by Charlie Edwards | May 16, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks, UK
I’ve got a short piece about organised crime on the Guardian’s blog Comment is Free. From the intro:
The annual report from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, published yesterday, is a mix of self-congratulation and spectacular underachievement. While the rhetoric from politicians has been to get tough on organised crime, the reality is more humbling: we still don’t have a clear idea of the scale and nature of the problem. Read the rest here
Pretty much everyone is unhappy with the agency. Sean O’Neill, The Times’ Crime Editor has been trailing the publication of the annual report for the past week. According to his sources police officers have been leaving in ‘droves’, while the agency’s hit list has been shelved. The allegations were swiftly dismissed in a letter to The Times by Bill Hughes, SOCA’s Director General. He is now having to manage some internal strife at the Agency and has rounded on some officers who have chosen to take their problems to the media and not the management (which is odd given the top heavy nature of the organisation).
Elsewhere Alison Saunders, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Organised Crime Division is arguing that expectations of Soca had been too high at its inception. She has a point. Meanwhile the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are standing back and basking in the Government’s and the Agency’s incompetence and ineptitude.
by Mark Weston | May 16, 2008 | Off topic
A post I wrote last week described a “push” approach to AIDS prevention – circumcise men, tell people to use condoms, encourage them not to sleep around too much etc. The World Bank is trying a different tack, using a “pull” method instead: pay people not to get infected and let them work out for themselves how to stay safe. The Bank will pay 3,000 Tanzanians $45 – good money in Tanzania – if they regularly test negative for sexually transmitted infections (though not HIV, which is more expensive to test for but for which diseases like gonorrhoea are a good proxy). “Reverse prostitution,” they call it, rather alarmingly.
Conditional cash transfers are the new new thing in the development world. The success of Mexico’s Oportunidades scheme, which gives cash to poor families if they participate in health programmes, has sparked a wave of imitations in both developing and developed countries – even New York has got in on the act. A randomised controlled study of Oportunidades found that it reduced illness among children in the programme by 23% compared to a control group. The children’s height increased by 1-4%, and the health of adults also improved. Similar programmes to reduce drug dependency in the US by giving cash to cocaine and methamphetamine abusers in return for clean urine samples have cut stimulant use.
The World Bank scheme relies on a crucial insight, which LSE AIDS guru Tony Barnett and I discuss in a paper to be published in ‘AIDS‘ this summer. In order to take decisions now that will benefit them in the future, people need to value that future. In other words, they need hope:
People with hope for the future are less likely to engage in activities that put them at risk of illness or death in the present…Without future goals, there is little reason to avoid actions that may cause harm in the future but do not do so in the present. People may therefore forfeit future gains in favour of present benefits.
Studies of hope have found strong effects on quality of life. Hopeful children do better in skills tests; adults who have goals have better mental health; and those without hope of career advancement have higher rates of mortality. And it’s not just about money; drug users in the US programmes reported that having something to aim for and receiving rewards for achievement spurred them to quit.
In much of Africa, where HIV is rife, people lack hope and therefore take risks. They exchange safety for pleasure by having unprotected sex with multiple sexual partners. They know they might one day die as a result of this, but the concerns of the present are too pressing, the future too remote. Cash can make a difference – a study in South Africa found that poor women women who received small loans in return for participating in HIV and gender programmes reported increased hope and reduced violence at the hands of their partners.
You might think that not dying of AIDS would be reward enough for practising safe sex. In an environment where people have little to hope for, however, and thus no reason to make plans, you’d be wrong.
by Alex Evans | May 16, 2008 | Off topic
Via Kevin Drum, this vignette from Johann Hari about his experience taking Provigil, which (we’re told) college students describe as “viagra for the brain”:
I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I’m thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn’t noticed anything, except the words I was reading, and they came in cool, clear passages; I didn’t stop or stumble once.
Perplexed, I got up, made a sandwich — and I was overcome with the urge to write an article that had been kicking around my subconscious for months. It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual….The next morning I woke up and felt immediately alert. Normally it takes a coffee and an hour to kick-start my brain; today I’m ready to go from the second I rise. And so it continues like this, for five days: I inhale books and exhale articles effortlessly. My friends all say I seem more contemplative, less rushed — which is odd, because I’m doing more than normal. One sixty-something journalist friend says she remembers taking Benzadrine in the sixties to get through marathon articles, but she’d collapse after four or five says and need a long, long sleep. I don’t feel like that. I keep waiting for an exhausted crash, and it doesn’t seem to come.
Tempting to agree with Kevin, who says he wants some – though you can’t help wondering about the general rarity of free lunches, as well as the implications for social equity (c.f. Jules on transhumanism)….
