African neighbors and the West want to stop piracy, uproot terrorism, relieve famine, end civil war, and strengthen a federal government:

This is all very laudable, except for one thing: It won’t work.

The transitional government, established in 2004, has no credibility, in part because it could not exist without foreign backing. In fact, many Somalis don’t want a central government. Or, to be exact, they are so embittered by their experience of centralized power that they would rather have no government than the type that their African neighbors and the West have designed for them.

…For quite a lot of Somalia and for quite a lot of the last 20 years, quite a lot of things have worked. Above all the country has a booming private sector, self-regulating and helped by the country’s simple monetary policy (no one can print banknotes). The efficient, informal hawala system of money transfer allows the Somali diaspora to send money home. And Somalis enjoy one of the cheapest and most modern mobile phone networks in Africa, if not the world.

Somali society has functioned for centuries without a state, on the basis of kinship, customary law and Islam. These traditions survive.

…Instead of gathering Somalia’s discredited politicians and promising them more help, Cameron should support what already functions well in Somalia: the vibrant middle class and Somaliland. Britain, and other donors, should empower Somali businessmen with lines of credit and an improved system to regulate money transfers; Somalia needs a chamber of commerce before it needs a cabinet.

Interesting throughout. I concur with supporting the business community. It’s the idea that this is done “instead” of boosting a central government that is less obvious. “Before”, “alongside” or “at least as much as” would be more defensible.

Can we really expect regional political stability without some kind of national-level regime? Is this institutionalized anarchy? Why not a highly federal system in its place?

Most of all–Is it realistic to ask the UN, Presidents and Prime Ministers to accept that route (and could they if they agreed)?

I don’t know in general, and I know next to nothing about Somalia. Readers?

h/t @cheng_christine

…asset transfers (such as land redistribution) can be an effective anti-poverty tool. Not only should they be constrained by fewer questions about work disincentives than are cash transfers, they should be able to generate very high rates of return if they succeed in unlocking the productive potential of the poor

…Despite this promise, well-identied empirical evidence on ecacy of land redistribution has been scarce, in no small part because the most interesting reforms arise endogenously, either as a response to, or as a cause of, conflict.

…For this paper, we have been able to explore a relatively low conflict situation (South Africa) and exploit the fact that the implementation of its market-assisted land reform program generated a natural experiment

…Standard binary treatment effect estimates indicate that the land transfers boosted household living standards by 25%.

More interestingly, our continuous treatment estimates, which exploits variations in the period of ownership of the redistributed land, show that living standards initially dip with the land transfers, but then after three years rise to levels that imply a 50% increase in living standards of the treated households who entered the program with poverty line standards of living.

A new paper from Malcolm Keswell and Michael Carter.

We provide experimental evidence that information about copious corruption not only decreases incumbent support in local elections in Mexico, but also decreases voter turnout, challengers’ votes, and erodes voters’ identification with the party of the corrupt incumbent.

Our results suggest that while flows of information are necessary, they may be insufficient to improve political accountability, since voters may respond to information by withdrawing from the political process.

A new paper from Chong, De La O, Karlan, and Wantchekon

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

…About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry…

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

Actually, sir, I don’t think you do.

Full article. h/t @justinwolfers and Forbes

The net worth of all 43 U.S. presidents collectively – from Washington to Obama – totals $2.7 billion.

…The net worth of individual African presidents from banditry: Abacha (Nigeria), $5 billion; al-Bashir (Sudan), $7 bn; Babangida (Nigeria), $8 bn; Mobutu (Zaire, now Congo DR), over $10 bn; Mubarak (Egypt), over $40 bn; Khaddafi (Libya), over $60 bn.

According to Nigeria’s former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion from their people in the decades since independence

For the enquiring minds, my first motive was in many ways personal, to live in the same city as my wife and daughter, and have a 15-minute as opposed to a 150-minute commute. It certainly helps to have such a terrific destination.

It’s a bittersweet departure, however, since I’m very fond of New Haven, my department, and amazing colleagues. But Columbia is a great new intellectual home, with some of the most exciting development and political economy research and teaching in the world.

Students: I’ll be teaching the political economy of development to PhDs, African development to SIPA students, and the politics of violence to undergraduates.

Expect a future post on selling you on studying at Columbia.

This course will explore alternative ways of thinking about contemporary market economies and their reconstruction. It will do so by addressing three connected themes: the worldwide financial and economic crisis and the response to it, the effort to advance socially inclusive economic growth in richer as well as in poorer countries, and the past, present, and future of globalization. In addressing these themes, it will ask what economics is and should become. For 2011-2012, the central topic will be crisis and the struggle for recovery as provocations to insight and as opportunities for reform.

Syllabus and first two lectures.

Via Opalo.

And don’t miss one of my favorite videos of 2011: a very dictator Christmas.

We study theoretically and empirically whether natural resource windfalls affect political regimes. We document the following regularities.

Natural resource windfalls have no effect on the political system when they occur in democracies. However, windfalls have significant political consequences in autocracies. In particular, when an autocratic country receives a positive shock to its flow of resource rents it responds by becoming even more autocratic. Furthermore, there is heterogeneity in the response of autocracies.

In deeply entrenched autocracies the eect of windfalls on politics is virtually nil, while in moderately entrenched autocracies windfalls signicantly exacerbate the autocratic nature of the political system.

A new paper by Caselli and Tesai

2a. Excellent comments to my MegaPAC post. Worth reading.

2b. From one, turns out Warren Buffet had a not dissimilar idea ten years ago

2c. And turns out Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown are onto something cheaper but not unrelated (h/t Dan Stock)

3. “Love is being a spiritual parasite”, and other Ayn Randian madness

One energy shot purchased = One meal for a hungry child.

That’s right, kids. Need to keep yourself up all night overindulging in booze, food and dancing? It’s 4a.m. in New York but it’s lunchtime in Somalia. Pop back one of these ginkgo caffeine vitamin sugar bombs and a little girl gets a bowl of beans.

Well, at least they are giving to WFP.

He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.”

What might have once sounded like the behavior of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies that do business in China and Russia

In the weekend Times.

This would make for much more boring Le Carre novels.

Add this to the list of things I do not yet need to worry about in the places I research. Though I suspect Uganda and (more likely) Ethiopia may be only a few years away from something like this on a more limited scale.

For some years, designers of dating sites have been experimenting with ways of allowing daters to signal their earnest intentions. Plentyoffish.com, for example, sells Serious Member badges, and Cupid.com allows members to attach a rose icon to a limited number of messages to potential dates.

Now, an Asian dating company has teamed up with some market design specialists to analyze whether these “virtual roses” are an effective way of indicating genuine interest. In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “Propose With a Rose? Signaling in Internet Dating Markets,” economists Soohyung Lee and Muriel Niederle ran an online event through a Korean dating site in which participants were given a couple of “virtual roses” to signal their interest in someone special.

It turns out nothing says I’m interested like a rose: A digital flower increased the chances that an offer of a date was accepted by about 20 percent.

There is more in Ray Fisman’s Slate column. Interesting throughout.

If optimizing your martial inputs and outputs gives you the warm fuzzies, you will also like this NY Times profile of econ power couple Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers.

There has been a surge of interest in conflict early warning. More like a frenzy.

Ushahidi has become one of the most-talked-about NGOs of the decade. They developed a platform for crowdsourcing real-time crisis information (like incidents of violence) from  web and text message.

The LRA crisis tracker does something similar, focused on the movements and actions of the marauding Lord’s Resistance Army.

I’ve been skeptical of each, and haven’t decided whether they are advocacy tools or actual tools. But I think the answer is both, and I can see the value for planning and rapid response. Both are important experiments, possibly over-hyped, possibly not.

It would be nice, of course, if early warnings came, well, earlier. What if we could forecast where mass violence was likely to break out?

Police have been trying this out in rich cities with fancy statistics, to mixed results at best. My view has been that mass violence is fairly idiosyncratic: many places have the potential, but picking the most likely places it will erupt is fairly futile.

A project in Liberia provided an opportunity to see. From 2009 through 2010 my coauthers and I studied whether the government and UN could change the norms and institutions around conflict and dispute resolution in 250 towns and villages. With virtually no formal security or justice sector, the informal system delivered justice, and the aim was to improve it. (Policy report here, and draft academic paper, “Institution building at the local level”–ready in the next couple of weeks, I hope.)

Following a panel of 250 violence prone villages, and 10,000 surveys, sparked an idea: Could we use the 2009 data to predict mass violence–communal killings, ethnic conflicts, or mob violence–in 2010? I was almost sure the answer would be no.

As usual, nearly every one of my field experiments and studies prove my expectations wrong. I must be the worst qualitative observer on the planet.

Here is our answer (the lite policy memo version–the detailed academic paper will take much more time). Even without the best 2009 data (we hadn’t planned this at the time) and even with little time-varying data (we only had two rounds) we do unexpectedly well.

Some highlights:

• We correctly predict up to 75% of all conflicts two years later
• Simpler model with fewer factors do better than more interactive models with many factors
• We can train the models not only to maximize accuracy, but to minimize “false negatives”–the costly cases where you predict peace instead of violence
• We can identify 40 to 70 percent of all incidents (“true positives”), with three to five false alarms (or “false positives”) for each correctly predicted incident

Some caveats: these are not the ideal data or sample, we are not skillful statistical forecasters (we are learning). I am looking forward to May, when a conference of forecasting luminaries are going to shine harsh light on our foibles.

I can imagine a Ushahidi-like system of crowdsourcing could be harnessed to give early, early warning if one designed a system that pulled in consistent and complete data, ideally at regular frequency. This would be interesting to develop and test. You know, with all that free research time I have. We will see.

I don’t think this would work for the LRA crisis tracker, or its imitators. There is a difference between predicting the actions of many people perpetrating many like acts in many places, and predicting the actions of an individual or small force. Game theory and people like Bruce Bueno de Mesquita may be a better guide there.

Yes, I realize I am beginning to sound like Hari Seldon.

Reader pointers to similar forecasting and prediction efforts welcome. I am almost certainly ignorant of some of the interesting things going on.

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.

Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.

6. Check your quotations.

7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.

8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.

9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.

10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

David

From Letters of Note, via Brain Pickings.

I have not read the Roman-Raphaelson book, but it has just been downloaded to the Kindle.

Here are the books I recommend to my students on writing.

I also have advice on how to write an essay.

US Citizens Huwaida Arraf and Radhika Sainath were arrested by Bahraini security forces in Manama on Saturday during a peaceful protest in near the Standard Chartered Bank downtown. Protesters had marched into the city center to reestablish a presence of nonviolent, peaceful protest leading up to the 1-year anniversary of the Arab Spring uprising in Bahrain.

Source.

One of those arrested is a friend. Please tweet, blog, share, etc.

Update: They are apparently in deportation court. There is a YouTube video of one, showing what it looks like not to cooperate with police in Bahrain.

My first impression was that their police are rather well trained. I tried to imagine how a US officer would behave. Probably more aggressive and assertive in manner though not in deed.

This paper investigates how the extent and configuration of Chinese road and railroad networks has shaped the spatial transformation and degree of compactness of Chinese urban regions in the last 20 years, a period in which central cities were experiencing strong population inflows but relative losses of industry to the urban periphery.

We find strong evidence that the presence of radial roads and ring roads outside of the central city reduce central city population density. However radial roads have no effect on the spatial distribution of economic activity (GDP) in urban regions, though ring roads outside of central cities may contribute to industrial decentralization.

Rather in a country where inter-city trade relies heavily on rails, rail networks have significant impacts on the extent to which economic activity decentralizes.

A new paper from Matt Turner.

I call it the Mega PAC.

One fabulously rich person (or a gaggle of them) would put X million dollars into a trust that expires November 9th. X would have to be very large. Probably several hundred million.

The rules would be simple. You could choose a funding cap for all candidates, x, which is much, much smaller than X. Say, $100 million. Plenty of money for a modest number of attack ads, since the parties must have a little fun.

The key: If any one candidate’s super PACs raised more than x, then the trust would automatically release an equivalent amount of funds to the opponent’s super PACs. The trust would be ready to hurl all its money if it must.

Now, imagine yourself the eccentric millionaire thinking of giving $5 million to your favorite in the race. You could still buy a little price and influence, but you would pay knowing that it would simply fuel your opponent’s campaign. I’m guessing you just use the money instead for that indoor 100,000 gallon scuba diving tank you always wanted.

The game theorists could improve the mechanism, no doubt. But I think this could work.

Now, if only there had been a sudden explosion young and idealistic of multi-millionaires this week. Oh wait.

A question. [The NGO] were unable to receive the grant direct from [the donor] so had to find an ‘accountable body’.  For this service, they were quoted 17% of the project’s budget – by a UN organisation. Can you relate fact or opinion on that at all?

[The NGO] eventually found that [a pan-African governmental body] was able to provide the service for free, with additional benefits. But UN, World Bank etc. apparently make having an accountable body to channel funds a very costly thing.

I’d be extremely grateful if you have time to share thoughts.

This is indeed a pet peeve of mine, but my ire is not directed at donors like DFID or the World Bank or UN. My response:

My opinion: 17% is an unfortunate expense but a rather common rate for administration, and even low by many standards.

It’s a requirement driven not so much by the multilateral donors, but a consequence of the fact that the giving public and governments have close to zero tolerance for misuse of funds.

This drives a Byzantine and expensive accounting system which partly reduces risk of misuse, and partly gives the multilaterals cover (“we did the best we could”).

This discomfit with misuse gets amplified by the press who tend to tend to report on graft and mismanagement more than success.

So the root cause is the failure of the public and donors to think about the high cost of extreme accountability.

It would be nice of the donors could take a sensible stand against this silliness. I’m not sure they are terribly concerned, or even cognizant. Surely it has occurred to some, but (in my experience) cost-effectiveness is so far down the list of most NGO and donor priorities it may as well be left off.

Thoughts from the NGO and donor world?