tisiwoota

Today’s web-clicking led me to the website for a philanthropy organization called Modest Needs. Its mission is to reach out “to the people conventional philanthropy has forgotten: hard-working individuals and families who suddenly find themselves faced with small, emergency expenses that they have no way to afford on their own.”

How beautiful: the internet is now making possible the type of personalized, targeted emergency support that used to be typical only in small towns.

Besides donation, the site also coordinates volunteering of professional services (plumbing, dentistry, auto help, etc.) It seems like a very hands-on site, for both donors and applicants, with a community “bulletin board” and a section devoted to advice on fiscal responsibility.

There are also profiles of recipient families, which are very touching, and really show what a big difference “small change” can make– one that I read told of a cancer survivor to whom $16 was going to make the difference between making the next month’s rent or losing her housing. Another tells of three children who held a garage sale and sold their toys to help a woman who was caring for her sick mother to make her mortgage payment.

The more I read about the organization’s philosophy and set-up (including secure giving, requirements of specific documentation from applicants, etc), the more I am impressed with the thoughtfulness and integrity of the people running Modest Needs.

I encourage you to check it out (and when you can, to help out).

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To contrast my earlier post-title today, it’s good to be reminded that sometimes we humans can get the whole “an ounce of prevention for a pound of cure” thing right…

“By offering to assist individuals and families before they have been forced into the unforgiving cycle of poverty, Modest Needs’ donors work with our applicants to beat the cycle of poverty before it starts.”

A San Diego startup has devised a way to produce monoclonal antibody drugs on the cheap, using freshwater green algae that have been genetically-engineered to produce human-like proteins:

“The Rincon system involves introducing the gene sequence responsible for producing a particular human protein into the cells of the algae. Once there, the algae cell “reads” the human gene sequence and begins producing the protein.

The algae grow and multiply in a petrie dish, and then are transferred and grown in plastic bags of increasing size, all the way up to 25,000 liters. The algae are then harvested, and the human protein is extracted from the plant cells and purified.”

The process is approximately ten times cheaper than the traditional method of splicing engineered hamster or mouse cells with human DNA components.

There’s an interesting article in this week’s Economist comparing the ability of democracies and dictatorships to reduce poverty. Basically it finds that dictatorships (like China) achieve the most extreme results– either the most striking miracles or the most terrible tragedies, often within the span of the same ruler, while democracies (like India) muddle along with more moderate achievements. The analysis is drawn from the work of Ashutosh Varshney of the University of Chicago, who has also done some very interesting work in conflict resolution.

“Why might democracy militate against poverty reduction in poor countries? Mr Varshney has two suggestions. First, democracies have a bias towards “direct” methods of tackling poverty, such as subsidies and hand-outs, which, in the long run, are less effective than “indirect” methods—ie, those that generate faster economic growth. In India, this seems undeniably true. Governments have built up whopping budget deficits, thanks largely to subsidies. Many farmers, for example, receive subsidised or free fuel, fertiliser, electricity and water. But little public money is spent on improvements that would do most to lift the growth rate: in infrastructure, primary education and basic health care. Everybody wants better roads, and nobody votes against them. But every politician promises to build them and hardly any do. Cutting subsidies, on the other hand, is a sure vote-loser.

Second, the poor are not necessarily a homogenous group. In a democratic system, they may organise themselves along lines other than economic class and “the shared identities of caste, ethnicity and religion are more likely to form historically enduring bonds”. If you are born poor, you may die rich. But your ethnic group is fixed. In India, with its myriad linguistic and caste-based groups, the upshot is a dispiriting beggar-thy-neighbour politics. Just as subsidies are easier to deliver than are roads and schools, so are affirmative-action schemes, giving jobs to members of specified castes.

The relationship between caste and class helps explain the wide regional discrepancies in India. Mr Sen has noted that in one Indian state, Kerala, infant mortality has fallen from 37 per 1,000 in 1979, the same as in China, to ten now, compared with 30 in China. He suggests that the improvement relates directly to India’s democratic strengths. The collapse of the public health system in China in the reform era was possible because there was little political resistance, whereas the deficiencies of Indian primary health care are subject to constant public scrutiny.”