I’ve been reading a variety of treatises about proposed frameworks of understanding international development - the standard, virtually canonical literature such as Collier, Easterly, Krugman etc.

I’ve also examined the primary texts of the Millenium Development Goals and corollary literature, as well as the standard charter documentation of the World Bank Group and others.

What they, and scores of other institutions and organizations have in common is a pursuit of an abstract model for understanding the problem such that they can simulate it and thus test solutions which can then be applied to reality. The assumption, unproblematically accepted, is that an accurate simulation and abstraction means the reality is understood.

Often the solution predicates the model; such as the Marshall Plan becoming, however transiently, the model for international development amongst the western world.

There is a profound problem with this as any engineering student can tell you - abstractions don’t problems, and solutions built into unreliable or erroneous simulacrum are problematic, ineffective and often damaging. They build the scale models out of chip-wood and card-board, they construct the buildings out of concrete and steel, there is both a quantitative and qualitative shift.

International development is a combination design and engineering problem - both in the literal sense of technological innovation, but also in the philosophical sense of developing solutions and identifying principles of applicability.

Plain example, few people would dispute the utility of the hammer as a tool, and thus as a solution. It’s often seen as an indispensable tool for anyone who works in construction and thus should be taken nearly everywhere.

However, availability and implementation are often indistinguishable when it comes to solutions in international development. That is, it’s very costly to have a variety of solutions readily deploy-able within a nation and thus one must be judicious in selection in light of tightly limited resources. These resources, notably, are getting tighter in the contemporary economic climate.

So solutions, such as micro-credit, which thanks to Yunus and the Grameen bank have been a boon to legion Bangladeshis, must be seen as a hammer - a single isolate solution in a specific context.

A hammer, one can easily forget, is a extremely contextualized solution - it requires a nail, material amenable to nailing and stresses on the material amenable to nailing - the fixture of materials is the solution, just as providing means for entrepreneurship is the solution, not the credit itself.

That’s why micro-credit finds itself stalling elsewhere, such as Uganda or Sierra Leone. These places lack the population densities and the social norms expected of the model - the nails, materials and stresses.

On the one hand, international development practitioners, NGOs, CSAs, IGOs etc., develop contextualized solutions which frequently fail utterly to replicate outside the narrow conditions of the original. On the other hand, international development scholars identify global trends that frame the issue of international development is a unified homogeneous gestalt - which if taken as describe is beyond the capacity of a dedicated fraction of humanity to abate, let alone solve. As the Millennium Development Goals would indicate.

International development is plainly an engineering and design problem - more literally than figuratively. Amy Smith and her D-Lab’s solution for charcoal fires in Haiti, for example, demonstrates the kind of impact a combination of insight, education and technology can render on a community and then a nation. Solutions like the Solvatten, and yes micro-credit are profoundly important.

The issue is, there is little in the way of a catalogue, of problems and solutions. There’s no easy way for a agriculture engineer to look for descriptions of problems sorted say, by number of people affected with contact information of a stakeholder and immediately get to work developing a solution or to contact people who are already working on a solution to see how they can contribute.

Further, there’s no simple way for an aid worker with a particular problem to find a catalogue of solutions with descriptions of existing implementations and specifications for requirements. What education is needed? What are the pitfalls of this strategy? How long has it actually taken and what were the estimes? What was the scope and scale of deployment?

Such domains for problem and solution interchange, discovery and synthesis are sin qua non in software engineering, it is the primary and most salient virtue of open source development.

The average person cares little whom solves the problem and care tremendously more about whether the problem is solve and whether the solution is sustainable.

Programs such as Cameron Sinclair’s Open Architecture Network and Amy Smith’s courses at MIT are good starts.  We need more and these meta-innovators need to form an integrated community themselves to share knowledge - and on it goes.

The issue isn’t that the information is hidden, it’s that it’s disorganized and massive. The amount of open Academic literature available is paltry, and what is accessible and recoverable is largely out of date. Most of the cutting-edge material is still controlled by proprietary academic publishing houses - keeping it out of the hands of African and South-East Asian academic institutions (among others). While open scholarship will go a long way to get the information to the people with the circumstance and motivation to act on it, I think simply churning out literature is insufficient since it doesn’t address the underlying issue of quickly identifying and resolving problems in a highly contextualized fashion, while keeping the “customization costs” near zero.

What exactly the tools would be and what form they would take elude me - but I think it’s an important question and I think part of the answer lies in the open source movement and the tools (both technological and social) it has developed to handle the informational and labour scope, complexity, diversity and atomicity.

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In Feb 2006, a thoughtful Flickr contributor named Ludwig Gatzke, uploaded a graphic. It was basically a big collection of logos of Web 2.0 companies. I thought it would be interesting to see what happened to all these various start-ups in the last few years.

So I’ve edited the graphic by fading out those start-ups that are no longer with us.

The methodology for this was simple, I typed in the URL for the company, failing that I Googled the company. If I didn’t find anything relevant on Page 1 of the Google results I marked it as dead. I also marked as dead sites that are “under improvement”, still in closed beta-signup or otherwise not immediately usable. Further, any company that redirected to another domain I marked as dead - so buy-outs/ups are faded as well (eg. Writely became Google Docs so it no longer exists as such).

There’s lots to think about in terms of what led to these companies disappearing - especially those that simply shut-down.

If any of these are alive and kicking, I’ll be happy to amend the photo, so let me know.

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An increasingly common technique, I think appropriated from PDF and other document viewers (Google Maps?), is the draggable interface. http://www.fichey.com/ is a site that implements this navigation method.

This kind of thing allows for innovative two dimensional navigation, especially if you use Flash to make the movement fluid. Fichey and others that use a Flash solution miss a critical element, especially give the rather massive size of their grids - and that is bookmarking.

A simple solution would be to have Flash parse the GET request to look for a “coord” value. If your site implements so-called clean URLs, make the x and y coordinates the last sections in the URI.

That way a user can link their friends directly to the area in question and bookmark it to return to later - both a critically important to usability.

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My good friend David Eaves wrote an exciting post wherein he talked about his vision for StatsCan and how it should act like Google.

I think that StatsCan, on its own, could provide some compelling and valuable data for citizens of all stripes by implementing simple, cheap and scalable web services via conventional APIs. However I think StatsCan alone fails to capture the potential in technology.

Taking the Google analogy further and perhaps more literally - I think the Government of Canada needs a centralized managed repository for all its open initiatives. From APIs to software projects and packages to documentation.

Models abound for this kind of service - code.google.com being the most salient and directly applicable.

By providing robust (bilingual) documentation of the APIs proffered by Statistics Canada (and other ministries) Ottawa could spur innovation nationwide. Value-added services, mashups, statistical models and the like would all be available to anyone with the determination and the skills required to make use of the data provided.

Taking it a step further, the Government could provide an eco-system for these projects. A greenhouse for projects that make use of government data or contribute or expand government services.

The savings this could bring to the government’s TCO for software would be tremendous. The cost of staffing an open source community management bureau would be a fraction of the expense paid out to extortionist software vendors. Even if the government outsourced the maintenance of this project to a company, the cost savings would still be significant.

If the government developed robust and transparent standards for security, provided code and tools to develop applications - the issues of security and usability would be minimized.

By providing incentives for development of specific projects and fostering a community of recognition and respect the government can use its most valuable assets, trust, knowledge and influence to drive innovation.

The infrastructure required to build this is peanuts by governmental standards - a rack of servers, a high bandwidth internet connection and a horde of politically minded software nerds (some of whom speak and read French).

To start out, the working group should look like this:

6 developers with experience in open source. Two should know .NET, two should know Java EE and two should be web app experts - PHP, RoR, Python etc. They write foundational code, submit updates to the code bases and handle bug fix delegation etc.

1 project manager - this is our big-picture thinker, tie breaker and bean-counter. The Boss-Person.

4 community managers to wrangle the community projects and facilitate community leaders.

2 government liasons. One should be techie and the other political but both should be competent in the other discipline.

2 UX people, these people ensure applications comply with usability and accessibility guidelines and give guidance to the designers in the community.

3 Tech writers. These people document code and APIs, write tutorials and construct videos and other media.

So that’s 18 full-time, high-quality tech people - that’s probably about a million dollars per annum in costs all told,  the value generated by the team would be tremendously greater than that.

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One of the worst kept secrets to the growth of the developing world is the massive financial aid pouring in the form of remittances. Huge diaspora populations in the developed world send money back to their countries of origin in the form of remittances - often a single worker supports a multi-generation family in their old homes.

In Africa, for example, remittances have outstripped Foreign Direct Investment in dollar count for half a decade. FDI in 2005 total $15 billion USD for the entire continent, whereas remittances totalled $17 billion. While these totals are over-shadowed by the $25 billion dollars in official development aid (which is mostly spent on humanitarian subsistence projects.

The millennium development goals and many other models for global development indicate that Africa must receive nearly double the inflows of cash to attain sustainability of the MDG outcomes; so every dollar counts.

The synchronized global recession puts these remittances under severe threat. The risk to labour jobs is stiff, and those jobs under the greatest threat are those disproportionately filled by immigrant workers. Moreover, the financial protectionism that is very trendy in political circles (particularly American) puts at threat the typical channels through which remittances are made.

Changes to the legal framework of financial structures could render such remittances illegal or infeasible, cutting off a huge source of funding for Latin America, Africa and SE Asia.

What was the fastest growing source of international finance for the developing world is under significant threat by the global recession - we must be very careful when recommending financial policy that could place these mechanisms under threat, we may have to pick up the tab down the road and it will have accrued interest.

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Unless you possess a degree in computer science or a related discipline or spend your free-time immersed in technical manuals like I do it is unlikely you’re aware of the epistemic crises facing software developers.

That is the issue of parallel processing, also known as concurrent processing. The basic theory of parallel processing allows for multiple operations to be performed simultaneously on different processors and the results to be combined and returned.

This is contrast to how processors have typically worked unto now, which is sequentially. A processor (such as the Central Processing Unit or CPU in your PC) performs operations in strict linearity - one step precedes another. Computers give the appearance of simultaneous activity by switching rapidly between each application’s processing tasks. Modern PCs can also offload certain types of processing by delegating it to specialized hardware - graphics processing goes to your graphics card, sound to your sound card etc.

Parallelism exists not because of some brilliant innovation in computing science, it exists because there hasn’t been a brilliant innovation. The amount of computing power available in a fixed amount of space, that is in a single chip, has a ceiling and we have essentially reached it.

You may have heard the marketing terms “multi-core” processor, such as Intel’s “Core 2 Duo” - these processing units add additional processors rather than making the one single processor faster.

The problem arrises because the way software is engineered prevents any sort of linear performance boost - for each processor you add you’ll experience a logarithmic decay in performance as each processor must coordinate its tasks with the other processors. Obviously this doesn’t happen, instead you simply get no performance enhancement despite the extra billion switches in your box.

Software isn’t engineered this way because there aren’t many commonly used languages that support parallel processing, moreover parallel processing isn’t merely a superficial change to phrasing  - it’s an entirely different architectural paradigm with which to architect software.

The holy-grail in computing research is to automate the process of parallel processing conversion from serially conceived software. Currently there is no such process that is commercially feasible.

C, C++, Java, PHP, COBOL, Ruby are all descended from the same serially premised roots. In the same way object-orientation revolutionized programming - pushing all but ANSI C to the procedural fringes, parallel processing will likely cause many languages to be abandoned.

What does this mean to consumers? Aside from the curiosity it presents, one can hope that it means very little. No hardware on the market is designed to truly take advantage of parallel processing even if though there are a few languages that support it. In the future it will likely mean an initial up-tick is shoddily made software as the current-generation of software programmers are forced to relearn their trade.

I suppose one could hold out hope for the 15 Ghz 100-Watt single-core processor, but I’d sooner wait on cold fusion or quantum-computing.

On the other hand - this does give another chance for small-businesses and obscure geniuses to break into a whole new market. The accumulated girth of the code currently available could be shed - the best applications would be ported over quickly and the rest deprecated, it could be seen as an industry-wide refresh. This means those otherwise intimidated by the dizzying array of platforms and tools (talk to anyone learning C++ or Java from scratch) might find it more enticing to get in on the ground floor.

While Parallel Programming models are being deployed in contemporary languages, these seem (to my illtrained eye) to be inappropriate bolt-ons to satisfy programmers enamored with a particular syntax.

Curiously, one of my favourite languages has supported parallel processing for more than a decade, Ada - the friend of anal-retentive high-integrity programmers the world over. Parallel processing is far from a new concept, it has its roots in the days of reel-to-reel tape media, room sized Cray machines and the computational hegemony of Lawrence-Livermore Labs.

Which language will be the next C? Will Haskell’s initial popularity carry it through? What about Castle’s impressive innovations? Sun certainly knows how to make a language. How about IBM’s X10? or good ole Cray’s Chapel?

Ultimately parallelism is the way to a new generation of ultra-fast computers. These machines will be not just folding proteins but simulating gene-expression, modelling the biosphere, monitoring the market, predicting the weather, encrypting data and of course….calculating really big prime numbers.

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This month’s Foreign Policy, among other things, features a back page contributed by editor-in-chief Moises Naim. He posits what should be a salient observation of our times - economics, as a discipline, has failed us miserably and is in dire need of an intellectual bailout.

Naim’s thesis rests on the fact that economics failed to predict and correct for the predicament that is the global financial disruption we’ve been coping with. Any model, for it to be successful most both explain and predict - most economists wouldn’t argue that economics is poor at predicting.

Examination, however, will reveal that it is also poor at explaining. What Naim is getting at, but perhaps can’t get to within the scope of his publication, is our conventional notions of rationality and sagacity are fundamentally erroneous. Any discipline that rests upon them is equally flawed. Economics isn’t unique in its use of instrumental rationality, it’s unique in the degree to which it relies on this ontological assumption.

I think it uncontroversial to suggest conventional notions of international relations, economics and much of decision theory has its roots in Hume. Adam Smith justified instrumental rationality - giving it a moral teleology through “enlightened self-interest.”

The unsettling problem about Hume and Smith, and von Neumann and others, is that their neat worlds of utils and maximization curves; the calculus with which they explain social (or at least economic) reality simply doesn’t exist. It simply cannot be a possible (or even normatively desirable) way of explaining how people act, even in ideal circumstances.

Smith and Hume have contrived formal systems - that is, they make the problem of choice computable in the formal sense of token manipulation. One simply seeks a maximum payoff given an algorithmic imperative (profit maximization, loss aversion, etc.)

I expect you to take me at my word that has proven, thus far, impossible to use formal systems to explain human behaviour - yet economists run on the assumption that one can. Not only do they run on the assumption that it’s possible, they believe they have contrived such a formal system.

So, most of the social sciences premise their theory on a particular definition of rationality. A definition, which if explored (even by a college undergrad) becomes untenable and worse than useless.

Pragmatic economists argue that while irrationality, that is deviation from the precepts of instrumental rationality, exists within the decisions of an individual, it is unsystematic. That means that in aggregate (such as in the market) irrationality is in effect random “noise” that doesn’t disrupt the models developed by economists.

One doesn’t need to be a social scientist to find this argument unconvincing - turn on the news and one can see that irrationality is more systematic than could be tolerated by the above explanation.

Kant saw this coming - he expressed profound dissatisfaction with utilitarian instrumental rationality because it would simply be a collection of theoretical imperatives. Daniel Dennet should find it equally troubling, because instrumental rationality would result in a total erosion of moral choice due to combinatorial explosion - a situation of even moderate complexity or novelty would paralyze even the most specifically principled agent.

Instrumental rationality not only doesn’t exist - it cannot possibly exist. If one were a rational agent in the instrumental sense, arising from a chair or drinking a glass of milk would be paralyzing events of decision, optimization and action.

Smith and others recognized this crippling problem of economics by simply isolating the system - factors outside the model were either deemed irrelevant or held constant. Where could anyone get it in their head that your family’s religion didn’t affect your economic framing? This is a procedural change - not some shift in quantitative utility, the very logic applied shifts - the kind, quantity and degree of bias one shows is affected.

How is it possible anyone could be regarded a competent expert in optimal decision-making while simultaneously stating baldly that psychological factors are irrelevant?

Naim was right to suggest that economics is in need of an intellectual bail-out. However, just like the financial melt-down caused the excision of poor performers and bad-actors, so too must economics (and adjunct disciplines) toss out bad ontology. It will be painful and violently disruptive to the discipline - but economics must box-in the traditional assumptions about rationality.

In light of Einstein, physicists had to revise much of their understanding. Newton wasn’t locked out but his inclusion was qualified. Newtonian physics (which uses the same syntactical tools as economics, that is calculus) is still used and taught - despite being heavily disrupted. Economics must perform a similar renovation.

Elsewise it will go the way of Ptolemaic astronomy or the aether theories of physics.

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So it appears again that saying unkind things about people with good intentions is the pathway to discussion! I thank Michael for his (very reasonable) commentary on my previous vociferous post regarding Taking IT Global. I should clarify that I had very little issue with Taking IT Global as an organization, my beef was with their website, which I generously called a platform.

I recognize that Taking IT Global is attempting to accomplish something monumental, and failure to accomplish the goal of engendering action in it’s millions of users shouldn’t be used as evidence of pathology. Ultimately one need ask only if it does more harm than good; a messy, heuristic and subjective judgment to be certain.

I do not denigrate its objectives or its staff members. I do not think them lazy or ignorant or any such thing, I do not question their motives. My concern is that they, bright young people that they are, are pouring a huge amount of effort into something that will not help. Intentions do not make outcomes and TiG’s time has passed, its model obsolete.

It does good things still - Michael thoughtfully outlined some of them, and not one had to do with their website. But that is not my contention, my contention is that the opportunity cost for operating the website as it does is unacceptably high.

I think a significant underpinning epistemology here is that I do not believe in the inherent validity of institutions. They exist to serve a purpose and do not bear merit of themselves. Taking IT Global was developed in an environment where institutions were thought to be only viable avenue for change, now this is no longer true.

TiG was highly innovative, there is little reason why it can’t continue to be.

I don’t like pointing out shortcomings without offering some solutions. So here are some suggestions to TiG.

Firstly, open everything on the site.  Hand out the source code to the platform, make the authorship process of all content writ-large open to public scrutiny, commentary or *gasp* direct participation.

Currently, much the system’s prominent content is “vetted” and authored by closed organizations who are “responsible” for the issue - mostly (Canadian) governmental or government supported bodies (cf. The Climat Action Guide). This is problematic. The government is a source of a great many of the problems and allowing them access to shape the discourse has profoudnly distorting effects upon which I don’t think I need to elaborate.

Secondly, Creative Commons the whole thing. Every shred of content should be copy-left and waive as many rights as it can muster - if content authors can’t swallow this they’d best start a private blog and link in because if you want to foster discussion and interaction you’ve got to give people the right to use the information you’re presenting. No more (C) 200X TakingITGlobal!

Thirdly, deploy contemporary web technology. Even the mark-up in TiG is 9 years-old. Where’s my OpenID? OpenSocial? REST APIs? What about my OPML and other DataPortability standards? Heck even plain-vanilla RSS? If the platform were open these features could be available (hell, I’d develop some of them) - but because it’s closed because the TiG need to retain total institutional control these kinds of technical features are infeasible.

Fourthly, integrate integrate integrate. Where’s the TiG Basecamp API integration? Wikipedia integration? Google MAPS? KML files? How about a Wikipedia task-force to ensure relevant articles are maintained? How about TiG Google EARTH Overlay(s)? Facebook/OpenSocial app (framework)? Google Docs ? Twitter ? You know the names…

Finally, provide an open translation back-end for all languages. It seems odd to me that it’s not available in any of the languages of India despite it being the biggest source of traffic.  They have Romanian and Turkish but no Korean? Japanese? German? What about Pashto? Urdu? Somali? Farsi? A huge diversity of languages isdemanded of a truly global website, especially if you want to target the developing world (where only the highly-educated elite both own computers and speak English).

I’m willing to bet the answer to why TiG hasn’t done any of these things is because it can’t.  The site is stretched like a drum over its current system and there’s no room for expansion or diversification, again because everything is insitutionally C&C-ed.

As mentioned in the comments, Taking IT Global was borne of the Web 1.0 era and of a climate in civil society action that had very different laws of nature than today. My suggestion to TiG and to the many sites and organizations like it is to stop fighting against change - it’s easier on the Web 2.0 side of the fence.

I didn’t criticize Taking IT Global because I want to see it fail, it won’t fail, it’ll keep puttering along doing what it’s doing without making the kind of impact it can and should.

I wouldn’t waste anyone’s time if I didn’t think Taking IT Global’s mandate weren’t important - which is why it’s so disheartening to see it squandered in backward models and technology.

If it were my call? I would drop the old platform and switch to a customized Drupal installation (or any other modern CMS, for that matter).  While this won’t fix all the problems of Taking IT Global, it’d be a big step in the right direction and switching to open source provides them with a lot of software and a lot of good will.

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As I’ve mentioned in the past, if technology, particularly open technology is to be regarded as a social movement on the global scale to which it aspires it must be prepared to address concerns that will resonate with people all over the globe.

Having a free version of YouTube, while entertaining, doesn’t give people clean drinking water or feed them. Nor does it prevent the thousands of monthly deaths due to violence in the six conflict raging on this planet of ours.

TakingITGlobal is emblematic of the fatuous slacktivism that has run rampant across the web. TakingITGlobal, for those umfamiliar with it, is a primitive-Web 1.0 social networking system that provides a platform for “interaction” and “involvement” over “issues.” It’s unambiguously youth focused, if totally unappealing to the Facebook generation.

It plays on the notion if that one thinks happy thoughts hard enough at global issues then magically they will solve themselves through sheer force of good will. Good will does not stop the violence in Darfur, does not make crops grow and does not clean the air.

Creating inumerate layers of chatter repeats the same sedimentary bureaucracy that saddles government. Awareness is finished, people are more aware than they’ve ever been in history. I can find out about all the violence that has occurred on this planet of ours within a few days of it happening if I were so willing. Information about what is happening is not the bottleneck - it is information about direct, measurable and valid action that is totally missing TiG (or any system like it).

Obviously this is the case because that is the real problem, the real difficulty. People are starving and dying of preventable disease, we’ve got statistics up the wazoo demonstrating this - heaping up more data to prove it is useless and unhelpful, what is to be done? What information do we need to solve this?

The concern here is that tackling these issues are not well-formed problems, they’re insight problems. One cannot simply pull a lever or push a button to release the appropriate resources to feed Guinea Conarky.

Fear not fellow geeks! Technology can and must help. Firstly, the path lies in the data - not in vacuous ignorant conjecture filling up online fora. We must have ready access to relevant data and systems for integration - even for laypeople. I speak of GIS tools, statistical modelling tools and other systems. These need to be open sourced, simplified and internationalized.

Anyone with a theory should be able to test it easily and cheaply with robust, useful data-sets. At present, this kind of construction is the provinence of academics at wealthy universities to do in between hammering out theory papers.

Once we have the data and tools to analyze it we can, collectively as a community of problem solvers, explore those blind allies. We must accelerate the pace of exploration in the world of human security and development.  The climate crisis hasn’t been solved and no ivory-tower genius has bestowed upon us the perfect solution, so lets get out the spreadsheets and do it ourselves.

TakingITGlobal is precisely the wrong answer, it affirms the stereotype of amateur social involvement amongst the academic and political elite and destroys the credibility of genuine social activity. It is precisely what newspaper journalists are talking about when they reference the vacuous, insipid “me-media” that has become to many the web’s raison detre.

TiG puts lie to Jeff Jarvis and Tim O’Reilly and retracts the promise of the web as source of action, as a leverage point for effective change. It instead acts as a cognitive heat-sink, as much as TV, to absorb the impetus for real change to avoid any nasty progression.

We must demand the data! Make the tools! If the power that forged Wikipedia can bear down on fixing the myriad crises that press upon us we have a fighting chance - we can’t afford to fail.

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DropFees.ca, for anyone not submerged in the murky depths of Ontario higher-education, is a movement orchestrated by the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) to agitate for increased government subsidy of higher-learning. This is not something one could or should divine from their moniker.

The CFS rightly observes that Ontario has the lowest per-capita government support of students in Canada. This is a mishandling and profound misallocation of resources on the part of the Legislature and should be rectified. Education is the best investment one could make and given our turbulent economic times its importance to a strong economy cannot be overstated.

However, the expected reciprocal response that students want universities to enact is the proportional decrease in student tuition and ancillary fees. Their reasoning is that this would lower the barrier to entry for students otherwise unable to afford schooling.  This is profoundly mistaken and problematic, especially from the vantage point of the University of Toronto.

Universities are not exempt from the realities of the forces of supply and demand. There is a massive, historically unprecedented demand for post-secondary education, especially at a university level that overwhelmed the system. Ontario, with it’s comparatively older establishment had greater institutional enertia - prompting very young institutions like York University to mushroom into the second largest English speaking university in the country.

Lowering the barriers to entry misdiagnosis and in fact aggrivates the problem of capacity - there are tremendously more applicants than spaces. Universities are expected both to offer excellent educations to students and to expand to accommodate future cohorts - all with strictly confined budgetary constraints.

The University of Toronto has managed to establish an expectation of financial investment - in exchange it provides arguably the best undergraduate education available anywhere in Canada and certainly the most comprehensive. This comes at a steep cost that students, by virtue of attending agree to accommodate.

Dropping the fees in response to a cash infusion limits this capacity for expansion and exacerbates the REAL problem. Student fees are going up because universities can afford to charge them - if nobody could pay, the University of Toronto wouldn’t be putting classes in Convocation Hall.

Further, education at the level of a university degree is neither a right nor a privilege and one is off in some utopian delusional fantasy when they think it is. It is a luxury of the excess of our economy.  UToronto is not located in Nairobi or Jakarta precisely because of this. To suggest that we have some ordained right to access to a place like this is disgusting and irresponsible - you say that to 14 year-old AIDS-orphan in Malawi.

Until we appreciate and internalize the profound serendipity of our circumstance we’re not much more than the bratty teenagers with an over-developed sense of entitlement some of us continue to be when they step foot on campus.

Further, the University of Toronto and the kind of institution it exemplifies is a product of converging factors. One of them is a thick, and deeply rooted culture of elitism and performance. Elitism has become unnecessarily pejorative (and gendered) and the connotations have overtaken the denotation in salience. UofT is unapologetic in demanding the utmost from its students - this includes a profound investment across time, finances, emotions and labour. By diminishing the investment you diminish the culture and you transform UofT into York or Trent or Brock - insitutions with a more egalitarian culture.

Student loans are quite forgiving as is, while making them more attractive is always nice - I think it should be recognized that education is a very lucrative investment and should be treated in the same way, subject to the same risk analysis. Where the government should come into play, however, is subsidizing those programs whose research and education do not necessarily translate to financial performance; the humanities of course comes to mind. There is a social benefit not easily quantified that the province can understand but a banking institution cannot.

Education should implicitly require investment, investment usually requires debt. The favourable terms of borrowing in place and the chances of repayment are very good - $28,000 in debt-load accumulated over four years for the very significant bump in capacity-to-pay is about as good an ROI as anyone could hope for. If businesses had an equivalent to university our economy would be rocketing.

Discriminating based on capacity-to-pay is integral to a justifiable fee-restructuring. Providing subsidy for those who need it and none for those who do not is essential. Providing additional subsidy for excellence is also key and is standard practice, but I am also an advocate for the reverse - removing support for students who do not or cannot perform is essential to effective use of the limited resources at hand.

Further, providing multiple channels to prove worth beyond a high-school transcript would become ever more important. Distance learning education, like that available at Athabasca, is a very cost-effective way to deliver learning to those sufficiently motivated and invested.  Perhaps requiring an up-front deposit on distance education courses with full or substantial repayment following successful completion would solve the issues of capacity and barriers to entry while not diminishing the pressure for excellence.

Ultimately, dropfees ignores the problem of capacity and proposes a solution which would curtail its solution and constrain the discretionary powers of universities, who are still more accountable to students than the Province. Many accuse, absurdly, that universities are gouging students turning our (comparatively) paltry tuition into a profit centre - the government of Ontario has rung up a half-billion dollar deficit, is this really the institution you want holding the purse strings? Further, given the deficit - where is the subsidy money going to come from? More borrowing or cuts from other programs.

Lowering the barrier to education is not some beneficit wonderous ineffable good, it has profound implications for the quality of the education, it’s rigor, comprehensiveness and nuance. I believe university must be a meritocracy - help is given to those who earn it and withdrawn from those who do not. While students should initially be given the benefit of the doubt, which they are, it is encumbent upon them to ensure their own success.

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