Members John Rozehnal

Aug 6 2009: Spoken like a true economist - to assume that (1) those who would be willing to translocate would leave their cultural baggage behind, (2) the difference between Haiti and DR is purely institutional, (3) you can just pre-fab a successful city onto a empty stretch of coastline, and (4) that the Hong Kong experiment and its authoritarian quasi-capitalism alone did more to alleviate poverty 100 years of aid (ostensibly including the Marshall plan).
Lastly, one further reason electrification is a problem is that desperately poor people in rural areas will salvage and sell copper wires to buy food and medicine. I love the optimism, and the idea bears further consideration. If only we had a clean slate...

Jul 10 2009: The devil is in the details. If only gluing a known reactive epitope to HIV were as easy as drawing a line between a square and a triangle (not to mention that Mullis himself is one of the few remaining skeptics of the connection between HIV and AIDS). Second, the immune system is a complicated thing, and activating the right kind of immune response is critically important, and is something that we don't do very well yet. Still, it's a fascinating proof of concept.

Jul 7 2009: Religion has enormous power to do good and to bring people together - how many inner city missions and global development projects would cease to exist without the religious organizations that spawned them?
Second, I would argue, as she alluded to, that religions are not the cause of conflicts, but are often fault lines along which other causes of conflict can drive their wedges. Religious disharmony was until the early 20th century more the exception than the rule. Jews lived among Arabs in Iraq for thousands of years, Greek Orthodox and Turks lived alongside each other until around 1912. The drive for a unitary nation-state, among other things, used religion to distinguish between self and other.
To respond to Z.A, religion has been a political tool for all sorts of purposes, including pacifying the people. But it's also been used as a driver for liberty, as in the liberation theology in Latin America and US slave colonies.
It's a powerful thing, it's our job to use it for good.

Jul 7 2009: Nope. The stat means that if your partner has HIV and you don't, unprotected sex will statistically result in transmission once per 1000 times. The number is actually a bit higher for male-to-female transmission than female-to-male, and only holds if you're healthy. It varies for all sorts of other reasons - eg. If you have another STI, it greatly increases the risk of infection, likewise if your immune system is active, the virus is more likely to encounter a T cell that it can infect. That being said, a 0.1% risk of HIV is not a risk I'm willing to take. wrap up.

Jul 7 2009: It's true that there is a cultural norm in some places to have a wife as well as a mistress, and that arrangement is considered faithful. This DOES NOT mean you can extrapolate this, either statistically or socioculturally into assuming that every sexually active person in Africa is connected. That claim is a great example of the intellectual laziness and assumption of pan-African uniformity that Rosling warns against.
There have been interventions (eg Uganda) that resulted in successful reductions in incidence by convincing people to stay within their two-partner system, and to abstain from occasionally "grazing".
Of course, concurrency isn't the whole story, but I'll save that for another post.