whythawk ratings: measuring effective development

1.
(Comments)

...tion from Facebook or Google doing the same thing? Net Neutrality, aimed as it is at a few incumbents, creates asymmetric rules that will favour a few web 2.0 companies at the expense of what econo...

2.
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...o blame the US or UK for these problems, but how? North Korea? Myanmar? Zimbabwe? Are the leaders who create these hell-holes not responsible for their own actions? How on earth do you lay respon...

3.
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...dards as they can afford them? First we must address our attitude to the informal sector, then we must create bridges which allow legal investment back and forth across the two markets. Only then ...

4.
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...ut a living. There is no growth there. It is driven by wealthy individuals who start small businesses and create employment and further wealth. The sooner we learn to value wealth as a creator of wea...

5.
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...al problems, creating real jobs is just too hard, so they all default to: An enabling environment must be created to allow our teeming youths .... (you get the picture....

6. No way out; ducking the Eskom bullet
(Analysis/Analysis)

.... The first option is to embark on a period of state-led intervention; where government-owned businesses create new industries or extend existing ones. The alternative is to promote private endeavour...

7. Xenophobia and the end of the African Renaissance
(Analysis/Analysis)

...er. Companies from MTN to Shoprite have entered the African continent with tremendous success. This has created investment opportunities both in the destination country, as well as in South Africa w...

8. Netscape, the Internet and Creative Destruction
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ant to be left to the private sector. Like electricity, for instance. But it was private endeavour that created power generation in the first place. The price of internet use has plunged in South A...

9. Funding departments instead of people cheats everyone
(Analysis/Analysis)

... next year we will be complaining once again that state hospitals don't deliver, and public education creates a nation of unemployable illiterates. ...

10. Jacob Zuma, Inflation Denialist?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...come true then the money in circulation does not represent the value of the economy. Money that has been created and is in circulation cannot be removed unless it is physically destroyed. Too much m...

11. Trevor Manuel and the "Plunder of Skills"
(Analysis/Analysis)

...st be loyal to its people; not the other way round. If South Africa wants investment then it must act to create a favourable environment for those investors. Whether they are foreigners whom you wis...

12. Contradictions resolve in ways you don't intend
(Analysis/Analysis)

...uch of the ANC succession debate has been over this seeming contradiction. Either capitalism doesn't create jobs, or businesses are being selfish and refusing to create them, goes the argument. ...

13. 100 Days of Sodom
(Analysis/Analysis)

...: people will fight amongst each other for who gets seniority on the list, jobs of dubious value will be created and the state entrenches the idea of short-term contractual work as a solution to unem...

14. Slaves to land, the policies of Land Affairs
(Analysis/Analysis)

...hemselves. This spending helped other companies' profits, increased consumption as salaries rose and created a more confident and wealthier middle-class. This middle-class bought houses. They b...

15. The Miracle of Investment
(Analysis/Analysis)

...uit Mill into an upmarket office and business complex. It was an even greater dollop of self-belief that created the Saturday morning market of produce, food and crafts. Imagine investing that much ...

16. Killing the Golden Goose, a lesson in Economic Freedom
(Analysis/Analysis)

... autocratic. Democracies place the needs of the majority over the actions of the individual and this can create winners and losers. The majority could, for instance, vote to ban hunting and so disad...

17. The spectre of loyalty over ability
(Analysis/Analysis)

...on of their talent. Not every person has the capacity to lead, but every person enjoys the opportunities created by talented leaders. Leadership is a knotty task. It is not merely about seeing furt...

18. Ending poverty means abandoning charity and accepting reality
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ectly into a free-market economy. He disbanded the central state, sold off the nationalised services and created the direct form of a free-market state. It was a disaster and resulted in the backlas...

19. Scrogues Converse: Open-space, Identity and the Missing Web
(Analysis/Analysis)

...unwanted, per se, but more of the inevitable truth that human irrationality and tribalist impulses will create class distinctions even in the flattening, no-one-knows-you're-a-cocker-spaniel...

20. Atlas Shrugged at 50
(Analysis/Analysis)

...vernment will have to raise additional taxes from other businesses. Government's "need" to create jobs will see millions of rands taken from people who have the best ability to turn it ...

21. Zimbabwe: recovering the irrecoverable
(Analysis/Analysis)

...rica than Libya. If the customs union between Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Mozambique can be used to create a mini-free-trade zone then we really can look forward to some serious Asian Tiger-styl...

22. South Africa's two tiers
(Analysis/Analysis)

...nships into Special Economic Zones?" His answer was brief and confident, "We don't want to create a two-tiered society." That sounds like the sort of answer regularly heard from t...

23. The tragedy of innovation: how brilliant ideas are criminalised
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ntiments expressed about antibiotics: "Yes, antibiotics have extended human life, but they have also created multi-drug resistant bacteria. I think we should get rid of antibiotics and go back to...

24. Suburbanise! How aid and trade obliterate unique cultures
(Analysis/Analysis)

... To say, "I'm not offering money. You don't need it. But I can show you how to organise to create your own cultural capitalist core and meet the tide as an equal." Suburbia. Lost...

25. Start your business in Johannesburg but hire your advisor in Cape Town
(Analysis/Analysis)

... consultants, as well as development programs, the opportunity to improve their effectiveness in order to create more businesses and more jobs," says Jeuschenak. The full report is available to s...

26. Two Frontiers: wars of liberation and of determination
(Analysis/Analysis)

...s to spend vast amounts on new technology and top analytical teams to ensure that they can, once again, recreate that gulf of ability and talent. It has not yet happened but the orgy of consolidation ...

27. Do you hate the poor enough to be charitable?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...h is spent is a decision for that society. But, whatever we do, we must ensure that our subsidies do not create their own distortions. South Africa has more than 5 million people who suffer from AID...

28. Nigeria, or the idiots guide to stealing an election
(Analysis/Analysis)

...e than half of Nigerians live in absolute poverty, below the UN's measure of US$1 per day. Saro-wiwa created the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) in support of the Ogoni'...

29. The future of newspapers II: of shock-jocks and self-made media-stars
(Analysis/Analysis)

..., "rather it is about complimentary media. The New York Times increased its audience by 12% after it created a website. The new media allows companies to reach new people through a variety of cha...

30. The future of Newspapers, journalistic integrity and the battle for Google's soul
(Analysis/Analysis)

...at is being spearheaded by the World Association of Newspapers - is designed to automate this process and create a new standard of what is allowed and what procedures the search engines must follow wh...

31. Guess which South African cellular company offers the best contract tariffs?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...widely as is humanly possible. Ensure that it is impossible, even with a calculator, for all but a few to create a normative set of comparable figures between competing companies. Even Virgin Mobile, ...

32. Government to gag South African bloggers?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...der the apartheid government, had an exemption from that process on the basis that you can't possibly create that kind of pre-publication of news media. But what this bill does is it takes away th...

33. One Laptop Per Child, now costing 75% more ...
(Analysis/Analysis)

... the Internet.  Wealth and stability produced the Internet, not the other way round.  China has created 300 million jobs in a decade with a government completely opposed to the Internet.&nbs...

34. Jobs are from Mars, Business is from Venus
(Analysis/Analysis)

...opportunity to nurture agents of socio-economic development." Let us summarise: they need jobs to be created to absorb their vast labour pool.  How do they intend to create these jobs? ...

35. Internet Bubble 2.0: the future of dotcom depends on the mobile phone
(Analysis/Analysis)

...nceivable revenue model now make money by hosting Google Adwords.  Suddenly companies can offer user-created content in ever-expanding formats: video, music, chat, blogs, diaries, encyclopaedias,...

36. The Jimmy Wales interview: Wikipedia and Lessons in Globalisation
(Analysis/Analysis)

...centre-stage into Wikipedia's domain. "Recently," says Wales, "a small group of people created a new Wiki in a new language.  There were only about five of them but, after a fe...

37. Lawrence Lessig, take note: Digital freedom still needs digital responsibility
(Analysis/Analysis)

...n people become, then the more dogmatic they become.  And the more dogmatic they become the more you create an environment where terrorism seems like a reasonable response. While moving forward w...

38. What market is worth R 100 billion a year and is growing at 10.9%?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...getting their cellular licence, Vodacom developed a sophisticated telephone call-centre.  Technology created by Psitek, and housed in old shipping containers, allowed for the distribution of fixe...

39. Leveraging your good name; the power of a positive credit rating
(Analysis/Analysis)

...w community. Even worse, though, is that those who sabotage their reputations entirely in one spot simply create a new persona for themselves at the same site or elsewhere and start all over again. T...

40. The US$ 5 trillion market at the bottom of the pyramid
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ou may not be interested; but 50 times less for the same quality? Says Prahalad:  “We need to create inclusive capitalism.  If we exclude the poorest we will get social unrest and out...

41. Unions, the leverage of the highly skilled, and the future of work
(Analysis/Analysis)

...nies use farms of coders to do the slogging of getting basic algorithms to work around the overall design created for them by a highly talented programmer working for them only on that project.  ...

42. Racial arguments muddy human rights and the ending of poverty
(Analysis/Analysis)

...p and suffering where they did not have to. It is impossible for government by an act of intervention to create any jobs.  It is impossible for any government to determine what products will sel...

43. The Last King, the Centralised State, and Democracy
(Analysis/Analysis)

...elfare groups, child welfare, tourism societies, NGOs, charities … anyone or anything that acts to create work opportunities and promote different aspects of the whole of society. No one group...

44. Rating to create a market; questions and answers
(Analysis/Analysis)

The Whythawk team is going through an exciting period of growth; rolling out enterprise development ratings in Gauteng, and developing a new model for rating HIV/AIDS organisations, is pushing us hard

45. What happens when they hate you? The impact of charity.
(Analysis/Analysis)

...eting fame and seeks long-term solutions over short-term populist grandstanding, whose only thought is to create choice and opportunities for the beneficiaries of their interventions, is the jewel of ...

46. "Heads or Tails" ... resolution to a difficult choice
(Analysis/Analysis)

...xpanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) launched by the South African government in 2004. With a mandate to create one million jobs in five years, it has created 250 000 temporary jobs for unskilled wor...

47. Western Cape economic development support agencies lack the capacity to halve unemployment
(Analysis/Analysis)

...s development consultants in the Western Cape, South Africa. Rated organisations collectively managed to create approximately 8 200 jobs in the past 12 months. The average level of unemployment in th...

48. The 'War Against Corruption' starts with ending the 'Culture of Entitlement'
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ve initiatives to expropriate land from large-scale farmers and redistribute this to peasants.  This created an entitlement in which peasants felt that they were entitled to land, whether they co...

49. We're from Mars and we want to help: four lessons in development
(Analysis/Analysis)

...eas). Education: set up universities and colleges and academic programs to develop local school syllabi - create bursary programs for the most desirable skills; bursary recipients will be required to ...

50. Coffee, the miracle of poverty, and other wonders
(Analysis/Analysis)

... – in the middle of one of the longest economic booms we have ever known, when more wealth has been created than ever – remain poor? China too, despite super-star neglect, has over the pa...