Category: Current Affairs

Counterintuitive stories

This one is from Canada:

Muslim group moves to ban burka

"Considering the fact that women are in fact forbidden from wearing burkas in the grand mosque in Mecca, Islam's holiest site, it hardly makes sense that the practice should be permitted in Canada, she said."
This is interesting as well, even though it does not come from Canada:
The proposed ban comes on the heels of reports that Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi, dean of Egypt's al-Azhar university and the country's highest Muslim authority, is poised to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, against the garments.
The full story is here and I thank Alex Conconi for the pointer.

Sentences to ponder

The insurance commissioners in 11 states are elected. Under the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, insurers will now be able to finance the election campaigns of those who will be their regulators. Among other powers these state insurance regulators have authority over rates and policy forms.

That's a letter to The New York Times.

Addendum: See the comment by Michael Yuri.

Predictions about Yemen

Most experts predict Sana'a, the fastest-growing capital in the world at 7% a year, will run out of economically viable water supplies by 2017. That is the same year the World Bank says Yemen will cease earning income from its oil, which currently accounts for three-quarters of the state's revenues.

Here is the full article.  The Yemeni government, by the way, is still subsidizing water usage.

This is Chile, not Haiti

"There is a certain lawlessness in this country that the government enabled," he said in Spanish. "They don't protect people and people don't respect them and criminal elements get out of control. People also have a high sense of entitlement. They expected the government to have water and power and things under control."

There is much more at the link or try this tweet: "The situation in Concepción is deteriorating. Citizens have taken up arms to defend themselves and their stores. 8 PM to 12 PM Army curfew."  By no means is it just a bunch of people trying to feed themselves: "…many residents in the most damaged areas have not only taken food from supermarkets, but also robbed banks, set fires and engaged in other forms of lawlessness."

Haiti, on the other hand, remains fairly orderly and there have been reports that police corruption has gone down significantly

One implication here is that I fundamentally distrust the use of "social trust" or "social capital" indicators in cross-country growth regressions.  Repeat three times after me: context-dependence, context-dependence, context-dependence.  The lessons for social science run deep.

My deeper worry is that this event will change Chile and set it back more than the damage alone would indicate.  It will alter their self-image and national unity could decline.  An alternative story is that Chile will become more progressive, as there will be greater common knowledge of income divisions and it will be harder to pretend everything is just fine.

Maybe it is a sign of social health to have some looting after an earthquake.  In this part of blogland we do not dismiss the counterintuitive conclusion out of hand.  For instance perhaps Haiti is so orderly because a) looters would be killed on the spot, and b) the entire fate of the nation is at stake and thus every small event is taken very seriously.  Neither factor is exactly good news.

African poverty is falling

Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy report:

The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (2009), we estimate income distributions, poverty rates, and inequality and welfare indices for African countries for the period 1970-2006. We show that: (1) African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly; (2) if present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time; (3) the growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it; (4) African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral-rich as well as mineral-poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below- or above-median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade.
Here is an ungated version.  This part is especially interesting:
Not only has poverty fallen in Africa as a whole, but this decline has been remarkably general across types of countries that the literature suggests should have different growth performances. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral rich as well as mineral poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below or above median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade. Hence, the substantial decline in poverty is not driven by any particular country or set of countries.

Sentences to ponder

This note shows that the aggregate fiscal expenditure stimulus in the United States, properly adjusted for the declining fiscal expenditure of the fifty states, was close to zero in 2009. While the Federal government stimulus prevented a net decline in aggregate fiscal expenditure, it did not stimulate the aggregate expenditure above its predicted mean.

That's from Joshua Aizanman and Gurnain Kaur Pasricha.  I don't currently see an ungated copy.

Concepción, Chile

I haven't been to Concepción since December 1989, yet I will never forget my trip there.  It was the first time I learned what was for me to become an important truth.  If you set off to a mid-sized city in South America — especially in the Southern Cone — your chance of finding an idyllic spot are high.  There may be, in a way, nothing to do there, at least not in the sense that your guidebook can report.  But it will feel so fresh, so undiscovered, so representative of the vitality of everyday life, that you will at times think you have stumbled upon paradise.  Everyone there will seem so apart from the world you know and there is a sudden (and quite silly) shock at seeing how seriously they take the world they know.  Plus they have superb vanilla ice cream and strawberries for dessert.

Here is the Cathedral, which was destroyed in 1939 by an earthquake.

The elasticity of natural disaster deaths with respect to income

Matt Kahn has a good paper (and here) on this topic:

Using a new data set on annual deaths from disasters in 57 nations from 1980 to 2002, this paper tests several hypotheses concerning natural disaster mitigation. While richer nations do not experience fewer natural disaster events than poorer nations, richer nations do suffer less death from disaster. Economic development provides implicit insurance against nature’s shocks. Democracies and nations with higher quality institutions suffer less death from natural disaster. The results are relevant for judging the incidence of a Global Warming induced increase in the count of natural disaster shocks.

Germany and Greece

…the Greek Finance Ministry had warned of "complete collapse" if the whole system…was not rethought…"Prices and value move in an atmosphere of imminent catastrophe," he wrote.  "In Greece for a while now all the foundations of a healthy economy have been overturned.  There can be no stability, neither in economic equilibrium nor in monetary or financial affairs."

…While the Italians…were genuinely worried by Greece's financial crisis, it was the Germans who needed to be persuaded.  Initially, Altenburg's advocacy of the Greek position was not well received even in his own Ministry.  But then the political stakes were suddenly raised…

…In Athens people expected the Finance Minister to win substantial concessions from the Germans.  In actual fact he was in a very weak position.

…It was not that the Greek financial crisis could be ignored; nor that the Greek Finance Minister lacked the wit or intelligence to present his case.  It was simply that no Greek politician carried enough weight to be heard seriously in Berlin.

That's from yesterday's Financial Times, no…whoops, sorry!  That's from Mark Mazower's Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44.  It's a good book.

Haiti vignette markets in everything The Ricardo Effect

Haiti, a nation of 10 million, does not have a single sewage treatment plant. Trucks often simply take the waste to the Troutier trash dump near the slums of Cité Soleil on this city’s edge.

The trucks empty into pits filled with medical waste like intravenous bags and garbage. Smoke billows from burning piles of trash. One truck from a private company, Sanco, with its motto “Fighting for a Clean Environment” emblazoned on its side, did not bother to go to a pit, dumping its cargo of human waste on the open ground.

A squatter community of a dozen families, including some new arrivals whose homes were destroyed in the earthquake, tries to eke out its survival by scavenging in this setting.

…The human waste problem was daunting even before the earthquake. Lacking a municipal sewage system, many families here employ a socially scorned class of nocturnal latrine cleaners known in Creole as the “bayakou.” They descend into latrines to clean excrement with their hands, before transporting it in carts to improvised disposal sites.

The story is here.

Haiti fact of the day

Victims like her could eventually bring the number of Haiti's quake-related amputees to as many as 150,000 – meaning almost 2% of the nation's 9 million people could be in that condition by year's end.

The source article is here.  Here is one source on the problem:

Most previous amputees were like Verly Boulevard, 31, who lost a leg in a car crash and has spent years hobbling on crutches, unemployed. "In Haiti, if you're an amputee you don't exist," says Boulevard as he waits for water at a crowded and squalid tent camp in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Pétionville. "It will be difficult to change that, even after the earthquake."

Is the systemic risk council on its way?

I visited Across the Universe only because I liked the dreamy feel of the sappy newspaper ad; the movie had several potential negatives for me, including being a musical, tampering with the sacrosanct Beatles, and a slew of negative or lackluster reviews.  I loved it, though it messed up my plans for the day when I realized I had to stay and see the whole thing.  The kitsch was self-mocking plus the music director understood what made Beatle vocal lines so good, why most of the instrumentation should not be mimicked, and which of the guitar riffs were essential as filler.  The movie was willing to plain flat out admit it didn’t make much sense, which was also a virtue of Dragon Wars.  I saw the first third of that one only because it was South Korean.

Book season this fall is amazing; there is an impressive pile on the sofa, but sadly (for the sake of science) I cannot find many books that I have only one reason for reading.  I liked the title of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (though nothing else about it) and so I have a library copy.  Tree of Smoke is shaping up as the best American novel in years.  The new Pamuk is getting me interested in rereading Dostoyevsky; it is sad to see Pamuk having written that he cannot imagine leaving Istanbul.

Jacqueline Passey reports that I am less funny in person though she did not resort to the word grim.

I gave my DVD of The 25th Hour to Peter Boettke; we both loved it.  Natasha and I have started following Tell Me You Love Me, the brutal and anti-erotic new HBO show.

I’ve been to lots of meetings lately, if only to become a better and more productive person.

Ferran Adrià confuses us

He now states that El Bulli will not close permanently but rather after a hiatus it will become a foundation.  Kottke parses.  My theory is that he doesn't know what he is going to do, but in the meantime he wishes to avoid negative publicity or seeming irrelevant.

Don't take this personally my foundation-employed readers but…um…I don't feel you have the appropriate organizational form for running the world's best restaurant.  When it comes to the $300 meal, I'll stick with the for-profits.  Maybe someone needs to give Adrià a copy of those Fama papers from 1980 or so.