Chris Blattman

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Links I liked

1. Gregg Zachary on the bumpy road to property rights in West Africa (de Soto would fume, but I lean towards Zachary)

2. If you can’t beat ’em, loot their homes and their friends’ homes (Gbagbo exploits edition)

3. An astonishing Liberian photojournalist and his war photographs

4. Experiments in unconditional cash transfers: the British  homeless

5. I’m adding The Stone to my list of favorite NYC jazz spots, alongside St. Nick’s and Jazz Standard

5 Responses

  1. That article about Cote d’Ivoire is very poorly researched. My ENTIRE district of Abobo has been emptied and overtaken by rebel forces– not a mere 10 houses, and not of those who are political– innocent civilians. Where is the outrage at that? How come all I read about is the government abuses in the international media? The rebels came into my home armed with guns and machetes and forced my family out. We had to hide out in a church for several days and had to pass brutal rebel checkpoints where my kids had to see men on the ground with slit throats. We didn’t know if we would make it out alive. Then we had to pass further government checkpoints after that. Now we are homeless, all our money paid to pass the checkpoints, no where to go…
    If you think this is innocent protesters getting gunned down, you are being fed lies. There is a civil war here with both sides brutally slaughtering the others. And it is not as simple as removing Gbagbo from power– you will still have war in this country if that happens. Both Gbagbo and Ouattara need to leave and never come back or we will never have peace. We need entirely new leaders. The international news has been incredibly disgraceful in covering the events here– their complete siding with the opposition and one sided reporting is only neglecting the moderate voices of peace in our country and making the situation worse. We need the truth, not more propaganda.

  2. Dear Chris,
    I have been following your blog for about one year now, always finding interesting suggestions about issues related to African adn development.

    Today I was very happy that you mentioned The Stones about the place you like in NYC. I love that place – while I am in NYC (unfortunalty not so often living in Rome) – I always go there to listen to very interesting music.

    And I was thinking: who would have imagined that Chris would have liked Zorn’s music and its (almost) crazy friends. I ask wheter there is any possible relationship between begin interested in not-so-much stiudies issues in economics and loving not-so-common way of doing music.

    Ciao,
    mic

  3. de Soto may or may not fume (I don’t think he would — I think he would just see that as further support for his view that the poor benefit from property formalization).

    But I’m more curious what you, as an economist, think Demsetz would say about it. (Sorry if this is straying into property arcana here.) His idea was that property rights emerge when they are efficient — when the net marginal gain in productivity is greater than the net marginal cost of the upgraded property regime. As important as the mud trade is to these individuals, it seems possible that full enforcement of those rights wouldn’t add marginal economic value sufficient to justify the administrative costs of enforcing the rights.

    What if that is the case? Should the state ‘inefficiently’ enforce those rights because of their distributional benefits?

    This doesn’t go so far as to suggest that the state will only enforce rights when it is efficient for the state — when the cost of enforcement is less than the tax revenue generated by the trade. That would be the “Art of Not Being Governed” take on the situation. But while it seems reasonable to assume that a modern state should work toward net wealth generation, perhaps further justification is required to ask the state to implement policies that reduce net productivity but increase equity, as would be the case above.

    (As a footnote, in Uganda it is possible for individuals to obtain title to their land for about $20 and with relatively little administrative hassle. It is the only country in Africa where the state does not own ‘radical title’ to land. There are numerous land titling programs underway, both for individual and collective title. It would be interesting to think about the implications of elective non-participation in a property regime, although it is probably a social/political choice rather than an economic choice.)

  4. Actually, the progressive de Soto of ‘The Mystery of Capital’ would probably agree that the best property rights regimes emerge by just such a bumpy ride based on how people live, whereas the arch liberal of ‘The Other Path’ would fume and demand a nice neat land titling exercise that steamrollers customary laws. Am I the only one who things there are two de Sotos at war with each other?

    1. Duncan, as you know, I’m with you on this one. Mystery of Capital De Soto would actually be arguing that these conceptions of property that Zachary talks about should be engaged by the state to give them the formal yet flexible backing they need to convert the land into capital.

      I take solace in the fact that the Mystery of Capital comes after the Other Path, by about 15 years, so clearly represents and evolution in his thinking.

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