Soundbites
Pitfalls of volunteering International volunteering can be incredibly rewarding for the volunteer as well as the host community. Participants build international relationships, learn about local customs and come home with a better sense of global citizenship. Communities can receive much-needed support and an infusion of resources into their economy. However, there are pitfalls. Many volunteer projects cater more to the volunteer experience and less to what the community needs, wasting everyone’s time and money. Sometimes inexperienced volunteers can cost an organization more than their help is worth. And volunteer unskilled labor may simply re-
place local paid labor, crippling a developing economy. — Elisabeth Oakham in Ensemble Vacations magazine
and productivity can be controlled effectively, and when the rest of the Earth’s land surface is carefully monitored for destructive changes. We have or are rapidly gaining the tools needed to do this, but the political agreements needed to use them wisely are yet to be realized. — Tim Flannery in Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet
GPS writ large I can imagine the day when our surveillance of the atmosphere, the oceans, the land and the heavens is so complete that we will be able to anticipate most natural disasters. Such a system would also give us fair warning of when human intervention is required to disperse malign trends. I can also imagine a time when that 12 percent of the land surface that is used for intensive agriculture will be managed so that carbon flux
Real productivity? In some cases, the very attempt to increase productivity will destroy the product itself. If a string quartet trots through a 27-minute piece in nine minutes, would you say that its productivity has trebled? For some other services, the apparent higher productivity is due to the debasement of the product. A teacher can raise her apparent productivity by four times by having four times as many pupils in her classroom, but the quality of her ‘product’ has been diluted
by the fact that she cannot pay as much individual attention as before. A lot of the increases in retail productivity in countries such as the U.S. and Britain has been bought by lowering the quality of the retail service itself while ostensibly offering cheaper shoes, sofas and apples: there are fewer sales assistants at shoe stores, so you wait 20 minutes instead of five; you have to wait four weeks, rather than two, for the delivery of your new sofa and probably also have to take a day off work because they will only deliver ‘sometime between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.’; you spend much more time than before driving to the new supermarket and walking through the now longer aisles when you get there, because those apples are cheaper than in the old supermarket only because the new supermarket is in the middle of nowhere and thus can have more floor space. — Ha-Joon Chang in 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism
Eating lean That’s me in the yellowing photograph, that thin young man from Port-au-Prince in the terrible 1970s. If you’re not thin when you’re twenty in Haiti, it’s because you’re on the side of power. Not just because of malnutrition. More like the constant fear that eats away at you from inside.... I’ve been eating fat for three decades in Montreal while everyone has gone on eating lean in Port-au-Prince. My metabolism has changed. And I can’t say I know what goes on these days in the mind of a teenager who doesn’t remember having eaten his fill one single day. — Dany Laferriere in The Return
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The Marketplace November December 2011
