Category: Current Affairs
Emergent Ventures Africa and Caribbean, fourth cohort
Sokhar Samb is a Data Scientist from Senegal. Her EV grant supports her work of drone mapping Senegalese cities and towns such as Dakar and Semone by capturing high-resolution aerial imagery and Light Detection.
Cesare Adeniyi-Martins is from Nigeria and founded Abelar to promote the special jurisdiction economics charter cities in Africa. His EV grant is for general career support.
Alecia McKenzie is a Jamaican author currently residing in France. Her EV grant supports her work at the Caribbean Translation Project to translate Caribbean literature (originally written in English, French, Spanish, or Dutch) into Mandarin Chinese.
Lorenzo Gonzalez is a Belizean currently residing in Canada. Lorenzo has a Masters degree in Economics from the University of Waterloo. His EV grant is to support his writing on tourism on Belize Adventure to promote economic growth in the country.
Keeghan Patrick, Graduate student at MIT; Shergaun Roserie, Mechanical Engineer at FAANG; and Dylan Paul, current MBA student at Harvard Business School. All three are from Saint Lucia. Their EV grant is to support their work through their organization, Obtronics, which, among other activities, offers robotics engineering educational programs to students in St. Lucia.
Raymer Medina is from the Dominican Republic. His EV grant supports his work on low-cost robotics design and development.
Thomas Aichele is multi-based in Chicago, Dakar, and Abidjan. Thomas works in the FinTech industry in West Africa. His EV grant supports his writing on technology infrastructure progress in West Africa.
Marla Dukharan is a Trinidadian Economist. Her EV grant is to support the production of a documentary on the causes and effects of the EU taxation blacklisting of Caribbean countries.
Mary Najjuma is a Ugandan Engineer and current PhD candidate at the London South Bank University. Her EV grant supports her research on rural efficient and optimal cooling hubs.
Andrew Ddembe, Ugandan social entrepreneur. This follow-on grant is to help support the work of his organization, Mobiklinic, in promoting medication care and education in rural Uganda.
Farai Munjoma was born and raised in Zimbabwe and resides in Edinburgh. He founded the Sasha Pathways Program, a virtual career accelerator for African youth. His EV grant is to support the career development program.
Stéphanie Joseph, originally from Haiti, is currently residing in the US. Stéphanie is a current MBA candidate at Harvard Business School. Her EV grant supports her project on land-mile financial inclusion in the Greater Caribbean.
Evalyn Sintoya Mayetu is a Kenyan guide on the Greater Maasai Mara. She is the country’s first female safari guide to achieve Silver Level certification. Her EV grant is for general career development.
Dr. Collin Constantine, born and raised in Guyana, is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Girton College, University of Cambridge. His EV grant supports his research on integrating income distribution and the balance of payments constraint into macroeconomics, focusing on the Caribbean.
I am very thankful for the leadership of Rasheed Griffith here, he also wrote those descriptions.
AI Worship
i expect ai to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes.
Sam Altman on Twitter. Clearly true.
I predict AI driven religions. At first these will begin as apps like, what would Jesus say? But the apps will quickly morph into talk to Jesus/Mohammed/Ram. Personal Jesus. Personal Ram. Personal Tyler. Then the AIs will start to generate new views from old texts. The human religious authorities will be out debated by the AIs so many people will come to see the new views as not heretical but closer to God than the old views. Fusion and fission religions will be born. As the AIs explore the space of religious views at accelerated pace, evolution will push into weirder and weirder mind niches.
What strange outcomes do you predict?
U.S.A.-Europe facts of the day
The U.S. government Friday said its deficit rose to $1.7 trillion, or 6.3% of gross domestic product, in the year ended Sept. 30, from $1.4 trillion, or 5.4% of GDP, a year earlier. Without an accounting change related to the administration’s aborted student-loan-cancellation program, the deficit would have been closer to $2 trillion, a doubling from the prior year.
In projections released earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund projects U.S. deficits for all governments will reach 7.4% of GDP in 2024 and 2025.
But in Europe it is a different picture. The IMF expects combined deficits of eurozone governments will fall to 3.4% of GDP this year from 3.6% in 2022, and further to 2.7% in 2024.
Those countries that were in crisis a decade ago are expected to have much smaller budget gaps. In Greece, the deficit is forecast to fall to 1.6% of GDP from 2.3% last year, while Portugal’s is expected to fall to 0.2% of GDP from 0.4%. Ireland is forecast to have a budget surplus for the second straight year. Italy and France, among others, continue to have deficits of roughly 5% of GDP.
Here is more from Paul Hannon at the WSJ.
The good news, sort of
But financial markets have mostly been subdued in reaction to the conflagration brewing in Gaza. The benchmark US S&P 500 index has barely budged since the Hamas attack on October 7. Even stock markets closest to the battle zone, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt and the Gulf states, have experienced moderate pullbacks. There has been no rush to safety in bond markets, where prices have been falling, and little drama in oil prices either.
That is from Ruchir Sharma in the FT.
The polity that is Argentina
The current Peronist government has created or increased at least 27 taxes, often by decree. At least seven new exchange rates have been invented under this administration. In the run-up to the election, Mr Massa abolished income taxes for 99% of registered workers, increased wages for public employees and handed out a bonus in pesos worth $100 (converted at the official exchange rate) for pensioners.
Populism has contaminated trade, too. Successive Peronist administrations have cut the country off from international commerce in order to protect workers and keep domestic prices down. Trade as a percentage of gdp is just 33%, among the world’s lowest (it is 84% in Mexico and 64% in Chile). Such governments have also bashed the country’s main export sector, agriculture, as an oligarchy, and sought to hobble it by imposing export restrictions on farm produce. Exports of soya, the country’s main product, are taxed at 33%.
All of this means that most Argentines prefer to do things off the books. Banks, which in the past have effectively confiscated savings under government orders, are avoided. Domestic credit to the private sector is only 11% of gdp, compared with 83% in Chile.
Here is more from The Economist, an excellent survey.
Building credibility?
Or do they want you to like and admire them? Or maybe they are just telling the truth?
It’s no surprise that social media brims over with videos from real estate influencers. What’s astonishing is that property owners and landlords, some of the most broadly despised people in the country, are logging on to boast about the most ruthless and loathsome things they do. In one video, the protagonist of an account called Build Wealth With Gustavo laughingly bemoans the damage an evicted resident has done to his “house in the hood”; soon, he’s transforming it into an attractive $100,000 rehab project. In another, a landlord exhibits the “nightmare” of a rental trailer trashed by tenants, explaining that rents are so high “because of people like this.” Scroll on, and you might find a maintenance man dancing in the wreckage of an eviction while onscreen text explains his plans to add to the former occupant’s debt. “So who really got the last laugh,” it reads, alongside a smiley-face emoji.
Here is more from the NYT, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. Don’t forget the comments of Alex T.
The death of deterrence?
https://twitter.com/RLHeinrichs/status/1715171574167261313
Not to mention Hamas attacking in the first place (you also can debate at whom the Houthis were aiming, probably not the U.S. per se). And the 32 dead and 11 Americans unaccounted for.
Forget about moralizing and sides-taking for a moment, and just try to think this through as a game. Either a) attacks of this nature recur and escalate, or b) the U.S. and/or Israel act to reestablish deterrence? If b), what kind of act would suffice to reestablish some kind of effective deterrence? Again, to think clearly please try to steer your attention away from the moral question of what you think the U.S. and/or Israel should do.
I date the decline (but not death) of deterrence to when Iraq fired 42 Scud missiles into Israel in 1991 and the Israelis did not retaliate. That decision was widely praised at the time, and perhaps correctly. Still, since then people have been solving for the equilibrium…and now that new equilibrium seems to be upon us. What would Thomas Schelling say? This is all worth a very serious ponder.
My excellent Conversation with Jacob Mikanowski
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Jacob Mikanowski is the author of one of Tyler’s favorite books this year called Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Tyler and Jacob sat down to discuss all things Eastern Europe, including the differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays, why the best Polish folk art is from the south, the equilibrium for Kaliningrad and the Suwałki Gap, how Romania and Bulgaria will handle depopulation, whether Moldova has an independent future, the best city to party in, why there are so few Christian-Muslim issues in Albania, a nuanced take on Orbán and Hungarian politics, why food in Poland is so good now, why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West, how Eastern Europe has changed his view of humanity, his ideal two week itinerary in the region, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why isn’t Stanisław Lem more popular in the West today as a writer?
MIKANOWSKI: That’s interesting. I grew up on Stanisław Lem like some people grow up on the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. My dad’s a computer scientist. His father set up one of Poland’s first computers. The world of Polish science and science fiction: he used to read the Tales of Pirx the Pilot and the Ijon Tichy stories — the robots, the short, fun ones — like they were fairy tales. I grew up with them.
I think — actually I have trouble going back to those. I’d go back to Solaris, and I think Solaris is a real masterpiece and I think it’s had lasting influence. But there’s something pessimistic about them. They don’t have that thing that Asimov does, or even Dune, of world-building and forecasting the human future far in advance. They are like Kafka in space, and that’s absurd situations, strange turns of events — I think a pretty pessimistic view of progress. Maybe that makes them hard to digest. Also a kind of odd sense of humor with the short stories. Almost a childlike sense of humor that maybe makes them hard to take.
I think there’s been a little bit of a Lem revival, though. I know technologists, some people like them; futurologists like him. I like him.
COWEN: Some of the cybernetics tales, they seem weirdly close to the current state of LLMs. And I think I’ve seen this mentioned once, but it’s not generally known: the idea that you use them to talk to, that they’re weird, they might be somewhat mystical, they serve as therapists or oracles — that’s very much in Lem, quite early.
MIKANOWSKI: I think people should go back to them. I think — I was just thinking of Solaris, which I always thought about as this story about contacting a truly alien alien. Now it’s like, well, this is a little bit of what we’re doing with virtual reality and AI. It’s like, what would happen if you could actually talk to your dreams, if you could revive people? You could have the mimicry of consciousness, the appearance of consciousness, without anything behind it — without a consciousness.
There’s something seductive about it, and there’s something monstrous about it. I think he was there way ahead of anyone else, and people should be going back to them. Maybe they will.
Of course we talk about the Suwalki Gap as well. And this: “Given all your study of Eastern Europe, what is it you feel you understand about the current war in Ukraine that maybe other well-informed people would not?”
Recommended, interesting throughout. Again, here is Jacob’s new and excellent book Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.
Is Tokyo really a YIMBY success story?
It is common lore in YIMBY circles that Tokyo is such an inexpensive city because Tokyo/Japan has allowed so much freedom to build. Sometimes it is mentioned that Japanese building and regulatory decisions are made at higher levels than the strictly local, which lowers the power of the NIMBYs to restrict building.
I don’t doubt the key elements of this story, namely that Tokyo real estate is relatively cheap, and also that it is relatively easy to get a certain kind of construction through, including vertical construction, both up and underground.
Yet the more I think about it, the more I tend to believe a very different proposition: Japan is in key ways a very NIMBY country, and its brand of NIMBYism has keeps real estate prices down.
A corollary is this: YIMBYism gets much less credit for low Tokyo real estate prices, and furthermore the low real estate prices are a sign of something having gone wrong on the productivity side, in large part due to regulation.
As a piece of background information, note that Japanese productivity levels are about 60 percent of the United States. And few have claimed that is because the Japanese do not work hard, or cannot coordinate well. It is not a low-trust society.
Here are some key ways that Japan has been a NIMBY country, noting that I am not referring so much to construction per se, but rather to high-value, high-productivity construction:
1. Japan has had very tough immigration restrictions. This has eased considerably, but a) the stock matters not just the flow, and b) current Japanese migrants often are from countries such as Thailand and the Philippines, which fills in for some mid-level jobs, but does not massively boost rents.
2. It is extremely difficult to learn written Japanese. Among its other effects, this discourages high-value immigrants from settling into very high productivity service jobs in Tokyo or in Japan more generally.
3. Various regulatory and legal decisions have prevented Tokyo from developing into the financial capital of Asia (haven’t you wondered about this?). I won’t go into all the detail here, this is the modern world so just ask ChatGPT. I’m sure you all know that major financial centers usually lead to exorbitant rents, due to the opportunity cost of the land.
4. So, so much of Japanese regulatory policy and culture is geared toward maintaining small retail businesses, super small in scale, and low in productivity. They do not place much upward pressure on rents. By the way, this is one reason why tourists find Tokyo so wonderful, but those enterprises lower productivity considerably relative to say Walmarts. It is no accident that so many Japanese examples populate “Markets in Everything,” that they have cat and furry cafes, and so on.
Now, those are not building restrictions in the sense of passing a law “no such new building may be placed here.” But they are significant — yes very significant — legal, institutional, and cultural restrictions on building out high productivity, high rent real estate options. (Are you reminded of the 1980s debates on trade restrictions, when it was pointed out that so many of the Japanese trade barriers were indirect rather than upfront tariffs? History is repeating itself here.)
The YIMBY movement just doesn’t talk about those indirect NIMBY-like Japanese restrictions so very much, at least not in the context of how they affect rent levels. Instead, YIMBY wants to take credit for low Tokyo rents, but a much less regulated Tokyo market would in fact be considerably more expensive, not less expensive.
One accurate way to describe Tokyo would be: “They allow a lot of construction, yes. But they make high value, high productivity construction extremely difficult to pull off. They have their own Japanese unique blend of YIMBY + NIMBY, where the NIMBY parts of that equation are really a very important reason why Tokyo real estate prices stay so low. So many factors push construction toward lower productivity construction options.”
And there you go. Again we see that true YIMBY adds value, or can add value, but it very often raises rather than lowers rents.
Response functions for Israeli-Palestine conflict
A VAR is a clever way to model whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is tit-for-tat.
Here is much more by Cremiaux, with some simple statistics, controversial obviously. Via N.A.
That was then, this is now, Maori fashion edition
The outfit is distinctly Victorian. A high, vintage lace collar with ruffles cascades over the lapel of a black tailcoat. But it is not meant to be a throwback.
For Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, the co-leader of Te Pati Maori, a New Zealand political party, it is a reclamation of the era when her ancestors first engaged with the British, who began colonizing New Zealand in the early 1800s. She has worn this attire, plus a top hat, in Parliament.
“When you want to get a message out fast, fashion is a way to do it,” she said.
Here is the full NYT story. Here are further NZ fashion pictures. I told you the new world was going to be strange…
A variety of very recent electoral results
From Australia (WSJ):
…voters in Australia easily rejected a proposal to give indigenous people a special place in the country’s constitution. The vote was about 60% in opposition, and the referendum lost in all six states. It had to win in four of six to prevail.
The referendum was pitched as an attempt at “reconciliation” with Australia’s Aborigines and Torres Strait Islander people, who make up about 3.8% of the population. Labour Prime Minister Anthony Albanese campaigned on the idea in 2022 and urged a yes vote. Most conservative politicians opposed it.
Opponents said that adding the indigenous Voice to Parliament into the constitution was divisive and would create a special racial status in advising Parliament on indigenous matters that would complicate the job of the elected executive government. The proposal is part of the identity politics that has become a preoccupation of the global left.
I do think Australia should treat its indigenous groups better, but not through that mechanism, so I am happy. The results in New Zealand were positive too. Ecuador opted for the pro-business candidate rather than the pro-Venezuelan socialist. And most importantly, in Poland it is likely that the liberal, pro-EU forces are going to win. So good news all around, and all just in a few days time.
From the comments, what will happen in New Zealand edition?
Might a few Kiwi reforms resume or be restored?
New Zealand’s next prime minister will be Christopher Luxon, a former chief executive of Air New Zealand, whose center-right National Party will lead a coalition with Act, a smaller libertarian party.
Here is the full NYT story. Jacinda Ardern is revered in many circles, but note support for her Labour Party collapsed to 27 percent, in part due to their inability to solve cost of living issues. Via tekl.
What is an Emergency? The Case for Rapid Malaria Vaccination
Compare two otherwise similar towns. In Town A there have always been 1000 deaths every month from disease X. In contrast, Town B has been free of disease X for as long as anyone can remember until very recently when disease X suddenly started to kill 1000 people per month. A vaccine for disease X is developed. Which town should receive expedited vaccinations?
From a utilitarian perspective, both towns present equally compelling cases for immediate vaccination (1). Vaccination will avert 1,000 deaths per month in either location. The ethical imperative is thus to act swiftly in both instances. Lives are lives. However, given human psychology and societal norms, Town B is more likely to be perceived as facing an “emergency,” whereas Town A’s situation may be erroneously dismissed as less dire because deaths are the status quo.
A case in point. The WHO just approved a malaria vaccine for use in children, the R21/Matrix-M vaccine. Great! There are still some 247 million malaria cases globally every year causing 619,000 deaths including 476 thousand deaths of children under the age of 5. That’s not 1000 deaths a month but more than 1000 deaths of children every day. The WHO, however, is planning on rolling out the vaccine next year.
Adrian Hill, one of the key scientists behind the vaccine is dismayed by the lack of urgency:
“Why would you allow children to die instead of distributing the vaccine? There’s no sensible answer to that — of course you wouldn’t,” Hill told the Financial Times. The SII said it “already” had capacity to produce 100mn doses annually.
…“There’s plenty of vaccine, let’s get it out there this year. We’ve done our best to answer huge amounts of questions, none of which a mother with a child at risk of malaria would be interested in.”
Hill is correct: the case for urgency is strong. More than a thousand children are dying daily and the Serum Institute already has 20 million doses on ice and is capable of producing 100 million doses a year. Why not treat this as an emergency?! Implicitly, however, people think that the case for urgency in Africa is weak because “what will another few months matter?” The benefits of vaccination in Africa are treated as small because they are measured relative to the total deaths that have already occurred. In contrast, vaccination for say COVID in the developed world (Town B) ended the emergency and restored normality thus saving a large percent of the deaths that might have occurred. But the percentages are irrelevant. This is a base rate fallacy, albeit the opposite of the one usually considered. Lives are lives, irrespective of the historical context.
Hill, director of the university’s Jenner Institute, compared the timeframe with the swift rollout of the first Covid vaccines, which were distributed “within weeks” of approval.
“We’d like to see the same importance given to the malaria vaccine for children in Africa. We don’t want them sitting in a fridge in India,” he said. “We don’t think this would be fair to rural African countries if they were not provided with the same rapidity of review and supply.”
The term “emergency” inherently embodies the conundrum I highlight. Emergency is defined as an unexpected set of events or the resulting state that calls for immediate action. When formulating a response to an emergency, however, the focus should not be on whether the events were unexpected but on the resulting state. The resulting state is what is important. The resulting state is the end that legitimizes the means. The unexpected draws our attention–our emotional systems, like our visual systems, alert on change and movement–but what matters is not what draws our attention but the situational reality.
Lives are lives and we should act with all justifiable speed to save lives. The WHO should accelerate malaria vaccination for children in Africa.
(1) You might argue that in Town B the 1000 deaths are more unusual and thus more disruptive but you might also argue that Town A has undergone the deaths for so much longer that the case for speed as matter of justice is even greater. These are quibbles.
That is from Ben Smith. For the interested, here is some New Zealand election coverage.