The Free Thinker

Citizens of the Borderless World

The Age of Ambition (Nicholas D. Kristof, NY Times, 1/27/2008)

With the American presidential campaign in full swing, the obvious way to change the world might seem to be through politics.

But growing numbers of young people are leaping into the fray and doing the job themselves. These are the social entrepreneurs, the 21st-century answer to the student protesters of the 1960s, and they are some of the most interesting people here at the World Economic Forum (not only because they’re half the age of everyone else).

Andrew Klaber, a 26-year-old playing hooky from Harvard Business School to come here (don’t tell his professors!), is an example of the social entrepreneur. He spent the summer after his sophomore year in college in Thailand and was aghast to see teenage girls being forced into prostitution after their parents had died of AIDS.

So he started Orphans Against AIDS (www.orphansagainstaids.org), which pays school-related expenses for hundreds of children who have been orphaned or otherwise affected by AIDS in poor countries. He and his friends volunteer their time and pay administrative costs out of their own pockets so that every penny goes to the children.

Mr. Klaber was able to expand the nonprofit organization in Africa through introductions made by Jennifer Staple, who was a year ahead of him when they were in college. When she was a sophomore, Ms. Staple founded an organization in her dorm room to collect old reading glasses in the United States and ship them to poor countries. That group, Unite for Sight, has ballooned, and last year it provided eye care to 200,000 people (www.uniteforsight.org).

In the ’60s, perhaps the most remarkable Americans were the civil rights workers and antiwar protesters who started movements that transformed the country. In the 1980s, the most fascinating people were entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who started companies and ended up revolutionizing the way we use technology.

Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways. Bill Drayton, the chief executive of an organization called Ashoka that supports social entrepreneurs, likes to say that such people neither hand out fish nor teach people to fish; their aim is to revolutionize the fishing industry. If that sounds insanely ambitious, it is. John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan title their new book on social entrepreneurs “The Power of Unreasonable People.”

I like to call this the "purpose-driven voluntary sector," as distinct from (a) the profit-driven voluntary sector, i.e. the private sector, and (b) the purpose-driven coercive sector, i.e., the public sector.  Its role is reminiscent of the religious orders in the Middle Ages, groups like the Franciscans and the Dominicans, or the Templars and Hospitallers who fought in the Holy Land.  It includes universities, NGOs, churches, the blogosphere, Wikipedia, and so on.  Its aims and its loyalties transcend both the self-interest of individuals and the interests of national states.  It is a major driver of innovation and progress.  It is growing in influence and power.

Accosting

The Free Online Dictionary defines the word accost as "to approach and speak to boldly or aggressively, as with a demand or request."  This sounds abrasive, but I think accost can be used, in a novel say, in an innocuous sense, meaning merely: to approach and address someone, in particular a stranger, without any particular business or reason (other than perhaps some pretext).

What I would be interested to know is: how is the frequency of accosting distributed across cultures and across human geography?  That is, how likely are you-- the impersonal you may stand in either for an outsider or for a local-- to be accosted in different places and cultures: in Moscow, Russia, say, or a Russian provincial town like Kostroma; in India, or in Africa, and within Africa in large coastal cities like Maputo, Mozambique, as compared with the landlocked, agrarian hinterland, or the wild bush; in London versus Paris; in Washington, DC or New York, versus a small town; on a college campus, compared to a night club, compared to a beach, compared to a church?  Does the likelihood of being accosted vary with the physical features of the accostee, and if so how is it affected by age, physical attractiveness, casualness or formalness of dress, eccentricities or oddities of appearance, facial expression and external indicators of current activity etc.?  Are attractive women more likely to be accosted?  Are people who amble slowly along more likely to be accosted than people who stride swift with a businesslike air?  Are people in special costume-- in monastic garb, say, or a policeman, or a Hari Krishna-- more likely to be accosted?

I will hazard four generalizations: (a) accosting is commoner in small towns than large cities, (b) accosting is commoner in specialized environments like colleges and churches than in public streets, (c) accosting by fellow-nationals is far commoner in foreign countries than at home, and indeed is almost a mathematical inverse of the foreignness of the environment, (d) accosting is commoner in some foreign countries, particularly Russia to cite my own experience, than in the United States.

A puzzle arises: given that there are so many lonely people in major metropolitan areas, why doesn't more accosting occur?  I think the reason is ethical: people assume that others don't want to be disturbed.  But if they don't want to be disturbed, they can always say so, and the injury done would be a very minimal one indeed.  And people might like to be accosted.  For my own part, I would almost always be glad to be accosted by a stranger, if only for the novelty of it.  Yet I don't accost others, for fear of invading their privacy.  Mabye I rightly believe that others are less lonely than I and have better things to do than talk to me, even if I'd be glad to talk to them.

This seems to be an important social question, even perhaps an important economic question, since it relates to the formation of social capital links and transmission of economically important information.  I wonder if there would be some way to research it.