Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

~ Posted by Robert Butler, April 10th 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, March 27th 2012

When Caroline Fiennes taught at a school in Tamil Nadu, India, in the early 1990s there were times when her class was only half full. She discovered there were four main reasons for this: the transport was poor; the cost of the uniform was too high; the parents needed their child to work in the fields or take care of a younger sibling; or the child had intestinal worms, which causes malaise, lethargy and severe pain.

There are charities that deal with these issues. One pays parents when a child attends school. Over a year, this costs about $1,000. Another distributes school uniforms—with $1,000 you could get 10 children into school for an additional year. A third offers deworming, and for $40 a year (sometimes much less) this can keep a child in school for a whole year. The maths is obvious: when large numbers of children are unable to get to school, $1,000 spent on deworming is "25 times better".  read more »

Remember burying a time-capsule as a kid? These care packages to our future selves usually included a letter and any valuable possessions we could bear to part with: stickers, a mood ring, a key chain. How much would you pay for that mossy stuff now, and the letter explaining them? How much would those objects be worth to a stranger? The value of such things is complicated, and largely subjective. This is why I still have my Breyer horse collection, and why I would pay real money to have any of those time-capsules back. Rob Walker, author of the book “Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are” as well as the “Consumed” column for the New York Times Magazine, understands our compulsion to sentimentalise things. Together with Joshua Glenn, a fellow object lover (his books include "Taking Things Seriously"), Walker began the "Significant Objects Project", an experiment that tests the malleability of an object’s value.  read more »