# Hope For The World (part 1 of 4)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [270], part 1 of 4. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2017-03-21 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): The fullest early statement of the relief-and-development model that Harappa later dramatises.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Hexayurt (2002): A public-domain disaster shelter made from whole 4x8 building panels with one diagonal cut.
  - Folding hexayurt (2007): An 8-foot hexayurt that folds into a single flat package and unfolds in minutes, first shown on video in...
  - Saving the World on the Cheap (2007): Essay on a new way for charities and governments to fund lifesaving engineering.
  - Ending Poverty With Open Hardware (2008): Talk: half of all deaths are deaths from poverty, and open technology built household by household can...
  - Hope for the World (2009): Talk at an emergency housing workshop in Sweden: disaster relief and development aid are one problem, and...
  - The Physical Aspects of Distributed Infrastructure (2008): Design study for ultra-low-cost solar thermal homes off the grid: cooling from the ground and evaporation,... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it.
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - hexayurt builds: Hexayurt variants, many designed and built by the community.
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
- Ideas developed here: SCIM / six ways to die
- Topics: disaster / refugee / food (48%); Burning Man shelter building (29%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Hurricane Katrina (5 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Red Cross (7 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); Sphere standards (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); toilets (6 here; 44 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); refugee camps (5 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2007, 1 undated); water purification (3 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); Six ways (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 5 undated); Department of Defense (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); Iraq (5 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); refugee camp (4 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006)
- Importance: core-text score 0.60 (1.00 is the top), number 43 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [710] [TEDxEWB - Vinay Gupta - Enabling Humanitarian Innovation (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/710.md): same career work: Saving the World on the Cheap
  - [341] [Vinay Gupta - Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference -... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/341.md): same career work: Ending Poverty With Open Hardware
- On the same works, just before: [274] [3 (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/274.md); [208] [Taming Black Elephants (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/208.md); [705] [Vinay Gupta - Thought Menu on Enlightenment (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/705.md)
- On the same works, just after: [267] [The future of humanitarian innovation (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/267.md); [691] [Vinay Gupta (Part 2) by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/691.md); [699] [Vinay Gupta, Hexayurt.Capital | Blockchain: Ecology,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/699.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Hope For The World, video, 2017-03-21, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [270], https://guptaoption.com/texts/270.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages, part 1 of 4
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=0s) so we're going to do basically three 40 minute blocks which cover different sides of the shelter stuff um the first [Music] one sure all my gear works here so the first one understanding poverty and disaster actually looking at what poverty is and how it interacts with this whole field that you call disaster relief because that interface is not commonly understood and it's not heavily talked about but it's actually where all of the opportuni are to really solve these problems in a deep way rather than in a shallow way and what I mean by a deep solution is a deep solution solves the problem and the problem doesn't come back so you're not talking about a Band-Aid where you apply the the solution once you have a problem we're talking about deep structural changes in the way that societies which are vulnerable work which leave them protected in the long run and in the future um so yeah understanding poverty and disaster uh the other thing I want to say is if you got questions interrupt me you know raise your hand yell through things but we're going to cover a lot of material a lot of which is kind of controversial and a lot of which might not make sense immediately so ask questions because each piece Builds on the piece before it and I don't want you be in a position where you disagreed with the point and then none of the stuff that comes afterward makes sense so uh let's begin so our current

[1:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=81s) situation right this is the number of people in the world 5 billion six billion uh this is their income so this is a dollar a day is about 1.2 billion $10 a day is about 4 and a half 5 billion uh $100 a day so that's 36 $36,000 a year uh which is about just kind of truck driver salaries when you get up to this $100 a day Mark there's really only about a billion people who earn more than $100 a day it might be a little less than that so um at this kind of $10 a day level you're is primarily rice and beans uh you've got basic Medical Care you have a cell phone your house probably has electricity but it's probably not super reliable in many cases you own a TV set occasionally you'll have a motorbike or a car when you get down to a dollar a day you have just about enough calories to make it as long as nothing weird happens to your economy and for example remember there was this bubble of uh there was an increase in food prices because of biofuels about a year and a half ago two years ago so what you saw was this kind of area in here where people aren't quite starving but they're really they're kind of economically marginal food prices doubled and suddenly a lot of those people who'd been fairly comfortable pushed back into absolute poverty where they were really kind of short of calories something like 30 million people that pushed down that curve and you saw civil unrest all over the world in response to that in urban areas because if you live in a slum then you don't grow any of your own food and you're economically dependent on market prices to eat and you've only got got just enough money for food you're not really spending very much money on anything else so if your food prices double you go into absolute hunger it's it's basically an economic famine and this curve this is the background of disaster relief um if you think of uh almost any natural disaster other than Hurricane Katrina that happened in a developed World area by and large developed world people are wealthy enough to rescue themselves you know you can some inconvenience but at the end of the day if you stand on a street corner with a handful of $20 bills in your pocket it doesn't really matter what kind of problem you have somebody will come and figure out how to help you and this is really important to understand market pricing for emergency services is fairly cheap you know if you had enormous flooding in Holland most of the dut are

[3:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=231s) not going to starve somebody's going to come and sell them rubber boats people from neighboring countries with pumping equipment will come to help their own government has a good deal of reserve and is fairly flexible and they'll basically just kind of take care of the prop if that same thing happens in Bangladesh the people don't have any food reserves the government doesn't have any money nobody around has pumping equipment if they did they're not going to bring it there because you're going to lose some of your equipment there's no money to replace it same physical situation affects people completely differently depending on how much money they have and how much Reserve they have and their access to outside hell is enormously affected by the amount of money that they have to spend if you look at any of the major disasters that we've seen recently and you basically just walked up there with you know 500 or ,000 pounds you know dollars in cash and handed it to each of the disaster victims most of these situations would resolve themselves pretty quickly does this all kind of make sense yes hurrian Katrina yes well in Hurricane Katrina 2,000 Americans died because of government incompetence right I mean they were already very poor right you've got some of what happened in your WS is poverty but the real killer was this mix of poverty and bureaucracy so you had lots of military resources you lots of Civilian resources you had lots of people attempting to self-rescue by getting the hell out of the city being turned back by police from the bridges because they weren't going to have the all these poor black people running into middle class areas and Hurricane Katrina was completely predict the disaster unfolded exactly as it did in federal disaster plans that went back 30 years why did 2,000 people die right a a disaster that had days of warning that proceeded exactly as everybody expected it to from the government preparation you still had 2,000 Americans die that's 2third as many people died in 911 and our response to 911 was to invade two countries that had very little to do with it and spent something like $3 trillion you know there's kind of a mismatch here in terms of risk analysis so the the reason that I do Katrina to one side is that in Katrina what you have an example of is government bureaucracy which is as bad as poverty and this is something that you quite often see where the government bureaucracy is so bad they're unable to spend money on a solution look we can buy this thing it costs $500 it will solve the problem well we got to do three years of studies before we can invest in it okay but in the meantime

[6:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=381s) you have no money and you still have a problem it's it's poverty caused by bureaucracy it's the inability to spend on the solution and Katrina had some elements of that but mainly it was just an absolute disaster of bureaucracy that answer your question okay so next boom

[6:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=398s) um this is not an expected number but every year 60 million people die of all causes old age uh disease hunger accidents the entire spectrum of stuff 60 million people die all of that number about 30 million are dying because of poverty now now how big that number is depends do you ask um food and agriculture organization says that 36 million people a year die of reasons which have some aspect of malnutrition so what they're talking about is bits of vitamin deficiency um you know a life without quite enough food security you know they're talking about all of these contributory causes they're not talking about 36 million people starving they're talking about small effects that add up the number who actually just playing die of various causes hunger 3ish million waterbor disease 2 3 4 5 million depends who you ask cooking fires cooking fires turns out to be a huge issue if you spend your entire life cooking over an open fire it turns out to be the equivalent of you know smoking two or three packs of cigarettes today and people are starting to cook at the age of 5 6 S 8 um all of this stuff together forms this thing that I call the poverty cluster and it's Medical Care overwork nutrition vaccination stress there's a whole list of things which generally lower your quality of life and lower your length of Life yes what statistics um this is kind of a basket of stats if I go back uh I I'll show you the slides later on but at the bottom I've got the URLs of the actual studies so I'll send you I'll send you the PDFs when you start looking oh there's a longer talk that I did on this which is on the internet um called saving the world through open source that really digs into the statistics side of it the basic case is that everybody double counts so if you ask the water people how many people die water born diseases they'll give you a huge number and they'll say water contributes to this many deaths if you ask the cooking fire people how many people dive in smoke inhalation they'll give you a huge number and they'll say it contributes to this many deaths because what you see isn't that people die of one clearly identifiable cause what you get is a general decline in health because of all these interacting factors so when you want to try and nail it down to a hard number of this many people die at this cause what you actually get in the statistics is a lot of arm waving so it makes more sense to go back and say well

[9:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=548s) if you put all of these numbers together you get this kind of bundle and I think the actual death toll that's really just plain old poverty and infrastructure failure and all the rest of this stuff is about 10 million but it really depends who you ask and how they want to count it's a bunch of people and it's very hard to Define in hard terms but if you go through um you know each one of these causes has a specific group at the UN or a specific charity associated with it who give you their ballpark estimates and what they don't do is any real examination of the overlaps and the synergies so I don't want to say I'm guessing but it's looking at the statistics and making a best interpretation half is probably the influence of which about one sixth are hardcore these people just died to being poor period um does that help yeah

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=600s) okay so why doesn't this stuff affect us U this is a thing that we call six ways to die and there are basically six ways that your body can stop working you could be too hot too cold hungry thirsty you can have an illness or you can have an injury and these are the six fundamental causes of human mortality um Now by and large very very very few people in the developed world die of anything except illness you got hand of injuries you get illnesses in old age all the other causes stopped killing us in large numbers usually hundreds of years ago um I think I'm trying to think when was the last big famine in Sweden anybody know 3 4 500 years probably 1800s 1800s okay so I mean for it to be remembered 200 years later you probably had significant mortality right probably that's the last time that you had a significant number of people in Sweden starve if you go to Iceland they had some pretty serious trouble after one of the volcanic eruptions uh Ireland had the Potato Famine I mean it's not a really really long time ago that you had people starving to death in Europe but it's been a good you know half a dozen Generations so the reason this stuff doesn't happen anymore is that what we've built up is these very complex infrastructures that protect us from this stuff so I'm just going to go out from The Ring individual infrastructure is the stuff that you carry with you or you have in your pockets household is all the services in your house town is all the services that are provided at a municipal level so for example your water supply is typically purified at Town level uh in a lot of places your power supply is done at Town level then you go to Regional systems and Regional systems are things like transport infrastructure major hospitals fuel supply fuel transport all that stuff is kind of regional and then you get out to the global level which is primarily markets your fuel markets your food markets and all the rest of the stuff so um if we just take food as an example so this is the transportation Network that most of your food travels through and on the international level it's things like ports and you get down to the local level it's roads and then food is warehouse at the Town level in storage and in the warehouses of storage then when you want to cook it you got energy that comes from these International grids all the way around it is combined with your food in your kitchen and it turns into something you can eat and this is why we don't have hunger very

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=750s) little of the food is actually grown locally the vast majority is taken internationally and you know you've got this weird situation where all countries are exporting food and all countries are importing food there's very little local self-sufficiency um even if you're producing enough food to survive typically you don't eat what you grow you actually export it to make money to import it from somewhere else not terribly efficient process That's How We Do It um we come over here the water grid right again very little action at the international level lots of action at the regional level where you get purification transport storage comes around to the household level um your sanitation the reason we don't typically get sick is we we have sewers right uh won do you guys know about the ghost map this guy called Jon Snow so won had a cola which was a waterbor epidemic in 18 I want to say 56 56 and people were dying of c and nobody knew at that point what C was or where it came from but a scientist drew a map showing all the people who died in London and saw that they were all clustered around a given well so they investigated the few people who had died and who didn't live close to that well and discovered that they drunk water from that well because they happened to work in the area or somebody had taken the water from there or something along these W and once he'd ascertained the problem was the well the guy went down to the town area just took the handle off the well to saw people using it and sure enough when they investigated they discovered that there was a sewage pipe that was very close to the well and you'd gotten contaminated water so that's 150 years ago in London you had people dying of you know waterborne P pandemic disease and all of this stuff that was built in a as a result of those kind of situations is the water infrastructure what the Victorian year is famous for is building sewers gigantic brick pipes underneath everything um you go out you know there's a whole pile of stuff there go out to injury primarily what protects us is armies and police protect us from violence and all of our safety regulations protect us from anly being injured and hospitals will patch us up if we do get hurt so this system is the Western infrastructure model and it's fairly static you know uh industrial cities all over the world and the rest of society in the west and most of the middle class countries Europe all pretty much looks like this

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=900s) uh America pretty much looks like this all the urban areas look like this out side of the slums does all kind of make sense now the what happens if you lose a chunk of this infrastructure right I mean if you take you know the electrical infrastructure if you guys have an electrical infrastructure failure your power grid goes down because there's some terrible winter conditions your houses are big they're fairly warm many of them have stoves you've got access to fuel wood you've got lots of clo clo you've got access to money to buy things like gas seaters if you need them in an emergency right if you go to some country like Afghanistan where the Afghan power infrastructure is they get wood and they burn it and they don't have tons of additional money and tons of additional clothing and tons of additional everything else right you got this Afghan earthquake that knocked over I don't know 600,000 houses something like this any remember the number might be 300,000 houses anyway it left about 3 million people without their conventional access to shelter or various other essential services and you all these people freezing to death in these mountain valleys and the equipment that the NOS took out there had never been tested in heavy winter conditions and just didn't work they they had no effective rehousing solution for the Afghan refugees because that was the first time they'd had a cold weather disaster altitude and it was it was a real humanitarian crisis that the NGS did not respond to uh in a particularly effective way they didn't have a plan ready to go and there was a lot of trial and error when they got out there trying to find some kind of tent system that would survive the weather conditions so when you lack resilience what happens is that when something goes wrong you don't have any ability to get yourself out of trouble um actually I'm going to skip forward to here right pre-existing poverty is

[16:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=1009s) what makes people fragile to disasters you're already poor you're already marginal economic when something goes wrong you've got no ability to dig yourself out of the hole um does that kind of make sense okay so I'm going to I'm going to skip back here very briefly um so alternative models right if you want high standard of living in a long life do you need to build all of this stuff do you need to modernize do you need to industrialize do you need to be somewhere way up on the income curve the answer is no Kola it's a state in India 60 million people 76 year life expectancy dollar day average income 99.5 sorry that's wrong 99.5% literacy basically European birth rates how did they manage it nobody really knows they call it the corala model it's also informly known as the corala miracle um how are they managing to make that work there just isn't a really good clean answer their government had a different set of investment priorities the most governments um they had a very different economic model they had some natural advantages like they had had an already their population already had a long history of learning and education but at the end of the day it's an extremely remarkable situation that you can get Western life expectancy on a dollar a day that's not something that anybody expected but the numbers are good and it's just not really clear how they're achieving it there are some real questions about you know just how was that done yes um in English there are a couple books neither of which I found terribly sad satisfactory and there's a whole bunch of Journalism but given how remarkable it is there's really a very very deep absence of solid work on it I don't know why every developing world country in the world doesn't have an embassy there trying to figure out what they're doing and copying it doesn't seem to be happening um why is that well I mean you know the problem could be something to do with this right if it turns out that there's some form of Communism that actually works that are what people who'd be very uncomfortable to discover that and exactly what democratically elected Market communism is as a political system I'm not really sure anybody understands you know it doesn't sound like it's actually communism because there's no sense of being a a command economy and they're democratically elected so is it some kind of European socialist model that's being implemented

[19:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=1159s) in the very poor it's really hard to get hard information about I keep meaning to try and get some funding to go out there and spend a couple years on the ground just mapping what they're doing but so far no m um other other stuff along these lines so distributed infrastructure and sustainable development so if we go forward um the there are other ways of

[19:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=1181s) arranging your infrastructure which keep it more or less all at the household level so if you need power you got little windmills you got little solar panels uh you can do far more in terms of keeping your houses warm and cool if you work with particularly traditional housing models are often really good at this uh energy efficient wood stoves for cooking solar cookers uh local food storage and local food growing there's a whole bunch of work on um radically increasing the agricultural output of developing World areas based on organic agriculture techniques there's a paper by a woman called the vet Perfecto that says that rural Farmers uh in the developing world could increase their food output by about 80% using organic farming techniques and that's the end of world hunger using no more ecological resources I mean that's kind of important again how much funding do we have not heck of L water there's a whole bunch of household level water and sanitation Technologies soab toilets uh Potter for piece water filter solar water pasteurization solar water disinfection there's a whole Suite of technologies that can handle sewage and drinking water issues on a house by housee basis and there's also a whole bunch of medical stuff along these lines as well so you could talk about providing all of these essential services at the house household or occasionally The Village level which provides you with the possibility of a very high standard of living without having to go all the way up this curve and right now one of the things that nobody knows is whether we have enough natural resources to have all that many more rich people the current evidence is that we don't have enough natural resources to support the rich people we have never mind 5 billion more of them so there are potentially extremely hard natural resource limits that will prevent us increasing the size of the rich portion of society without completely destroying the world as we know it and when people talk about ecological collapse what they're talking about is the planet collapsing under the weight of the existing Rich populations because the resource footprint is so enormous and you know if if people are particularly interested in that I can revisit it but it's not particularly relevant to disaster relief so we'll

[21:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=1310s) move on so bottom line what is a disaster something bad happens earthquake right boom some people immediately die they're they're killed in the collapse the buildings fall on them you know they're just they're gone uh infrastructure breaks down so water and sanitation is probably the first thing to go because those systems are really fragile power grid goes down you're left with the chaos of a post disaster setting something like 2third of all disasters are what they call wet disasters which are floods storms tsunamis and this kind of stuff and those tend to be really really hard to deal with because because all of your water gets contaminated and at that point you've got water everywhere but none of it's safe to drink so once that immediate crunch has happened then you get this rebuilding phase um in dis developed disasters Rich self rescue uh remember these enormous fires that you saw in around the San Diego area last year are these these bushfires um about the same number of people were displaced as were displaced in uh Hurricane Katrina some you know an enormous number of people had to leave their houses I think you know I'm talking very Loosely don't hold me to these numbers but an enormous number of people had to move does anybody hear about there being any significant problems as a result of that most of them rented hotel rooms or went to stay with their sister at the coast they were wealthy people they they could buy and large transport themselves they bond large it somewhere to go if they didn't had access to credit just w problem so the problem case is this poor people often die before the rebuilding occurs or before they rebuild because if you're making a dollar a day and your house washes away and your farm washes away you have no money to do anything with so you're now basically living on a patch of ground with no food waiting for the next Harvest if it ever comes and this is the fundamental mechanics of disaster the real damage is when you take poverty and then you have a very sudden system perturbation right you got you've got people who are economically marginal they're hanging on by their fingernails a disaster comes through and they go from just about making it to not making it at all and that's where the dying happens does this kind of make sense now this is a very different model

[24:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=1460s) from the conventional models of disaster relief partly because of the history of where disaster relief comes from most of the stuff that you think of as disaster relief is basically modeled on the UN model uh sorry the Red Cross model and the Red Cross model is basically you know they turned up on battle fi fields in Europe sometime around in know 1870 1890 handing out blankets and food to soldiers so they had to be extremely politically neutral so that neither side would think the other side was getting unfair advantage and they had a very fixed very limited set of things that they were to do on the battlefield without becoming combatants without becoming you know offending the armies on one side or another so um what happened is that what other NOS kind of copied this model you and you got this idea that we've got a fixed limited set of things we're going to do we're going to turn up we're going to provide Aid we're going to leave and that model got very deeply ground into the disaster relief world then you get World War II Europe and you have millions and millions and millions of displac people in Europe and enormous warehouses full of Army Surplus from the various combatant Nations and you take the Army Surplus you have volunteers who give it out and you go and you rehouse these people in what are essentially um military encampments but without any military people in them demilitarized military encampments and that's where you get your standard template refugee camp from you know all these orderly rows of tents one after another all alike you know x y GD north south align Central Services for water and power and all the rest of that stuff it's a military Camp from World War II rebuilt by the NGS in the present these fundamental mental models have been carried forward through time um and it turns out that you know what worked in postwar Europe where you had tons of army surface and lots of trained soldiers doesn't tend to work so well in the developing world who you're dealing with people who are farmers they lack education they're already economically marginal they have no real interest in living in a tent for two years and you're not really giving them a choice about it and there's all of these cultural issues around that and then there's this simple fact that demilitarized military camps are not really how people would choose to live and there are all kinds of problems that that model doesn't address because that model was for you know young men in huge

[26:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=1610s) numbers with massive Supply chains bringing in food and ammunition every day when you start looking at what family need and what you need to develop economic self-sufficiency you wind up with a completely different set of problems do you see what I'm saying like this way of regimented tents and every tent is the same you don't have any trade inside of the camp and you don't have any provision for agriculture you don't have any provision for Education it's it's what happens when you apply a conceptual model that was built for a military situation and you just take the guns out and then apply it to a civilian population civilian populations have much more comp needs because you've got old people you've got young people you've got sick people you don't have these huge convoys bringing in food and gear it's a completely different situation that the NGO model has not really adapted past this kind of demilitarized post World War II kind of setup so um sorry I'm going a little further system interventions right how do you change this situation the first thing is we covered we've established poverty as why these population are soal vulnerable transitional Solutions right transitional housing basically takes this model right so you've got the military Camp Model the tents last for a year because ultraviolet light eats plastic do you know this come across this so any plastic object thin plastic that's been Outdoors for a long time gets thin and it gets brittle and it gets stiff and then it tears and it falls to pieces and it's very very hard to stop that happening even if you use treat chemical treatments in the plastic at the end of the day ultraviolet light is you know really really corrosive in the long run to plastic type things um and just about all tents made of plastic or they made of canvas sunlight rot everything and as a result the transitional model is well the tents have fallen to pieces and these people are still not in a position where they've rebuilt their houses now what do we do with them and that's where the transitional model comes from but transitional housing is not really enough because if you just give these people houses you haven't solved their problem well now they have a house but they still don't have any income so they're now Starving in the nice house you give them you see what I'm saying you need to start thinking about what's the fundamental goal of disaster relief and my contention is that it's to restore economic self-sufficiency so that you put people back in a position where they can feed themselves then you

[29:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=1760s) leave and at that point what we've got is a goal which is the same goal as development there's no fundamental division between disaster relief and development you go there you take care of the immediate problem they still have all the problems they had before but their capital is gone um how are we doing for time give me 45 45 minutes Cofe break 45 minutes until cof so I should wrap this section up then we should take a little brief all right so I'm very briefly going to talk about capital and then we'll take a couple of questions and stop so capital is the key right does anybody want to give a definition of capital anybody kind of know what it is somebody take a shot somebody do ecomics yeah can have an intri Capital you can have a machine or you can have like a piece of for or something what do they all have in common it's power power very good buy that it's good any other definitions of Capital so in general whether it's an area of forest whether it's training and education whether it's a pile of money Capital produces something useful just by existing or you give it a little energy and it returns you something really useful in return so it's kind of like an amplifier or it's a like a well but what comes out of it is something that you want and the reason that the countries that we in are so wealthy is they've got lots and lots and lots of streams of cap you know lots of reserves of capital in different forms that produce a stream of wealth that we all live on right we each have a share in the cultures around us that supports us with this enormous jet of wealth that just you know sprays out of these cultures they're like gazers of money they really AR right I mean there's just the West is a gazer of money and that's a combination of hundreds of years of really serious cultural focus on education It's relatively effective forms of government although they have some problems now um it's all of these factors that come from stability and reinvestment over many many many centuries and the result is that we are rich without really having to try very hard um in other parts of the world that

[31:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=1910s) didn't have these advantages and sometimes these cultures had these advantages hundreds of years ago and it was destroyed by colonialism sometimes they just never had those advantages sometimes it's wiped out the disease in any case in places where you don't have these enormous reserves of capital people are living hand to mouth they have to scratch out a little money and then they eat it and then they scratch out a little more money and then they eat it and there's never this huge buildup of Reserve that gives them resilience at a financial level and without that what happens is when something goes wrong in the system they run into real problems so the fundamental structure is that disaster comes through and it destroys whatever Capital they had or at least destroys a part of it and that can take the return on their investment from being enough to feed them to being not enough to feed them and thinking about this in terms of restoring their access to Capital gets into things like microcredit it gets into things like land grants it gets into improving the farming methodologies all of this is about building up their Capital reserves to the point where they can live effectively from their own resources does that kind of make sense so this is sort of a Loosely economic model of disaster and what comes out of it is an emphasis on doing things differently from the way that they're normally done in a disaster setting and that includes really questioning this connection between you know really looking at this divide between emergency relief and transitional shelter transitional housing and saying actually we kind of have to think in a whole system's way the objective is to get these people back down into a situation where their death rate is something that we find acceptable and that includes thinking about their access to Capital One form or another to support themselves reasonable okay so done that's the that's the end of the

[33:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=2019s) first section uh any some example yes good okay so isn't that an impossible task I I don't know I mean if you're if it's if you're saying that it's fundamentally the same as development work right and so you move into any area that has any kind of an emergency situation and you apply development techniques development work takes a lot of time and a lot of resources how I mean how do you do that how do you fund it what's the structure I think that what we have to start doing is cheating cheating cheating right because the current development models are very very technology averse they don't really believe in Tech fixes but all the evidence that I see is that the West's got to be the West because of a series of tech fixes that we applied relentlessly um and I'll give you an example of this which is malaria Nets um the studies that I've seen suggest that the impact of malaria Nets in malarial areas on Farmers is it roughly doubles their farming productivity because they're not sick and their kids aren't sick so they can actually spend more of their time Farm well that's not so difficult is it and if we wanted to really fix poverty in you know subsaharan Africa if we could go around to all the farmers and give them malaria Nets and it would double their Farm output that sounds like a win doesn't it and that's what I mean by cheater I mean you can't actually apply Tech fixes and if you pick the right Tech it can work and I think that there are a lot of examples of things that I would call the right Tech uh solar water uh disinfection Sodis really cheap gets rid of practically all of your waterborne disease problems it's less than a dollar per head per year and it's a technology that people can teach each other pretty easily um so I think there are a lot of examples of Technologies which could be applied to development that also have applications in disaster relief that so that we could actually take the capital that we're investing in these areas to deal with disaster and actually think about it as a single step where you deal with the disaster and the development

[35:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=2155s) problem in one step and I don't think think that we know how to do that fully effectively yet but I think that there are some really very promising starts that are really worthy of further study reasonable answer I just think it's I mean I just think it's complicated it's more complicated well I mean you have to convince everybody in suban Africa that work well I mean I I'm willing to try handing them out and if people don't use them that's not my problem now I realize that sounds a little hard your problem I mean not the argument no no please please but that's development work development work is not handing on N development work is convincing all of the villagers that their productivity rate would be doubled if if it were as easy if development Mark were as easy as putting up houses that would be one thing but there's years of education and PR work that going behind the scenes and I just I think there are I think there are very deep questions about the development model at a fundamental level very similar to the questions that I'm asking about disaster relief but I definitely agree that it's not that simple or we'd be doing it that way already right right I there was a 70s generation when everybody thought appropriate Technologies was going to solve The World's problems and it just didn't and it wasn't because the Technologies didn't work in many cases so yes I mean there are definitely deep questions there but at the same time I think that we've got at least a few answers which are fairly pluging play and we have seen that some technologies like the cell phone you know it just went television just went the LA Rover just went so if we can get something for water that just goes and we can get something for cooking that just goes then we've got really serious fixes for those kind of problems and I think there is this need to say well in a lot of cases the problems of getting Technologies adopted are problems with the Technologies not problems with the transmission you see what I'm saying like if we'd gone to Africa and tried to give them one Vine telephones it would have been basically impossible because the technology just wasn't right and I think there's a lot of room for looking at this stuff and saying well a lot of the approaches to development are basically trying to give people landline telephones the technology isn't right no amount coaxing will make it work but figuring out which Technologies are like that and which Technologies would work if we could just get people educated it's a it's a mindfield but I think there is room

[38:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN7q23D4rBo&t=2305s) there for some new approaches is and I

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