And the Exploitative Oscar goes to…

Bill Easterly starts the official “Exploiting Africa Academy Awards”:

Following the Academy Award nominations earlier this week, we introduce the Exploiting Africa Academy Award (EAAA) nominations to recognize films who do the best against stiff competition to portray the most insulting and exploitative images of Africans, usually being heroically saved by some white people.

Machine Gun Preacher. This one is so exemplary that it inspired the EAAA in the first place. A commercial film based on a violent ex-con turned violent Christian who goes to central Africa to shoot bad guys and rescue any children still alive after the cross-fire. Principal white saviors : based on “true(?)” story of ex-biker-gang-member Sam Childers, supported in the movie by a beautiful model playing his ex-biker-gang-member-wife.

The Reckoning. About how the International Criminal Court protects African females and children against male African killers. Principal White Savior: Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

Darfur. About how Western correspondents protect African females and children against male African killers. Principal White Saviors: macho journalists supported by one attractive female journalist.

The Vice Guide to Liberia. OK it’s actually a web-based TV series from the Vice media empire, but it’s so horrifically exploitative (baby cannibalism, enough said), we had to include it. Principal White Savior: the Vice correspondent , although it’s very unclear how he’s saving anyone but himself.

An older classic:

Blood Diamond.  Educated the movie-going audience about the acronym TIA to be used whenever anything horrible happens in the movie — “This Is Africa”.Principal white saviors: mercenary and smuggler Leonardo di Caprio supported by gorgeous journalist Jennifer Connelly.

You can vote here. Or add your own nomination.

The powers of data prediction

I was a skeptic, but  I have begun to hang on Nate Silver’s every prognostication, election addict that I am. More importantly, some conflict forecasting work we’ve been doing in Liberia has (so far) unexpectedly successful. More on that in the next weeks.

In the meantime, others have been forecasting more weighty matters:

Hunch then looks for statistical correlations between the information that all of its users provide, revealing fascinating links between people’s seemingly unrelated preferences. For instance, Hunch has revealed that people who enjoy dancing are more apt to want to buy a Mac, that people who like The Count on Sesame Street tend to support legalizing marijuana, that pug owners are often fans of The Shawshank Redemption, and that users who prefer aisle seats on planes “spend more money on other people than themselves.”

From “How Visa predicts divorce” in the Daily Beast.

Three of the Hunch forecasts above fit my profile.

The Descendants

It is a critic’s pick (e.g. the NY Times) and apparently a favorite for Best Picture. I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

It is entertaining and pleasing to watch. It avoids most of the opportunities for cliche. The Hawaiian soundtrack is original. George Clooney does an excellent rendition of George Clooney. Ho hum.

Usually a good litmus test for a character-driven story is: “Would I feel much emotion if one of the characters were hit by a bus?” In this case, not really. There is no sense they are real or interesting and hence worthy of attachment.

You might think “What’s the big deal? It’s a Hollywood production, so what did you expect?” I agree. But when you have a baby, film-going is much more difficult, in part because the price of a babysitter is only slightly less absurd, for the value, than the theater popcorn and soda. So the critically acclaimed films get your hopes a little higher, and more likely to be dashed.

I think I probably should have gone to see Once Upon A Time in Anatolia, even if it the most boring trailer ever. And Tyler Cowen tells me 24 hours too late that I should have seen A Separation.

 

Are high transport costs holding back development in Africa?

Adam Storeygard, from Brown, is on the job market, and he says yes.

Focusing on countries whose largest, or primate, city is also a port, I find that as the price of oil increases from $25 to $97 (as it did between 2002 and 2008), if city A is 465 kilometers (1 standard deviation) farther away from the primate than initially identical city B, its economy is roughly 6 percent smaller than city B’s at the end of the period. At a differential of 2360 kilometers, the largest in the data, this rises to 32 percent. I then determine that this effect falls disproportionately on cities that are connected to the primate by paved roads, most likely because they are initially more engaged in trade. Cities connected to the primate by unpaved roads appear to be more affected by transport costs to secondary cities.

An argument for more roads for Africa?

How to referee an academic paper

Berk Ozler does us all tremendous good by interviewing legendary QJE editor Larry Katz over at Development impact.

David McKenzie follows it up with his own tips on the same blog. He makes an observation I’ve heard too often, which is that older development economists eat their young.

For some time I’ve been meaning to write up my own thoughts on how to referee an empirical paper, inspired in large part by a photocopy Betty Sadoulet and Alainn de Janvry handed out in a development economics seminar. While not exactly the same thing, you can see my main suggestions in the last two pages of my causal inference and research design syllabus.

And to save all of us pain, I do have an old advice post on how to be a discussant on a seminar paper. there are many parallels.

The historical roots of East Asia’s growth miracle

I’ve mentioned before my beef with the so-called puzzle that “[insert African nation here] and [insert Asian nation here] had the same income per person in 1950, and yet look at the difference now.”

Income levels in 1950 were not, it seems, the best guide to why some countries became rich and why some stayed poor. The understudied field of development history has much to teach us. One recent example:

In this paper, we provide aggregate trends in China’s trade performance from the 1840s to the present. Based on historical benchmarks, we argue that China’s recent gains are not exclusively due to the reforms since 1978. Rather, foreign economic activity can be understood by developments that were set in motion in the 19th century.

We turn our focus to Shanghai, currently the world’s largest port. Shanghai began direct trade relations with western nations starting in 1843. By 1853, Shanghai already accounted for more than half of China’s foreign trade.

In tracking the levels and growth rates of the city’s net and gross imports and exports, foreign direct investment, and foreign residents over more than a century, we find that Shanghai’s level of bilateral trade today with the United States, the United Kingdom, or Japan, for example, are by no means high given Shanghai’s 19th century experience.

This paper argues that a regional approach that embeds national trading destinations within an international trading system provides a meaningful approach to understanding the history of China’s trade.

A new working paper by Keller, Li, and Shiue.

I am also fond of this Keller paper on ‘Why the industrial revolution in Western Europe and not China?’

And yes, I have development historian envy.

The founding fathers get down

The notion of America’s founding fathers as proto-rappers is not far-fetched. The show depicts Hamilton as a revolutionary rebel and volatile genius whose hopes for the presidency were dashed by one of America’s first sex scandals, an extramarital affair. His fatal duel with Burr echoes the kind of verbal and territorial skirmishes that preceded the deaths of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur.

I’m going to say the idea is actually pretty far-fetched, but I still want to see the show.

The play is The Hamilton Mixtape and the theater review is here.

Follows closely on the Broadway heels of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson–a rock opera–which was also excellent.

The definition of an economist?

According to the urban dictionary:

one who, starting from a position of over-educated and under-informed logical supposition, commences making erroneous and devastating judgements about the functioning of the world, and then formally codifies their misunderstanding in dogmatic and arrogant absurdity

h/t Michael Clemens and @justinwolfers.

The peacebuilder’s poetry

His name is John Paul Lederach, he is a longtime international peace negotiator, and his poetry of choice is Haiku. An untitled poem, from Tajikistan in 2003:

Gods and men love maps.
They draw borders with pens that
split lives like an ax.

He is interviewed here. His is a professor at Notre Dame, and I am intrigued by his recent book.

Another, titled, “Advice from the Mediator’s Fellowship”:

Don’t ask the mountain
To move, just take a pebble
Each time you visit.

How much economics should you study in college? (Or why economics is like a martial art)

One of my development-oriented students writes:

I have already taken intro micro and macroeconomics and statistics for political science. I am considering intermediate microeconomics this semester, but have heard mixed opinions on whether it will actually be useful or not, and could really use a second opinion.

My personal experience: economic theory courses are a little like karate.

After a course or two you might get your yellow belt, but basically you have just been going though the motions and learning some basics.

(I used to say to my students, “It’s like learning wax on, wax off,” but apparently aging references to a movie that predates their birth is a bad teaching strategy that elicits only blank stares.)

Anyways, with your yellow belt, you’re a little more flexible and you have a sense whether you like the art, but if someone jumped you in an alley you would probably be worse off than before you took the class.

Your karate classes will pay off slowly, with time and practice. You might get your green or brown belt eventually, and this will serve you well in life. For most of you. For others, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and you will run around looking for a fight, sometimes clobbering an innocent, and basically simply miss the big picture.

Stick at it awhile longer, and you might get your black belt, some perspective and some discipline. It takes a while for this to pay off, however, and very soon diminishing returns set in, unless you happen to want to run your own dojo.

In case it’s not obvious, intro to microeconomics is the yellow belt, and intermediate micro is the green at best. An undergraduate degree in economics is a brown and an MA is arguably the black. And if you want your dojo or jedi master status then get a PhD or go into investment finance.

And of course the ass who runs around looking for a fight is the ideologically left or right jerk who manages to turn a conversation about the weather into a diatribe about free trade.

(In college I was actually just such an ideological ass–I won’t tell you what side of the spectrum but leave you to guess. Glad to say it was just a phase.)

This lumpy, nonlinear learning pattern is fundamentally different than the other social sciences, or even bits of applied economics like history or development. The accumulation of knowledge, and your ability to use it, is much more linear there. You learn something and you can see quickly how it fits into your view of the world. You talk about a problem differently after just a few books.

You can still be dangerous. The difference is lumpiness. To add a second metaphor, in my experience your brain needs to marinate in economics for a while before you deeply get it.

Some might take this as a warning not to embark on economics. I disagree. I think a serious student of any social science interested in applying their skills in the real world–including development workers and diplomats–ought to seek a degree of mastery in political science, statistics and economics, and dabble in things anthropological, post-modern, or historical to stop them from having asinine views.

I think economic learning could be more linear and less lumpy if undergraduate courses were taught with fascinating problems first and theories supporting them, rather than theories for the sake of theories. Good instructors do this, and you will find them everywhere, but maybe less at top research universities where the instructor sometimes leans towards generating future PhDs over informed citizens. Or maybe they just want to get back to their research. So find the dedicated instructors.

Of course, you might do well to ask someone who has actually taught undergraduate micro. I TA’d intro and intermediate macro for several years, as a PhD, under superior professors, and saw the benefits. But the textbooks available often get good instructors off on the wrong foot right away.

For related academic advice that is actually informed by experience and expertise, see the development and academic advice on the right sidebar.

Do you know who made your iThing?

Mike Daisey was a self-described “worshipper in the cult of Mac.” Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes all my crap? He traveled to China to find out.

That is the tagline from this week’s This American Life, freely available as an mp3 this week. Often funny but also often horrifying: Child workers, terrible workplace injuries, and police state tactics. They have released reports on the Apple subcontractor from October 2010, May 2011, and September 2011.

I am of two minds. If even a tenth of the abuses are systematically true, then even the most ardent capitalist among you should be incensed.

On the other hand, I am in the midst of a randomized control trial of factory labor in Ethiopia. One reason is because I believe–and the early results suggest–that the improvements in poverty and work conditions and risk and well-being are huge. Huge huge.

But accounts like Daisey’s add nuance. Factories may only look good relative to the alternative (unemployment, or toiling in fields) but could be terrible in absolute terms. This is most true when workers have at least basic rights and protection, and the employer is not a monopsonist or cabal–the only real employer in town. The Apple subcontractor’s plant has more than 400,000 workers. That offers more than a little non-market power.

Listen to the podcast, but be warned that you won’t look at your Apple product the same way again.

Daisey is a superb storyteller and this is a travelling monologue/show. Daisey’s website, showdates and other monologues are here. I am planning to see the NYC show.

Thank cloud.

Yesterday afternoon my HP told me that my hard drive failed. “Why are you telling me you have failed?” I wondered, “shouldn’t you just die?”

As it turns out, yes. It appears to be a virus that basically makes it impossible to access files. My first virus since 1996 I think. No idea how it happened.

In any event, I have my entire My Documents folder in a 100GB Dropbox account, all my addresses and calendar in both Plaxo and Google Calendar (oh how I wish they worked together) and all my Yale email in Gmail. So I lost pretty much zero, and in a couple of hours was back up and running on a spare laptop.

I am in love with the cloud.

Right now techno-geeks are sitting there reading this thinking: “Dropbox? Plaxo? What is this, 2009. He should really be using Gweezlewhatsit.”

If so, please do tell. But note that if your definition of a user-friendly program is that it only uses ASCII characters and you have to have a minor in computer science to understand it, my take up probability would be low.

(Oh, and if you about to say “You should really buy a Mac,” save it because we are all a little hateful of you, only a little out of jealousy.)

Sherlock 2012

The second season of the celebrated Sherlock Holmes BBC series is now streaming.

I would not have expected you could transfer Conan Doyle to the present without travesty, but I found it outstanding.

Sadly, it only seems to be available in the UK, while Season 1 streamed easily in the US.

Information on how/where to stream Season 2 welcome. iTunes has just Season 1.

Should universities protect sources like journalists?

Federal prosecutors, at the request of the British government, have told Boston College to hand over records relating to interviews with former members of Protestant and Roman Catholic paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland — part of the college’s Belfast Project.

Researchers had assured the interview subjects that the their identities would remain confidential, but, unfortunately — depending on your perspective — oral historians have no special right to keep information relating to possible crimes secret, observes the Chronicle of Higher Education.

…Boston College, and other institutions in similar predicaments, could potentially shape First Amendment law by pushing back hard against the government’s subpoenas. “Journalists are willing to go to jail to protect sources,” he tells the Chronicle. “What will Boston College do?”

Via Ideas Market.

If you run surveys dealing with war, violence and crime, this should be alarming to you and your human subjects committee.

Links I liked

  1. When I pointed to the most expensive item on Amazon, I had not read the customer reviews. Must read.
  2. MIT pushes free education further
  3. Ben Goldacre’s TED talk on Bad Science. My only quibble: a mischaracterization of the publication bias paper.
  4. After my Portlandia recommendation, Trey (a reliable source) suggested two other excellent, vaguely unknown programs. I just watched and can vouch for at least the first.
  5. The problem with intellectual property in the US

What I’ve been reading

  1. What God Hath Wrought, by Daniel Walker Howe. Subtitled ‘The Transformation of America, 1815-1848′. I am brushing up on my US history, and this is superb. I may assign in my comparative development course, in case people are feeling pessimistic about Africa today. It could be worse. Usually an author who uses his full middle name is a bad sign, but the book is excellent.
  2. Bright’s Passage, by Josh Ritter. Journey of a traumatized WWI veteran, with his talking angelic horse. Somehow it works.
  3. Freedomland, by Richard Price. Gritty, modern urban crime fiction. I liked Lush Life enough to buy a second Price novel, and was sorely disappointed. Put down after Chapter 3.
  4. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John le Careé. Since, with a baby, going to a movie now costs $100 more dollars, I read the book. I have a soft spot for le Carré novels, at least when he is writing about the Cold War rather than Africa. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold will become available on Kindle in a couple of weeks.