Chris Blattman's Blog

A good day for policy-focused economists

2008-10-13T08:00:00.002-04:00

Tyler Cowen puts it best so far.

I have to say I did not expect him to win until Bush left office, as I thought the Swedes wanted the resulting discussion to focus on Paul's academic work rather than issues of politics. So I am surprised by the timing but not the choice.

He goes on:

This was definitely a "real world" pick and a nod in the direction of economists who are engaged in policy analysis and writing for the broader public. Krugman is a solo winner and solo winners are becoming increasingly rare. That is the real statement here, namely that Krugman deserves his own prize, all to himself. This could easily have been a joint prize, given to other trade figures as well, but in handing it out solo I believe the committee is a) stressing Krugman's work in economic geography, and b) stressing the importance of relevance for the economist.

John Stuart Mill: right about everything

2008-10-13T07:15:00.000-04:00

No one has ever been so right about so many things, says Adam Gopnik, as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century English philosopher, politician, and journalist:

Mill believed in complete equality between the sexes, not just women’s colleges and, someday, female suffrage but absolute parity; he believed in equal process for all, the end of slavery, votes for the working classes, and the right to birth control (he was arrested at seventeen for helping poor people obtain contraception), and in the common intelligence of all the races of mankind.
He led the fight for due process for detainees accused of terrorism; argued for teaching Arabic, in order not to alienate potential native radicals; and opposed adulterating Anglo-American liberalism with too much systematic French theory—all this along with an intelligent acceptance of the free market as an engine of prosperity and a desire to see its excesses and inequalities curbed.

Lest you wish you could stand in his shoes, Gopnik points out the price paid:

Chosen for an experiment in education, he was crammed with learning by his father and his father’s mentor, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The aim was to produce a mind distended out of all proportion—force-fed facts, as unlucky geese are force-fed corn.
The foie gras of the boy’s mind was then to be dined on by a grateful nation; the boy’s life, like the goose’s comfort, was secondary. Latin, Greek, ancient history, political economy: “By the age of six,” Reeves notes, “young Mill had written a history of Rome; by seven he was reading Plato in Greek; at eight soaking up Sophocles.” By twelve, he more or less sat his examinations for university entrance.

And I thought Baby Einstein toys were a bit much.

In Nigeria, nothing says I love you like... HIV?

2008-10-12T15:43:00.003-04:00

The book, called "Touching the heart through unforgettable text messages (vol.2)" is one of several on sale in markets around the country that give suggestions to tongue-tied young lovers.

...the book's author, 33-year-old entrepreneur Femi Emmanuel, says he writes text messages for people who are too busy, or illiterate, to properly express what is in their hearts.
..."I was watching a Bollywood film and the main actor said to his female lead 'hey baby, I'm a crazy lover'," Mr Emmanuel told the BBC.

"I thought 'that's good,' I paused the DVD and copied down the subtitles."
The text message threatening HIV was inspired by watching a Nigerian film.
"In the film, a man threatened a woman with giving her HIV. I thought how could I turn this acronym into a message?"
"You could send the first sentence on its own," he says.
"You are putting them in suspense, to create fear, and then you follow up with the interpretation that will give them joy and happiness."

Via the BBC. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day, this is not...

Why women make better foreign correspondents

2008-10-12T10:32:00.005-04:00

What's the root of self-indulgent African journalism? Men, says Michela Wrong, journalist and author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz:

My ambivalence peaked last month when a youngster with the accent and confidence of the public-school-educated British male rang. In the wake of Congo's first democratic elections, he said, he was planning to travel across the country and thought it would make a good book. Any advice? Did he have much journalistic experience, I asked? Not really: a couple of years wandering East Africa, the odd bit of freelance. Had he spent much time in Congo? Nope. Had he thought of learning the trade as a journalist first? He waved the idea away: too banal. When I put the phone down, I was seething. Since then, I've been trying to identify the source of my fury.

There is a graceless human tendency to wish upon others the ills visited upon oneself. Instead of pointing successors towards short cuts, you relish seeing them clambering through identical hoops. I'm as prone to this as anyone, but I don't believe it explains my bile.

No, it was the sheer bumptiousness that did it. A book must be the biggest act of presumption it is possible to commit. If you're a white westerner writing about Africa, that arrogance reaches dizzying levels. What gives a spoilt bourgeois, who didn't even grow up there, the right to interpret the continent for the world?

The only answer can be: I have devoted years on the continent to listening and learning; I have done my homework as conscientiously as I know how; and it's just possible, because I have spent so much time learning to write accessibly about foreign cultures, that I may be able to serve as a bridge between two cultural viewpoints.

My caller saw no need for any of this. With the chutzpah of the privileged young male, he believed he could bypass it all and still produce something for which the public would be duly grateful. In fact, there's only one way of writing a book in these circumstances: you deliver a manuscript that is all about you, with Africa as a picturesque backdrop to your macho derring-do.

I realised that my conversations with aspirant writers, and there have been dozens, had one thing in common: they all involved the male of the species. Africa is full of female reporters who tramp through Darfur's refugee camps and grit their teeth during Mogadishu firefights. Yet not one of these indomitable females has ever called me for the Quick Guide to Successful African Book Writing. I think I know the reason. It's the same one that ensured I tried my hand at being an author only after 16 years of journalism. Women probably see an Africa book as featuring Africa first, their own exploits second. They fear they know too little, have nothing original to say. Even in this neo-feminist era, they have a sneaking suspicion they are not worthy.

I think she may be on to something here.

End the tip

2008-10-12T05:40:00.000-04:00

Tipping was imported from Europe, and when it arrived in America, it met with impassioned and organized opposition. While the precise origin of tipping is uncertain, it is commonly traced to Tudor England, according to “Tipping,” Kerry Segrave’s history of the custom.

By the 17th century, it was expected that overnight guests to private homes would provide sums of money, known as vails, to the host’s servants. Soon after, customers began tipping in London coffeehouses and other commercial establishments. One frequented by Samuel Johnson had a bowl printed with the words “To Insure Promptitude,” and some speculate that “tip” is an acronym for this phrase.

Tipping began as an aristocratic practice, a sprinkle of change for social inferiors, and it quickly spread among the upper classes of Europe. Yet even at its outset, tipping engendered feelings of anxiety and resentment. In the mid-1800s, after leaving the Bell Inn of Gloucester, the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle complained: “The dirty scrub of a waiter grumbled about his allowance, which I reckoned liberal. I added sixpence to it, and [he] produced a bow which I was near rewarding with a kick.”

The New York Times Sunday Magazine profiles a restaurant that has eliminated tipping.

Not a bad idea. The shift up to 20 percent tipping spoils my dinner, most of all because it's become an entitlement, not a performance incentive.

I still remember exiting a Korean restaurant, with the owner in hot pursuit. The service was so horrible--offensive, even--that I left not a penny of a tip. The owner, outraged, threatened to call the police. Yes, the police.

I'm now asked to tip my coffee counter kid. And call him a barista.

The world is descending into madness.

Environmental intelligence

2008-10-11T14:52:00.005-04:00

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) are the James Bonds of the green movement, an international campaigning organization that investigates and exposes environmental crime by going deep undercover.

The New Yorker's Raffi Khatchadourian tails EIA as they track Walmart toilet seats and baby cribs back to illegal ramin wood loggers and mafias in China and Russia

In 2003, von Bismarck picked up the trail in Singapore, where he went undercover and met with a trafficker who boasted that profits from black-market ramin were “better than drug smuggling.” In Malaysia, he met with associates of an underworld figure known as the Ramin King, who described how the wood was given false Malaysian paperwork to obscure its origins.
In Taiwan, he secretly filmed a baby-crib manufacturer named Jim Lee, who made products that were sold at J. C. Penney, and who said that he was shipping thousands of cribs made with ramin to Wal-Mart, “even though it is smuggled.”
Von Bismarck presented this information to Taiwanese officials, who raided Lee’s facilities and barred half of his stock from export. (Lee now maintains that his wood was legal.) Von Bismarck also contacted J. C. Penney and Wal-Mart—both took steps to remove items made of ramin from their stores.

The article is here.

This is a video of how a tree from halfway around the world becomes a toilet seat at your local Wal-Mart.

And this is an excellent podcast discussion with reporter Raffi.

From Russia with love

2008-10-11T14:49:00.001-04:00

Yanked whole from FP Passport.

The Russian SOYUZ TMA-13 rocket is moved to the launch pad of the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, on Oct. 10, 2008. U.S. space tourist Richard Garriott is set to blast off for the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz TMA-13 rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome with Michael Fink of the United States and Russia's Iouri Lonchakov on Oct. 12.

DMITRY KOSTYUKOV/AFP/Getty Images

Bill Ingalls/NASA via Getty Images

DMITRY KOSTYUKOV/AFP/Getty Images

Bill Ingalls/NASA via Getty Images

The winner's curse and the distortion of science

2008-10-11T14:41:00.003-04:00

In auction theory, under certain conditions, the bidder who wins tends to have overpaid. ...Since the firm with the highest estimate bids the most, the auction winner systematically overestimates, sometimes so substantially as to lose money in net terms. [...]

An analogy can be applied to scientific publications. As with individual bidders in an auction, the average result from multiple studies yields a reasonable estimate of a “true” relationship. However, the more extreme, spectacular results (the largest treatment effects, the strongest associations, or the most unusually novel and exciting biological stories) may be preferentially published.
Journals serve as intermediaries and may suffer minimal immediate consequences for errors of over- or mis-estimation, but it is the consumers of these laboratory and clinical results (other expert scientists; trainees choosing fields of endeavour; physicians and their patients; funding agencies; the media) who are “cursed” if these results are severely exaggerated—overvalued and unrepresentative of the true outcomes of many similar experiments.
For example, initial clinical studies are often unrepresentative and misleading. An empirical evaluation of the 49 most-cited papers on the effectiveness of medical interventions, published in highly visible journals in 1990–2004, showed that a quarter of the randomised trials and five of six non-randomised studies had already been contradicted or found to have been exaggerated by 2005.

From a new paper in PLOS Medicine. I think they just described the entire civil conflict literature.

Via Marginal Revolution

Why it's safer to work in war zones

2008-10-10T08:46:00.002-04:00

I'm sometimes asked if working in northern Uganda or Liberia is dangerous. This Guardian article adequately sums up the answer:

India's chaotic roads are now officially the most dangerous place to drive in the world.

Last year road accidents claimed more than 130,000 lives – overtaking China, which has seen fatalities drop to fewer than 90,000, and prompting a government review into traffic safety that until now has been best summed up by local drivers as "good horns, good brakes, good luck".

..The Geneva-based International Road Federation estimates that India already accounts for about 10% of the million-plus fatal accidents in the world

I was in two bus accidents in India in the space of a few months. Northern Uganda? Bad roads + few vehicles = safe driving. I was far more at risk in Kampala taxis than northern badlands.

The same wouldn't hold for Iraq or Afghanistan, but beyond that, I don't see many conflist zones that worry me more than Delhi or Nairobi.

More tips on working in conflicted areas.

Brushing up on foreign policy credentials

2008-10-10T08:44:00.001-04:00

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin sought to silence those who have criticized her lack of foreign affairs experience Tuesday by announcing plans for a weeklong, 10-nation tour of Walt Disney World's Epcot. According to Palin, the trip—her first past Frontierland—will include speaking engagements at Norway's famous Viking ride, sausages at Germany's Kaufhaus, and, time permitting, a fact-finding mission to Future World.

From the Onion.

Links I liked

2008-10-09T14:47:00.002-04:00

1. Where are you on the global rich list?

2. Dining with Tyler Cowen

3. Judo master Putin

4. The proper way to eat a persimmon

5. A better advice column

6. The state of American political science

7. The new battlefield in the Middle East? Hummus

The end of the ANC?

2008-10-08T05:29:00.000-04:00

As the ANC sinks deeper into crisis as a direct consequence of its leadership's vindictive sacking of former South African President Thabo Mbeki, disillusioned members and supporters are weighing up whether to form a new party.
Yet, can a new breakaway from the ANC succeed when previous splits from it and the current opposition parties failed?

For starters, the success of a breakaway will depend on whether Jacob Zuma, who still faces 12 formidable corruption charges, could provide so far unseen political maturity and leadership, by abandoning his destructive obsession with becoming the country's next president.
In spite of his cult status among some ANC members, others are resolutely opposed to having him as the new president. They are unhappy with his and his aides' intolerant behaviour, while they, blinded with revenge, ousted Mbeki, who in any case had only a few months to go on his term for similar behaviour, setting in motion the possible breakup of the ANC.

That's William Gumede writing in The Guardian.

I'm no expert on South Africa, but the monolithic ANC strikes me as an unstable political equilibrium. Disenchanted party factions face a huge incentive to break off and seize the median voter. But if the party is destined to unravel, why doesn't it do so immediately? Is this a coordination problem? Or a set of imposed constraints?

I am all but certain there are a dozen theories of political coalitions that would illuminate the situation. Any suggestions from readers?

Circumcision's HIV impact questioned

2008-10-08T01:50:00.000-04:00

African trials have shown circumcision cuts the likelihood of male to female HIV transmission by up to 60%.
But a US analysis of data on 53,567 men who have sex with other men found HIV rates were not significantly lower among those who were circumcised.

Reported in the BBC. Sad news if true.

Warning: This information could make you unhappy

2008-10-07T16:21:00.003-04:00

Want to know what you should be getting paid? Sebastian Bauhoff points us to the Department of Labor visa petitions for foreign hires:

You can search by institution on the DOL website or type in a keyword in this search engine.

For example, looking for "assistant professor economics harvard" will reveal two visa petitions from the university, with a proposed salary of $115,000 in 2005. Stanford proposed to pay $120,000 in early 2006. The data is not just limited to academic jobs of course. You can also see that Morgan Stanley proposed to pay $85,000 for an analyst in New York in 2006. Or that a taxi company in Maryland proposed $11.41 per hour.

Links I liked

2008-10-07T16:02:00.002-04:00

1. Does the free market corrode moral character? (Via MR)

2. Those pijacked tanks? Headed for South Sudan

3. Video: Global air traffic over 24 hours

4. New in Gmail: ending drunk ~~dialing~~ e-mailing

5. Israel rolls out the stink bomb

6. And this is simply mesmerizing:

Does this mean there is justice in the world?

2008-10-07T08:05:00.001-04:00

From the Guardian:

The American author of a bestselling critical biography of Barack Obama containing the false allegation he was raised a Muslim has been detained in Kenya.
Jerome Corsi, who wrote The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, is being held at immigration headquarters in Nairobi while his immigration status is checked.
Police picked Corsi up from his hotel today because he did not have the temporary work permit needed to conduct business in Kenya, according to Carlos Maluta, a senior immigration official. "We still haven't decided what to do with him," he said.
Obama is a popular figure in Kenya, where his father was a government economist. Several of his extended family still live there.
In 2004, Corsi was the co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift boat veterans speak out against John Kerry, which was criticised for carrying interviews with people who did not serve in Vietnam with the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate. Many who did said the book's claims were false.

A different kind of Chinese economy

2008-10-07T00:39:00.000-04:00

MIT Sloan School professor Yasheng Huang wants us to believe that the China of the 1980s was a hotbed of entrepreneurial capitalism. His new book, reviewed in The Economist:

In the 1980s rural China was in the ascendancy. Peasants, far from being tied to the land, as has been assumed, were free to set up manufacturing, distribution and service businesses and these were allowed to retain profits, pay dividends, issue share capital and even a form of stock option. State banks rushed to provide the finance.
Nian Guangjiu, a farmer from impoverished Anhui province, built up a business selling sunflower seeds (a popular snack), employed over 100 people and made a million yuan (nearly $300,000) in profit in 1986—just a decade after Mao’s death. Because most of this activity was set up under the misleading label of “Township and Village Enterprises”, Western academics largely failed to spot that these ostensibly collective businesses were, in fact, private.

Jupiter looking sharp

2008-10-06T22:00:00.000-04:00

From National Geographic

Too close for comfort

2008-10-06T21:34:00.002-04:00

The Economist reviews Timothy Ryback's exploration of Hitler's private library:

Flicking through a copy of what is probably the earliest acquisition in the collection, an architectural history of Berlin that Hitler bought in November 1915, he discovers between pages 160 and 161, “a wiry inch-long black hair that appears to be from a moustache”.

Randomizing armadillos

2008-10-06T12:58:00.002-04:00

The Ig Nobel prizes were awarded yesterday. The prizes honor achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

My favorites? For archaeology:

Astolfo G. Mello Araujo of the University of São Paulo, in Brazil, and José Carlos Marcelino of São Paulo’s Department of Historical Patrimony, “for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.”
Reference: “The Role of Armadillos in the Movement of Archaeological Materials: An Experimental Approach,” Geoarchaeology, Vol. 18, No. 4, April 2003.

For economics:

Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, and Brent D. Jordan of the University of New Mexico, “for discovering that a professional lap dancer’s ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings.”

Reference: “Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?” Evolution and Human Behavior, Vol. 28, No. 6, November 2007.

And for physics:

Dorian M. Raymer of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Douglas E. Smith of the University of California at San Diego, “for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.”

Reference: “Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 104, No. 42, October 16, 2007.

The long term impact of ethnic cleansing: wealth and strong institutions?

2008-10-05T21:46:00.005-04:00

This paper uses the 1609 expulsion of 300,000 Muslims from the Iberian peninsula to analyze the mechanisms through which exploitative institutions dampen the development of pre-industrial economies. The evidence suggests that the persistence of extractive arrangements in formerly Muslim lands stunted the development of the non-agricultural sector long after the expulsion. Arguably exogenous variation in the Christian re-settlers’ human capital is then used to investigate the extent to which initial differences in human capital explain the observed divergence in between-institutional outcomes. The results cast doubt on the long-term importance of such differences and stress the role of institutions, at least for the specific case of early modern Spain.

That is a new paper by Eric Chaney, a Berkeley econ grad now at Harvard.

Bubble goes pop

2008-10-05T20:19:00.004-04:00

Jeannie and I pounded the pavement in small town Pennsylvania this weekend for the Obama campaign. I would use my brain for the election, but unfortunately the demand for African micro-development skills are, well, non-existent. As a two-handed economist, I also make a terrible partisan. So a canvassing I did go.

Long have I known I live in a bubble. Not only do I hardly know any Republicans, I barely know any Hillary supporters. Since moving to the U.S. I have lived in Cambridge, Berkeley, Washington, Manhattan, and now New Haven--the bastions of overeducated liberal elites. So, whenever I see a poll that says "69% of Americans believe X," I think to myself, "where are these people?"

The answer: small town Pennsylvania.

My big discovery this weekend: lots of Americans really do believe Barack Obama is a Muslim.

My second big discovery: it's not that hard to convince them otherwise. Especially when your wife is a preacher's daughter, and a former Republican. Our street cred was solid.

Least expected moment: There are still restaurants that serve you burgers in your car, on rollerskates.

Most poignant moment: knocking on the doors of immigrants from Pakistan and India. When someone asks you how you plan to vote in their countries, it's usually not a question. We made them visibly nervous.

The best moment: hitting a property that looked dodgy, braving the (restrained) pitbull, and finding two young, unregistered, first-time supporters--both lovely people. We just made the registration deadline.

Your take away message: Get out there. Canvas. Register. Vote. Even if it's for the other guy.

Links I liked

2008-10-03T12:36:00.002-04:00

1. HIV is at least 100 years old

2. Bill Easterly in the WSJ: Poor countries are learning the wrong lessons from the crisis

3. Gorby starts a political party

4. The World Food Programme on David Letterman (Hat tip: MoLT)

5. Help Google map African cities

6. Two Africa book reviews

Only two people know what tonight's debate will be like

2008-10-02T18:39:00.005-04:00

This week NBC interviewed George H.W. Bush and Geraldine Ferraro about their famous 1984 debate. The story is here.

Via the Caucus.

Taking the long view on the financial crisis

2008-10-02T14:28:00.000-04:00

My rule of thumb is not to blog the same topics as the rest of the econosphere. This week, that would mean no US election or US financial crisis talk. But every so often, I see fit to break my rules. I figure this is better than breaking my thumbs.

What's so worthwhile? On the CGD blog, Michael Clemens urges us to take the long view:

This is the best estimate of real income per capita in the United States since 1820.
Over these years we had violent financial crashes of various types, bank panics, piles of recessions and a huge depression, many foreign wars and one enormous domestic war, had a central bank and didn’t, were on the gold standard and weren’t, had governments topple in scandal and multiple leaders assassinated, and what did it all amount to in the medium to long run? In per-capita income terms: Nothing. The overall trend does not bend or shift. Every bad year was followed by a good year that returned us to trend.
The US average growth rate of real per capita incomes over the last 190 years has been 1.8% a year, and the same rate over the last 10 years has been…. 1.8% a year.
Stare at that graph: The Great Depression was traumatic in countless ways, but astonishingly, it’s not clear that we are any worse off today than we would be if the whole thing never occurred. Anyone who made such a claim in the 1930s would have been scoffed at, but that’s what happened.