I’ve got a hip-high pile of books by my bedside, including several manuscripts written by good friends. But after Paul Collier’s talk at TED, his book moved to the top of the pile, and I spent a rainy Saturday diving into his new book, “The Bottom Billion”. It was time well spent.

Collier has dedicated the last thirty years of his life to the study of African economics, as director of the development research group of the World Bank and now as Director of the Center for the Study of African Economics. While he’s got a wealth of technical papers, “The Bottom Billion” is his first consumer book - at TED, Collier explained that he hoped to write an economics book that could be read on the beach. That might be a stretch, but it’s a good, quick and enlightening read, assuming you’re interested in the basic questions of development economics.

The most basic question addressed in development economics is “Why are some people poor?” There tend to be two highly political answers to this question: “Because capitalism is unfair” or “Because poor people don’t work hard enough.” Neither’s an especially satisfying response, and neither is well supported by data. The rise of China, India and Asia has had far more to do with embrace than rejection of the principles of capitalism, and those societies have collectively pulled hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. On the other hand, hard work and embrace of free market principles isn’t likely to have much impact on a rural farmer in Chad.

Most development economists avoid arguments this simplistic, but they’re subject to their own polarization. Two of the most influential popular economic books offer the contradictory advice that rich countries need to give the developing world a whole lot more aid, and that development aid is, for the most part, a near-criminal waste of money that damages as much as it helps. Collier, to his credit, references both Sachs and Easterly in “The Bottom Billion”. A warning to my Sachs-phobic readers - he’s a fan of Sachs’s economics, though he’s far more critical of his advocacy for increased aid.

While Collier’s work is significantly more nuanced than most popular books on development economics, he’s not exactly shy or soft-spoken. He’s particularly contemptous of ideological dreamers, with a special disregard for Marxists. (In describing China’s recent economic success, he notes, “Mao made his own invaluable contribution by dropping dead.”) But he’s almost as critical of free marketeers who believe that markets will solve all development problems, especially in the poorest countries of the world.

Collier is optimistic about the future for most of the world’s people. Nations like China and India are on the right track to “converge” with developed nations, in the long run, just as the poorest members of the EU (Ireland and Portugal, when they joined) have seen their GDP per capita match those of their neighbors. Many of the nations of the world are genuinely “developing” - as they develop further, they’ll become fully integrated into the global economy and provide more opportunities for their citizens.

The problem is a set of nations that aren’t developing. Since the 1960s, when many of these countries threw off foreign rule through colonialism, these nations have progressed very slowly or, in some cases, regressed. Most of these nations are in sub-Saharan Africa, but countries like North Korea, Burma, Afghanistan and some other Central Asian nations also are home to members of the bottom billion. Collier refers to this set of nations as “Africa+”, but that’s a bit deceptive - all his examples come from Africa, though some lessons may be applicable to countries like Tajikstan as well. (He never quite defines the set of nations - South Africa is explicitly exempted, and I assume nations like Botswana are as well - less clear if nations “on the bubble” like Senegal and Ghana are included.)

Leaning on Jeff Sachs’s identification of malaria as a “development trap” that can keep a nation from growing, he identifies four traps that the bottom billion nations are stuck in. Some suffer from only one of these traps - most suffer from two or more.

Conflict: The single easiest way to destroy economic development in a nation is to fight a civil war. Civil wars last a long time - six years on average - and devestate the local economy. Growth is reduced 2.3% per year on average in the countries Collier and colleagues studied. When you consider the effect that wars have beyond a nation’s border, especially impact on the economies of neighboring countries, the cost Collier estimates for a civil war is $64 billion. That sounds like peanuts in comparison to the cost of the civil war we’ve managed to bring about in Iraq, but it’s huge in the terms of bottom billion nations - it’s just below the GDP of Ethiopia, a country of more than 70 million people.

Collier and friends have also demonstrated that poor nations are far more likely to fall into civil war than wealthy ones. He’s skeptical of ideological explanations for civil war, believing that they take place, basically, when a group sees the opportunity to buy some guns, loot the national treasury and, preferably, exploit a nation’s natural resources. He calculates that the average low-income nation has a 14% chance of falling into civil war in a five year period - this percentage goes up if the nation’s economy is stagnant or contracting.

We shouldn’t expect civil wars to go away, even with the arrest of bastards like Viktor Bout - it’s just too easy to overthrow a government. “Rebel leader Laurent Kabile, marching across Zaire with his troops to sezie the state, told a journalist that in Zaire, rebellion was easy: all you needed was $10,000 and a satellite phone. While this was obviously poetic exaggeration, he went on to explain that in Zaire, everyone was so poor that with $10,000 you could hire yourself a small army.” And the satellite phone? You use that to strike deals with resource extraction companies for the territories you seize.

Natural resources: For those of us who are obsessed with international development and have no formal economics training, it’s often disturbing to find out what sort of questions economists don’t know the answers to. (It seems like we should have a much better answer to the question, “Does aid work?” before giving lots more of it, for instance.) Weirder are some of the answers we do have. For instance, it’s pretty much conventional wisdom in developing nations that being “blessed” with natural resources is a bad thing.

Natural resources tempt would-be rebels, but that’s not the main problem. More troublesome is “Dutch Disease”. This is an economic term coined to explain the slowing of the manufacturing sector in the Netherlands after the discovery of natural gas in the 1960s. In all economies, people want foreign currency so they can purchase imports. They trade with domestic exporters, who earn foreign currency by selling goods abroad. When a country discovers oil, for instance, it’s very easy to turn that resource into hard currency. Activity in that sector tends to “crowd out” other activities, especially the sort of labor-intensive manufacturing that’s helped economies like South Korea and Singapore move into high income strata.

Collier believes that Dutch Disease is a critical concept in understanding the bottom billion, and that aid can cause the disease just as surely as oil. But he sees other corrosive effects of natural resources - specifically, he thinks natural resources tend to subvert democracy. In a functional democracy, politicans are rewarded for policies that improve society. In natural resource-rich societies, he sees politicians more frequently rewarded for bribery and patronage. Collier terms this “survival of the fattest” and suggests that Nigeria in the 1990s is a pretty good example of what emerges when this happens.

As Collier argued in his talk at TED, the solution to this problem is to focus on the checks and balances of democracy, rather than on elections. Countries that have survived major natural resource discoveries have strong democratic institutions, especially a strong free press.

Landlocked with bad neighbors: Landlocked nations have a problem exporting - they don’t have ports. Somehow, this isn’t a problem for Switzerland in the way it is for Uganda. But Switzerland has some very wealthy neighbors, and these neighbors can serve markets, as well as providing infrastructure to use their ports. Uganda’s neighbors are much less wealthy, and relying on Kenya’s infrastructure to export wasn’t a great idea for Uganda even before the recent post-election crisis.

Collier has less helpful thinking on this topic that on most others - he advises these nations to rely on remittances, to ensure that they’re not “airlocked” or “e-locked” due to poor internet access (which is a challenge, as the fastest net access is through undersea cables) and to try to change their neighbors economic policy, while acknowledging that this rarely works. Unfortunately, he concludes, some of these nations simply shouldn’t exist as independent states - their boundaries are the consequences of Europe’s colonial carve-up of the continent. That depressing idea resonates with me, and seems to intersect with Lant Pritchett’s observation that Zambia currently has way too many people now that the copper mines have been exhausted - the fixed and non-porous nature of borders is going to be a problem for Africa for years to come.

Badly governed: Governance has been the cause celebre of the US aid community for the past decade - if you wanted money from USAID, you’d be well advised to build an economic growth program based around good governance and accountability. Collier is less worried about poor governance than many economists - he points out that Bangladesh was able to achieve economic growth despite being tied for the most-corrupt government in the world for many years. The path to economic success for Bangladesh was pretty conventional - high-labor manufacturing, a sector that, Collier asserts, doesn’t require too much goverment intervention to make work in countries with large labor forces and ports.

The situation is different in small nations, especially small, landlocked nations like Chad, which tied Bangladesh for the dubious honor of most corrupt government. Conventional paths to economic success are closed off, and the government needs to be more than “not a hindrance”, but an active player in creating economic development. Unfortunately, some of these nations simply cannot provide services to their populus anymore - Collier lists Angola, Central African Republic, Haiti, Liberia, Sudan, the Solomon Islands, Somalia and Zimbabwe as states that he would classify as failed under political and economic critera. (I assume Liberia is improving, and I wonder if a current list would include Guinea-Bissau.) Collier estimates that the cost - to citizens of the nation, to neighboring nations, to the world as a whole - of state failure at roughly $100 billion. Unfortunately, when states descend to this poor level of governance, they have a very small chance - 1.9% per year - of experiencing a turnaround.

Of the bottom billion nations, 73% have experienced civil war, 29% have economies dominated by natural resources, 30% are in landlocked nations, and 76% have experienced a sustained period of bad governance - some unlucky nations have three or more factors working against them. Collier believes that the two solutions most often prescribed for the developing world - trade and aid - won’t be enough for these nations, which are failing to develop.

Freer trade could help the bottom billion, but it needs to be the right kind of trade. Collier sees a great interest - especially from China - in African natural resources, but predicts that economies that overfocus on natural resources will become increasingly corrupt and increasingly uncompetitive in other industries. Most countries that have developed significantly have large manufacturing sectors, and their manufacturing exports earn vastly more than natural resource exports.

Manufacturing, however, requires major upfront investment to purchase factory equipment. We’d hope that global capitalism would mean that adverturous investors would be pouring money into these poor nations to spark manufacturing development. Nope - these markets are too risky, and most international investors steer clear. (See the country rankings from Institutional Investor to get a sense for the sorts of nations that are too high-risk for most investors.) Instead, the globalization of financial markets means that capital flows out of very poor countries, not it. If you’re lucky enough to become wealthy in the Central African Republic, you’ll likely choose to get your funds the heck out of your home nation, rather than investing in local industries. Collier sees a similar pattern with talented labor - if you’re a smart, ambitious Chadian, your temptation is to look for success in a global talent market, not stay at home.

(I think Collier oversimplifies these arguments. There’s a growing group of brave Africans looking for ways to return home and invest money earned in North America and Europe in their home countries. That said, while I’ve got piles of anecdotes about these investors, I have no idea if their total contributions would affect Collier’s statistical analysis at all. Ultimately, that’s the challenge in arguing with Collier - he’s dealing in broad statistical analysis, and it’s hard to know how much any single counterexample challenges his conclusions.)

The most depressing part of this argument is that Collier believes some of these nations may simply have “missed the boat”. They might have had a chance to enter into labor-intensive fields a couple of decades ago - now those fields are so thoroughly dominated by nations like China that these countries might need to wait for China to develop to the point where labor becomes expensive, a process that might take decades to become widespread.

If globalization won’t save us, perhaps increased generosity and compassion, expressed via aid, might. Nope. Collier is skeptical of many forms of aid, pointing out that in a dysfunctional state, many types of aid never reach their destined recipients, lining the pockets of corrupt politicians and subverting the rule of law. (Again, the example of choice is poor Chad, where a study of money donated to support rural clinics discovered that less than 1% of money donated was used for its intended purpose.) Aid dollars siphoned off by corrupt governments often end up financing military expenditure, which can fuel the conflict trap so many nations fall into.

Collier ends up promoting a kind of aid that’s become extremely unpopular in liberal development circles: technical assistance. This involves paying experts from developed nations to offer advice and training to governments and businesses in poor nations. It’s the business I used to be in, and I’ve fielded my share of criticisms that giving money to wealthy American PhDs is a stupid way to go about development. Collier counters that very poor nations often don’t have human resources in key fields and need to import trainers, and that technical assistance is one of the few forms of aid that isn’t susceptible to corruption or Dutch Disease. He also favors aid to build the infrastructure that makes exporting possible.

So if aid and markets alone won’t help us, what will? Collier has solutions, but they’re technical, policy-directed and less sexy than you might hope. It’s hard to imagine a pop concert on five continents pushing for improved international norms of transparency on natural revenues accounting, but that’s the sort of change Collier believes the bottom billion needs. Specifically, he’s in favor of:

- Targetted military interventions. Collier understands that it’s politically untenable to advocate for outside regime change in the waning days of the GWBush era, but he notes that there are cases where military force allows very poor nations to get back on a path towards development. His analysis of British intervention in Sierra Leone suggests that the economic benefits of ending a civil war exceeded the cost of intervention by a factor of 32.

- A set of international charters that set basic standards for developing nations to follow, in the fields of natural resources transparency, democratization, budget transparency, investment and the management of post-conflict situations.

- A lowering of OECD trade barriers towards bottom billion nations and barriers between bottom billion nations. Collier promotes an unusual strategy to encourage export diversification in bottom billion nations - he recommends maintaining tarrif barriers with Asian nations and eliminating similar tarrifs with the bottom billion - AGOA done correctly, in effect, over a long period of time.

- A rethinking of the reciprocal nature of the WTO - bottom billion countries shouldn’t be striking bargains with rich nations. They need a trade forum where wealthy countries are willing to make concessions on development grounds.

After Collier’s brilliant articulation of the problems facing bottom billion nations, I expected a call to action that would send me into the streets, rather than sending me to Wikipedia to review the history of GATT and the WTO. That might have been overly optimistic on my part. Solutions to problems of this magnitude are going to require changes in multilateral institutions and international norms.

The problem, I suspect, is that if I have trouble getting excited about Collier’s proposals, it’s going to be difficult to get people not obsessed with international development pumped up. Collier acknowledged this problem in his TED talk, ending with a story that a blogger had written “Collier is not charismatic. But his arguments are compelling.” That’s why, Collier said, “If you agree with that comment, you realize that I need you.”

I don’t think it’s charisma that’s the problem - I think it’s complexity. Collier does the best job I’ve seen of answering the question, “Why are nations trapped in poverty?” It’s going to take more effort - from him and from other people who care about this topic - to make a set of policy recommendations and build a movement around them that’s as cogent and compelling as the first half of this book.

After TED (and a tiny bit of BIL), I got about as far from my computer as I could get. My friends Nate and Ari were launching their new business - Scream Sorbet - and I spent Sunday hauling coolers full of organic frozen treats and washing out sorbet containers in an industrial kitchen in Emeryville…

As a result, I missed some of the blogospheric kerfuffle re: TED. Sarah Lacey published a piece on a BusinessWeek blog titled “Why I’m fed up with TED” - it’s been quite widely linked and provoked a variety of reactions, many of which she seems to have anticipated in her introductory sentence: “Maybe it’s sour grapes because I wasn’t invited, but I’m irked by the conference’s smugness and the nearly unqualified show of support from Silicon Valley.”

There’s a lot of sour grapes in Lacey’s piece, but some truth as well. It’s pretty hard to build an egalitarian, inclusive conference with such a high price tag. In fairness to TED, it’s not cheap to run a conference that has such high production values, that puts most of its content on the web for free, and that invests hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus thousands of hours of staff time in supporting people like Jehane Noujaim in launching Pangea Day or Neil Turok in building science academies across the African continent.

I have the opposite of sour grapes about TED. I’m very grateful for the fact that I’ve been able to attend these past few years. I’ve tried to pay my way by opening the conference, to the extent I can with text and the occasional photo, to the wider world. (And I greatly appreciate the kind words from everyone who appreciated the blogging.) I can understand why it seems like something of a closed world - closed events are like that. But I remember going to Davos for the first time and expecting it to be filled with world leaders chatting in corners to conspire and set world zinc prices. It was a little disappointing to discover that it was a bunch of guys in suits having panels about big issues and drinking too much. TED’s more fun, but there’s even less global conspiracy taking place.

There was a conspiracy at TED Africa in Arusha last year, but it was largely one founded by the 100+ young African activists and bloggers the TED conference invited to attend the event free of charge. Not the sort of thing that makes it into Valleywag, but there are several major collaborations that began in Arusha that have a good chance of transforming African business and people’s understanding of the continent. I would guess that TED lost a lot of money on the event. It’s to their great credit that they’re continuing involvement with African conferences and helping produce one later this year.

Tom Guarriello, who blogs and videoblogs from TED, has a fierce response to Lacey’s piece:

I am a nobody.

I am not a star.

I am not a celebrity.

I am not rich.

I am not famous.

Nobody knows who I am.

I have just returned home from my eighth TED Conference.

Now, according to the extraordinary number of snarky blogs, bitter Twitter tweets and downright cheesiness surrounding this year’s conference, those statements are supposed to be mutually exclusive. If you listen to these people, TED is a place where rich, famous stars go to listen to a stream of feel-good talks in an “aren’t-we-special?” atmosphere.

As an eight-time attendee: Bull.

I’m with Tom, up to a point. I’m not a star, a celebrity, and not especially rich. But lots of folks here are. And it does get a little surreal sometimes. John Moltz’s Twitter feed parodying the conference was especially spot on:

- At TED: My balloon animal presentation went really well. Great feedback from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Stephen Hawking and Frank Chu. 12:36 PM February 28, 2008 from web Icon_star_empty

- At TED: Prediction: David Gallo’s 2-man baking soda-powered submarine will do more for third world development than the OLPC. 10:37 AM February 28, 2008 from Hahlo Icon_star_empty

- At TED: Larry Flynt to demonstrate his World Wide Colonoscope later today. I think I’m going to give that one a pass. 07:38 AM February 28, 2008 from twitterrific Icon_star_empty

- At TED: Up early to do yoga with Jennifer fricking Connelly. Then I.M. Pei is hosting an ironic breakfast featuring “Dadaist waffles”. Yum! 06:05 AM February 28, 2008 from Hahlo Icon_star_empty

- At TED: Five words - Jello shooters with Maya Angelou. 09:48 PM February 27, 2008 from twitterrific Icon_star_empty

- At TED: Lech Walesa is helping me prep for my presentation tomorrow. He knows almost as much about balloon animals as I do. 06:58 PM February 27, 2008 from twitterrific

But here’s the thing. I’m an idea junkie. There’s really nothing I enjoy more than being awash in provocative ideas for four days. One of the reasons I blog the damned thing is that it lets me make mental notes on ideas I want to explore at more length - Paul Collier’s ideas for saving nations from the resource curse, Neil Turok’s moving vision for Africa, Joshua Klein’s fascination with animals that evolve to live with humans, Paul Stamets and his belief that mushrooms can solve many of humanity’s problems. (Oh, and I plan to read every word Chris Abani ever wrote.) I’m a grouchy, anti-social bastard at TED because I’m fascinated by the ideas, not because I’m blogging - the blogging is a defense mechanism so people leave me alone and I can pay attention to the talks.

Do people come to TED so they can brush shoulders with Al Gore or Sergey Brin? Yes. Do most? I doubt it. Most people are riveted to the stage, paying attention to the ideas, the personalities, the passion of the people on stage. In other words, what they’re getting out of the event is what hundreds of thousands of people get from seeing TED talks on the web, only more concentrated, and in less comfortable seats.

I hope Sarah Lacey gets the chance to come at some point in the future - her colleage from Businessweek Helen Walters did, and it looks like she had a pretty good time. So did I.

35,000 words? Just a warmup. There’s another conference in town, and just try and stop me from blogging it.

(Please. Please stop me before I type again…)

Actually, they almost did. BIL put an announcement on their site saying they were full up. Turns out this was mostly a way of keeping the fire marshall happy. There’s a very happy gang of folks at the Monterey Youth Center, mostly lining a conference hall to listen to some excellent speakers… but another gang standing in the hallway drinking Pepsi and eating cupcakes.

Given my current level of burnout and the number of people I need to see in the Bay Area, I’m only able to drop in for a couple o talks. I caught the end of a brilliant talk by KV Fitz about gifted education. She comes by the topic honestly, as a very bright kid who had the opportunity to go to college at sixteen. Her personal story, which included an academic collapse, is an eye-opener for anyone who’s wrestled with questions about what opportunities to give to very bright kids.

One of her best lines: “There’s no such thing as a twelve year old who’s intellectually twenty. Your ass is twelve. You still need a bedtime.” She tells us that intelligence, by conventional measures, is a misleading thing, pointing out that Richard Feynman describes his IQ as “respectable byt not amazing.” How many potential Feynmans are there out there? Finally, she tells us, “intelligence is a function of passion.” You have to want knowledge to actively seek it and you have to care about knowing things to be smart.

Scheduling at BIL

Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey has spoken at TED previously, and presented this year at TED University, a preconference event that focuses on short, practical talks. He gives this talk, called “Not the TED Commandments, or How to Be a Successful Heretic” to the BIL stage. de Grey is a phenomenally successful heretic - he’s the founder of the Methusela Foundation, and he’s been systematically challenging thinking about life extension for the past dozen years. And he’s quite controversial.

de Grey shows us the stone tablet, engraved with “the TED commandments”, that every TED speaker receives. It includes admonitions like “Thou shalt not sell from the stage” and “Thou shalt not give your ordinary talk”. de Grey explains that, in the rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge, there’s one place where Oxford is simply unrivaled. “Oxford teaches you how to be so pretentious, it’s not obvious that you’re joking.” The implication is that TED may be a bit Oxonian.

The reason to beat up TED is to set up his own commandments, rules for successful revolutions in thinking. He quotes Ganhdi:
“First, they ignore you, then they laugh and you, then they fight you, then you win,” and two scientific thinkers, who offer similar formulations for how heresy becomes orthodoxy.

Want to market your own heresies? de Grey offers (rather orthodoxly) ten commandments:

1. Be right (diligence before oratory). He quotes Sean Carroll: “Being a heretic is hard work”. It’s not enough to disagree with mainstream thinking - you actually have to be correct. “Galileo was a heretic, but understood the reigning orthodoxy at the time beter than anyone else.” Very few people work that hard: “Many casual heretics can’t be bothered.”

2. Be boastful (about your topic). de Grey points out that, when speaking to an audience like TED, you’ve got to oversell. So he titled his talk “Fixing humanity’s worst problem.” After all, ageing does kill twice as many people as all other causes of death.

3. Be a doer (as well as a talker). One reason to take de Grey seriously is the number of people who’ve taken him seriously, pledging huge sums to support his research. (I plan to steal his methodology for Global Voices.) You have to work very hard to raise these sorts of sums… and fundraising is a form of doing, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

4. Be indominitable (if not invincible) - if you want to upset the applecart, grow a thick skin.

5. Be diplomatic (not all the time) - This seems like a commandment often honored in the breach. He quotes from one of his papers where he dismisses a set of someone else’s arguments by announcing his intent to “tow those arguments fimrly out into the ocean and give them the decent but unambigouous public burial that they so richly deserve.” Those sentiments certainly didn’t make him popular but, “they made some people sufficiently angry that progress was made.”

6. Be everywhere (a pint is worth 1000 words) - You won’t be influential as a hermit who just writes. Successful heretics maintain insane travel and speaking schedules.

7. Be pithy (especially under pressure). Sometimes you get only a few seconds. He shows a clip of himself interviewed by Stephen Colbert, suggesting that your grandmother can help you across the street, because she’ll be hale and hearty as well…

8. Be inspirational (and have a team that’s organizational). (Oh man, is this one true.)

9. Be selfless (remember that control is only a means to an end) - Don’t control all your work too carefully - you make progress by reliquishing control to other people to take your idea forward.

10. Be right (and be able to explain why to both experts and laymen.)

Rules good enough that they probably ought to be engraved in stone. As I write slides for my talk at ETech on Tuesday, I’m trying to keep them firmly in mind.

I wish I’d been there for more of BIL - I love the idea of a completely open-topic unconference, and I hope there’s a way to build one in the future that lets me enjoy both it and TED, rather than wrestling with exhaustion and burnhout. Fortunately, people did seem to come from TED to BIL, and it looked like the BIL crew was having a blast. Hope the fun continues today.

Three hundred TED attendees haven’t been with us in Monterey - they’re in Apsen, Colorado, where they’ve watched most of the sessions on simulcast. But there are some amazing performers there as well - Jill Sobule, Ze Frank, Rives, and a pair of jugglers whose names I didn’t catch. They perform as “The Kid’s Table Collective”, offering the Aspen perspective on TED.

It sounds like Aspen involved a lot of drinking. Ze Frank offers a spot-on parody of some of the quantum mechanics talks, called “The Dark Bottle Theory.” There are a lot of jokes about the cost differential between the two events, and a spirited singalong to “The Whole World in his Hands”. Sounds like lots of the cool kids were having fun in Colorado.

Chris Anderson introduces the last speaker of the conference, admitting, “I actually liked the Boomtown Rats.”

Bob Geldof doesn’t have slides or A/V and he says “fuck” a lot. But he’s someone who tries to make things happen, and whether or not you agree with all he’s tried to do, he’s tried to do a lot. (I spent almost an hour arguing African politics with him last night, and I found him incredibly passionate and thoughtful, despite the fact that I disagree with him on a lot of issues.)

He tells us that this conference probably wouldn’t work in England, but welcomes us anyway to next year’s conference in Oxford: “You’re all rich fuckers, you can spend $6000, let’s face it.” He makes it clear that his job here isn’t to be reasonable, quoting George Bernard Shaw: “All human progress demands on unreasonable people.”

“Rreasonable accept the world as they meet it, unreasonable people persist in trying to change it. Well, I’m Bob and I’m an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people.”

Geldof takes us back to his childhood, trying to explain his trajectory from rock star to humanitarian. “Ireland was planet Ireland - in our inferiority complex, we locked ourselves away.” He wasn’t a student or an athlete - “I read, I listened to the radio, to those whispering, siren voices.” Radio Luxembourg introduced him to Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and John Lennon, “telling of other possibilities, whole parallel universes of possibilities.”

He couldn’t get into college. “I had no exams and I was worried I’d have to wear one of those fucking awful Simon and Garfunkel scarves.” So he tried to get a job in Canada and got thrown out by the Mounties. And so he founded a band. “Those of us who’d left school tore up the symbols of that authority, stuck it back together with safetypins and cellotape.” And that was punk. It’s hard to imagine how punk has become mainstream - it’s like how Ireland has moved from the poorest to richest country in the world. “Punk pre-empted Thatcher. We didn’t expect thatcher to be a punk - it just turned out that the revolution was on the right.”

The Boomtown Rats did well. “We did the drugs, did the girls - and thanks to the girls for coming tonight - Hi Cameron! Hi Noor!”

“And then we didn’t. In late October 1984, I was sitting at home. Rock stars don’t sit at home - they tour, they record.” He knew his career was at an end, and he was depressed. And then he saw images of the Ethiopian famine and was overwhelmed. “The Eighties were about surplus. The Common Agricultural Policy, your farm bill here. We pay taxes to produce food we would never eat, to store it, and shamefully, to destroy it.”

Geldof knew that he could write a pop song and record it, “but not having hits any longer”, he asked his mates to do it for him. He went on TV and told peple that “to die of want in a world of surplus is not only intellectually absurd, but morally repulsive.” He put together Band Aid and inspired the USA for Africa project, as well as dozens of others. “I would like to personally apologize for two of the worst fucking pop songs in history.”

He reminds us that these movements predated cellphones - “We did LiveAid through the telex.” The percolation of computers around the planet brought the Soviet empire down, he argues. “With 24/7 trading, we all discovered the Soviets had nothing to trade with us.”

Turning to the TED audience, he thanks them for implementing Bono’s wishes:
- Supporting the One campaign website, which has now received a billion impressions. “We’re going to be bigger than the NRA in a couple of years.”
- Helping to wire up Rwanda
- Helping to bring technology to the continent via mobile phones.

Now, he has another Africa-focused project, and he wants some help. He tells us of a trip to Niger, talking to an elder, who tell him “18 months ago, there were 300 languages here.”

“Separate, complete cultures. They’re gone. I never heard those languages, but I already miss them. It’s in these ways that the lights of human genius wink out.”

So Geldof is proposing “a great mapping to be undertaken. I’m going to log all of us. I’m going to take a snapshot of now.” He proposes making 900 half-hour films of 900 different cultural groups. He wants to see a screen with 6.8 billion pixels - “You don’t have to join, just activate yourself.” He sees a moment of human history slipping away and asks the TED community to help him build a Dictionary of Man: “You must have a million ideas fizzing in your head. I need your help.”

Tom Rielly, TED’s director of sponsorship and standup comic, planned not to offer a satirical summary of this year’s conference. He bows to popular demand and takes the stage as “Tom Rielly unplugged.” He tells us his preparation included, “72 miutes, 25 index cards, and one pencil made of psycoactive mycelium.” He tells Queen Noor that, “it’s hard to share the audience with another world famous queen.” And he tells us to look for his new autobiography, “The Billion Bottoms.” We would have missed him had he not taken the stage.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been listening closely to the TED conference. He’s figured out that this is a pretty liberal group. And he asks the group to try a thought experiment - two Americans are in Italy looking at the famous statue of David. One is amazed by the beauty of the form; the other is embarrased by the naked penis. Which one is more likely to have voted for Bush?

Our prejudice is right, as it turns out. Liberals are much more likely to be open to new experiences. Conservatives are more likely to seek familiarity and comfort. “With that knowledge, you can understand why people eat at Applebee’s, just not anyone you know.”

He asks for a show of hands and discovers almost everyone here identifies as liberal, with a dozen libertarians and a handful of conservatives. “Our lack of diversity here is a problem.” In these homogenous groups, you end up with team mentality, and you end up rooting against the other side. “If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix.” He invites us to “take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.”

Haidt argues that the brain is well organized at birth with certain moral values, held in place by neural and hormonal programming. He identifies five basic values:

- Care and harm avoidance. He argues that roughly 70% of the arguments made TED invoke these arguments.
- Reciprocity - we should be fair and just. 30% of arguments followed thiese arguments, he argues.
- Ingroup loyalty, our allegiance to our tribe. “When we don’t have tribes, we make them, because it’s fun” - think sports teams.
- Purity/sanctity - The right does it with sex, but he reminds us that the left does it with food
- Authority and respect

So, if everyone has these five basic moral drives, what happens when you raise people in different environments?

Haidt has been running an experiment at YourMorals.org. It asks people their political affiliations and their moral beliefs. It turns out that liberals care more than conservatives about harm and fairness. And liberals care a lot less about authority, ingroup and purity. This is true in all the nations where they’ve collected data.

Why should liberals care about these other three moral values? Because there’s a tendency for social order to decay. He shows us the Hieronymus Bosch “Garden of Earthly Delights” - reading from left to right, we see purity, then sexual excess, then hell. This is true artistically, but it’s also true in terms of behavioral economics - research shows that cooperation in economic games decays over time without punishment. We may need authority and purity to maintain social order.

“The Grand Canyon isn’t complicated - it’s just wind and rock. Villages in the Grand Canyon are complicated. This is the wonder of the world.” Civilizations require people to “use every tool in the toolbox.”

“Liberals reject three of these social rules - purity, authority and ingroup identity. They want change and justice even at the cost of social chaos. While conservatives want order, even at cost to those at the bottom.”

He advises us to look for balance, places where Vishu and Shiva work together - the creative and destructive forces. He quotes Sent-ts’an, from 700CE China: “If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.” He asks us to step out into moral humility “from the moral self-righteousness that is the normal human condition.”

I’m looking forward to Haidt’s book, The Happiness Hypothesis.

And then there was one. Bruno is sitting upstairs, so we can see him onstage later this morning. Mark left yesterday to take care of family matters. And as we head into the bottom of the ninth at this year’s TED, I was worried I’d be all alone here at blogger alley. And then some grey-haired dude came and sat down with me. He’s not bad company.

He takes the stage playing the banjo, greying hair pulled back in corn rows. John Francis is not your everyday TED speaker. In fact, he’s someone best known for not speaking. For seventeen years, he didn’t speak a word. He spoke for the first time on the 20th anniversary of Earth Day, and thanked his family for coming to hear him. “I didn’t recognize my voice. So I turned around looking to see who’s saying what I’m thinking.”

In 1971, Francis witnessed two oil tankers collide underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. He was so concerned, he decided to stop riding and driving in motorized vehicles. This isn’t an easy thing to do in California, and people argued with him about it. He argued and argued, and got pretty sick of arguing. He argued a great deal with his parents about his decision not to ride. His mother said to him, “If you were happy, son, you wouldn’t have to say it.”

That simple statement triggered an amazing reaction. On his 27th birthday, he decided to stop speaking for a single day. What he discovered was the value of actual listening. He tells us that he had been listening just long enough to figure out how to respond to these statements.”It was very sad. I was 27 years old and I thought I knew everything. And I realized how much I’d missed. And I decided I’d better do this for another day.”

One day became 17 years. He walked, he played the banjo, he wrote in his journal. He read environmental books and eventually decided to get a degree in environmental studies. “So I walked up to Ashland, Oregon - it’s only 500 miles.” He brought a newspaper clipping explaining his unusual decisions, and the university allowed him to get a BA through a special two-uear program.

After graduation, he walked to Washington, built a wooden boat and sailed and walked to Missoula, Montana. “I’d written them ahead of time and said I’d be there in about two years.” The University of Montana accomodated him to an extent that seems unbelievable. They gave him $150, registered him for a single class, and then allowed him to use all the university’s resources. He audited classes, but the professors kept his grades, and when they were able to find sufficient cash for him to pay for credits, they gave him a Master’s degree.

As a Master’s student, he taught, without speaking. His class began with 13 students - when an interpreter came in for the first session, most students wanted to leave. Two weeks later, everyone wanted into the classroom. His decision not to speak meant the students had to try to interpret what he was saying. In the process, they often said things he wasn’t trying to say, but should have been. “If you aren’t learning, you probably aren’t teaching very well.”

He walked next to the University of Wisconsin and spent two years writing on oil spills. No one cared, until the Exxon Valdez disaster, at which point his work became quite influential. Finally, his father began to understand his decisions: “Your sister says I should leave you alone - you seem to be doing better when you don’t talk.”

It took him seven years and one day to walk across the US. When he came to DC, he finally decided to speak. Why? He realized that the environment is us. We need to care for it, by caring for one another, and by listening to each other. To find ways to spread this message further, he decided he needed to speak. He became a UN goodwill ambassador and started working for the US Coast GUard, writing oil spill regulations.

After a year, he decided to go further, sailing to the Caribbean and to Venezuela. Something odd happened in Venezuela - he was walking through a prison town and was asked to show his passport. For reasons he didn’t understand, he refused, and walked off into the jungle. “I didn’t get shot. Instead, I said out loud, ‘Free at last, thank god almighty, I’m free at last’. And then I asked, ‘What was that about?’ It took a hundred miles to figure out -in my heart, in me, I had become a prisoner. I was a prisoner and I needed to escape. The prison I was in was that I don’t drive or use motorized vehicles.”

Every birthday, he asked himself about his silence, but didn’t ask about the decision just to use his feet. “I realized I have a responsibility to more than just me. I was going to have to change. And I was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who only just walked.”

It’s important to “leave the security of who we are and go to the place of who we are becoming. I encourage you to let yourself out of any prison you might find yourself in. Because we have to do something now. We have to change now.”

He ends his talk with five seconds of slience, then is given a standing ovation.

Singer, ukelele player and pianist Nellie McKay gives the impression of the fluttering femme fatale, but she’s got quite a voice. She’s received very warmly by some of the TED crowd, and sends others out of the room. She closes with “Clone Me” - “Mother Nature, don’t you call her phoney - she’s my clone me.”

This is the last TED in Monterey. (No word on whether they’re running away from BIL.) Next year, the conference takes place in Long Beach, and Chris Anderson explains that the desire is to bring everyone together in the same room. He throws the discussion open to the crowd, and the first question comes from Cameron Diaz, who welcomes everyone to her hometown, but wonders, “How are the seats?” Other questions ask about maintaining a simulcast room, possibly creating a room for parents with kids, asking about the ability to have side events at restaurants and elsewhere. There’s enthusiasm from the crowd in Aspen, who are watching this whole conference via simulcast. Anderson explains that he’s amazed that people are willing to spend $3000 to sit for four days in Aspen and watch television…

Could TED hold seats until much closer to the conference, instead of requiring people to sign up almost a year in advance to attend? Chris argues that TED is not a conference, but a community, and that participating the whole year is part of the fun. But he’s sensitive to the idea that some people may not like the Long Beach experience and will find a way to refund the fees for people disappointed by the new event.

Net advertising pioneer Andy Hobsbawm wants us to think creatively about climate change. “Science is clever, but creativity is more magical.” He’s working on an initiative called Do The Green Thing, which has released a very funny video designed to tempt us into walking more… perhaps in the hopes that we can get laid.

Al Gore’s amazing appearance at TED two years ago inspired a number of TED-related activities, and Hobsbawn’s is one of them. Gore takes the stage this morning and thanks half a dozen TED founders and speakers… ultimately blowing a kiss to Tom Rielly, a wonderful reference to Tom’s 2006 conference summary, where he made dozens of Brokeback Mountain jokes featuring himself and the former Veep.

Gore reminds us that “Optimism will not be created by belief alone” - we need to change behaviors as well. “But behavior can be misunderstood - I’m a big advocate of changing lightbulbs, buying hybrids, installing solar panels.” But it’s more important to become involved as citizens. “In order to solve the climate crisis, we need to solve the democracy crisis.”

“There’s a bridge between the climate crisis and the extreme poverty crisis around the world,” he tells us. As a young congressman, he studied nuclear arms control. “There are local battles, regional or theatre wars, and the rare but important world war.” Most environmental issues are local ones. There are a few regional ones, like acid rain. And there is a profound global one that require global movements to solve them. “Martin Luther King said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere.’ In our time, environmental crisis anywhere is a threat to environmental justice everywhere.”

Gore blames climate crisis, in no small part, on “a pattern of consumption that has morphed into overconsumption.” We can continue consumption, but we need less overconsumption… and we can’t build our economy around our capacity to overconsume.

He reminds us of some of the aspects of the current crisis, focusing on the panic on the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap. “The amount of ice cap that disappeared last year was the equivalent of the United States east of the Mississippi.” This disappearance is leading to houses falling into the sea in Newfoundland and Alaska, losing the ice they’ve historically rested on.

Putting global warming in cosmic terms, he shows us Earth and Venus. “Earth and Venus are exactly the same size. And they have exactly the same amount of carbon. On earth, over time, most has been leached out the atmospehre and deposited into the ground. On Venus, it’s mostly in the atmosphere.” And there’s a big difference - on Earth, the average temperature is 59F, while on Venus it’s 855F. And Venus is 3 times hotter than Mercury, which is closer to the sun.

But now over 65% of Americans believe that human activity is responsible for global warming. However, when given a list of challenges to confront, global warming is near the bottom. There’s a missing sense of urgency. He shows us a video that won a competition sponsored by CurrentTV:It features 1.2 billion elephants - symbolic of the amount of carbon dioxide we’re releasing - falling from the sky and crushing people. “It’s time to stop ignoring the 1.2 billion elephants in the room.” (No commentary on whether elephants are somehow symbolizing an American political party.) He tells us that the hundreds of questions asked on Sunday talk shows almost never address global climate change - two questions out of hundreds asked.

The US can’t solve this problem alone. But we need to recognize that “we have given developing nations the technologies and the ways of thinking that have created the crisis.” There’s a simple solution: a carbon tax. “We should tax carbon, not work. A tax on work was started by Bismark, and the world has changed a bit since then.” He believes we need to integrate responses to poverty with responses to the climate crisis.

One solution could be a proposed energy supergrid, a system that connects solar collectors in the developing world with the power grid in Europe. These sort of radical solutions are what are needed, not simply finding oil in new places. “If you’re investing in tar sands or shale oil, you’re investing in subprime carbon assets. You know, junkies find veins in their toes when those in their arms collapse.” He shows some of his own investments - geothermal, advanced photovoltaics, energy efficiency and conservation.

He points out that Australia has now ratified Kyoto - the US is now the only country that hasn’t. Support for Kyoto in Australia came, in part, from a horrible drought. He wonders if we named droughts whether we would have seen more support in the US given the drought we’re facing in the Southeast.

Our enemy now is distraction. He points to Jill Taylor’s speech - “she figured out how to save her life while distracted by her stroke. We need to fight the culture of distraction” and create a sense of cultural mission. He offers images of the US constitutional convention, movements for women’s rights and emancipation of slaves. He challenges us to be the people that are celebrated in song a thousand years from now.

Chris Anderson asks him his opinion on the current Presidental candidates on these issues. He points out that, while all three
have offered leadership, and all three are very different from the current administration, none is proposing truly radical steps like a moratorium on coal plants that can’t sequester their own carbon. He blames a media environment obsessed with Britney and Ana Nicole Smith for weaking our debate and points out that the presidential debates have been sponsored by the “Orwellian-sounding ‘clean coal’ - ‘Now, even lower emissions!’”

Dr. Paul Collier, an economist from Oxford, is a provocative thinker on one of the topics I’m most concerned about - why extreme poverty endures. He’s in a tough position, sandwiched between Ben Zander’s astoundingly popular performance last night, and a Nobel prize winner. “When you follow Ben Zander, good philosophy is to show a video. Then I discovered Al Gore is following me.” But he’s got fascinating ideas about some of the world’s hardest problems and captures the room’s attention quickly.

“How do we give credible hope to the billion poorest people in the world?” It has to be a combination of “compassion and enlightened self interst.” We need compassion, because a billion people are living in societies that have not offered credible hope. But we need enlightened self interest because “if economic divergence continues, combined with global integration, it will build a nightmare for our children.”

“It requires compassion to get ourselves started, and enlightened self-interest to get serious.”

What happened the last time we got serious? Well, it was the reconstruction of Europe after WWII via the Marshall Plan. Why did the US get serious? We were worried about the spread of Communism. So what did we do?
- Aid - “that was great, thanks.”
- Trade policy - “You ripped up your trade policy and reversed it. You stopped protectionism and brought Europe into global trading networks.”
- Security policy - from isolationism to troops in Europe for over 40 years
- “You tore up the eleventh commandment - national sovreignity.” Previously, the US was unwilling to join the League of Nations. But the US launched the UN, founded the IMF and encouraged the European Community. “This is still the waterfront of effective policy: aid, trade, security, governance.”

“Now the challenge is different - reversing the divergence of the bottom billion. Is this easier or harder?” Collier advises we focus on governance, because money isn’t the problem. There’s a huge natural resource boom taking place - Uganda and Ghana have both discovered oil, and Guinea has a huge discovery of iron. “These new revenue flows dwarf aid.” In Angola, new oil revenues are $50 billion a year - total aid flows to the bottom billion nations is $34 billion a year.

So how do we ensure these flows of money make life better? Historically, they don’t - economists talk of “the resource curse.” In the short term, oil makes everyone a bit better off… and in the long-term, countries tend to end up worse off. The critical issue, he tells us, is the initial level of governance. “If your governance is good enough, there’s no resource boom.” That’s happened in places like Norway, Australia, and Canada. “The resource curse is entirely confined to a threshhold of governance.” Nigeria is a great example of what can go wrong if you don’t have enough governance. You need a level of governance around where Portugal was in the 1980s.

So, is the bottom billion above or below that threshhold? Collier hoped that the spread of democracy would help some of these nations. “And democracy has sigificant effects. But they’re adverse effects - democracies make even more of a mess of these booms than autocracies.” While Collier tells us he was tempted to give up his research at this point, he made a critical discovery. Democracies involve both elections and checks and balances. “It’s the electoral competition that does damage, but strong checks and balances make booms good.” Unfortunately, new democracies don’t have these checks and balances - they’re “instant democracies”.

There’s now an intense struggle to bring in these checks and balances. We need international standards, voluntary ones. He refers to resource extraction transparency standards that are currently being pushed in the developing world. Nigerian reformers printed some of these standards in local newspapers - there was so much interest that circulation in newspapers spiked.

What are these standards? Instead of letting an oil company fly in and meet with a minister, making a deal that’s good for the company, good for the minister, and not good for the country, why not have transparent auctions? The British treasury estimated that the rights to the 3G mobile spectrum were worth $2 billion - it sold at auction for $20 billion. “If the British treasury got it that wrong. imagine how the government of Sierra Leone will do.” And so the government of Sierra Leone immediately asked for help with running resource auctions.

Collier tells us that “unless we have an informed society, politicans will get away with gestures.” To build an informed citizenry, Collier “broke all the professional rules and wrote an Economics book you could read on a beach.” He tells us that a blogger once commented “Collier is not charismatic. But his arguments are compelling.” And that’s why, “if you agree with that comment, you realize that I need you.”

I disagree with that blogger. Collier may have been the best speaker at TED this year, despite some seriously stiff competition - powerful ideas presented compactly and compellingly. Read the damn book.

Entrepreneur Ben Kaufman and his company, Kluster, have been working almost as hard as Bruno and I. To showcase their online collaboration software, they’ve decided to brainstorm, design and launch a new product within 72 hours. 2700 people participated from around the world, and decided to create an educational game. Online, they brainstormed the rules and solicited names and logos. It launched on stage today - “Over There: The Game of Social Awareness”.

The story is not the game itself, but the collaborative platform that makes it possible - it’s a very pretty Ruby on Rails application that will be launching shortly. It’s pretty ballsy to agree to design something in three days with alpha software in front of one of the world’s toughest audiences. (Disclosure: my friend and former business partner, Bo Peabody, is one of the backers of Kluster.)

Research engineer Johnny Lee had a cool idea - he wanted to use the Wii remote, which contains a pretty high-quality infared camera, to build some innovative new products. His first demo is an interactive whiteboard, built for $50. It involves putting a Wii remote on a projector, an infared LED in a dry-erase marker, and projecting a desktop onto the screen. The Wii tracks the pen, and allows the impressions to be made on the whiteboard and on the computer screen. “It provides about 80% of the functionality of professional solutions for 1% of the cost.” He’s not kidding about the functionality - with two pens, it supports multitouch, like the Perceptive Pixel devices that are being shown off at the conference. The software to support this use has been downloaded half a million times, and has become quite popular in underresourced public schools.

His second demo is using the Wii remote for head tracking. Put it on your head, load his software, and you can produce a stunning 3D effect that moves as your field of vision moves. This is possible with about $10 of extra hardware added to a Wii - Electronic Arts is already talking about incorporating it into games.

Lee ends with a quick plug for YouTube in sharing these sorts of ideas. “I’m just a guy in a lab with some cool stuff. I put it out on YouTube and within days, I’m getting videos from other people with their own versions of the tool.” He gets a standing ovation from the TED crowd.

Chris Abani wasn’t the last speaker of the day, but he kicks so much ass, I’m blogging him last.

Chris Anderson introduces him, saying, “Ten minutes into student production Abani was participating in, the soldiers came in. They gave him a statment to sign. He could either confess to treason, punishable by death, or he could send his classmates to prison. He’d already been to prison twice for a novel he’d written. So he signed the statement, and went to jail for the third time, this time to sit on death row.” Chris waits a beat. “He’s got material to write about.”

Abani tells us that when he grew up in Nigeria in the 1980s, a whole generation was protesting military dictatorship, not just him. Their protests taught him that the world is never saved in grand gestures, buth through small, soft acts of compassion. He tells us the South African word “Ubuntu” - the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back to me. We tend to feel like our humanity is transparent most of the time, like a window - sometimes we don’t notice the reflection until we catch an insect or a smudge on it.

He tells us of his mother, an English woman who was 5′2″ and incredibly feisty. Before she passed away she visited Abani in LA, and was disappointed by Malibu, he says. “Chad the surfer dude told us about the specials - it’s this great salmon in pistacio with a wasabi glaze, dude. My mother said, ‘What language is he speaking?’ and I said, ‘English, Mom.’ She said, ‘Oh these americans, we gave them a language, why don’t they use it?’”

His mother converted from Church of England to Catholicism to marry his father. And that’s how she found herself teaching the Billings ovulation method to Ibo women. Unfortunately her Ibo wasn’t very good, so she took Abani along to translate. He was seven. He points out that Ibo women never discussed these matters with their own husbands, so they found it a little odd to have a boy asking them, “how swolen is your vulva?” His father was afraid the experience would make him too feminine, but his mother declared, “Anything a man can do, I can fix.”

He, his siblings and his mother fled the Biafran war, travelling from camp to camp, fending off soliders who want to take his nine year old brother as a boy soldier. His mother didn’t cry that whole year. But as they were flying to England, stopping in Lisbon, his mother was stopped by a woman who wanted to know why her clothes were so threadbare. She explained their story, and the woman emptied her suitcases, giving the family all the clothes and toys she carried. Her mother wept then, saying, “the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will not stitch you.”

His father stayed behind. And when they returned to the village, each year, they sang the names of the war dead when planting rice. And when they harvested, they sang the names of children who had been born that year. “In this way, the women enacted a lot of transformation.”

“Before the genocide in Rwanda, the word for rape and for marriage was the same. But now it’s the women who are rebuilding that nation.” Under Apartheid in South Africa, the government buildings had no women’s toilets. “Apartheid was the matter of men.”

To become an Ibo man, men are taught to be men in ways that means they are not women, which mostly means killing animals. “Hey, it’s an agricultural lifestyle - you can’t go to Whole Foods.” As a young man, he was told to kill a goat. He brough a friend, a former child soldier named Emmanuel. His friend saw him, unable to kill the goat “which had eyes like a child, and bleated like a human being.” And then Emmanuel covered the mouth and the eyes of the goat, allowing him to kill it. “To someone who’s seen so much, this must seem like such a quotidian experience, but he found a way to help me. He never made fun of me. He just said, ‘It will always be difficult, but if you cry like this every time, you will die of heartbreak.”"

Abani’s birthday is two days after Christmas, so he rarely got presents. A visiting priest asked him where his birthday present was, so his father, embarrased, sent the boy upstairs, saying, “Take one thing from my suitcase and that will be your present.” his father figured he’d choose a book; he chose an inflatable sheep, and carried it downstairs, “with my finger where it shouldn’t be.” His mother was agitated, but the priest said, “It’s alright, Daphne - I’m Scottish.”

As the room stops roaring from that joke, he tells us about his cellmate in prison that last time. His name was John James and he was 14 years old. He was being held for ransom, because someone in his family had committed a crime. And he was a comics nut, who had smuggled a copy of X-Men and one of Spiderman with him. In the evenings, he taught the hard men on death row to read - “There were these hardened criminals reciting’ ‘Take that, Spidey.’”

John James didn’t really understand death row and believed they’d get out. “They killed him. They handcuffed him to a chair, nailed his penis to a table, and let him bleed to death. That’s how I ended up in solitary, because I made my feelings known.”

The Ibo, he tells us, would build their own gods. “If the god became unruly and asked for human sacrifice, the Ibos would destroy the god. This is how they came to reclaim their humanity.”

“Every day, we are building gods that have gone rampant. We should start knocking them down and forgetting their names.”