanged for investment, as an address for collection of debts and taxes, or a place to identify individuals for judicial, commercial, or civic purposes. It is access to this aspect of ownership which the poor of the world are lacking.

DeSoto tallied up the value of assets "owned" by the world's poor and found them to be in excess $9.3 trillion dollars. But these assets exist as what De Soto calls "dead capital." The ownership is "informal" or "extralegal." They lack the legal representations of ownership which create enforceable property rights. Although property rights may exist on paper (in the laws), the actual barriers to formalizing ownership are cumbersome and expensive. The time and money required to legally register property or to legally start a business exceed the resources of the poor, so their businesses remain outside the law.

Without access to legally enforceable property rights, businesses must remain small and hidden from the authorities. Transactions can only occur between people directly known and trusted. Assets cannot be used as collateral for loans or credit. There is no way to create securities for trade in the capital market, or to spread risk among multiple investors. Forced to exist outside the law, the law becomes a threat. Disrespect for the law breeds opportunity for mafias and political instability.

In his book, De Soto analyzes in detail the requirements for turning an asset into functioning capital. Through his Institute for Liberty and Democracy, he has put these ideas into practice, helping Peruvians turn their dead capital into true capital. He is a true hero of capitalism.

Here are some links to learn more about his work:

• http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2001/03/desoto.htm

• http://www.cato.org/special/friedman/desoto/index.html

—May 8, 2008

TIA Editor's Note: I have been aware of De Soto since I was a student at the University of Chicago and saw him give a talk on El Otro Sendero in 1987, and I agree with the assessment of him as a "hero of capitalism." I also intend to add him as a prominent example in the forthcoming print-issue version of my "What Went Right?" series.—RWT