"Slow Money" is charity, not investing

"Slow Money" is branding itself as an alternative to traditional investment, but at the same time is not saying anyone will get back the money they put in.

The name is a take-off of the "slow food" movement and it has wrapped itself in all the same old "buy local" and locavore nonsense of creating a new world fed and clothed by low-impact, wealth-creating cottage industries and handmade products. See the "Buy Local" tag on this blog for many, many posts on why almost all of those claims are false and counterproductive.

This voiceless cartoon they made shows a woman putting her money in the bank and expressing concern that it is being invested in arms manufacturers, oil companies and cliche 18th century smoke-belching factories. The woman then gives her money to a local farmer, who puts the money in the ground and a big plant comes out, which eventually sprouts an identical amount of money that she put in. We then we see more plants grow more money, and eventually a farmers' market sprouts up.

This one minute, 45 second cartoon doesn't actually show the woman getting her money back, and people who participate shouldn't expect to either, but it's the closest thing to a coherent pitch the group has.

Slow Money is a network of ideologically-motivated investments clubs who give what they call "loans" to local food producers. Since local farms typically lose money, I imagine they have a high default rate. The Slow Money network has been around for four years and has given out $35 million. It's very telling that the proponents do not talk about how many borrowers pay back their loans. Instead, their website talks about their principals, which for some reason includes a quotation from a Hollywood actor,

I realize that Slow Money is trying to attract angel investors, people who are interested in the cause and the personality behind the business more than generating a profit, but for some reason they won't come out and flatly say it. I wouldn't have such a problem if the Slow Money people would just say that they deal in donations, instead of talking about "investments" and making vague references to building a new economy.

Why not just say that the money people give will not be returned to them, but instead will create things in the community they want to see? Why not just be straightforward with what they're doing, instead of presenting it as something akin to financial investments.

You have to dig deep, but their are times when the movement heavily implies that is the goal. To complete the checklist of a faux-intellectual movement, Slow Money leader Ari Derfel gave a TEDx talk in 2011. After dropping shallow buzzwords like "business 3.0", reading inspiring quotations and talking about someone's honest-to-god vision quest, he summed up what Slow Money is all about. Vaguely. In particular, he said:

What makes life worthwhile is not profit; it's relationships... We need to measure return on investment not simply by profit, but by things like soil fertility, by the jobs we make, the relationships we build, the ecology we restore.

Please note: He never said his "investors" won't make any interest, he just implied it. He never said one way or the other if they can expect to get their principal investment returned.

Before giving his brief summary, Derfel explained  that he would need "a whole TED Talk" just to explain what Slow Money is. Funny, the title of the video of his talk is "Slow Money." Was he really invited to speak about organic food in rich communities and cliche wise-Native-American stories? If an executive director of an organization can't sum up what they do in 15 minutes, they are either incompetent or dishonest.

He could have told us that Slow Money is an angel investment group-slash-charity that accepts the growth of small farms instead of fiscal profit? How hard was that?

Sadly, his vague summary is as close to straightforward as you will get from this movement. If you want to delight in seeing local farmers milling about your community, than you probably won't have a problem with not getting your principal investment back. You're already choosing to pay too much for food anyways. Just don't have any illusions that the money you give to this organization will eventually return to you. As in gambling, don't spend what you can't afford to lose.
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Maggie Anderson is not an economist

I was curious to whatever happened to the Buy Black scheme from a few years ago, officially called the "Ebony Experiment" and later changed to the "Empowerment Experiment. The idea was for black people to only buy from black-owned businesses. Most people got so upset about the upfront racial discrimination that they forgot to ask if it actually helps enrich the black community.

A Google search revealed that Maggie Anderson, the wife in the couple behind the campaign, wrote a book and has a website that introduces her as "Author, activist, speaker, economist..."

While Maggie Anderson may make claims about economic ideas, she is no more an economist than creationist Ken Ham is a biologist. Anderson's classic mistake was to only look at what black merchants stood to make in profits and ignore about the higher costs and other difficulties experienced by black customers. She doesn't understand mainstream economic thinking, in fact, she is oblivious to it and relies on novelty and gimmicks.

She received the highest honor bestowed on a pseudo intellectual-earlier this year - she was invited to present a TEDx talk.

She made one compelling point - that white people can also choose to shop from black merchants (most likely out of guilt). While this fails to help the economy as a whole and will create a net economic loss, the section of the economy she cares about will benefit.

The last time I saw her, Maggie Anderson's group was operating an ignored Facebook fan page. The page was filled with spam posts for get-rich-quick swindles peppered with assigned updates asking followers "Did you EE today?"

Now she has become an evangelist on the stage, making the same tired old promises that if we only agree to buy a few products here and there at an inflated price we would save the community by creating jobs. It's an old claim polished up with an ebony coating, and the core is as hollow as ever.
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TEDx is all wet

In the latest example of TED Spread, we see that a TEDx event in Maksimir gave a slot to scam artist Ivan Jakobović who claims to have converted a car to use water as a fuel.

The supposed mechanism is that the hydrogen and the oxygen atoms in the water are separated so the hydrogen can be burned, but that separation process uses more energy than the burnt hydrogen generates.

A skeptical blogger posted on the TEDx events organizing page that Jakobović is a scam artist and got into an email exchange with the organizers as well and ended up banned from the event.

I can't say I'm surprised, of course. TED and TEDx events are ripe pickings for faux-intellectuals, scam artists and fools who are able to give a presentation. This events location in an obscure nation shows there are too many events for the central organizers to manage beforehand. There are plenty of good TED talks, but viewers can't see it as a place to let their skeptical guard down.
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TED spread is catching on

A few months ago I wrote about TED spread, where the TED lecture series is being compromised by its own success, as the demand for TED events causes organizers to accept speakers with ideas that are not actually worth spreading.

Now TED organizers are trying to warn organizers of spin-off "TEDx" events to watch out for charlatans. Unfortunately, some of the TEDx organizers are pseudoscience believers themselves and will keep promoting nonsense under the TED banner.

From the article I learned that science writer Carl Zimmer took a similar anti-TED stance six months ago, where he also discussed how some videos can be good and others are worthless pseudoscience. It's true that Zimmer wrote his article before mine, and he went into more detail about why an specific video was terrible information, but does he have a catchy rhyming name like "TED spread" under his belt? No he does not.

Your move, Mr. Zimmer.
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TED Spread

I used to love watching TED talks online. A few years ago I would happily spend an evening absorbing quick, accessible and informative talks such as Michael Shermer on skepticism, Matt Ridley on gains from trade and Steven Levitt on the economics of dealing crack. Not only were they educational and intellectually stimulating, they were fun.

But there's a lot of bogus TED talks mixed in too, such as Elaine Morgan on aquatic ape ancestors, Tony Robbins on motivation and Dean Ornish on healing with diet. Blubbering fear-mongering organic huckster Jaime Oliver won the award for the best talk at the 2010 conference with his food-snob nonsense.

TED's popularity is eroding its quality. As the talks have gotten more popular, more TED events are being organized to satisfy those demands, such as the TEDx events which are supposed to be non-official, but are set up the same way and given nearly the same standing by the public.

This has lead to something I call "TED spread," where organizers have to scoop deeper and deeper into the barrel in order to find speakers to fill that demand. The conference used to be annual, but looking at the TED event calendar, I see 18 upcoming TED events, and that's just for Sept. 1. For every Tyler Cowen talk they find, there are several Nick Hanauers.

Probably the worst talk I've ever seen was from TED NextGenerationAsheville, which exclusively has presentations from kids. The heralded success was Birke Baehr, an 11-year-old who regurgitated a collection of anti-science foodie nonsense, including the fake scaremongering story that supermarket tomatoes have fish genes in them. I don't want to pick on a child for being ignorant, but his talk is shared by the TEDx Talk YouTube Channel and has more than half a million hits, and contained nothing but well-worn cliche activist claptrap.

About a year and a half ago I went to a viewing party in Portland, Maine for a live TEDx broadcast and saw one good talk for the entire day. This was offset by a flawed presentation of Felisa Wolfe-Simon's arsenic-based life form findings, which at the time had known contamination problems that were never addressed. The event itself had signs letting us know the free salsa was locally-grown organic, because to that crowd of TED followers, that meant something. 

I was taken aback at how superficial and shallow everything felt when I met these other TED fans. I fear TED talks are encouraging a new generation of faux-intellectuals who can't be bothered with traditional education and would rather have pre-packaged wisdom served to them like hot dogs at a baseball game.


TED is giving an air of legitimacy to bogus ideas. There are, and will continue to be, good talks available from the conference, but viewers need to be on their guard and remember to use critical thinking and double-check everything they hear before adding it to their world views.
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