Spirit in Action

Loren Cobb: Part 1 - Aetheling International Consultants

Loren Cobb has an exciting and unusual job. As Aetheling International Consultants he facilitates NationLab, a simulation game helping countries of this hemisphere experience and plan for social, economic and political developments. Loren, a Quaker pacifist and mathematical sociologist, works alongside with the military to strengthen our neighbors, and keep the peace.

Broadcast on:: 30 Dec 2007
Audio Format:: other

[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helps Meat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ My guest today for Spirit in Action is Lauren Cobb. Lauren has quite a story to tell. His work is profound in its implications, if a bit intricate for the average person to understand. Lauren Cobb is, at his root, a mathematician, and in his heart is a profound connection with and concern for people everywhere in the world. He was a conscientious objector, and yet his work today pairs him with a military man in conducting games, simulations based on intricate models of societal factors which allow governments throughout the Americas to learn to better run their countries in terms of health, security, economics, and many other dimensions of well-being. But this is only part of what Lauren Cobb does. I couldn't cram all of his story and work into one hour, so this is part one of a two-part series. I hope you'll be as intrigued as I am to learn about the fascinating ways in which Lauren Cobb does his bit to help and heal this world. Lauren, thanks for joining me for Spirit in Action. Well, thank you for inviting me. You're back in the country now. Last time I talked to you, you were often the Dominican Republic, I think, right? That's right. In Santa Domingo. And what were you doing there? Well, the Dominican Republic for the last five years has run an annual exercise for its future leaders. These are people who are enrolled in a master's program in national strategy. They come from all walks of life, some are military, most are civilian, some from police and some representing the court system. There are political advisors, there are economists, there are medical doctors, all kinds of people. Once a year, we have a formal exercise where everybody in the class plus some hangers-on take roles in government. There's a president, a role player for the president, a role player for the vice president, all of the cabinet, principal agencies, some vice ministers. And we play starting from the present current conditions of Dominican Republic, all their social problems, all their financial situation, their economic situation, inequality, everything. Nothing is barred. And we play forward into the future. And the role players attempt to cope with the current situation and problems that arise due to other role players. We always have an opposition, for example. We have international banks there, like the IMF and the World Bank and the American Development Bank. Sometimes these banks are friendly and sometimes their influences are distinctly negative. You never know what the international banks. Many of the problems are developmental, economic, social. And some problems have to do with things like derising price of gas or relations with Haiti or what's going on with Cuba. So it's a lot of fun. It lasts all week. And this time we went five years into the future. In some games we've gone as far as 20 years into the future. It just depends on what the school wants. Representing the United States, we had two role players, not role players, facilitators, of which I'm one. And we just try to keep the game running and just help out with operations of the game and logistics. I offer a simulation to show the economic effects of what they do on the society, the inequality, the poverty, the migratory patterns, corruption, traffic of drugs, public health, everything. That's my primary role in the game is to try to show them an idea of what the consequences are as far as I can determine them. If I get what you're saying, it's like you're playing Dungeons and Dragons, and you're the Dungeon Master, or at least you're one of two Dungeon Masters, setting up the conditions of play. You know, Dungeons and Dragons came out after my time in college, so I don't have a lot of personal experience with it. But it does sound somewhat that way. Of course, the president has his own powers, which are granted by the Constitution. The same with other major role players, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs is extremely powerful, as is the Defense Minister, et cetera. They attempt to exercise their powers, but we always have a press, both a role player for the respectable, legitimate press, and a role player for the yellow journalists out there, which every country has. And they're always stirring up trouble, and then the legislative role players act as a huge roadblock, and it can be very complicated seeing the game in action. The idea of being a Dungeon Master year-round for employment is something that might really appeal to some people. Is this something that you do many weeks out of the year with different countries? Oh, yes. This is what I do professionally. I have a list now of seven countries or institutions around the hemisphere. So it's South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the heart of darkness, Washington, D.C. In Washington, there's the Inter-American Defense College, which has people from all over the hemisphere, including Canada and Haiti. It's not just Latin America, in other words, and it is owned and operated by the Organization of the American States. So it's an OAS educational institution. There we play hemispheric problems rather than any single country or regional problems. But that's where I go to Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru. Many years I went to Bolivia, but recently, of course, with the change of government, we have not been asked back. I go to Ecuador, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic. And on a one-shot basis, special projects here and there went once to Colombia, which was fascinating, for a provincial level exercise, really interesting out in the sticks of Colombia. And Honduras recently, which was the highest level thing I've ever done, where we designed a game specifically to test a draft version of their new national security strategy. This is the first document that Honduras has ever written outlining their national strategy. And, of course, they wanted to give it a real critical look before they made it public. So we had a week-long game just to test their national strategy, which, again, was not -- we're talking about something much more of the military strategy. This is, in fact, primarily economic, social welfare, education, migration, corruption, judicial reform, that kind of thing. That's an amazing amount of stuff going into this. I'm still not sure I've got a really good grip on what you're doing in those week-long games or simulations. Could you describe a typical day in the life? Yeah. We call it a nation lab. Let me give it a name. That's its real name. A nation lab is an abbreviation for laboratories of the nation. We have the entire government and the whole opposition has role players and some international actors as well. And at the beginning of every day, normally that represents the beginning of a new presidential administration. So the president will give a kick-off speech, maybe ten minutes long, in which he outlines his vision for where he wants to go with his administration. And then the opposition leader stands up and counters that with his opinion. And then we just jump right into the game, and the main activity of the day is policy development. The president's team, his entire Cabinet, National Security Council, whatever, has to come up with a four or five-year plan for implementing the president's vision. Meanwhile, the opposition, and if there is one we sometimes will have a irregular guerrilla opposition on the field as well as a loyal opposition in the Congress, the opposition will be doing its best to advance its goals, and the international players have their own agendas and will be imposing their conditions and restrictions on the country. So the president has his plate full all morning trying to coordinate the construction of a feasible national policy as well as sending off all the little emergencies and problems and national problems that arise. A couple of scripted events may come in, like for years we've been playing that the dollar will lose its value. And this, I think, has been particularly valuable for these countries because, in fact, the dollar has been losing value. And all the countries where we've played this, they saw it years ago in our games, and they had at least the first track at trying to solve the problem of how does a tiny little country with a poor population cope with the fact that the hemisphere's premier financial power may be declining. That's a real problem if you're a country like El Salvador or Ecuador, which is dollarized. So during the day, there are all these negotiations, and at the end of the day, the president or his cabinet, usually his cabinet, will present what they have come up with and how they've dealt with the various demands of the opposition. The opposition takes its turn, saying what they've done, which may be general strikes or may be reform push in Congress or prosecution, who knows. And the press will have its moment with a press conference, one-on-one with the president, I should say many to one. And then we go into adjudication, usually about three or four in the afternoon. We have to do adjudication because often the policies and initiatives of the opposition are in complete conflict with the government. We can't go on with the game until we resolve what actually happened. So we turn into a committee of the whole, everybody takes off their role-playing caps, and we discuss the major points in conflict. And this is where I get to try to exercise my accurately conflict resolution skills. I usually chair that meeting and try to achieve group consensus among all the actors present on what actually happened in each example of conflict. This is often the most revealing and educational part of the day because we can comment on and expose the flaws in any policy from any perspective. Anything goes. There are no holds barred here in the discussion, and the discussions are often frank, sometimes even brutal. The outcome is a resolution of all these different conflicts in the sense that we figure out what did happen in the game, and then whether the government was paralyzed by general strike or not. Whether the police were able to clean up their corrupt problem, or whether the corrupt officials actually won the day, and short-circuited, prevented all attempts at reform. Then at night, I get to work with my little computer and my dynamic model of third world economies and societies, and try to show them the next day, what has happened, what happened with the educational structure of the country, what happened in public health, what happened in the economy, and especially the informal economy, a huge part of the model. How are they doing with corruption, what's happened in inequality and poverty, whether they've been affected by migration and if so how. What is happening with rural urban migration, which is a major theme in every country we deal with? The next morning, we're ready for the next day of play, and we show them the new state of their country. Here's where we are now as a result of all the actions you took yesterday. If, during the game, some president somewhere or some key cabinet maker makes a real serious mistake, the consequences are visited on the next day's president. We switch every day. A problem can start on day one, on Monday, and be get worse on Tuesday and critical on Wednesday, leaving Thursday the last day before the game is over when things really have to be resolved. So often, because these problems are cumulative, Wednesday and Thursday are really the most fascinating days of the exercise. And by then, people are beginning to get used to how to exercise the reins of power, what it means to be in a decision-making capacity. And the game really flows by that point. You talk about doing modeling with this. What is your specialty that allows you, as the winds of providence, to make reasonably predictive, accurate determinations of the future? Well, I try to properly predict, and I try to explain to everybody at the outset that no model really works perfectly. And this is, the world is interpreted by Lauren Cobb, not anything else. But I'm a mathematical sociologist, and I've spent my entire career doing this type of modeling. At the foundation of the model, I use pretty standard demographic models of population growth and migration. And I build on top of that the education system, how people move through the education system, and how the rate of which they drop out and whether there's female discrimination. Then there's a public health component, which really is there to take in the government's policies, how much they're spending on public health, how effectively, and translate that into changes in the fertility rate and infant mortality rates, which feeds back into the population. In Uruguay, we also have an elderly sector so that people, as they graduate out of working adulthood, get retirement age and need to be taken care of. Uruguay suffers problems like all the rest of the developed world with too many retirees and getting worse in the future. So that's a sector. And then on top of all of that is the two major economic models, the formal economy, where I use pretty standard models out of developmental economics, designed for the third world. And the informal sector, which is my own construction, I like it pretty well, and it shows labor flows from the agricultural sector to the street informal society to the formerly regulated economy. There are many more sectors, some of them fairly complicated, for example poverty, which whose basic output is the inequality structure of the country. And corruption, which is an area of active development where there simply are no published models out there. And I've had to exercise my mathematical ingenuity to try to produce something that makes sense to everyone, and it's always a work in progress. And then terrorism and insurgency, where we have to look at how repressive the government is, how much economic pain is it being suffered in the countryside, the influence of foreign actors recently, in the last five years, we have had to build in the tight relationship between narco traffickers and insurgents for countries like Colombia comes to mind as the first example and Peru, has had problems in which the narco traffickers are funding the insurgents, even though they're technically on opposite sides of the ideological divide. Most left-wing governments, when they come to power immediately, put the screws on any insurgencies and narco trafficking, but when neither one is in power, they have this phenomenal connection. In Colombia, for example, the narco traffickers have recently started purchasing the services of the FARC and other insurgents for protection against the government. And that leads into the whole question of public security, a whole separate aspect of the model, dealing with police services, where the influence of corruption is absolutely critical. Each country seems to approach this in some of different ways, and we have to fine-tune the model for each country. I hope that gives you a feeling for what's all involved. Well, it does to a degree. Actually, my first experience with something comparable to this was way back in ninth grade. I had a history teacher who didn't want us to just memorize dates and names, but he wanted us to really understand the processes of history, so he included in the course a couple simulations, and in particular, one that he called the Island Project. The idea was that our class was going to a remote island encountering conditions and needs there that would naturally force us to figure out how we would act and make our decisions as the government of the island. Each day, he would deliver to us the pronouncements of the winds of providence, telling us what conditions we were facing that day. Anyway, the hope was that we would experientially realize what some of the necessary conditions of governing are and were back in the times when the USA became an independent country. Although, I realized this was not nearly on your scale. Was that something like what you do? There's at least a family resemblance there, and then there's the game Civilization, which I'm sure our listeners are being reminded of. It's a commercial product in which you can try to play a role in the growth of civilization. My model predates civilization, but there is a lot of overlap. The main difference, of course, is that civilization is designed from top to bottom to be a commercial product, whereas mine is designed to support real-life policy games. Well, and of course, there's also computer programs like SimCity and SimFarm, et cetera. Are they related, although obviously limited, compared to what you're doing? They're related. I don't use the automata approach of SimCity. I have in the past, especially in all the peacekeeping and disaster relief work that I've done, where I support training exercises in United Nations, peacekeeping, or generally military disaster relief. Sometimes we have to get into that level where you have a map and there are little automata crawling around representing, in the case of peacekeeping, they can represent either formal military units, or guerrilla units, or NGOs, like the Red Cross, and international committee of the Red Cross, which is completely different. Care, international, you name it, Oxfam, they're all in there. Crawling around the map, doing things. It's a lot of fun, actually, to watch. For Nation Lab, we don't use anything quite that elaborate. It's a global model. By global, I mean, each variable represents the entire nation. We don't divide it down into provinces. [music] I was window shopping flop is just the other day. I knew it when my baby looks the other way. And appearance on the clearance table caught by eye. It said, "For nine out of seven, I can learn how to fly." I didn't have to worry about no parachute. It was a simulated chopper around the sky to poop. I'm talking about my helicopter simulator. It's how I tell my troubles, baby, to see you later. And even though I know it's not a motivator, it's one place I can land and never leave a crater. At least I know there's something I can lie as above. With a simulated word of burden, a real love. Some days I get disgusted with my database. And all my little programs seem to go the whole place. My babies know what they're enough to give their hugs. My brain has no work clear enough to do with drugs. That's when my computer makes a fuzzy and sound. Then I go round and around and around and around. [music] I do it with my helicopter simulator. It's how I tell my troubles, baby, to see you later. And even though I know it's not a motivator, it's one place I can land and never leave a crater. At least I know there's something I can lie as above. With a simulated word of burden, a real love. [music] Some people go berserk when they reach my age. The folk holding to Nepal and falling with a sage. My searching for somebody who can make them young. Or sending excess alcohol across their dog. I maybe just a dreamer who's afraid to die. But I still got my baby and I know how to fly. I do it with my helicopter simulator. It's how I tell my troubles, baby, to see you later. And even though I know it's not a motivator, it's one place I can land and never leave a crater. At least I know there's something I can lie as above. With a simulated word of burden, a real love. I might look like a hawk but I am still a dove. With a simulated word of burden, a real love. I hope you enjoyed that little song and maybe you even noted how it's related to today's Spirit and Action interview. I suppose that the moral of the song and of this interview could be that there are safe ways to learn about dangerous things without risking your life. The song was Helicopter Simulator and it's by Bob Frankie. If you've just tuned in, I'm visiting today with Lauren Cobb and he does fascinating work all around the American continents with modeling. Conducting simulations with high-level representatives within a country so that they can learn about dealing with all the various forces driving events with the hope that it will better prepare them to run their countries. Lauren Cobb does much more than this. His personal and professional history are rich and varied, so I just couldn't pack it all into a single hour. Hence, this is part one of my interview with Lauren. There will be much wonderful more next week. I'm your host Mark Helpsmeat and this is an Northern Spirit radio production called Spirit and Action. Check this and other programs out on our NorthernSpiritRadio.org website, including the links to my guests. Lauren, I'm interested in how you're getting to do this. What you're doing is a business entity and what you as a person are doing being involved in this, and also as a Quaker. You're going out doing these games, these trainings, so that those you work with can make better decisions as they run their countries, but you've got, I imagine, your own values and objectives of how you see the world and what you want the world to end up being. Very true. I was frustrated for many years with sociology. I tried to be an academic sociologist. Oh boy, that didn't work. Ultimately, I taught refuge in medicine and taught as a biomattentition and statistician in a medical school for many years. Until I got a break, I got a call from the military, U.S. military, asking me if I'd like to help out teach people to do peacekeeping and being a Quaker, I found that really hard to say no. In fact, it sounded fantastic. So I joined this group based in Miami that was about to launch a series of UN peacekeeping exercises all over Latin America. I wrote the initial, one of the two models that they use. One model is purely military, force on force, blowing people up, and the other was purely social. That was mine. And it dealt with refugees, epidemics, poverty, political affairs, rioting in the streets, public opinion, with emphasis on polarization. You know, when you have a country in a civil war, primed and ready for UN intervention, typically public opinion is drastically polarized. And that process of polarization of public opinion, how to mend that, how to heal it, bring people close enough together again so that they can begin to form a single nation rather than divide up into two tiny impoverished nations. That's a real trick, and that's at the core peacekeeping. So all of those were the aspects of my model, and I had to work side by side with the military modelers. They had to reflect my information, I had to reflect their information. You know, they really needed to know, for example, when 100,000 refugees were pouring across the border, my model would tell them where the refugees were coming from, where they were going to, what their health status was. And I set it up so that you could see epidemics sweeping across the map in areas where public health systems had collapsed. Sanitation was down, rivers were polluted. It's quite a thing. It can be rather horrifying. My wife began calling me Dr. Death then, because I was dealing with so many thousands of deaths being represented on the screen, and babies dying, and cities going to hell. And it's quite a powerful model. I like to think that it has been helping these peacekeeping exercises. It's still in use, but I have moved on to this nation lab thing, which is much less military. The peacekeeping, the training audience was military from all over the world. In nation lab, I'm primarily dealing with civilians with some high-level military representation and high-level police. So it's a rather different focus now, but I still try to bring to bear models which talk to people, which really bring home in terms you can feel emotionally the consequences of what they have done. That's really the goal here, and that's what I live for. And how does this interact with your Quakerism? For instance, a lot of Quakers are very concerned about our government's choices on how to wage a war on terror. And I assume that you could do a model about the inputs and outputs around terrorism. Would your values and presuppositions as a Quaker show up in that model? Let's just imagine that you're doing that, creating such a model. What should have been done if they had played through this model with respect to the war on terror and the actions that could be taken to effectively deal with terrorism? You know, it's an interesting question. Some months before 9/11, I actually did write a grant proposal, contract proposal, to DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which they solicited from me, from a group of us actually, on terrorism. Many of the questions that you're just asking appeared there in their request for proposals. They wasn't just aimed at me, they made this request of a variety of people and institutions. Ultimately, they didn't fund any of them, none of them, because they judged other things to be higher in the priority scheme of the nation, and then 9/11 had. You mean higher priorities like giving tax breaks to the wealthy? No, no, no. I was just trying to make a sideways put on my comment. Now we're talking about military priorities. Do you use DARPA, their Advanced Research Projects Agency, to, for example, pour millions into developing an invisible tank? Or do you put some hundreds of thousands of dollars into things like terrorism and insurgency and inequality problems around the world? Well, most military people will say, "We need an invisible tank." That other stuff can wait. So it wasn't until we suffered ourselves our very own huge international terrorist attack that people changed their minds. I have not participated by choice in any of those post 9/11 research projects. I felt it was a very bad place to be. The thinking was driven top down. It is that we're, what I felt the best, were being shunted to one side. And I just didn't want any part of that Homeland Security apparatus. It's rather ironic. Now, the group that I work for, which is part of the National Defense University, is actually housed in the same building as Homeland Security. So I have to walk through their security system in order to get to a conference in my own office. Very ironic. But basically, I think there is an awful lot that could be said and done and simulated. But the climate is not there. It's not right. You have to pick your moment if you want to get anywhere. And this is not it. Is the problem that they're making different assumptions about what will work, what won't work, what will be effective? Are they making different assumptions about what the model will or should produce? Yes, of course. And there's also an underlying fear factor, which tends to distort people's judgments. I think that's beginning to diminish. In fact, I know it is. A very interesting thing happened a couple of years ago. General Petraeus, who at that time had some completely different position. I think he was in charge of developing doctrine for the Army. Met an Australian historian who was in the Australian Army who had some interesting ideas on counterinsurgency. And Petraeus was so impressed that he asked this Australian to come to the Pentagon and work up a proposed new field manual on counterterrorism. That ultimately bore fruit. This Australian, his name I cannot remember. I'm sorry. Produced a very interesting, really innovative new approach to counterinsurgency. And it was adopted by the Army as doctrine. It's now enshrined in a field manual. And that is what Petraeus is using over there in Iraq. And I think the results speak for themselves. The idea of moving U.S. troops out of their bunkers and into the neighborhoods on a permanent basis has really paid off. It may be too little too late, but it's an interesting development. A find that things do change in the U.S. Army. In fact, in my experience, they change faster than other militaries, but not very fast. Saying that they're faster than other militaries in their evolution is not making a very strong statement. Tell me about the company that you have that allows you to do all of this work. Well, that was an accident, really. I was a professor of medicine in South Carolina, a technical job. No worries, but both my wife and I developed severe asthma problems from Charleston, South Carolina. And we basically had to move. And I saw an opportunity to set up my own business. We moved to New Mexico, where the climate was much better. And I set up a consulting business. It's really just me. I'm the whole bit. So even though it's called ethylene consultants, there's really only one consultant. And he's the same guy that answers the phone, et cetera. It took a couple of years to get off the ground, and I did some interesting computer stuff. And then came this invitation to work on peacekeeping. I signed on as independent consultant, thus keeping my little consulting company intact, and preserving my independence from the U.S. military, and also the Beltway bandits. The large consulting firms like Computer Science Corporation hire people like me. So I was insulated twice from the full impact of the military mode of thought, and yet brought in as a valued member of the team. And I remember my very first experience on one of these military exercises in Argentina. It was the first UN peacekeeping exercise. We were staggering from crisis to crisis because it was the first one, and no one had ever done a thing like this before. In order to make it work, we had to spend long hours, I mean, just 16, 18 hour days. And the contractors who were able to function in that team environment, doing whatever was necessary to make the darn thing work, were the ones who survived. And the ones who were pre-medonos or who thought they were special and didn't have to work as hard as the people on salaries, they were all fired. Through that, I began to learn for the first time in my life. I've never been in the military. In fact, I was a conscientious objector in the Vietnam War. This was the first time I ever experienced the extraordinary value that the military places on teamwork. Somehow, more by luck than anything else, I passed that initial hurdle and having proven myself, so to speak, under fire. Obviously, we weren't under fire, but it was one crisis after another. Having proven that I was a good team player, it didn't matter whether I was a pacifist, a conscientious objector, a Quaker, left-wing, right-wing, just didn't matter. I was a team player, I was accepted. If I spoke up, people would listen. And the people who were not team players didn't matter if they had on a row of medals. They were just out of there. It was a fascinating experience. Are you saying that when you get invited in as a consultant doing these modelings that you go in, partnered with someone else, that the military says, "Yeah, we want him here, too." Who is it that chooses you and the other facilitators? There's usually more than one of you, right? Yeah, the facilitator team has just a team of two people. And for years and years in Nation Lab, it has been myself and a retired colonel named Mike Gonzalez, a very good friend of mine. Mike is about as different for me as you can imagine. He's Puerto Rican, speaks Spanish from birth. He's military all the way, military family, and yet he trained as a foreign area officer, which is as close in the military that you can get to being a diplomat, has a PhD in political science and has studied social problems his entire life. So he brings more depth than the typical military colonel. He has had amazing amounts of real life experience with refugee situations, displaced people, and he and I make up the U.S. team. He's a very right wing, I'm very left wing. He is military all the way, I'm a pacifist, and yet we managed to somehow work together and represent the whole spectrum of American opinion, and we make a great team. You asked me to think, "Who picks the team?" Well, it has kind of evolved over the years. Of course, like every project, there is a government person, a lieutenant colonel, who oversees what's going on, but the real decisions were made in the past in the upper levels of U.S. Southern Command, so we're talking about generals here and the general staff who support the commander. Recently, we've been actually kicked upstairs out of U.S. Southern Command and into the Center for Hemisphere Defense Studies at the National Defense University. So now we're in a much more academic environment, and we are overseen by people who are professors, deans, and a much more academic environment. So we're changing a little bit so that we can be more academic. Fortunately, both Mike and I have PhDs, and we both taught, so we're used to the academic point of view. It's very different from U.S. Southern Command, which is, you know, this is part of the operational side of the U.S. military. The pointy end of the stick, they make no bones about their chain of command and rules of engagement and everything else, so very military. And so now we're in a funny, quasi-military academic environment where the money comes from the Pentagon, or I should say from the office of the Secretary of Defense, and yet the entire system is academic, with everything a normal academic school would have, including promotion and tenure and curriculum committees and all the rest of it. How does this work for you, Lauren? I mean, here you are, a pacifist, a conscientious objector, serving somewhere in the military structure somewhat at their beck and call. Is this difficult for you? Yeah, it has been a strange and wonderful experience. The thing that made it possible is the fact that I am separated by two legal layers from the full impact of the military. I don't have to wear a uniform. I can't wear a uniform. I'm a civilian. That gives me more freedom, considerably more freedom. And if I want to turn down a job, I just say, no, I can't do it. Sorry. Nobody ever orders me around. In the beginning, there was something that I would receive called travel orders, but of course, they weren't really travel orders. They called them ITO's invitational travel orders. How about that? Meaning that I was invited to receive these orders to travel, and I could turn it down if I wanted. There are all sorts of funny things like that that happen when you're a contractor for the military. The best thing about Southern Command is that they are dealing with a continent that is fundamentally at peace, where the primary problems occur from economic and social issues, development, inequality, poverty, corruption. And they know it. They're well aware that these are the primary problems. And whenever Southern Command forgets, they get reminded by presidents of these countries who say, hey, look, number one national problem in my country is, and then they'll name it. And it's usually either corruption, or it's poverty, or it's narco-trafficking. Occasionally, you'll find something else, like Paris, who turns up in Paraguay. Migration is in Paraguay as a huge national problem. But the Biggies are almost always the social, economic, legal problems of the country. Those are their threats to national security. These are things that keep the President up all night worrying about what's going to happen. And these are problems that I like to deal with. So the U.S. military, in its infinite wisdom, tries to reach out to people like me who volunteer to help. And we carry the burden in Latin America. Can you say that these trainings that you've led, these modeling simulations, has led to a concrete betterment of the South American world? Well, you know, I wish we had some objective measure. I take a huge amount of satisfaction in some events that I see. For example, a couple of three years ago, Bolivia set up a special office in the -- what they call the Fiskeleo, which is the prosecutor's office. This is their equivalent of our attorney general. They set up a special task force of prosecutors to go after corrupt public officials, including legislators and judges. Now, this is, in my view, tantamount to revolution. This is really fantastic. It was just what Bolivia needed. Countries like Bolivia and Peru and El Salvador are, in fact, now taking corruption very much more seriously than they did ten years ago. Ten years ago, when I started out, corruption was just a part of the background picture. And it was considered a moral problem. The dominant theory in South America at that time was that people are corrupt because they are evil. These are bad people. They need to be weeded out and to prevent bad people from coming into government, we need to have better education, moral education. Things have to be stricter in families, stricter in the education system. There was an entirely morals-based approach. And I, and Hernandez, settled on a bunch of other economists said, "Look, it all has to do with incentives." If you were to somehow create a government which gives incentive to corruption, people will be corrupt. And some of these systems, the incentives are so screwy that you cannot survive in government as an employee without being corrupt. The salary in most countries is less than the nominal salary. They tell you, they're going to pay you $25,000 a year, and you actually receive $15,000 or $10,000. And then you owe, under contract, a part of that salary to the political party of the president who appointed you to that position. So the political parties are making money out of creating jobs. So they have an incentive to having the Congress, their own legislators, pass laws which create new jobs. And then those new jobs need justification. So they pass new regulations and paperwork that those new bureaucrats will have to enforce, giving them the power to extract bribes so that they can pay the political parties more. To see how this is a vicious cycle, and it's these structural incentives that lock each country into a terrible, permanent system of corruption. One of the themes in Nation Lab from day one has been, "Let's take a look at the incentives that your employees are working under and see if we can improve it so they don't have such an incentive to be corrupt." And I believe that that is gradually taking over all in all the countries where we've worked. You mean they're recreating the incentives within the country so that instead of just making moral judgments that by actually changing the structure and incentives they're actually getting some behavioral change? Yes, they are improving the pay of the police so they don't have to be corrupt. They are preventing or drastically reducing payments made by officeholders to political parties. They are establishing professional civil services in which promotion comes not by payment of a bribe, but instead by a professional evaluation. They are firing people who are incompetent, which they never did before. These are the kinds of developments that create good government. And boy, good government is what they need so badly down there. Absolutely. What countries are doing the best, and is that because of you? Well, there's no way to measure our real impact. It's probably small. But I can tell you right now that the country that I'm most impressed with is Peru. I don't work in Argentina, but it's clear from what I read that they are doing very, very well. Chile has been doing well for a long time, and everybody knows that. That's the sort of poster child of success in South America. The country that surprises everybody, which has done a brilliant job over the last 30 years of sustained development, is the Dominican Republic. Nobody, not even the Dominicans, knew how well they were doing. Recently, there have been some stories out, and I've contributed one or two of those, showing just how well the Dominican Republic has done in comparison to other countries. And it is truly an impressive story, not just economically, but in terms of the environment. Environmental protection in the Dominican Republic is really strong, much better, let's say, than Honduras. Rivaling Costa Rica, which is the country most people think of as an enlightened Central American country. The economic and social development in Dominican Republic exceeds Costa Rica over the last 30 years. To me, that's amazing. That's a real tribute to the Dominicans of what they've been able to achieve. And along the way, they have assimilated more than a million refugees from Haiti into their country. Now, it's not been without trouble, and the recent Haitian immigrants, especially those who can't speak Spanish, are treated pretty badly. And there is a lot of grinding poverty out on the countryside that has not been addressed. But if you look at the problems they were facing 30 years ago, and where they've come today, it is truly impressive. I want to remind our listeners that we're visiting today with Lauren Cobb, the prime force in a company called "ethyling international consultants." He facilitates games based on modeling of the complex variables that affect social progress, and uses these opportunities to train the leadership of a country to produce better outcomes. And that will include stuff like less unrest, better environment, better economic and health indicators, and peace. This is "Spirit in Action." I'm Mark Helpsmeet, and you can track down links about this program on my northernspiritradio.org website. I want to come back, Lauren, to something you mentioned earlier. Did you say that you were a professor of... I was in the department of, what do they call it? Biometry, epidemiology, and systems science. You said a professor of medicine, didn't you? Well, I was in the medical school, but I'm not a medical doctor. I am, however, a pretty good epidemiologist. But it's one of those funny things where the department didn't have an epidemiologist, so I said, "Well, I'll do it." I taught myself epidemiology for the next 10 years. So, you were a professor at a medical college. A mathematical sociologist, I think, is how you described yourself earlier. Are you a bit of a jack-of-all-trades? Oh, yes. My main business in South Carolina was as a mathematician. And so I was on call for every department in the entire medical school, nursing school, pharmacy school, everything. Whenever anybody had a mathematical model to create or to improve or to understand even. So I worked with all kinds of crazy things. I worked with pharmacokinetics, and I worked on epidemiology of mental health, and I worked on x-rays, scan technology, and MRIs, early days of MRIs, and some of the early trials of Prozac. I was the consoling statistician. You name it. I worked on it. It helped me over the years become a person with very broad interests and no disciplinary boundaries separating me for the rest of the world. So I was able to move into this modeling effort in Latin America relatively easily, because once you've coped with the breadth and depth of medicine, then trying to cope with economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology is a piece of cake. Well, I'm glad at least that you get some cake in your diet. I appreciate that. Let me try and flesh out a little bit more about who you are, Lauren, because sociology is somewhere between a hard and a soft science, whereas mathematics, even when it's crazy, almost unimaginable with mental contortions, is a hard science. It's got solid, demonstrable outcomes. There's a number of us on the left edge of the political spectrum who are really not very scientific. In fact, for some people, I think this is a conflict, as in, don't try and confuse my opinions by pushing the facts on me. In your position with the modeling of systems that you do, you have to pretty squarely face the facts. All this staring the facts in the face didn't convince you to give up your faith in pacifism? Oh, dear, not at all. Heaven. Let me explain a little bit. When I was 12, my whole family moved to Pakistan. My dad was hired to do population research as a medical doctor for Ford Foundation, and the Pakistan government was a joint project. And, of course, the whole family went along. I was the eldest. So there I was, suddenly, living just around the block, literally, from a refugee camp in Lahore, Pakistan, and visiting little villages that were back in the Middle Ages, both running sewers in the roads. Drinking water meant the pond in front of the village where all the sewage went and where you pulled out the water for cooking. And where people lived six to a hut, the kids made fuel for fire by taking the water buffalo excrement and mixing it with straw and sticking it on the side of the house to bake in the sun. So it could be burned that evening. I grew up friends with a lot of kids in the refugee camp and was really affected by them. By the time I was 16, I was just living and breathing the third world. It was just a part of me, inseparable part of me. And even though my primary talents lie in the mathematical direction, that really fundamentally changed the direction of my life. So I'm sort of by nature a mathematician. I can't get away from it. I've tried several times and failed. I just am a mathematician. And yet, what I focus on are the problems of the third world in all of their manifestations, whatever they are. And my approach is deeply informed by everything I learned from the Quakers on meditation and conflict resolution and absolute honesty. And you put all those in the mix and sort of try to make an amalgam and I think you come out with a guy like me who loves mathematics more than life itself and yet works constantly in third world conditions amid enormous poverty to see what he can do to help. That's kind of how it works with me. Were you Quaker raised Lauren? Well sort of. My parents are rather eclectic. My mother was born a Quaker and gradually over her life became a Unitarian. My dad was born into a Unitarian family and kind of became more Quakerly, especially when he really started working abroad. You know, you just can't go into a refugee camp around the world without meeting a Quaker. And we saw an awful lot of refugee camps. It doesn't take long before you realize there's something really special about the commitment that it takes to work with refugees. I was impressed. They never had me go to a meeting or a church service of any sort. But when it came time to pick a boarding school, I selected a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania, George School. And I've really benefited from that. It was a school of very international perspectives, a lot of international students meeting every day for worship and yet very liberal at the same time. With enormous attention on values and integrity, personal integrity. And not just personal integrity, but institutional integrity and being a park of the entire world with all of its foibles and warts and difficulties. So I feel it wasn't just good preparation for college and I left there with an invitation to attend Harvard, which I turned down. But it was also personally very good for me. We're not nearly done visiting with Lauren Cobb, but we'll finish off this exploration of his work next week. So please join me next week on this Northern Spirit Radio production as we learn wide ranging lessons on societal levels of violence, the role of economics, and the place of spirit in the events of this world. As we continue to talk with Lauren Cobb of Ethling International Consultants. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing.