There’s been considerable debate about why certain popular uprisings grab the popular imagination, and others are largely ignored, even by the professional media. Having given the matter some thought, I wrote this column for The Daily Maverick: A classy revolution: Why we cared

The sOccketball is an invention by a bunch of American college kids, aimed squarely at the sub-Saharan African market. It just got a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award. The problem? It’s useless, and the idea that Africans can’t look after themselves is supremely condescending. I explain why in today’s Daily Maverick column: Let’s return the beads

A number of people at #tech4africa, the excellent conference organised by Gareth Knight (@oneafrikan), asked whether I’d make the copy of my introduction to the panel on Unlocking Mobile Payments available. You can find the text after the fold. Attribution will be appreciated, but feel free to use it however you wish.

Read the rest of this entry »

South Africa’s Freedom Day is just past, and World Press Freedom Day is just around the corner. An opportune time, then, to highlight some troubling developments on the continent in The darkness of Africa. Governments are naturally at odds with a free press, but their attempts to control it are a danger to liberty and prosperity.

I wanted to reply to the two Australians who commented on this article: Can Africa Topple Australia in the Contest To Build the World’s Biggest Telescope?

All I got, however, was this: “Comment Submission Error. Your comment submission failed for the following reasons: Text entered was wrong. Try again.”

This summary rejection is somewhat puzzling, since the error is meaningless, and the preview worked fine. [UPDATE: After several more attempts, I appear to have succeeded in posting my comment. Looks like the Captcha widget was broken for a time, and it was this “text” that the error referred to. The comment remains invisible, however, with no indication of whether it is merely being moderated.]

However, because I think it’s important, I’ll post my comment on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope here:

Frankly, the SKA shouldn’t be built, except with private money. Not in South Africa, and not in Australia. There. Having got libertarian principles out of the way, let’s get to business.

It is true that Africa is considerably poorer, somewhat less politically stable, and composed of several more countries, than the island colony of Australia. The same is true for South America, Asia, and indeed Europe.

And nevermind McGruder’s blackness, or the dark skins of most Africans. Racist reasons for building it, or not building it, belong in previous centuries. Africa might move on, if the people outside Africa who incessantly disparage it would do so.

If anyone needs investments like these, it’s the 750 million people of Africa, many of whom are cursed with economies that Western do-gooders, along with vogueish socialism at home, have made dependent on foreign aid and debt relief. Africans suffer as a result of inadequate basic infrastructure and difficulty in securing basic education for their children. Not that some major economies in the West aren’t heading for the same socialist malaise, so there’s no need to whitewash reality.

Projects like the SKA will contribute to the development of physical infrastructure (like electricity and telecommunications), political infrastructure (like the SADC customs union that continues to make slow progress), and social infrastructure (like education).

In terms of the standard of its scientists, the sophistication of its economy, and the development of its politics, Africa is quite capable of hosting a Big Science project such as the SKA. It has problems, sure, but motives to solve them trump negativity and despair. No politician in Africa (well, very few) would be stupid enough to put at risk a major project with international visibility such as the SKA.

Unlike the two Australian gentlemen who commented above, I will decline to speculate on a country I do not know. Australia’s virtues or shortcomings are not mine to judge. I’m sure it’s a splendid place, full of shiny, happy people. However, they might show the same courtesy towards others. If anything, short-sighted and ill-informed comments by people who haven’t a clue about the reality of Africa should provide added impetus for siting the SKA in Africa.

I live in Africa, by choice. As a columnist, I am frequently critical of the socialism and corruption that so often hurts Africans. And while the West has a lot to answer for in this respect, I believe Africa should sweep its own doorstep first. But to do that, it needs brooms. And indeed doorsteps.

If anyone in Africa were sceptical of the local capacity to operate a major facility like this, and their reasons weren’t knee-jerk racism, I’d probably be among them. However, I’m not sceptical. I believe anything is possible in Africa. I have faith in the ingenuity and dedication of its people. I believe, based on the scale and sophistication of numerous other industrial and scientific projects, that Africa has the technical and organisational ability to make the SKA an ongoing success.

Most importantly, I believe hosting the SKA can only make Africa a better place for everyone in it.

And that is worth more than all the stars in the sky.

I’ll bet if the Science Insider blog was hosted in Africa, by an African, its comment system would have worked.

I have long been skeptical of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project. Not because I think selling cheap computers to poor people is a bad idea — I think that’s a brilliant idea. But because Negroponte’s non-profit whines endlessly that poor people don’t buy it, that poor governments won’t buy it for them, and that other companies have the temerity to try to sell competing products for profit. As if that makes a cheap laptop any less valuable.

His protest went something along the lines of: it’s not about the kit, it’s about education, and only the pure-of-heart, i.e. we, care about that. Intel and Asus and all those corporate scumbags are just trying to undermine my noble vision and prevent me reaching economies of scale.

Now, one ex-employee is calling Negroponte’s bluff. When Ivan Krstić resigned, he said only that, “OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project.”

But this past week, he explained just how drastic that change really was. In a long blog post mourning the faded glory of the OLPC, Krstić writes that the project is all about the kit, after all. It’s not about education. It’s about selling lots of cheap laptops. Negroponte couldn’t beat the corporate scumbags, so he’s joining them under the cover of his noble vision.

Quotes El Reg:

“I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward,” writes Krstić.

“Nicholas’ new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn’t work.”

Now perhaps Krstić is exaggerating. Perhaps he’s just appalled that the project backtracked on a “clarification” made last year, and just did a deal to offer Windows on the machine, with Negroponte going so far as calling it “key to the OLPC philosophy”.

I can see how this might annoy people involved with the open-source project. Maybe he’s just a bitter liar with an axe to grind. But his story confirms, in uncanny fashion, what I thought I read between Negroponte’s lines last year.

If you’re going to diss the profit motive, have the courage of your convictions, and the honesty or your vision. If a not-for-profit can’t compete with for-profit companies, it clearly isn’t delivering anything anyone needs or cares about. Which means that it only swindles cash out of the gullible with sweet-sounding lies, and exploits the poor to do so. OLPC wouldn’t be the first non-profit to demonstrate why, for all their noble intentions, so few deliver on the reasonable expectations of trusting donors and needy beneficiaries.

Hey kids, how’s it feel to be unpaid advertising execs for Negroponte’s neo-colonialist ego trip?

Economist David Hale includes some fascinating statistics in a recent WSJ op-ed piece. He notes that the rise of emerging markets and their growing ability to finance American debt and current account deficits, is “a complete reversal of 20th-century history.”

The current business cycle will go down in the history books as one which confirmed that leadership in the global economy is now shifting from the old industrial countries to the emerging market countries. During 2007, the developing countries produced over 52% of global growth, compared to 37% during the late 1990s. China alone produced 17.8% of global GDP growth last year, compared to 14.6% for the U.S. economy. The developing countries’ share of total world output has risen to 29% this year from 18% in 1995. The World Bank is forecasting that the economies of developing countries will grow 7.4% this year, compared to 2.2% in the old industrial nations.

As a result of their large current account surpluses, the developing countries also account for 75% of the world’s $6 trillion of foreign exchange reserves. They also have sovereign wealth funds with assets of $2.5 trillion. And there has been a huge expansion of developing-country stock markets during the past decade. Their market capitalization now exceeds $17.8 trillion, compared to $2.2 trillion in 2000. The capitalization of the U.S. stock market is $17.5 trillion.

In the decade before 2005, American consumers were the growth engine for the world economy, accounting for more than half of global consumer spending. The balance of power is now shifting.

In 2000, the consumer spending of the world’s 17 largest emerging-market countries was equal to 48% of U.S. consumer spending; last year it was equal to 65%. At current growth rates, the developing countries could exceed U.S. consumer spending by 2015.

This consumption boom is changing global trade patterns. America’s share of global imports has fallen to 14% last year from over 20% in 2000. The import share of the developing countries has grown to 40.6% last year from 33% in 2000.

This disconfirms the popular left-wing trope that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. In reality, the rich are getting richer, but so are the poor. It suggests even that “inequality”, the fall-back number on which Western neo-socialists alight whenever they realise they simply cannot claim the poor are worse off than they were 50 years ago, is a fallacy.

These numbers remind me of the spectacular presentation Hans Rosling gave at TED in 2006, and a follow-up in 2007. If you haven’t seen his presentations, do yourself a favour and take the time to watch Rosling make data come alive:

Myths about the developing world, Hans Rosling, TED 2006

Watch the end of poverty, Hans Rosling, TED 2007

“The seemingly impossible is possible. We can have a good world,” he concludes, before debunking the image of the Swedish academic and statistician by swallowing a bayonet.

Prompted by Wessel van Rensburg’s comment on another post, I dug through my archives to find a story I wrote for CIO Africa in September 2004, on Somalia’s telecommunications industry. It is not available online, but I have permission to quote it here in full:

Absent rules, luxuriant growth
Somalia’s telecom sector: a case study in anarchocapitalism
By Ivo Vegter

“A wild rose roofs the ruined shed / And that and summer well agree.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Day Dream

The most unlikely places throw up the most unlikely tales. Though Somalia has had no government for over a decade – or rather, because of this – international call rates are the lowest in Africa, most of the country has telephone coverage, and you can get an Internet account in a day.

When Somalia’s former ruler, General Muhammad Siyad Barre, was ousted in January 1991, the country rapidly degenerated into turmoil. The country has been fought over by secessionist factions and warlords ever since. A shortlived attempt at US intervention led to a famous withdrawal, and more recent peace negotiations in neighbouring Djibouti have spluttered fitfully without achieving much by way of either peace or effective government.

Before the collapse of the Barre regime, there had been 8 500 fixed lines, most of which were in the capital, Mogadishu. Even that meagre public switched telephone network was destroyed, leaving the country entirely bereft of telecommunications of any description.

Yet, when Walter Brown, an African telecommunications expert with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), was asked by the Ugandan delegation to a 1999 conference on rural telecoms about the best way to introduce a mobile phone operator, he suggested talking to the Somali delegation. At the time, the Somalis had a deal on the table for a tenth of what the Ugandans could extract from likely equipment vendors.

Speaking to CIO Africa at Johannesburg’s Kind of Blue, the jazz restaurant to which he has since retired, Brown says, “My presentation to the ITU conference said that technology lends itself to a private sector approach, by moving away from circuit-switched telecoms to packet-switching even in rural areas. It can be done cheaply, using any bearer you wish – radio, powerline, satelite, copper, fibre – and you can deal with any vendor you like.”

He recalls: “I made many friends, but made enemies of large industry players who needed to dump circuit-switching technology somewhere. Many delegates said the environment didn’t allow them to speak out.”

Not so the Somali delegation, which had no government to answer to, no vendors to mollify, and no legacy systems to consider.

According to the CIA World Factbook, the small industrial sector has been looted for scrap metal – among the country’s chief exports – and there is no formal banking sector. Yet despite this seeming anarchy, Somalia’s service sector has managed to survive and grow.

“Telecommunication firms provide wireless services in most major cities and offer the lowest international call rates on the continent,” it states.

Accurate statistics are hard to come by in a situation as fluid and chaotic as Somalia.

While the ITU estimated there to be about 10 000 main lines in operation at the end of 2000, the latest World Factbook figures, which date to 2002, estimate that there are 100 000 main telephone lines, 35 000 mobile phones, and 89 000 Internet users.

Writing in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) magazine, Choices, reporter Finbarr O’Reilly quotes Abdi Karim Mohamed Eid, manager of private telecommunications company Telesom, as saying, “If you add up the other companies, there may be around 20 000 Internet subscribers in [the northern region of] Somaliland. That’s much more than we anticipated initially and it’s a remarkable achievement given that there is no backing from the international community. This is solely done by the Somali business community. We are really proud of that.”

According to O’Reilly, 87% of the country now has telephone service, and some operators claim to be able to install fixed lines withing two days of applying, and establish Internet accounts within 24 hours. His figures of 105 000 fixed and 39 000 mobile lines back up the CIA’s numbers. An older report from the Somali Telecom Association (STA) state that 47 out of 74 towns have telephone service. And international call rates are as low as $1 per minute.

“It was clear supply and demand,” says Brown. “There was a need, and it got supplied. The service is reliable, because operators know if there is no service, there is no money. And you can get service within days of applying.”

The STA was formed at the behest of the UNDP and the ITU, in order to address the problem that to reach all people will telephones in Somalia, people had to subscribe to at least three different networks.

“With no government, no regulator, and no policy, they formed interconnect agreements,” says Brown. “Vendors didn’t take them seriously, until they started making money. Now companies like MCI help broker deals for Somali operators. Tariffs are set according to supply and demand, and are the cheapest in Africa.”

He adds: “They did well, and were able to advise Uganda to get rid of their oversight yokes.”

Not that complete anarchy is necessarily a good thing, of course. Though nobody imposes taxes on telephone calls, protects incumbent monopolies, demands exorbitant licence fees or imposes counter-intuitive technology restrictions, nobody collects refuse, supplies reliable electricity or provides adequate security either.

But Somalia’s experience with free-market telecommunications shows that the continent’s penchant for regulation, red tape and big government is not the solution to local development challenges.

It adds a new dimension to the existing weight of evidence that argues the benefits of telecommunication for the developing world.

“Consider the ITU study on the transport sector in Yemen,” explains Brown, “where simply providing communication long highways cut the costs of trucking companies by as much as 80%. Or the study in Sri Lanka, where farmers improved their income by 70% simply using a public telephone box.”

Somalia is a case study for the truth Brown learnt in a career spent at telecoms operations ranging from Zimbabwe’s PTC to the Iridium satellite venture to the ITU: “Oversight should not manage. It should lead, encourage and incentivise.”

Left free to innovate, an entrepreneurial people will find ways to succeed despite the most adverse of circumstances. Development goals foisted upon them by supranational organisations merely sound lofty. Liberalisation plans managed by government merely sound responsible. What makes the difference, in the end, is mere supply and demand.

2004 (c) CIO Africa, BDFM Publishers

Pictured alongside is Lauren Bush, the niece of US president George W Bush. She made the news recently with a charity project called FEED. Each designer canvas bag sold will generate enough money to feed one child in the developing world for a year.

Good Magazine quotes her as saying: “I would love for [this] to be completely nonpolitical because I think it distracts from the real humanitarian point of the project.”

But that’s not good enough for Sky News, whose Adam Boulton spent most of his interview with the 23-year-old trying to trip her up over his own prejudices about her uncle. According to the Sky report:

However, the US is often seen by some as the main obstacle to helping the Third World in terms of world trade.

It has the largest economy but as a proportion of its wealth it does not give as much as some other nations.

Nevermind that this is irrelevant, ill-informed and uncalled-for editorialising. Nevermind that it confuses aid with trade. Nevermind that the US is the biggest global aid donor in nominal terms, is on a par with many others in relative terms, and that the Bush administration has increased aid commitments to Africa compared to previous US administrations. Nevermind that the US is the leading promoter of trade (as opposed to aid) in the fight against poverty. Nevermind whether trade should be preferred to aid. Nevermind whether simply dispatching an arbitrarily chosen share of gross national income on foreign aid is better or worse than spending less money more effectively. Nevermind whether throwing good money after bad in foreign aid is likely to address “Third World” poverty (as opposed to merely soothing the collective conscience of the rich). These weren’t the questions Boulton asked of Lauren Bush.

Instead, Boulton threw his own simple biases about the US president at his college-age niece, which strikes me as pretty low. If he’s going to bash Bush, why pick on her? Is she to blame for the public’s perception (or more accurately, the media’s lack of objectivity) about the US? Why would she have anything at all to say about US policy on foreign aid or free trade? Why not ask her directly under which conditions she believes aid works, and when she believes aid trumps trade in poverty relief? Why not ask her about her own project, instead of harrying her with cheap shots about her uncle?

When the activistreporter closed by asking why she didn’t want to go into politics, she tartly shot back: “Because of questions like these.”

That barb didn’t make it into the online version of the report. Well done, Ms Bush, for revealing the brave Bush-bashing Boulton as nothing more than an editorialising chicken-hawk who can’t handle being smacked down by a good-looking girl.

Rav Casley Gera, over at an admirable quest for knowledge he calls African Development for the Completely Bloody Ignorant, is currently working on Jeffrey Sachs and his much-publicised plans to end poverty. By 2025. It’s high-minded stuff indeed, and interesting, but after reading Gera’s summary I’m left with more questions than answers.

Sachs raves about anti-globalisation, saying “Before Seattle…. there was little said about the world’s poor.” I’m sure Bob Geldof would have something to say about that; not to mention the rich-country taxpayers who’ve been spending billions on foreign aid for the last half-century and have very little, if anything, to show for their generosity. Before long, however, he’s on the other side of the argument, saying, “By now the antiglobalisation movement should see that globalisation, more than anything else, has reduced the numbers of extreme poor in India by two hundred million and in China by three hundred million since 1990.”

So, which is it, Mr Sachs? Globalisation, or anti-globalisation? Or anti-globalisation-inspired globalisation?

He invokes Adam Smith, but in the same breath calls for making good on promises to spend 0.7% of rich-country GDP on foreign aid in an effort to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals.

Which is it, Mr Sachs? Free-market capitalism, or tax-funded bureaucratic socialism? Or tax-funded bureaucratic market capitalism?

I guess that’s the problem when high-minded do-goodery meets the facts on the ground. Your head can’t argue with the facts, yet your heart can’t let go of the altruism that motivates you. So you come up with a confused mish-mash of ideas. My concern is not only that Sach’s self-contradictions cannot be resolved on an intellectual level, but that by insisting on having it both ways, government-run foreign-aid bureaucracies will only end up undermining the success Sachs notes can be (and has already been) achieved by global free trade and economic liberty.

Sachs and his friends in the foreign aid movement, noted economists like Angelina Jolie and U2’s Bono, are nice guys, no question about it. They mean well. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say, and nice guys finish last.

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting front-page story recently about Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. This project isn’t about laptops, you understand — it’s about education. But mostly, it’s about laptops. Building little green-and-white machines called “XO” that look like toys, to be sold for $100 to kids in poor countries. Problem is, the XO isn’t turning out to be very popular. So who do we blame? Microsoft, of course! And Intel!

With a subheadline one might expect from a newspaper that engages in left-wing editorialising, rather than hard business reporting, the Wall Street Journal agrees with him: “How a Computer for the Poor Got Stomped by Tech Giants”.

How, you may ask? Well, by supplying computers for the poor themselves. This, you see, is a bad thing. It appears to be less about computers for the poor than it is about who gets to wear the halo. Can’t have corporate profiteers nick Nick’s halo, now can we?

Mr. Negroponte’s ambitious plan has been derailed, in part, by the power of his idea. For-profit companies threatened by the projected $100 price tag set off at a sprint to develop their own dirt-cheap machines, plunging Mr. Negroponte into unexpected competition against well-known brands such as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system.

Negroponte does say he thinks it’s a good idea for people to sell cheap laptops:

“I’m not good at selling laptops,” Mr. Negroponte has told colleagues. “I’m good at selling ideas.”

“From my point of view, if the world were to have 30 million” laptops made by competitors “in the hands of children at the end of next year, that to me would be a great success,” he said in a recent interview. “My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It’s in the education business.”

Good thing too, because as the article makes clear, Negroponte’s laptop actually costs $188, and prospective customers are balking, turning to alternatives such as Intel’s Classmate, which doesn’t cost much more, is backed by a large company, and comes with Microsoft Windows. Other companies are also eyeing the huge untapped markets in the developing world.

“The Intel machine is a lot better than the OLPC,” says Mohamed Bani, who chairs Libya’s technical advisory committee but doesn’t have the final say on buying laptops. “I don’t want my country to be a junkyard for these machines.” Libya has decided buy at least 150,000 Intel Classmates. The future of the One Laptop program there is now uncertain.

… Nigeria, for example, so far has failed to honor a pledge by its former president to purchase one million laptops. That’s partly because they no longer cost $100 apiece, says Tomi Davies, a Nigerian-born technology entrepreneur who helped Mr. Negroponte set up talks with Nigerian officials.

… The higher price also has made the laptop vulnerable to competition from sellers of more traditional, Windows-based machines. For many education ministries, “it’s a no-brainer you go with Microsoft,” says Mr. Davies.

But that doesn’t stop him from complaining about the competition from alternatives such as Intel’s Classmate laptop:

Mr. Negroponte says he communicated this month with Intel’s chief executive, Paul Otellini, and demanded that Intel stop selling the Classmate. Intel, which says there is room in the market for many machines, has refused, according to a spokeswoman.

… “We can’t compete,” complains Ayo Kusamotu, One Laptop’s attorney in Nigeria. “The minute we started getting some traction, they [Intel] intensified their effort.” Nigeria recently agreed to purchase 17,000 Intel Classmates.

In May, Mr. Negroponte appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and blasted Intel, suggesting it was trying to drive his nonprofit out of business. Intel’s Mr. Barrett called that idea “crazy.” Two months later, Intel announced it was joining One Laptop’s board. The agreement included a “nondisparagement” clause, under which Intel and One Laptop promised not to criticize each other, according to Mr. Negroponte.

He claims, disingenuously, that the competition actually raises prices by not permitting his projects to achieve the anticipated economies of scale. What I’m seeing is that even his higher price point of $188 is sufficient to drive the prices charged by other producers down.

I’d think, if the purpose of the OLPC project is not to sell laptops, but to promote education, Negroponte would be delighted that so many private companies have picked up on his idea and realised that they can, indeed, provide cheap computers to developing-country customers. After all, a non-profit surely exists to serve a public purpose, not to compete against the private sector.

He may well dispute the arguments by customers about why the competing machines are better, and he may well have a point. I’d recommend open source software for educational computers myself. If he’s unable to deliver on his promises, when private companies can, the market is no longer failing. If he’s unable to convince prospective buyers, on price, performance or features, bitching in the press about competition strikes me as a desparate act to retain control of the market. Why try to shut up companies that are merely trying to promote their own products, unless you don’t think your own product can win on merit? Such tactics are hardly consistent with the supposedly altruistic motives of a non-profit organisation.

He’d gain a lot more respect from me if he’d stopped at declaring victory: “See? I told you it could be done!” But sadly, his slip is showing, and he just has to go on to reinforce the canard that non-profits are good and for-profits are bad. All he does is show that academics and non-profits are pathologically prejudiced against the power of free enterprise. Even when the empirical evidence in the market contradicts them.

In 2005, according to this news report, “8.8 million people became infected with tuberculosis and 1.6 million died of it. It takes months of careful antibiotic treatment to clear the infection.”

This sort of death toll is why projects like the Copenhagen Consensus, which is due for an update in 2008, cite disease control as a better way to spend a given amount of public money than many others (such as fighting global warming). It cites HIV/AIDS and malaria, though not TB, in particular.

The problem many countries — in particular developing countries like my own — face is that TB treatment is hard to enforce. Although South Africa has had some success with a buddy system to monitor drug treatment, the fact is that among poor communities, rigorous adherence to long-term drug treatments is a problem (and not only in the case of TB). Non-completion of courses of antibiotic medication leads to mutations that create drug-resistant super-strains. These affect not only the country of origin, but the rest of the world.

So, having sketched the bad news, the article cited at the top contains the good news:

Researchers have decoded the gene map of a strain of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis and said on Tuesday their work has identified mutations that may help develop better treatments.

They also sequenced the genome of another dangerous strain called multidrug-resistant TB, as well as run-of-the-mill tuberculosis bugs, and found a few mutations may explain how the mutant strains evade antibiotics.

“By looking at the genomes of different strains, we can learn how the tuberculosis microbe outwits current drugs and how new drugs might be designed,” said Megan Murray of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Of course, one needs to be careful with statistics such as the number of infections and deaths cited above. It turns out, for example, that statistics on HIV/AIDS have been grossly overestimated. As the Washington Post reports from Johannesburg, South Africa:

The United Nations’ top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement.

AIDS remains a devastating public health crisis in the most heavily affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemic.

The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year’s estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV — estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising — now will be reported as 33 million.

The main reason isn’t an actual decline in the underlying numbers: “U.N. officials say the revisions stemmed mainly from better measurements rather than fundamental shifts in the epidemic.”

Why is this a problem? Well, as James Taranto trenchantly notes in his Best of the Web Today column, the Washington Post piece is quite explicit about it:

Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.

“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda,” said Helen Epstein, author of “The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS.” “I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way.”

… Among the reasons for the overestimate is methodology; U.N. officials traditionally based their national HIV estimates on infection rates among pregnant women receiving prenatal care. As a group, such women were younger, more urban, wealthier and likely to be more sexually active than populations as a whole, according to recent studies.

The United Nations’ AIDS agency, known as UNAIDS and led by Belgian scientist Peter Piot since its founding in 1995, has been a major advocate for increasing spending to combat the epidemic. Over the past decade, global spending on AIDS has grown by a factor of 30, reaching as much as $10 billion a year.

But in its role in tracking the spread of the epidemic and recommending strategies to combat it, UNAIDS has drawn criticism in recent years from Epstein and others who have accused it of being politicized and not scientifically rigorous.

… Piot often wrote personal prefaces to those reports warning of the dangers of inaction, saying in 2006 that “the pandemic and its toll are outstripping the worst predictions.”

All of this lends support to the arguments by Taranto, Don Surber, Noel Sheppard and others, that UN claims about future dangers and funding priorities are flawed, corrupt, or both.

Large government or inter-governmental spending sprees are no match for scientific and technical progress that tackles real problems, rather than hyping up politically-correct bogeymen. Scientists outwit high powered mutants¹, whereas the bureaucrats create them.

But guess who’s going to get stick when a pharmaceutical company uses the excellent work of the scientists whom Eli and Edith Broad so generously fund, to make life-saving drugs for sale in Africa?

1. with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson [↩]