On a short note

The Bolsa program offers support for poor families in exchange for sending their children to school. It has been widely acclaimed at being one of the best tools to reduce poverty and enhance literacy at the same time.

I am by no means an expert on development aid programs and educational policies. However, what struck me is how the usefulness of programs like Bolsa seems to end as soon as they hit what the Economist termed “modern poverty” – domestic violence, drugs, gangs) as opposed to the traditional poverty, hunger and unemployment.

The reason to me seems to lie in the externalisation of discipline. The way the European countries developed was through a painful process in which they instilled discipline into most of their members. From the introduction of standing armies, the enforcement of punctuality at workplaces, the austerity and much-ridiculed exactness and rigity of their civil servants, all of these were different provisions to turn each and every member of their societies into a person that would maintain the schedules and routines that a modern industrial society needed – even if left to himself. Michel Foucault has been invaluable in describing this process, as have other french Philosophers such as Bourdieu and Virillo, probably cause their is a country that first started this “formation” of citizens.

It might just be a reactionary impulse, but I wonder whether it is possible to build a modern society without this internal clockwork, just based on incentives. I also do realize how fishy and self-righteous it may sound, advising peoples in a favela to “just develop some discipline”. That`s not really the point I am trying to make, and that`s not what I am saying. I just wonder whether this process, can be circumvented by replacing discipline by incentives.

I am not sure if this point is indeed a reactionary argument only, and if these “secondary virtues” – that,  as someone so rightly pointed out, can also be used to run a concentration camp,  are necessary, and if so, whether they can be created without all the hassle and pain the west went through. “No pain, no gain”, yes, the old yada yada.

I shall need to think about that some more.

Database Worries

After basically half a year I’m back to zero with my database project. I had found a PHP programmer that was willing to help me smoothen my programming of all the forms and tables that the Database needs to interface with the website, and he said his work had progressed quite a bit. Then in the last weeks he ditched some dates, and it looks like I won’t get anything out of the cooperation. His reasons sound convincing, but in the end the result is the meter to be judged by, and… I am back to Zero. Means I can devote more of my free time to the project and start to do it all by myself again, or I can start looking again for someone to help me, either in exchange for stuff I can do better like CSS and Webdesign, or I might need to pay someone. In either way a very frustrating experience – particularily so since so far I’ve made only good experiences collaborating with friends.

Next step in any case will be registering a new website and putting the stuff online again, for debugging, testing, and as a showcase. But thats only getting me to where I left the whole darn thing in 2007.

So, if there is some nice PHP-programmer out there who is interested contributing to a very uncool, data-heavy, sober historical database project that will bring us nothing but fame and glory, let me know, and I’ll be happy to provide details.