Boutique Simplicity

During the mid-nineties, in another milder recession, a colleague asked me if I would be downsizing - the term for an earlier version of what we call "simplicity" these days. I had been struggling to make a career change to academia, with only part-time and contract work for a few years - after the years of having even less as a student.

I was poor, not making enough to save anything to support myself through the summers with no work (and being overqualified for anyone to hire me for anything else).

I responded to the question, saying that I would have to "upsize" first in order to fully embrace the experience of downsizing. I wouldn't be enjoying the simplicity of giving up a European vacation, driving instead to a rented cabin on a lake for a week. I had no car and was worried about paying the rent on my tiny apartment for the summer.

Only the privileged and comfortable people can ask such questions. When people are truly "downsized," they have not much to give up.

Charlotte Allen writes about simplicity in an article in In Character - "Not Really Simple" - in which she is funny, frustrated and satirical about the designer simplicity movement and some of the nonsense that occurs.

Hunting wild boar in the hills above San Francisco in order to have a primal connection with one's food is one such bit of nonsense; any other type of hunting would make the simplicity set shudder:

Hunting is usually taboo in the simplicity movement because it involves guns (hated by the professionally simple) and exploitation of animals (ditto). However, if you're hunting boar in the upscale hills ringing the San Francisco Bay so as to furnish yourself a "locally grown" boar paté, as does Berkeley professor and simplicity movement guru Michael (The Omnivore's Dilemma) Pollan, or perhaps to experience an "epiphany," as another well-fixed Bay Area boar hunter recently told the New York Times, you're doing a fine job of returning to the simple life...But if you're a laid-off lumber mill worker bagging possums in Eutaw Springs, S.C., because your main primal connection with food is that you don't have much money to spend on it, you're an unsophisticated redneck.

Allen takes potshots at this kind of simplicity that calls for not a little wealth in its afficionados.

One anecdote is particularly telling. Walmart has recently introduced a line of organic produce which has drawn the ire of some shoppers at small markets. They worry that by making organic produce more readily available to those with lower incomes, Walmart may drive their boutique markets out of business - specifically THEIR boutique markets.

I don't know any specs on the Walmart produce - where it comes from or its carbon footprint, etc. - so there may well be room for criticism , but the point of the story highlights for Allen the main problem with what I call boutique simplicity:

The problem with the simplicity movement is that its proponents mistake simplicity, which is an aesthetic lifestyle choice, for humility, which is a genuine virtue. Humility is an honest acknowledgment of one's limitations and lowliness in the great scheme of things and a realization that power over other human beings is a dangerous thing, always to be exercised with utmost caution. The Amish, as well as monks, Eastern and Western, cultivate humility because they know they have a duty toward what is larger than themselves...For humble people, their own happiness or other personal feelings are secondary.

Simplicity as Allen points out is an aesthetic lifestyle choice for cool rich people. Real simplicity practiced by the truly humble involves everyone on the planet and the planet, too.

What a simple idea - everyone should have enough healthful food to eat. Methinks boar pate is not the answer!

Money Only Talks; Micro-Credit Sings and Dances

The Grameen Bank  may look like a conventional bank, but the resemblance ends at the front door. Unlike most banks, owned by rich men, the Grameen is owned by poor women. The bank does not take its clients to court for failing to pay, and interest can never exceed the amount of the original loan.

Economist Professor Muhammad Yunus began the bank as a village project  in Bangladesh in 1976. It became a formal bank in 1983 and has helped millions of poor people.

The Grameen bank lends money to the rural poor, mostly women, without collateral and with terms that would make a conventional banker faint. The women use their loans for self-employment based on their existing skills.

They weave, make mats, do wood and bamboo work, fatten cows and goats, and do embroidery. (The photos are from the bank's gallery.)

The bank is successful. In 27 years as a formal bank, Grameen has made a profit in all but three years. Since 1995, it has taken no money from donors and has been self-reliant.

The repayment rate is 99%!

Professor Yunus believes that micro-credit can go a long way towards eliminating poverty - at least by half by 2015.

So far, the results support this claim:

Grameen Bank has today over 7.5 million borrowers. 65 percent of them managed to clearly improve their socio-economic conditions and lifted themselves out of extreme poverty.

Professor Yunus has written two books about the bank and his theories of a more broadly defined capitalism - Banker to the Poor and The Poor Pay Back.

Professor Yunus and the Grameen bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Yunus won the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.

The bank's website has a wealth of information about its history, principles for lending, FAQs, and results.

I would like to invite Professor Yunus to my soiree.

A Wise Woman

Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist specializing in infectious disease. She writes about, cares about, and advises about HIV around the globe. Her blog covers things sexual and scientific.

Her book The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of Aids (released today) outlines the ways we fail to do what it takes to end the Aids epidemic.

She says that political correctness about sexual practices is killing people.

Agencies and governments don't want to label common sexual practices, especially in Africa - like multiple partners - as bad for fear of offending!

Pisani also concludes that we have to begin thinking of this epidemic as being about sex, and not predominantly about poverty and gender.

Pisani discusses her book in the Times Online. And Alex Renton reviews it in the Times Online. She makes sense, plus she knows several languages and has a degree in Classical Chinese from Oxford and was for a time a correspondent for Reuters. Wise and interesting.

I would like to invite Pisani to my soiree.