Going to California

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I'm moving to San Francisco at the end of June to work at Lighthouse! Here are my goals living in SF for (at least) the next few years (1):

1. Do a great job at Lighthouse. High-skill immigration is great for the US - and the world. I’m excited to work on this with the terrific team at Lighthouse.

2. Host the best dinner parties. Quite modestly, my wife and I want to create a salon for builders, a gathering space for thoughtful people driving the future of business, technology, and society. Put less pretentiously, we want to hang out with fun and interesting people. Our apartment is called the Big Beautiful Sino-American Co-Prosperity Sphere, and those of you in the Bay Area can look forward to coming to its launch party in July (2).

3. Meet builders more generally. I’m inspired by entrepreneurs, by Progress Studies, and Effective Altruism. I’m excited to meet as many people as possible in these spaces to trade ideas and build together (3). If this sounds like you or anyone you know, let’s grab coffee!

4. Become great at using AI. My ability to use AI to get things done better and faster will determine how much I get done in my career. So it’s worth continuously investing time in learning to use the tools. Luckily, there’s no better place to be for this than the Bay Area.

Also I’m excited to be active in local and national politics. When I lived in Kenya, I didn’t have much scope for political activity. I’m not planning to run for governor or anything, but I’ll be an engaged citizen.

Perhaps most importantly: I’ve made a playlist of canonical California songs. Please add any I've missed.

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1. I made a similar post when I moved to Nairobi, and found it extremely useful to have a public record of my motivations.

For keen readers tracking my evolving views on how to have positive impact in the world: I previously said that working in global development/global health was the best use of my time. Do I still believe this now that I am working in US high-skill immigration? I do still think global development is incredibly important, and am still working in it, though not as directly as I was before.

Here’s how I think about it:

  • Immigration drives development. It brings new opportunities - directly for the people who move. It drives the sending of remittances home. And it drives development in origin countries via brain gain.

    • Even if you are skeptical that high-skill immigration specifically has much development impact, it can still be instrumentally useful to creating more cross-spectrum immigration in the future. Because successful high-skill immigration can makes immigration overall more politically feasible.

    • In the future I will likely do a cost-benefit from an international development perspective of high-skill migration vs skill-trade immigration vs other types of development projects.

  • US excellence is important. I had previously underrated this. US technology, institutions, politics, and culture are really important for the world at large - including for global development (for starters - USAID matters!). By working in high-skill immigration in the US, I can contribute to making all of these better.

  • I have more faith in capitalism and commonsense morality to drive positive impact. I overestimated the impact I would have in my previous jobs, trying to optimize for global development impact. So taking a well-paying job in a field I think is important seems like a pretty good bet.

  • I’m also simply not optimizing for impact as much as I used to try to.

2. AKA “The Sphere”

3. I also intend to sharpen my own ideas by getting them out there. So expect more blog posts!

I'm joining Lighthouse

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Career update: I’m joining Lighthouse as Go to Market lead!

Lighthouse is the fastest immigration solution for the startup and technology industry. Our mission is to help the world's talent build their biggest ambitions in the U.S. and accelerate emerging technologies by making visa preparation fast and accessible.

High-skilled immigration is a flywheel that benefits both the US and the world’s top talent. This is great for the world. And US immigration services can be a lot better than they are now.

I’ve heard stories from multiple friends who have spent frustrating months going back and forth with unresponsive immigration consultancies. These are people who went to places like MIT and Stanford and who should be focused on building, not stressful immigration paperwork.

Lighthouse gives consistently fast, great experience to founders and critical tech workers so that they can focus on building the great companies of tomorrow.

If you or someone you know needs support on your immigration journey, let me know!

Half of the kids used to die

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Half of the kids used to die.

Across societies with very different climates, cultures, and forms of governance, half of children died before the age of 15. People tried to stop children from dying, and they just failed.

Our World in Data

Things are much much better now. Worldwide childhood mortality is now 4%. In Niger it’s the worst, and it’s still only 15%.

15% of children dying is awful, but it’s way less awful than 48%. Prior to 1800, any country that achieved a child mortality rate of 15% would be seen as the absolute pinnacle of good governance and public health.

Half of children used to die, and now they don’t. If you were making a list today of the top 10 most important facts about the world, this would definitely be in it.

Previous generations have worked hard, and given us the gift of a world where only one in twenty-five children die.

It’s still too many! It’s up to us to give future generations a world where less than 0.5% of children die. It’s possible! It’s already the case in Finland, Norway, Japan, and Slovenia.

If you find yourself thinking that modern life is terrible, just remember that half of children used to die.

—

This post is essentially just my reflections on this much better post from Our World in Data.

No-regrets actions for the AI transformation

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AI is changing the world and nobody knows what is going to happen.

Will we see an intelligence explosion or have a slow takeoff? Will AI lead to a new era of human flourishing, to autocracy, or to something much more mundane? How much work will get automated and how quickly?

All these things are subject to wide uncertainty. Smart people have widely differing opinions.

So, dear reader, what (if anything) should YOU do given that there is so much uncertainty?

I think there are a few no-regrets actions you can take if you - like me - you take the potential of AI seriously. Some actions that will be beneficial under a wide range of possible outcomes (1).

There are a few basic assumptions that underly my thinking:

  1. AI will transform society. This has happened before with technologies like agriculture, the steam engine, and the computer. It is already starting with AI.

  2. Nobody knows how the transformation will go. There is just a lot of uncertainty about what AI will be able to do, how well we will be able to control it,  how it will be deployed, and on what timelines.

  3. It might be bad. AI could enable terrorists to create powerful biological weapons. It could lead to mass unemployment. We could - wittingly or not - give AI systems access to powerful weapons that they decide to deploy.

  4. AI will take over a lot of work. AIs already do an OK job of writing copy, illustrating, writing code, and doing research. They will only get better.

  5. The AI transformation will occur under circumstances of competition. Both between nations as well as between companies.

Those are my starting points. I may write a future post on how you might think differently if you disagree with one or more of these starting points.

So now, let’s turn to the first thing that comes to mind in a situation like this. What’s going to happen to me?

How do I ensure the AI transformation goes well for myself?

If AI will take over a lot of work, what should you do to make sure that you will be ok if AI takes over a bunch of jobs?

There are four areas to focus here:

  • Use the AI. Become great at getting things done faster and better using AI. This blog post by Ethan Mollick has some great suggestions on how to get good. They boil down to “just use it a bunch and figure out what it’s good at.”

  • Know people and be likable. As more and more of the “thinking work” gets done by machines, a lot of the “people work” will still be left to humans. Your network will become more and more important. So be someone people know and like.

  • Manage. Know how to manage people well. And if relevant for your job, know how to manage AIs too.

  • Save more. To have a cushion against future shocks.

Now that your career is future-proof, and you have ample savings in the bank, let’s turn to what you can do to help the rest of us out.

How do I ensure the AI transformation goes well for the world?

Everyone should have at least one political cause of choice. If you don’t have one already, it is a great time to make AI your political cause of choice. Especially if you live in the US or China, since these are the two leading countries in the development of AI, and are both reasonably responsive to the concerns of their people.

But! Uncertainty. Is it better to Nationalize parts of AI development, or leave it largely in the hands of private companies? What kinds of regulations should be placed on AI development and deployment? To what extent should Americans be focused on getting the best models before China at all costs?

There are a couple principles that seem to make sense under a broad range of paths that AI development could take:

  1. Ensure transparency about what developers are training AI models to do. About what values are being instilled in the models. About what kind of safety measures are being programmed into them. The more these models influence the world, the more critical it is that they are subject to scrutiny by the widest possible number of stakeholders.

  2. Ensure adequate cybersecurity to ensure dangerous AI tools don’t get into the wrong hands.

Make your voice heard! The development of top AI models should happen transparently and securely.

It also seems valuable, even without the pressure of AI, to ensure US-China competition doesn’t turn violent. This is an area I am trying to learn much more about. If anyone has any concrete ideas on how we can ensure we don’t have war, let me know ;) (2)

Closing thoughts

AI is changing the world and nobody knows what is going to happen. The above is my best guess - right now - for how you can give yourself and the world the best chances of success during the AI transformation.

What do you think?

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  1. None of my thinking in this post is original. And this is very much a work in progress capturing my thinking at this point in time. I would love for you, dear reader, to tell me what you think. Also note that this advice - especially the political advice - will make the most sense for white collar Americans.

  2. My vague thinking here is: It’s inevitable that the US and China will compete. This is what global powers do. But the more we can channel our competition into productive ends, the better. For example, you can imagine countries focusing their competition on achieving soft power dominance by providing paths for economic development, winning at sports, and exporting great culture rather than fighting wars.

Learnings on the skill-trade migration opportunity

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I spent the past few months piloting a labor mobility project. This is a write-up of what I learned, in case it is useful for others thinking of launching similar projects.

Migration is an vast space. Migration occurs between thousands of origin-destination country pairs, across dozens of industries. There are refugees, economic migrants, family migrants. Every region in each destination country seems to have its own rules. I hope this post will help other entrepreneurs get up to speed faster than I did.

The opportunity in skill-trade migration

OECD countries are facing labor shortages in skill-trade workers in fields like construction and healthcare. For example:

  • There is a global gap of 7 million workers in green energy alone.

  • Canada has 40k+ job vacancies in construction work.

  • The UK’s NHS has over 100k+ unfilled jobs.

The driver is straightforward demographics: There are less young people in rich countries to do these jobs.

In rich regions working age to old age ratio has halfed since 1960 and is expected to half again by 2050 (1).

In a growing number of cases, governments are realizing the labor needs and are making visas available for workers in critical fields. For example, the UK does not cap visas for skilled workers. But obviously, there are a lot of frictions in hiring a worker from abroad, such as validating certifications, getting visas, booking flights, and establishing trust from both the employer and the employee that this job will work out.

The market to solve these problems is tens of billions of dollars. Increased skill-trade migration will be a huge trend over the next 30 years. Significant new businesses will be built in skill-trade migration.

It is also an area where there is enormous impact to be had.

  • The migrant benefits by 3-10xing their income, gaining new skills, and improving their quality of life.

  • The origin country benefits from remittances (typical migrant sends $1k+ home per year) + a stronger incentive for human capital investment

  • The destination country fills critical labor gaps

Learnings from looking into the space

Over the past few months, I explored the possibility of starting an organization facilitating migration of nurses or construction workers from Africa to the UK and Canada, and had 50+ conversations with nurses, construction workers, recruiters, prospective employers, and experts.

Here are some of my key conclusions.

1. You don't need a huge operation to make real money.

You can make profit of a few thousand dollars per worker moved, assuming the employer pays you a headhunter fee, or the migrant pays you an income-share agreement. Assuming you don’t have any employees, you only need to move 30-50 workers per year in order to make a comfortable living.

I would love to see a bunch of operations that are one person, using a bunch of AI tools, to move 50-100 workers per year within a very specific niche. Who is the person who will get Tanzanian solar installers moving to Sweden? Nigerian electricians moving to Italy? Many pockets of opportunity.

2. Many have worked on labor supply, but not on labor demand.

There are a lot of nonprofits and funders who, for impact reasons, want to help Africans find jobs abroad. None of them understand in detail the needs of employers in rich countries.

My advice for any entrepreneur working in the space is talk to your customers, talk to your customers, and talk to your customers (1).

3. Visa and certification requirements are complex.

Prospective migrants don’t know how to navigate visa applications, certification requirements, or English tests. At times it seems processes are kept deliberately complex so that middlemen can benefit.

There is clear opportunity for non-profits to provide legibility here (like Rahi Impact). Perhaps for-profits too, as part of a wider suite of offerings.

4. International actors are overly cautious.

Offering someone the chance to move from Africa to Canada is to offer them a chance to 5x their income. On its face, in this situation there is no moral problem with charging that person a fee for providing them this opportunity. But the international norm is to say that under no circumstances can migrants pay anything.

Similarly, the WHO advises rich‑countries not to do healthcare recruitment from a series of redlist countries. The red list list is built on crude head‑count ratios and a generic universal‑health‑coverage score. Of the 54 countries in Africa, 40 are on the red list, and the nurses in those countries who want to find opportunities abroad are not happy that the international community is providing obstacles from them.

International actors have overcorrected their stances in response to very valid concerns about exploitation, and less-valid concerns about brain drain. There is potential for policy advocacy to shift some of these policies to be more migrant-friendly.

5. It’s tough for new players in UK healthcare space.

Africa→UK nurse migration was the pocket I looked into most deeply and I think it would be pretty hard for a new entrant to enter the market here.

  • Demand for nurses is much lower than it was 3-4 years ago.

  • The focus within the NHS has shifted to improving nurse retention.

  • There are shakeups within the NHS over the past few months.

  • Trust is incredibly important in nursing recruitment. And there are already trusted and approved agencies in place, who to some extent have captured the NHS.

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What’s next for me with all these learnings?

In the near-term, I will be devoting my career to facilitating high-skill migration into the US.

  • There are exciting opportunities to improve migration here. More to come on this.

  • I want to be in the Bay Area - where the action is in AI.

  • I need to be in the US for immigration reasons of my own. My wife will be getting her green card over the course of the next year.

Skill-trade migration is something I’ll be keeping a keen eye on, and may come back to in the future.

If you are an entrepreneur making migration work better and want to chat, email me at ljeure@gmail.com (3).

—

1. For a sense of what this means - Japan had a working-to-old-age ratio of 2 in 2015, and there were news stories all the time about how Japan didn’t have enough young people. All “advanced regions” will be below 2 in 2050.

2. I felt I was being productive when I was setting up conversations with knowledgeable people in the space to pick their brains. I was fooling myself. I should have been talking to the companies who would be my prospective customers. If I had done that earlier, I would have learned much faster that the demand for nurses in the UK had gone down a lot in the past few years.

3. There are a growing number of organizations doing great work in the area. To help any other entrepreneurs get up to speed, the below is a list of organizations/individuals that I found useful and relevant:

Trying to get free money betting on the election

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In October I decided I'd try to make some free money off the betting markets (1).

I had just read On the Edge, by Nate Silver and thought it would be cool to be one of these renegades, going against conventional wisdom, putting money on the line, and being proven right. So when I saw that there were significant spreads between some of the election betting markets (Kalshi and Polymarket), I decided I had to act.

For example: In the presidential election, Kalshi had the odds of Trump winning Georgia at 26%. Polymarket had the odds at 29%.

This looks like free money! All I have to do is:

  • On Kalshi, bet that Trump wins. I put in $0.26, and if he wins, I get $1.

  • On Polymarket, bet that Harris wins. I put in $0.71, and if she wins, I get $1.

  • In total between the two markets, I spent $0.97. No matter who wins, I win $1. So I’ve made $0.03 for free!

Logical conclusion: I should drain my IRA, take out a huge loan, and put everything into chasing spreads.

My wife talked me down from “levering up and letting it all ride” to “take $100 and give it a try”. Which I’m glad she did, because I ended up losing money on this scheme.

And obviously so. Because there are transaction costs involved in making these bets. This is why - while you expect markets like Kalshi and Polymarket to be pretty similar to each other - still you can find small (<5%) spreads. Everyone knows this, and several people told me about this before I tried.

In the end, I placed $90 worth of bets, and won $92. A profit of $2. But since I paid $6 in transaction fees loading money onto the markets, I came out $4 behind overall (2).

My takeaway: Market frictions are very real, and finding a free lunch is a bit harder than I had hoped.

Shouldn’t I have been able to learn this takeaway without actually spending all the time and $4?

Yes. But so it goes in this vale of tears we call life. I can be told a hundred times that my idea is a bad idea and that it won’t work. But sometimes I just have to try for myself before I can admit that I’m wrong, and everyone else is right.

At least this time, my wasted effort has been the fodder for a blog post for you, Dear Reader.

—

1. Betting markets are sites where you can bet on real-world events. They are fun, and also helpful in checking how seriously you should take particular news stories.

Why? In short, because “BS talks, money walks”.

In contrast to your political friend who makes dire predictions in order to make a point that his enemies are ruining the country, the people betting on these sites have a financial incentive to be correct. When there are a bunch of people trying to make money, you would expect the aggregate behavior to be a fairly good prediction of the future. And studies of sports betting bear this out.

For example - when I heard people saying that they were worried that the government would start deporting US citizens to El Salvador, I initially thought that this was overblown exaggeration. But then I checked Kalshi and saw that they had the odds of this happening as greater than 50%. So now I take this pretty seriously.

Plus, "why don't you put money on it?" is a nice comeback to have in the old quiver.

2. Ironically, the transaction fees were all related to getting money onto Polymarket - a blockchain based betting market. I was very disappointed in the difficulty of using crypto to move money to Polymarket from Kenya (where I lived at the time). The traditional banking system fueling Kalshi was much easier and cheaper.

Kenya lessons and new ideals

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When I moved to Kenya, I boasted to have two core ideals. Now that I’m moving back to the US, I’ve revisited them.

Core Ideal 1: I ought to push myself to help people as much as I can.

I’ve moderated on this.

Fine fine fine! Older, wiser people were right. I’m not as radical as I thought I was. I no longer foresee a life of living in tiny rooms, on beans, trying to engineer my personality around having as much positive impact as I can.

I still won’t be complacent with a career that does only an ok amount of good. I’m still strongly opposed to [hedonism](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hedonism?). I have ambition to do great things in my career.

Concretely helping others is still one of my priorities. But it is no longer my only priority.

And to be frank, it’s not clear that obsessing over my impact has even done me much good. At both BCG Nairobi and Kapu I had less impact than I thought I would at the outset. There was definitely impact-motivated wishful thinking on my part in both these career decisions.

I can’t know the counterfactual, and I deliberately did things that were higher risk But there’s a decent case to be made (my wife has made it) that I have overthought things and would have had more impact by just working in the US at a job that made a lot of money, and donating a lot.

So gone are the days of looking at my calendar and pretending that all my time is exclusively optimized for having as much impact as I can.

Core Ideal 2: I ought to look for opportunities where I will be doing work that would otherwise not be done.

I 100% still agree.

Over the course of 3 years helping to build a company, it's become clear to me how many problems exist only because nobody has built solutions to them.

More generally: Much of our world was built by people. Companies. Relationships. Social norms. Works of art.

It's up to us to continue the work of those who went before. To build on what has already been built. And - when needed - to tear down and build anew.

So I plan to build things. Create some products. Start a company or two. Write music. Create community. Start my own family.

So: Luke’s New and Improved Ideals as I move back to the US:

  1. My top priority is my wife (and future children).

  2. I build things.

  3. I ought to push myself to help others a lot.

Let’s see how they stand up in 4 years time.

The AIs come for the homeschool teacher jobs

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The Alpha school claims that in just two hours per day, it’s students learn 2.6 times more than they would in conventional schools. They manage this using AI tutors, who give students individualized lessons.

I believe it. I was homeschooling until I was 14, and most days finished school before noon. I definitely learned just as well or better than I would have if I went to any of the private or public schools in my town. And I never got my love of learning ground out of me, as some kids do (1).

But it took up a lot of my dad's time! He spent hours each day teaching me and my sisters. Luckily, he seemed to enjoy it.

It's exciting to think that by the time I'm a parent, a lot of the benefits of homeschooling - personalized learning, and a minimum of wasted student time - will be freely available to all kids using AI tutors. At a minimum time cost to the parents!

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1. Or so I've heard. From my understanding, elementary school is a lot of standing in lines

We have now perfected the Frig-O-Matic Sabbath Zeiger

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I love the way that people solve problems. Like the way that Hasidic Jews in the 50s solved the challenge of whether or not to open the fridge on the Sabbath.

Observant Jews cannot work on the sabbath. And for Hasidic Jews, a lot of things can count as "work".

Consider the following chain of events: You open a walk-in refrigerator, causing warm air to come in This causes the thermometer to rise, which in turns starts the motor to cool the refrigerator Therefore you have - extremely indirectly - turned on the motor, which is not allowed on the Sabbath.

To get around this, a Hasidic Jew can install a timer on his fridge that turns the motor on and off at fixed intervals, irrespective of the door opening and closing. (Presumably the installation cannot happen on the Sabbath). Now the shop-owner can be assured that his fridge will be cold, and he does not have to worry that he is indirectly turning the motor on by opening the fridge.

This timer is marketed within the community as a "Sabbath Clock" - or a Fridge-O-Matic Zeiger:

With the aid of God Great Announcement

...We announce that we have now perfected the Frig-O-Matic Sabbath Zeiger through which you may open the door of the refrigerator on the Sabbath every time and it doesn't make any difference whether the motor is running or in a standstill position.

The Frig-O-Matic Zeiger is refined in every respect, it is much nicer, smaller, and more practical, it is easier to regulate, and also it is cheaper, to make it possible for everyone to have one. It is completely automatic; once it is connected it is good for the Sabbath and for every day.

Come in for a demonstration daily after 6 in the evening and on Sundays all day.

We sell wholesale and retail. Frig-O-Matic, care of L. Kaufman, 201 Division Avenue, Brooklyn 11, New York.

From The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg by Solomon Poll, 1962.

The AIs will replace the human-trafficked jobs

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Within 10 years, AIs will be able to do any job that right now is done by a human fully remotely at a computer. Probably sooner.

This is good news for some victims of human trafficking! This week, 260 victims of human trafficking in Myanmar were released. These victims were from all over the world, and had been duped into coming to Myanmar. On arrival, they were “pressed into conducting online criminal activity, ranging from love scams… and crypto fraud, to money laundering and illegal gambling” (1).

The human workers doing all four of of these types of scams will be quickly replaced by AIs. This is good news for people who would otherwise be trafficked into performing this labor against their will. It’s bad news for people with a propensity to fall for online scams.

We can hope the the AIs who defend us against online scams will win the arms race against the AIs who perpetrate the scams.

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  1. I should note that apparently, of the 260, some were willing to stay and do the work, but others were held against their will with reports of torture.

10 things to remember from 2024

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About the world

  1. People are wrong all the time. Even when they have strong incentives to be right. How much more so when they don’t have strong incentives to be right?

  2. Almost everything is non-essential. Having the right political opinions, “good taste” in movies and music do not matter. They might be fun, but they are not important outside of that.

  3. We need to get out there and build things. Care about people’s identities and opinions less, and what they are getting done more

  4. “My kind of people” don’t necessarily get things done. Analytical, impact-driven westerners often are very fluffy on executing things that matter.

  5. Embed yourself with the right collaborators. David Bowie is not great because he did it all himself, but because he pulled together the right collaborators in the environment to do great things together. The same thing happens in companies, partnerships, film crews, bands, etc.

  6. VC is very hard in Africa. There are markets worth building for, but in most cases VC is not the right model. And there are relatively few builders in the ecosystem operating at a high level. Then how are there so many startups? Because there is a lot of impact money - so frankly, the bar to get funding is lower. This enables a lot of “mickey mouse” startups, that look nice but have no real chance to become profitable at a VC scale.

About myself

  1. Jia is my #1 priority.

  2. I want to do hard things in my life. Not just “can”: - “want to”

  3. It will be hard enough to be a good husband, and spend my career building something. After that, just play video games all day for all that it matters

  4. The people I want to be around believe in things and act on them.

"Africa risk"

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I’ve heard from some founders fundraising in Africa that the one hurdle to get over with VCs is a general sentiment that “Africa is a risky place to invest”, that isn’t grounded in any actual fundamentals about the company or the market.

At first it might not seem rational for an investor to feel this way if it’s not based on company or market fundamentals. But general sentiment about a market can be self-fulfilling.

An early-stage investor in a company will only make money if the that company survives long enough to have a good exit. The company will only survive this long if other investors can be persuaded to invest at later rounds (1).

So an early-stage investor must believe that later-stage investors will believe invest in this company. If the early-stage investor knows that most investors won’t believe in the company because they are worried about “Africa risk”, then she won’t want to invest.

She has to behave as if she believes in “Africa risk” - even if she herself believes that there is no fundamental Africa risk (2).

The value of impact investors is to break this negative cycle. To put money into an ecosystem (be it a geographical ecosystem like African startups, or a cause-oriented ecosystem like climate-tech or immigration) until it becomes an attractive investment destination for purely profit-seeking investors.

—

  1. Or if the company can become profitable without having to raise another round of funding. A good option for many African startups

  2. This is the same fundamental dynamic that leads to speculative bubbles

What are human smugglers really like?

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“These people are not only my customers: they are my brothers. I help them because they are on the wrong side of the world.” -Abu Hamza, a human smuggler

Luigi Achilli is a anthropologist who studies migrants and refugees, and the smugglers who help them move across borders. For many people, the image that comes to mind when we think of human smuggling is a ruthless criminal who preys on vulnerable people. This was certainly my image of a human smuggler. But his fascinating research reveals a far more positive picture of human smugglers.

I did a quick run-through of some of his papers. Here were the main things I learned:

  • Migrants like the individual smugglers they work with, rather than thinking of them as exploitative. “Remarkably, accounts about the callousness of smugglers were often dismissed by those very people who risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean. The majority of migrants with whom I spoke did not perceive their smugglers as exploitative.” And the smugglers themselves emphasize the “importance of being morally respectable and kind.” Smuggling is a business, and as in any business your reputation is extremely important.

  • But when both migrants and smugglers think of “smugglers” in the abstract, they think of someone predatory. "[T]he degree of consensus was surprising: smugglers were fundamentally evil.” So in the abstract, they think about human smuggling basically the same way as we all do. They just don’t think of themselves as engaged in that sort of activity. (”Waiting for the Smuggler”)

  • There is not a strict dichotomy between smugglers and migrants. A lot of smugglers are migrants themselves, and migrants assist in smuggling activities (e.g., piloting boats, recruiting migrants, serving as lookouts) (”Waiting for the Smuggler”)

  • Smugglers often share ethnic ties with the people they transport, which helps them establish solidarity with them. At times they will even transport the elderly, infirm, or children for lower than their typical costs. The unfortunate converse to this ethnic solidarity is that when when smugglers and migrants do not share the same ethnic background, abuse is more likely to occur. (”Irregular Migration”)

  • Migrants underestimate the risks - at least those migrating from Africa to Italy. Many say that if they had known the risks, they never would have left (page 5).

He also has a few points that counter common narratives about how smuggling is organized For example:

  • There is this idea of extremely organized criminal organizations who organize the smuggling of people from, say, Nigeria all the way to Europe. This is not the case. Instead, the people who move from Africa to Europe typically make their way piecemeal. They don’t even have a final destination in mind when they set out - much less have their entire journey planned for them by a centralized crime organization.

    • “Indeed, it would hardly be possible for a single centralized organization to carry out all services alone along a route that comprises journeys of several thousand kilometres and in a market characterized by high levels of instability and unpredictability.” (from Irregular Migration)

  • Similarly, sometimes you might hear that terrorist organizations participate in migrant smuggling as a source of revenue. He finds that this is not really true.

One of my overarching takeaways from his work is that the “smugglers are predators, migrants are victims” narrative is far too simple. It is a way of thinking that lets you avoid blaming illegal immigrants, while still allowing you to view illegal migration as a moralistic issue. The reality is much more complicated than that.

I’m very glad there are people like Luigi Achilli in the world - helping the rest of us understand this area of human activity that is important, often misunderstood, and fascinating.

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Some interesting works from Achilli:

The cyclical pattern of Bangladesh -> Malaysia migration

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Migration from Bangladesh to Malaysia has followed an interesting pattern over the past 25 years.

Malaysia is a significantly richer country that Bangladesh. In Bangladesh 90% of people live on less than $10 per day, compared to only 9% in Malaysia. Bangladeshis who are able to migrate to Malaysia to work on palm-oil plantations are able to double their wages - so demand is extremely high from Bangladeshis for the opportunity to migrate to Malaysia to work.

Malaysian palm-oil companies need labor, so it would seem there is a clear win-win here. But every 5-10 years, Malaysia halts immigration from Bangladesh to Malaysia. this has happened in1996, 2001, 2008, 2018, and most recently in 2024.

It turns out that a cyclical pattern has emerged:

  • The governments of Bangladesh and Malaysia reach an agreement to allow Bangladeshi workers to migrate to Malaysia on temporary visas

  • The supply of Bangladeshi workers wanting to move overwhelms the capacity of the government to match them to jobs

  • Middlemen assist migrants to go outside the system. Sometimes they actually matching people to jobs (just without proper paperwork), and sometimes they invent fictitious jobs. And to do this higher-risk migration, migrants are actually willing to pay at least 5x the normal migration cost

  • In response to abuse of the system, Malaysia blocks immigration from Bangladesh

  • The Bangladeshi and Malaysian governments enter talks, and the cycle repeats

In general across the world, demand to immigrate is wildly higher than the supply for immigration slots allowed. Over a billion people worldwide would like to move internationally for work. Any American who has ever taken a taxi in Kenya can attest to this: You are always being asked "Can you help me get to America?"

Governments in destination countries do not always want to promote in-migration. But my takeaway here is that even when governments want to encourage migration, they don’t properly account for how much demand there is.

The willingness of migrants to pay 5x sticker price to migrate shows that migrants value the opportunity to move at a value far greater than the government thinks is fair to charge (1). Regardless of whether you think that the costs to migration should be determined by market forces or not, the fact that migrants are WILLING to pay so much shows how much people value the opportunity to move.

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1. By the way, the International Organization for Migration says that labor migrants should not be charged any recruitment fees or related costs. There seems to me to be an oversensitivity here - an equation of “charging money” with “exploitation”.

Luigi Achilli provides evidence that even in the case of illegal migration, we should not equate “charging a high price for an illegal service” with “exploitation”. In general, if someone understands the risks of a service and is willing to pay the price, then there is something more interesting going on than simple exploitation.

Similarities between Beyonce's COWBOY CARTER and the Beach Boys' Smile

COWBOY CARTER is Beyonce’s latest album. Smile is an unfinished Beach Boy’s album from the 60s (1).

  • Both open with prayer: The first track of Smile is called "Our Prayer”, and CC’s opening “AMERIICAN REQUIEM” ends with the word “amen”. The religious themes continue throughout both albums

  • Both feature Good Vibrations (2)

  • Both feature prominent covers / interpolations collaged together with original material. This is pretty typical in modern hip-hop and pop pop, but was much more unusual in the 60s. On CC are “Blackbird”, “Jolene”, “Good Vibrations”, and “Oh Louisiana” among many others. On Smile you have most notably “Gee” and “You Are My Sunshine”

  • Both are symphonic concept albums. On both, one track often flows directly into the next. Alongside traditional 3-5-minute pop songs, both also contain a lot of short song segments stitched together (e.g., “MY ROSE”, the last 40 seconds of “SPAGHETTII”, “I’m in Great Shape”, the bridge of “Heroes and Villains”)

  • Both are a sort of reclaiming and mythologizing of Americana. Smile was explicitly meant to act a “riposte to the British sensibilities that had dominated rock music of the era”. COWBOY CARTER is, among other things, a “journey through a reinvention of Americana, spotlighting the overlooked contributions of Black pioneers to American musical and cultural history.”

  • And both have a specific interest in westerns: Smile has the western-set “Heroes and Villains”, and Beyonce has described watching hundreds of westerns as inspiration for CC

  • Both feature performances from notable non-American Paul McCartney: Beyonce’s cover of “Blackbird” uses his guitar and foot-tapping from the original. On “Vega-Tables” it is rumored that he is the one percussively chewing celery

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  1. The album was never officially finished or released, but an approximation of the album - titled The Smile Sessions - was released in 2011. That is what I am referring to when talk about Smile throughout.

  2. On CC it is interpolated into the song “YA YA”

High-level thoughts on having the most impact with a company

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I decided over December that at some point during my life, I want to start a company.

How should I think about “return on investment” from an EA perspective when starting a company? Here is my thinking, very quickly sketched out.

  • What matters is how much “good” the company achieves achieved per “input”

  • The main sources of “good achieved” are:

    • direct impact on customers and suppliers

    • potential for profits of company to be donated

    • contributing to economic development via

      • job creation

      • skill building of employees

      • ecosystem development (e.g., building a startup ecosystem in a place like Kenya, building expertise in chip manufacturing in a place like the US)

      • bringing in foreign exchange

    • potentially other externalities (e.g., a green company having positive environmental impact)

  • The main “inputs” are:

    • My own time and energy relative to whatever else I could be doing

    • time and energy of my coworkers

      • → not too worried about this. The supply of talent is elastic

    • any capital the company takes

      • → supply of capital is elastic too. so don’t worry about this

My conclusion: Go for the company that does the absolute most good possible. Don’t worry hogging talent or capital because those are elastic, and more will be generated.

This means one of two things:

  • If your main source of impact will be making money that you donate, then your goal should be maximizing shareholder value (2)

  • Otherwise, your goal should be to make the biggest company you can (3), so you positively effect the most customers/employees/partners

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  1. both very squishy but useful concepts for the purpose of this exercise

  2. this also applies if you are taking a profit for good approach

  3. with the caveat that you don’t drift away from whatever it is that is driving the impact

I donated $35 to offset my carbon footprint for this year

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I want to start donating annually to offset my carbon footprint. I don’t really think of this as a charitable cost - instead it’s internalizing my externalities.

This is the first time I am systematically deciding to make an annual donation - I wanted to walk through my thinking in case it’s useful for anyone else! This post also serves as pro-Effective Altruism propaganda.

  • How much carbon do I need to offset?

    • The average American seems to emit about 15-20T of CO2 per year (source, source, source). I’ll assume 20T.

    • But I travel a lot. A round-trip flight from London to New York emits ~1T of CO2. This year I took 5 international flights - most had multiple legs, so I’ll assume I emitted 15T more than the average American.

    • So let’s say I have to offset 35T of CO2 each year.

  • Where should I donate?

  • How much should I donate?

    • I’ll use the top recommended climate charity from Vox’s Future Perfect as a benchmark. As of December 2023, this is the Clean Air Task Force

    • Founder’s Pledge estimates that a donation to CATF can avert 1T of CO2 emissions for $0.1-$1

    • So that would put the amount I have to donate to offset all my emissions at $3.50-$35 per year

    • I’ll be on the safe side and assume I should donate $35

Conclusion: I just donated $35 to the Climate Fund from Founder’s Pledge to offset my yearly carbon footprint. I intend to make this donation annually going forward, and encourage you to as well!

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Effective Altruism has been under some heat lately - with the collapse of FTX, and the drama around the OpenAI board ousting Sam Altman.

EA is both a philosophy and a community. I think the above exercise illustrates why both are really good, despite recent drama.

  • The philosophy of Effective Altruism gave me the intellectual motivation to donate in the first place. And it informs my decision about where to donate: I should not just donate to what feels the best - I should donate where my dollar will have the highest impact in terms of tons of CO2-eq averted.

  • The community of EA has created institutions (in this case Vox’s Future Perfect, and Founder’s Pledge) that help me quickly (1) identify a good donation opportunity, and direct my funds effectively. Also, a post on the the EA Forum provided extra social motivation to make this donation

Is this system perfect? No. Perhaps I could have spent more time finding a better charity to donate to. Perhaps I should be doing more in my lifestyle or in political activism to be addressing the problem of climate change.

But I think my actions here are a lot better than they would be if Effective Altruism did not exist (2). So overall I remain proud of Effective Altruism - both the philosophy and the community.

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  1. It only took 1 hour to do the research and decide to donate!

  2. For what it’s worth, the philosophy and community of EA were also key motivators in my decision to become vegetarian

On infrastructure challenges in Kenya

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“Infrastructure challenges” are often cited as a barrier to doing business in emerging economies. I thought it might be interesting for people to see very concretely how infrastructure challenges do and don’t affect our work at Kapu (1).

Roughly in order from least challenging to most challenging:

  • Water access issues don’t affect us. We have fine running water at our offices/warehouse. Water access is a bigger challenge in the countryside

  • Power outages: doesn’t affect our office or warehouse directly. But sometimes when power goes out for a night in a poorer neighbourhood, our agents can’t place orders the next day because their phones are all dead

    • power outages are a significant issue for businesses like manufacturing though

  • Cell network / internet issues: We have significant but not huge problems here

    • Cell and internet connection can be patchy. Lots of “can you hear me?” “sorry, there’s lots of lag”

    • Internet periodically just goes down - hurts our customer service response time most of all

    • Sometimes Safaricom - the biggest cell and payments network - goes down for a few hours, leading to failed payments, OTPs that don’t send properly, and lots of hassle

  • Low level corruption: Cops sometimes stop or impound our trucks and want bribes. They let us go after we show the proper paperwork for the 7th time, but it can make our deliveries late

  • No comprehensive street address system: You describe where something is by saying “it is next to House of God Church” or “it’s in the Mumbi area” (2). We rely on GPS pins (which are not always correct) rather than addresses to make deliveries. This slows down deliveries

  • The roads aren’t great: In Nairobi some roads are concrete, and some are dirt. When it rains hard, some of the dirt roads become impassable. This happens every couple weeks or so and then we are unable to make deliveries in a few neighbourhoods for that day

Collecting payment from customers and agents who - because of lack of trust and lack of liquidity - don’t want to pay in advance for a product that will arrive until tomorrow is also a huge challenge that you don’t face so much in the US. I wouldn’t consider this strictly an “infrastructure challenge” - but it is another type of challenge that also tends to go away as a country’s economy develops.

Overall these issues aren’t huge for us. I think these types of problems matter much more in industries like manufacturing, or in countries where infrastructure is worse.

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  1. ofc this is all my own views, not any kind of official view from Kapu

  2. My friend was once asked to draw a map of where he lived for an official document

How I use ChatGPT

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I came across a couple of studies on Twitter recently about the effects that AI chatbots have on productivity.

This matches with my personal experience using ChatGPT (which I’ve been doing increasingly over the past week or so).

ChatGPT does not make me great at the things I am good at. It makes me ok at the things I am bad at.

I basically use ChatGPT to teach me about things that I don’t know much about. It’s a much faster version and personalized version of Google. Here are some examples:

  • Explain to me what a fiber bodied truck is

  • Explain how instant coffee is made

    • Google could have gotten me the first-level answer here, but ChatGPT was great because I had lots of specific follow up questions that it could answer

  • Explain how a contextual bandit algorithm works from first principles, how it is distinct from other types of recommendation algorithms, and why it is called “contextual banditry”

  • Are personalized recommendation algorithms more relevant in developed countries vs developing countries? If so, why?

  • Analyze the macro-economic risk of investing into a company in Pakistan. How do the risks differ vs investing in Kenya? Vs Nigeria?

All of these are things I don’t know that much about. ChatGPT is great at getting me to an ok level of knowledge. But it is not useful for helping me at the core parts of my job - creating a sales pitch for Kapu agents, or understanding the issues that Kapu customers face.

I personally find this very enriching - I’m able to learn random things much more quickly and in a personalized way. It’s like having a generally knowledgeable person I can just constantly ask random questions and get informed (though not perfectly accurate) answers.

If there is a more general trend I draw from this, it is that tools like ChatGPT are enabling a lot of people to become passable at a wide variety of things. This is very exciting!