Central African Republic

The Central African Republic (CAR) was third in 2016 on the Fragile State Index published by the Fund for Peace. The twelves indicators used are demographic pressure (too many people v resources), refugees/internally displaced people, group grievances, human flight/brain drain, uneven economic development, poverty/economic decline, state legitimacy (e.g. corruption), public service, human rights/rule of law, security apparatus/use of force, factionised elites, and external interventions. 

The area was one of the earliest mixing point of the expanding Bantu, Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic speaking groups. The expansions were slow, with lots of space and a history of farming people settled, grew a little, pushed on a little, probably (we think) fought a little. 16/17th slave trading and colonialism sped things up. Kingdoms rose up off the back of trade, but you wouldn't have wanted to be close to enemies or you became the product. The 'civilising mission' that came with colonialism and the end of slavery didn't mean the end of forced labour (e.g. mandatory cotton cultivation and building of railways). The first of (or continuation of) several forceful take-overs followed 1960 independence. Despite an abundance of natural resources, CAR remains one of the poorest countries in the world.

Fragile States

Bouar Megaliths - date back to 2700-3500 BCE

Libya

Pax Romana described the peace in the period when the Roman Empire had a monopoly on violence incorporating the various ethnic groups it had swallowed. When the empire broke apart, St Augustine was a Berber Christian Philosopher who influenced the idea of the Church as a spiritual City of God, as opposed to the cities of men. The same idea Muslim's have of the ummah - a supra-national community. Libya was filled by Berbers, Phoenician trading posts, Greek Colonists, Egyptians and Carthaginians before becoming part of the Roman Empire. The Spanish, Ottomans and Italians also had turns. It became an independent kingdom in 1951 until a military coup ousted King Idris in 1969 and a NATO supported Rebel uprising in 2011 toppled Gaddafi. Civil War continues with attempts to form a unity government. 

Libyan Civil War

Not Normal

'Never forget the six-foot man who drowned crossing the river that was five feet deep on average' (Howard Marks)

The average actually tells us very little about something. The average family in the UK has 1.7 children. In other words, there is no average family. Enter the mathematicians and statisticians and you get various curves and distributions to describe things in more detail. Something like a map of the river that would have been useful for the six-foot man.

The most basic of all of these river maps is the normal distribution, otherwise known as the Bell Curve for obvious reasons. It is amazing how many things are distributed in roughly this shape. So much so that with a few other points (called moments), statisticians can give pretty good maps. You can make very good predictions about what is going to happen if you know how tall and how wide the bell is, and whether it is leaning to one side or the other.

Harriete Estel Berman Bell Sculpture

Unless you get 'Fat Tails'. In the sculpture above, the tails are the white one on the left and the black one on the right. These tails are outliers. Normally, there aren't very many of them and they don't tell us very much. Normally they aren't fat. Roger Federer is an outlier. He doesn't tell us very much about the normal experience of playing tennis. What we are normally far more interested in is what is going to happen to most people. You can't plan your life around being Roger Federer.

A Fat Tail is when the Federer's matter because there are lots of them. Then there are game changing events where the distribution doesn't actually matter. Nassim Taleb calls these single events which change everything 'Black Swans'. It doesn't matter how many white swans you see, you can't claim that all swans are white. The absence of evidence of a black swan isn't evidence of absence of black swans. One Black Swan changes your whole view.

Normally we build up our view of the world from what we see. We watch, we learn, and then when we think we understand, we act. This works very well when the underlying map of the river is reliable. This normally works very well. When there are Black Swans however, all the information that matters isn't how high the curve is, whether it is bending to the side, or how thick it is. What matters is the Black Swan.

Insurance works on normal things. When they happen often and predictably. Then you can spread the risk amongst lots of people so what you do matters more than luck. Insurance doesn't work for 'Acts of God'. Things like Earthquakes, Hurricanes and huge disasters crashes. They change everything.

There is a big fight going on between Steven Pinker and Nassim Taleb over whether the world is indeed getting better. Pinker has written a wonderful book called 'The Better Angels of our Nature' which talks about the bumpy progress of mankind in creating a more peaceful world. Max Roser has created many visual graphs on OurWorldinData.org showing how much better life is today in many, many ways. Taleb thinks both of them basically don't understand statistics. He believes Peace is a 'Fat Tailed Distribution' and that we are basically getting much better at wiping ourselves out in some tragic disaster.

'As technology increases, misunderstanding of ruin by a small segment of the population is sufficient to guarantee ruin' Taleb

Knowing you can't insure for something doesn't mean you can't do anything about it. It just means you can't avoid it hurting. You can't insure against the emotional side of a break-up, a divorce, a death, being fired etc. You can plan around the things that normally happen, and you can build resilience around the Black Swans. You can wrap your head and heart around worst case scenarios and try think of ways to not let them destroy you. To get back up.

I think Pinker and Roser are right. I do think the world is getting better and we should celebrate that. I also think that Taleb is right. We should always think about risk more deeply than the surface things we observe. A full picture of risk can't be reduced to a number or a map. The truth is always more complicated than that. 

We can plan and do. But things can happen that change everything. We should be careful and we should invest in our ability to get back up. Being insured and investing in resilience are different things. 

Correction:

Hugh Du Toit correctly points out that Black Swans don't make tails Fat. They make the whole distribution irrelevant. There can be fat tail and long tails. With a bunch of outliers still being part of the distribution, but very important. A Black Swan makes the observations largely irrelevant. I changed 'Nassim Taleb calls these Fat Tails 'Black Swans' to 'Then there are game changing events where the distribution doesn't actually matter. Nassim Taleb calls these single events that change everything 'Black Swans''. Thanks Hugh.

Together, Forgive, Change, Listen

Yesterday I got to tell my 6 year old niece and 3 year old nephew the story of four great men.

Once upon a time there was a man named Albert Lutuli. He lived at a time when lots of people got treated very badly. They were all very worried about their own problems but didn't see that other people were having problems too. Albert and his friends were part of  a group that brought all the people who were being treated badly together so that they could try talk. He was a teacher but he became a politician to try help people sort out the way they were forced to live separately. He was given a prize for helping people solve problems without fighting.

The next man's name is a little funny like a ballet dress. He is Desmond Tutu. He always makes people laugh and is bursting with joy. He is very good at talking to people and helping them deal with tough times. He also fought against the people who were trying to stop people from living, working and playing together. He also did it by asking them questions that were hard to answer without them realising they were being silly. He also asks people hard questions when they are normally good because sometimes we don't know we are doing things that we shouldn't. He thinks we are all really goodies and can all be better and his laugh is always just around the corner for those who say sorry. He also won the prize.

The next two men got the prize together. The first one got called by two letters instead of a full name. He was known as F.W. and was in charge of the group of people that were being naughty. He started to speak to the fourth man, and realised that the country he loved needed to change. To stop being naughty, he had to do some important things. It wasn't easy and not all of his friends agreed with him. Some wanted to carry on being naughty. Even the goodies thought that maybe they couldn't trust him. With the help of the fourth man, he did help make South Africa better so that everybody could live and play together.

Sometimes we are lucky enough to get a very special person come and help us when we really need it. It had been a very long time of people being naughty. Lots of people had tried to get everyone to play together but it just wasn't working. One of those people was named Nelson Mandela, but people liked calling him Tata Madiba which is a name for a grandfather and a name that tells him how much people loved him. They loved him so much because he was put in a prison by the baddies for a very, very long time. 27 years. But when he came out, instead of being cross and telling everyone to fight, he tried to get everyone to work together. Fighting doesn't solve anything. Madiba would talk to all the baddies. He would listen to them properly so he could understand them. That was the only way they could become goodies.

There are still lots of people fighting, but if we come together like Lutuli, laugh & forgive like Tutu, change like F.W. and listen like Madiba, there are no problems we can't solve.

A statue of the four South African Nobel Peace Laureates 

Living Better

We are watching. I had a discussion with a friend recently about whether education was a force for peace. Education in my view is not simply teaching someone a specific vocation. Education is at the heart of how we improve. It is the sharing of a better way. There is something that drives us forward. Collectively as we have learnt about each other and the world, we have learnt to engage with people we don't understand. Power over people has been ripped from hereditary families and fewer people have died in games of thrones.  The power of governments has then been reduced by putting in place checks and balances. The power of majorities to impose themselves on minorities is waning. We are treating each other better. We are living better. That is what I think education is.

Education is part of why reality is less of a Game of Thrones

Part of our bumpy long term improvement comes from transparency. Information is becoming harder to hide. In George Orwell's 1984, we had the image of a Government who is always watching. Technology is bringing about that transparency, but instead of Big Brother - we are watching. It is becoming more and more difficult for those who cling to ideas that prevent the world moving forward from doing so. I found the clip below very inspiring. The simple idea that you will not get away with it has to impact behaviour and make it far harder to conspire. The gains and rewards start to slip away in comparison to the chance of getting caught.

Journey of Discovery

Knowing someone who is a 100 year old chain smoker does not prove that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. The world is mostly random. A magical sprinkle that mixes things up just to make it interesting. I like to think that things don't happen out of malice or good will, they just happen. We make the best of them. That doesn't mean we can't work to put the odds in our favour.

I used to believe that smart people couldn't be racist, sexist, homophobic or bigoted. The truth will out. Learning about Wouter Basson made me doubt this. Here was an incredibly intelligent man who had also been an agent of evil. The truth is that things are more complex than that. What we believe and how we feel is made up of so many parts we don't understand. Who we interact with. How we react to situation. What random sprinkle happens to dust us. We like stories, and the stories of evil people who were really smart may tempt us to believe that education doesn't help. I don't believe that is the case.

I had always understood the Nobel prize to be awarded for a significant contribution to humanity. I knew of the problem that awarding it late in someones career could sometimes give them additional notoriety and a louder microphone at a point when their thoughts had veered off track. When their thoughts harmed more than helped. When Obama won it raised a new point for me. Sometimes the award was made in hope rather than in recognition. It was an investment in promise. That felt less comfortable for me... but the award isn't democratic, and there is no reason it should be. It is unashamedly in favour of certain principles and the committees who award it go after supporting those in the way they feel best. Still, I am not sure I would have done the same.

Then this year Malala won. I didn't know much about her but the cause she stands for is one I care about. I do believe in education as a tool for peace. Despite Mr Basson, I do think education is a powerful tool against the cancer of ignorance. I also think that a society which denies girls access to education is unacceptable. The controversy here is that she is 17. Again, the Nobel Prize seems to be an investment in potential. Is it an unfair burden to place on someone so young? Well, after reading her book I think it is very clearly a cause she is willing and able to commit to.

The book makes it clear that her ideas are not completely formed. It makes it clear that she is still young, but she is hungry. Her thoughts will develop. Her mind will mature. She will iron out contradictions. She will be embarrassed about some things she thought. Anyone who learns anything of value will feel the same. She will debate. She will read. She will listen. That is what education is, and I for one am glad that the random sprinkle left this symbol, not of an extraordinary girl, but as a symbol of every girl and of every boy and of a love of learning.

Congratulations Malala and good luck on your journey of discovery.