random quotes and notes

(Article taken from The Economist, sometime in Nov or Dec, 2007, dunno, I’ve since lost the article)
A prize for “ achievements in African leadership” worth $5M, plus $200,000 a year for life, to an African leader who “best provides security, health, education and economic development and who democratically transfers power to a successor.

“Two scholars… are helping Mr Ibrahim assess the nominees and measure countries’ performance – by such criteria as safety and security, rule of law and corruption, participation and human rights, economic opportunity and human development.”
--
The Index of Development, Poverty.
The world has many problems. Many of these problems could easily be solved with more effort from people from the developed world. However, people in the developed world don’t have incentives because they, like people anywhere, are selfish. They want something for their work. They want physical representation of their contribution to humanity - they want money.

What Mo Ibrahim has done, is put a price tag on successful development work.

A website needs to be developed to offer a system for people to earn rewards for their achievements in the development world. A financial incentive caters to the natural instinctive to be selfish and gets development done.

Ibrahim rates his African leaders “by such criteria as safety and security, rule of law and corruption, participation and human rights, economic opportunity and human development.”

Let’s break down his criterion for judgment –
Safety and security – sounds like the military to me
Rule of law and corruption – that’d be the judicial system, governed by the administration
Participation and human rights – umm, natural court system? Okay, weak.
Economic opportunity – sounds like the Peace Corps? And other grassroots biz dev organizations
Human development – I don’t even know what this is?

There should be nice-looking financial incentives set by do-gooders through donations, for tax-credit, that award people’s effort in development work.

Individual’s, involved or uninvolved and informed, are free to make a case and offer money, open an account and begin the reward.

Possible ideas,
Index of Corruption,

A reward system to give money to people who open up the communication of their government. Rated on a system of variables, governments are annually rewarded by the developed world.

If governments were smart, they would take the rewards and invest them in the people who gave them money.

Indexing is the reverse of taxation. Instead of building a system that requires people to give money to a certain institution, ie - a government in power, have a system that people give money to, out of both benign investment and greed. The more greedy you are, the more you believe that person will make you money. Sometimes, even if you’re bad, it might pay off.

Index of Poverty, Internet development, etc…