On housing innovation in New Orleans

Though a bit too focused on Brad Pitt, The Atlantic had a spot on housing in New Orleans this week. Check it out!

"If you look at the way ants behave when they’re gathering food, it looks like the stupidest, most irrational thing you’ve ever seen—they’re zigzagging all over the place, they’re bumping into other ants. You think, ‘What a mess! This is never going to amount to anything,’” says Michael Mehaffy, the head of the Sustasis Foundation, which studies urban life and sustainability and has worked with neighborhood organizations here. “So it’s easy to look at New Orleans at the grassroots level and wonder, What’s going on here?’ But if you step back and look at the big picture, in fact it’s the most efficient pattern possible, because all those random activities actually create a very efficient sort of discovery process.”

Actually, sounds a lot like how I spent my last two years.

Louisiana in the Economist

Two of my favorite things come together in this cautiously optimistc Economist article about Louisiana. Guess they must be reading my hopeful blog posts.

Hat tip to Dunc, the source of most of my interesting news links.

Today's homework

If you work in international relations, development or health, you probably have written up some glossy report you are convinced no one will ever read. Today, I will dive into that murky world of readerless reports. On the list:

• Asset-Based Approaches to Poverty Reduction in a Global Context (Brookings)
• The Future of Globalization (CG Researcher)
• The Final Report of the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice (The Earth Institute/MacArthur Foundation)
• Cuba's Future (CQ Press)
• Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out (The Annie E. Casey Foundation)
• The United States and Mexico: Towards a Strategic Partnership (The Wilson Center)

Also on the list: catching up on my brother's blog and finishing Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan. Not a bad day, I tell you what.

Homework stinks

Rather than researching graduate schools, I spent this morning browsing Holly's photos from Ecuador. Like Vandy at the bottom of the SEC, the two emails inviting me to view Holly's Picasa albums have held up the bottom of my inbox for months. A couple of my (shareable) favorites:

Trying to help Johana with her math homework. Note iPod headphones on the table; for a couple of days, she was able to focus while listening to Bach's cello suites.

One particularly colorful neighborhood in Quito
Isaac Suntaxi Suntagsíg, who referred to me affectionately as gringuito, or "Little White Boy"

"Pilsener - The beer we will never have to drink again" - Dunc

Fun stuff I learned in Manhattan

In New York last week, I attended a social entrepreneurship conference called "The Feast" (for a layman's definition of social entrepreneurship, see below). There were lots of exciting speakers, fancy videos, etc. Some bits that were interesting enough to copy down:

• In deciding what to be and what sort of organizations to build, we can make one slight but game-changing syntactical shift. Instead of trying to be the best ______ in the world, we should strive to be the best ______ for the world. Think for a moment about the difference between a firm being "The best investment bank in the world" and "The best investment bank for the world." (From Uffe Elbaek, the founder of some project in Denmark I don't understand).
  
• Make the smallest investment possible to achieve your goals; make bets that give you room to maneuver; bet big when you're happy with either outcome. In addition to making better poker players, professional poker player Annie Duke suggested applying basic game theory to the rest of life's conundrums: kids, families, jobs, and the like. For example: if you're taking six children to Disney World and one of them is acting up, a threat to cancel the trip will prove wholly ineffective. The kid knows you won't follow through, you know you won't follow through, and you've left yourself little room to maneuver.
• Keep your eye on the periphery. I've been long convinced that tomorrow's solutions to global problems won't come from existing businesses, governments, nonprofits or news agencies but will come from unexpected places. Some guy involved in the health care debate (whose name I didn't catch) put this much more eloquently.
  
• The food debate in the US is as much about social justice as it is about efficiency and competitiveness. Half of today's black and Latino kids will develop diabetes over the course of their lifetime, according to the boss of Slow Food USA. A fifth of our greenhouse gas emissions come from agricultural production. And "if we really wanted to manufacture a system that would lead to a health care crisis with real staying power, we would design something that looks a lot like our school lunch program."
  
• Success in entrepreneurship comes from deep expertise and commitment over time. Yeesh. Guess it's time to get back to school.

One more thought, this from a street musician in Grand Rapids:

"If you're a fan of what works, you become a student of the world pretty quick."

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*Social entrepreneurship, for those of you unfamiliar with or skeptical of the buzzword, is the application of resources designed for entrepreneurs to social ventures: nonprofits, socially minded businesses, etc.