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Category: Miscellaneous

Published November 23, 2011

Hilton’s Bits and Pieces of Soap: #SWEDOW?

According to an article in USA Today, the Hilton hotel chain is going to donate the partially used soap bars its customers leave behind to charity:

Hilton Worldwide has partnered with Atlanta-based nonprofit Global Soap Project to donate discarded soap from its 3,750 properties to be recycled for use in impoverished communities throughout the world.

In the first year of the partnership, the hotel chain expects to provide more than 1 million new 4-ounce bars of soap. Over the next three years, Hilton will also contribute $1.3 million to the effort.

Global Soap Project, founded by Uganda native Derreck Kayongo, uses a process of sanitizing, melting and remolding discarded soap from hotels throughout the country. Since 2009, the organization has sent recycled soap to 20 countries on four continents, including Afghanistan, Ecuador and Haiti.

Forgive my asking — and I am truly agnostic about this question — but isn’t this just another case of #SWEDOW (the acronym stands for “stuff we don’t want”)? Wouldn’t the recipient countries just be better off with the money made from selling the recyled soap in the US? Or from Hilton using its own (sanitized, melted, and remolded) discarded soaps and giving away the savings from doing so?

I haven’t visited that many sub-Saharan African countries (only Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Mali), but in all three places, I remember seeing soap that was made locally. Even if it were not dumping as per World Trade Organization rules, wouldn’t sending all that soap to those countries depress local industries? Is this really what we want?

Twitter for Dummies

When retweeted that article, someone on Twitter responded:

“SWEDOW or re-cycled product? Prefer Africa shea butter soap, but reality is soap in demand.”

Soap’s in demand? So is food. And when I pointed out that most African countries had their own soap-making industries, which this charity might well depress, that same person told me:

“as by-product bio-fuel industry — FOREIGN owned (to meet home country bio-fuel regs). Knee jerk criticism of RECYCLING wrong”

Right, because criticizing an entire industry because it is foreign-owned is not a knee-jerk reaction. Of course not.

Lest anyone question my recycling cred, here is what’s in the back of our house:

And here is what’s inside what’s in the back of our house:

Also, for anyone who would like to engage me in a conversation via social media, here is a bit of advice. Tweets like these:

“Guess academics can AFFORD cynicism”

“Suggest visit w/ Duke’s medical school and ask about connection SOAP and disease control…”

“Whatever happened to intellectual curiousity [sic]? Suggest study market dev early US – recycling/used goods stepping stones growth.”

Those tweets tell more about the twit that tweets them than they tell about my thoughts and thinking–especially when the twit that tweets them is cowardly comfortably hiding behind an anonymous Twitter account.

Published November 21, 2011

Chronocentrism: “This Time It’s Different”

Chronocentrism has been defined by British science journalist Tom Standage as “the egotism that one’s own generation is poised on the very cusp of history.” It is to time what ethnocentrism is to ethnicity.

From Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man — “History is directional, and its endpoint is capitalist liberal democracy” — to Rifkin’s The End of Work — “We are entering a new phase in history, one characterized by the steady and inevitable decline of jobs” — to Millenarians, present-biasedness and the belief that the old rules no longer apply seem insuperable for many people.

Nowhere was this clearer than when the world’s population hit seven billion a few weeks ago. Never mind the past 25 million years of human evolution, during which humans always managed to develop technologies to feed themselves. Never mind the fact that famines are man-made and not directly caused by a lack of food to go around. Never mind all that: many commentators saw fit to inform us that the old rules no longer applied, and that we were about to enter an era of starvation and famine.

The Four Most Dangerous Words in the English Language

But chronocentric policy making can be dangerous. The four most dangerous words of investing — “This time it’s different” — are also the four most dangerous words in the English language.

Going back to the example of the world at seven billion, if you believe we have crossed a special population threshold beyond which we will experience constant starvation and famine, you are probably willing to adopt drastic population-control policies that would curtail the freedom to have as many children as they want many people currently enjoy.

Would that be right? And how confident would you have to be that “this time it’s different” to justify a potential loss of welfare spread out over so many people?