Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Get someone to interview Hillary Clintion on her experience with a U.S. program that provided microloans to women in rural Russian locations to experiment with small local home businesses and learn the techniques of market and capitalism. Back then the local men were still just waiting around for a new government to give them a new plan. This seems to be an open secret of our relationships with Russia back then. Note we did mot give US government mega loans to Russia to bribe them to continue post-Communist evolution.

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/resilience/Resilience%20and%20Opportunity%20in%20Fourth%20Generation%20Wars%20(Final).pdf

Short paper we wrote on the economics of doing this kind of stuff a while back.

Right now, the US cost per insurgent kill is somewhere over $25,000,000 - yes, twenty five million dollars.

So the capital required for 1,000 microloans (at $2,500 each) is about the same as the spending for one kill. Is it reasonable to think that 1,000 microloans might persuade one person to put down their rifle?

Hard to tell, but it seems reasonable to me. Of course, you also need some infrastructure in place to make those loans fully effective - hard to do business if the power doesn't work. Our approach to that is very much one of using decentralized, grid-free technologies wherever possible - small solar rigs for offices, for example - simply because the robustness is worth the cost. There's a competitive advantage in being able to keep the business going when the grid is down.

But that's a much, much longer story...