What’s unethical about child sponsorship?

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A family with children sponsored through Compassion International. Photo courtesy of Compassion International.

A family with children sponsored through Compassion International. Photo courtesy of Compassion International.

The BBC reported yesterday on a study by researchers at the University of San Francisco showing that Ugandan children sponsored through Compassion International have significantly better lives than those who are not sponsored.

According to a release from the University of Chicago Press Journal of Political Economy, “the study finds that international sponsorship increased the probability of a child completing secondary school by 27%–40%, completing a university education by 50%–80%, and obtaining a white-collar job as an adult by about 35%.”

According to Bruce Wydick, one of the researchers quoted in the release:

“Too often we have focused our development efforts on provision for human beings rather than the development of human beings. Although child sponsorship does indeed provide help with school fees, access to health care, and other tangible benefits, Compassion’s particular approach focuses on the more holistic development of the child, such as development of self-esteem, aspirations, spiritual and ethical values. In follow-up studies involving currently sponsored children, we measure very large impacts in these areas, which we believe play a significant role in what we observe in the difference in adult life outcomes.”

The release goes on mention aspirations, goals, and self-esteem as underestimated factors of economic development. The BBC also reported this argument, as well as that “the spiritual aspect of sponsorship might be intrinsic to transforming children’s lives.”

So what’s unethical about child sponsorship?

According to the article’s lede, the research “has reopened a long and fierce debate over whether this hugely popular form of giving to the poor is either ethical or effective.”

Well, we’re beginning to have some facts about effectiveness, and it’s looking good for Compassion. So what about ethics?

The BBC cites and quotes several individuals, including a woman who grew up as a sponsored child, who believe sponsorship programs have a positive effect on the child and his or her community. The article includes no voices arguing that such sponsorships are unethical. In fact all we get are the lede (claiming that there is a fierce debate), a paragraph in the middle of the story referencing “critics of this form of child sponsorship,” and the last sentence, stating “this issue will still be hotly contested”.

Now, there may actually be ethical problems of the sort briefly mentioned in the article:

But critics of this form of child sponsorship argue it is unfair and discriminatory; while one child is helped others in the community are left behind.

But we wouldn’t know. There isn’t any background on the “fierce debate”. No critical voices are quoted. If this were part of an ongoing news trend, this might be forgiven, but the average person isn’t up-to-date on the fierce debates over child sponsorship. The only information we’re given is that many groups, such as World Vision, have moved away from individual child sponsorship to broader development projects. But just because many groups have moved away from a particular type of project doesn’t mean that project is unethical.

Most of the story is good. It reports the facts found by the researchers and quotes some relevant individuals. But framing the story as being about the ethics of child sponsorship feels contrived.

One might wonder if this is religiously motivated, or more properly, motivated because of the religious nature of Compassion’s programs. The article does mention that “Compassion has often been criticised for proselytising, with its sponsored children being selected by local churches and given an evangelical Christian education.” But I don’t really think this is the motivation for the attempted ethics angle. The same paragraph goes on to read, “But Dr Wydick found the spiritual aspect of sponsorship might be intrinsic to transforming children’s lives.”

All in all, it’s a good, interesting story that is unfortunately poorly framed. The outcomes of the Compassion programs are, as the researchers mention, quite amazing, and this research is an important step in the validation (or invalidation) of such programs.

Kids Who Don’t Need Nature

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Robertson Nature Reserve

As I was listening to Q with Jian Ghomeshi last night, I realized how fortunate I was to live near a park. Ghomeshi’s guest, David Suzuki is a Canadian environmentalist, who is starting the 30×30 Challenge – an attempt to get people, both children and adults, to spend thirty minutes outside each day for thirty days. Suzuki cited research that indicates kids spend on average six minutes a day outside and six hours a day inside on computers, TVs, and phones.

As Ghomeshi countered, many parents are afraid to let their kids out of their sight because something might happen to them. In fact, earlier this week I heard a guest on a public radio show urge parents to never let their kids out of their sight. What a tragic comment.

Suzuki, rightly I think, said that we are not creating spaces that are kid-friendly, and that parents are too concerned that their kids not be “bored,” a problem compounded by scheduled activities and leisure time. Neighborhoods are not kid friendly because too often they are made up of huge houses, and older people, grandparents, are not the eyes and ears of the street. To send a kid outside to play is to send them out into a de-peopled suburban wasteland. Meanwhile houses are big enough and families small enough that kids aren’t shoed outside because they are physically in the way. And whatever will the kid do outside? (I never got bored with a good pile of sand or dirt, and a running stream could keep me busy for hours.)

I realize that things have changed, people are busier, and things are not always safe. But, as Suzuki said, we need the outdoors. We need to realize we’re connected to it. Growing up indoors leads one to not realize how basic and important nature is to life. Even with all the calls to be “green” and “earth friendly,” what will happen when a generation of kids grow up who think, even unconsciously, that they don’t need nature?

The Death of Magazines and Rise of Personal Bubbles?

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Andrew Sullivan, of The Dish, writes about the changing face of blogging. He makes the point that blogs are not dying, but he also makes a point about magazines, which he says are dying:

When every page in a magazine can be detached from the others, when readers rarely absorb a coherent assemblage of writers in a bound paper publication, but pick and choose whom to read online where individual stories and posts overwhelm any single collective form of content, the magazine as we have long known it is effectively over.

This is an age of supposed empowerment, where readers are empowered by technology to read what interests them. If you don’t like it, or aren’t interested, simply move on. While this aspect isn’t vastly different from the print age (if you don’t like the magazine, you can put it down), what is vastly different is the incredible quantity of information at your disposal. I wonder, and this might not be so, if it isn’t becoming increasingly easy to get stuck in a huge bubble of your own interests and shared viewpoints.

Does this stifle curiosity? Does it diminish the likelihood of picking up a magazine because of an article on, say, bioethics, and finding within its pages a whole realm of other interests? Or is the web, with it’s cross-linking and easy accessibility actually improve this factor?

NSFWCORP, Paywalls, and The Future of Journalism, Possibly in Print.

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A company with a particularly backwards and innovative approach to modern publishing is the NSFWCORP, tagline “the future of journalism (with jokes).” Editor in Chief Paul Carr thinks they’ve found a solution to the porous paywall problem.

The problem, if you don’t know, stems from the fact that publishers have found that they can’t make enough money from web advertisements to sustain the publication. So they are learning that they must charge their readers to read their articles. If you implement a hard paywall, only subscribers can read. Nobody outside can really discover articles, they aren’t usually available in search engines, and most problematic for the modern web, they aren’t shareable. You lock a lot of people out.

So porous or soft paywalls let people in to a limited extent. The reader may get to read, say, five articles a month. After that, they have to pay for a subscription to read more. The problems are that a) people will go to the competitor’s completely free site rather than pay, b) these systems are easy to cheat (just delete your cookies, usually), and c) according to Carr, they penalize devoted readers while giving away their product to casual browsers.

Carr doesn’t think porous paywalls are the answer. Instead, he has a full paywall around NSFWCORP‘s content. You get to read the first couple paragraphs of an article, and that’s it, unless you become a subscriber. No five-article limit here. No try-before-you-buy. No sharing. Actually, yes, sharing.

NSFWCORP may have the solution to The Magazine‘s sharing problem. Originally, readers couldn’t share The Magazine‘s content because of a hard paywall, and none of the articles could become popular and go viral. They implemented a porous paywall so that paying readers could share articles with friends, who could then read the article as one of their free articles for that month.

Readers of NSFWCORP can “unlock” an article with a link to share it. These links are good for 48 hours and readers can unlock ten articles a month. I think this is brilliant. It empowers readers – the paying, invested readers – to share content that they think is important, content they know has limited availability, and is therefore, in some sense, premium. Forty-eight hours is about the lifespan of a link in social media and the blogosphere. It maintains the value of the product while increasing shareability – a key concern for modern media outlets.

The other awesome thing about NSFWCORP: They started out as all-digital, but a couple months ago they relaunched with a print magazine. Talk about going against the trend. (I wonder who else is doing that. Hmmmm.)

A long excerpt from Carr’s worthwhile blog post:

For a print publication to thrive today, it has to stop trying to replicate a web experience — snappy boxouts! 140 character features! SEO-tested headlines! HASHTAGS ON THE GODDAMN COVER — and start focussing on what paper does best. That means having the confidence (and budget) to run long pieces of journalism dealing with important or difficult subjects. It means investing in great, big art. It means pull-outs and fold-outs and other tactile tricks that just aren’t possible on screen. It means making a product that will remain relevant far beyond the lifespan of a trending topic. There’s a reason magazine nerds pine for the days of Spy or 1970s era Rolling Stone, or Ramparts or Scanlan’s Monthly: picking up a single back issue of any of those publications provides ten times more pleasure than a week spent on Buzzfeed.

On the flipside, it means being able to charge a meaningful cover price for a meaningful product. People expect to pay for print, in a way they don’t expect to pay for online.

The Magazine. (An arrogant title for a magazine, no?)

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(Part I in a series of reflections on the direction of modern textual media.)

What is the future of textual media? The decline and fall of daily newspapers and weekly news magazines is widely heralded, if overestimated. Tablets such as the iPad and the Kindle seem to be overtaking printed books. Blogs and online magazine articles seem to be getting shorter and shorter, the comments sections getting longer and longer. People are no longer willing to pay to read.

Or are they?

One of the hippest new publications is an all-digital biweekly that goes by the arrogantly definitive title, The Magazine. The brainchild of Marco Arment, co-founder of Tumblr and creator of Instapaper, each issue features about five medium-length articles. Originally exclusively for iPad and iPhone, subscriptions are now available for the web and Kindle. It costs $1.99 a month. In February, NPR reported that he had 25,000 subscribers.

Apparently some people are still willing to pay to read.

Screenshot from The Magazine‘s iOS app.

Marco has a leg up on the rest of us would-be publishers because of his standing in the tech world. Even still, that’s a lot of subscribers. Part of the appeal is in the presentation. There are no ads, the iOS app is very simple, and delivery to iOS devices is done in the background. There’s not any information overload as with the rest of the ‘net.

I would like to know the reader demographics. Race, gender, income, education, age, nationality. Who reads it? My guess is tech-savvy upper-middle-class professionals and creative types, all generally liberal, but I could be way off the mark.

It is possible to read a couple articles a month on the magazine’s website, The-Magazine.org. The idea is to give just a taste of the articles, and encourage people to subscribe to get the rest.

This “soft paywall” technique is being used by more and more publications as they discover that they can’t give away content for free if they want to stay in business. Many notable newspapers are doing this, including The New York Times, with varying degrees of success.

The Magazine went from full paywall (no free content) to soft paywall (some free content) after they realized that people were not able to share the articles. Thus there was no buzz around any of the articles, and thus no way to draw new readers when subscribers shared articles.

There are notable concerns with paywalls. The most important, to me, is about access and democratic engagement. The Internet has been, for the most part, a wide-open forum for discussion and expression. Putting up a paywall keeps people out. Those excluded might include the comparatively poor, the young, the foreign, and those who haven’t already been exposed and bought in to a publication’s line of thought.

Is this a problem? I’m not sure yet. I don’t think its a problem for Marco’s Magazine. It has an audience, and that audience is willing and able to pay for the content. But if this happens too much, we might witness a further stratification of culture based on class and income. What happens if trashy, “popular” magazines (and I’m including half of Huffington Post in this, but not the Pulitzer Prize-winning half) and unaccountable individual bloggers (cough) become the only source of news and information for “the people”?

What if good reporting becomes a luxury that only the educated and relatively rich can afford? At least a paper newspaper can be passed around and picked up by strangers.

There are some other interesting options out there that might shed light on some of these issues, or at least provide some alternatives. I’ll be featuring NSFWCorp‘s initiatives next time. That publication has some particularly interesting solutions to funding and paywall issues.

(The other question I have is, can The Magazine‘s success be replicated?)

Should Internet Purchases Be Taxed? The Marketplace Fairness Act.

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I find the uproar over the idea of sales taxes for online purchases rather absurd. First off, the taxes are already due to the state the purchaser resides in; technically the buyer is supposed to remit sales and use tax if it wasn’t collected by the seller. However, until the federal government steps in, the states cannot force online retailers having no physical presence (nexus) in a state to collect and remit that state’s sales tax. This is the goal of the Marketplace Fairness Act now in the Senate.

Opponents of the bill cite several problems according to Americans For Tax Reform (http://taxeswithoutborders.com/), this bill is objectionable because:

  • It “Threatens Privacy – Business and state revenue boards with a track record of losing private information will have more chances to do so.”

If business and state revenue boards have a track-record of losing private information, then those boards need to tighten their security. This has nothing to do with the policy at hand. Further, many online retailers have to submit information to shippers to calculate shipping costs, and almost all have to submit that information to the shipping companies to print labels and such, but we hear no outcry about the privacy implications.

  • “Slippery Slope – Opens the door for further government intervention in the internet and for states to reach across their borders for other taxes.”

It is unclear how this bill allows states to reach across their borders even for sales taxes. Remember, sales taxes are imposed upon the buyer, not the seller, although sellers are often required to pay them. While this bill does place the burden of collection on out-of-state sellers, it doesn’t allow states to collect taxes from out-of-state entities or persons. As for intervention in the internet, states already require internet sellers to collect and remit sales taxes for items sold to residents of the same state.

  • “Too Confusing – Small businesses would be forced to accommodate over 9,000 highly variable state and local tax codes and be required to settle disputes with out of state revenue boards in out of state courts.”

This is one of the main reasons the supreme court struck down efforts by states to collect sales taxes through out-of-state companies in the past. Specifically, in 1967, the court stated, “the many variations in rates of tax, in allowable exemptions, and in administrative and record-keeping requirements could entangle [the company]‘s interstate business in a virtual welter of complicated obligations to local jurisdictions”

But today, computer systems can calculate exact postage costs for any address in America. There is no good reason modern computer systems can’t do the same for tax jurisdictions. In fact they already do. Taxcloud.net does this for free.

Further, the new legislation requires states to simplify their sales taxes and provide free software for calculating and remitting sales taxes before the state can require out-of-state organizations to collect and remit sales taxes. States can meet these requirements in two ways, by following a set of five rules, or becoming compliant with the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement (SSUTA), a program that has been going now for eleven years. Both of these options require states to simplify the confusing tax base and hold retailers harmless for any errors that result from relying on state-provided systems and data.

Further, online retailers with less than one million dollars in out-of-state sales annually will be exempt from collection requirements.

  • “Discourages Tax Competition – Rather than competing to lower taxes and attract businesses, states will compete to raise taxes on residents of other states.”

It is unclear how this even makes sense. The bill does not allow states to tax purchases made by residents of other states. If anything it will encourage states to reduce sales taxes—which apply to sales at both brick-and-mortar and online stores—in order to encourage people and companies to move to or stay in a particular state. For example, residents of Oregon (which has no state sales tax) will get a 5-9% price break compared to states that impose a sales tax.

  • “Expands State Tax Authority – State Governments will be able to tax across their borders despite clear legal and judicial precedentarguing otherwise.”

Again, states are not taxing across their borders. They are being permitted (provided they meet simplification rules, above) to collect taxes that are already due.

Does this bill hurt small online retailers?

It does make compliance a bit trickier. But online retailers are already required to collect and remit sales taxes for their home states, and using online services, some free, should be no more difficult than the current system. In fact, it may make it easier for retailers who sell in states with incredibly complex local tax districts, since the software calculates the tax. And businesses that sell less than $1,000,000 out-of-state are exempt from the tax anyways.

If anything, this bill will help local brick-and-mortar stores which have always charged sales tax. It will put them on an even playing field with online retailers.

National Bookmobile Day #NBD2013 isn’t NBD.

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Allegheny County Bookmobile stopped in Ben Avon last Saturday. Photo by Daniel Favand.

Allegheny County Bookmobile stopped in Ben Avon last Saturday. Photo by Daniel Favand.

I’m starting to do some research on bookmobiles, and discovered that today, April 17, 2013, is National Bookmobile Day.

Bookmobiles have been around since at least 1859, when a “perambulating library” was started in Warrington, England. The first travelling library in the US was started in Maryland by librarian Mary Titcomb in 1905.

While bookmobiles may have declined over the last half-century, they were on the rise again between 2008 and 2010; the American Library Association claims the number of bookmobiles in the US increased from 825 to 930 over that period.

Anyways, there’s a lot of history and love surrounding bookmobiles. Of course there’s also a lot of speculation about the future of bookmobiles as digital technology becomes ever more pervasive. But bookmobilers aren’t Luddites: here’s a Twitter stream of thoughts on bookmobiles from libraries and individuals: