Category: Uncategorized
British colonialism in Nigeria
British colonialism in Nigeria lasted some six decades…First, the British sought to run Nigeria on the cheap. This led to a fetish for indirect rule. Much of the work of colonial governance was done in collaboration with traditional African authorities. The British expended little effort to create a centralized rule, a coherent armed force, or a professional civil service. The quality of the state that the British constructed and left behind in Nigeria was fairly poor…
The British depended on import taxes as the main source of revenue for running the colonial state. Little of these minimal revenues was spent on improving agriculture (except for the exportable cash crops), and even less on the promotion of technological or industrial development. When the British left Nigeria, the hand-hoe was still the main tool used for cultivation in the fields…
The British made do with a fairly low rate of taxation: during the interwar period tax revenue were only 2 percent to 3 percent of the GDP. As important was that nearly 60 percent of these revenues came from taxing foreign trade, a bureaucratic task that was much easier than collecting direct taxes…
Between 1900 and 1930, Nigeria’s average per capita income grew at about half a percent per annum and then essentially stagnated until the end of the war.
That is all from Atul Kohli, Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the United States Shaped the Global Periphery. The book is quite good.
Overall, I have found that as I learn more about the history of British imperialism, the lower my opinion of it sinks.
The coronavirus debate is splitting into two broad camps
The “growthers” and the “base-raters” — which are you and why? Here is my latest Bloomberg column. Hard to excerpt but good.
Tuesday assorted links
2. Are there negative externalities to having a lot of network-based hiring?
3. “My Guatemalan audiences took to Open Borders like fish to water.” Link here.
4. Why coronavirus testing is difficult. And here is a specific story.
Maybe they are the ones who know?
The top 1% are the only affluent group consistently more inclined than the general population to attribute variation in drive and IQ to both internal causes, particularly to innate causes (the top 1% also differ from the other affluent, at p < .01). This said, the affluent are not more dismissive than others of environmental causal explanations. Interestingly, across all income groups, “environmental” explanations for drive and IQ are more popular than the two internal explanations.
That is from a new paper (and here) by Elizabeth Suhay, Marko Klašnja, and Gonzalo Rivero.
What I’ve been reading
1. David Nutt, Drink? The New Science of Alcohol + Your Health.
A very good introduction to the growing body of evidence about the harms of alcohol, in all walks of life.
2. Samuel Zipp, The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World.
Who cares about Wendell Willkie? I received this review copy determined not to read it, but of course I could not help but crack open the cover and sample a few pages, and then I was hooked. The first thirty pages alone had excellent discussions of early aviation (Willkie was an aviation pioneer of sorts with a cross-world flight), Midwestern family and achievement culture of the time, and the rise of the United States.
3. I was happy to write a blurb for Michael R. Strain’s The American Dream is Not Dead (But Populism Could Kill It).
4. Simon W. Bowmaker, When the President Calls: Conversations with Economic Policymakers.
The interviewed subjects include Feldstein, Boskin, Rubin, Summers, Stiglitz, Rivlin, Yellen, John Taylor, Lazear, Harvey Rosen, Goolsbee, Orszag, Brainard, Alan Krueger, Furman, Hassett, and others.
4. Cheryl Misak, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers.
Thorough and useful, though not exciting to read.
5. Gabriel Said Reynolds, Allah, God in the Qur’an.
A very good treatment of what it promises, with an emphasis on the concept of mercy in Islam.
6. Sophy Roberts, The Lost Pianos of Siberia.
A wonderful book if you care about the lost pianos of Siberia and indeed I do: “Roberts reminds us in this fresh book that there are still some mysterious parts of our world.” (link here) Also of note is Varlam Shalamov, Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories, the first third being remarkably moving and incisive as well.
There is also Sidney Powell and Harvey A. Silverman, Conviction Machine: Standing Up to Federal Prosecutorial Abuse is a frank and brutal documentation of why you should never trust a prosecutor or speak to the FBI.
Also new and notable is Lily Collison, Spastic Diplegia–Bilateral Cerebral Palsy: Understanding the Motor Problems, Their Impact on Walking, and Management Throughout Life: a Practical Guide for Families.
Monday assorted links
1. Coronavirus protective shield markets in everything.
2. Does election forecasting itself lower turnout?
3. Ebola spread less under the local chiefs.
4. How much of world gdp has the coronavirus reduced?
5. Dreher interviews Douthat on decadence and different forms of pessimism.
6. Lots of younger Filipino crew members on Diamond Princess also infected.
A coronavirus conundrum, on the percentage of asymptomatic cases
New reports suggest that the coronavirus has been spreading in Washington state for at least six weeks, infecting hundreds or maybe more. At the same time, other reports suggest a high “R0 value,” sometimes 3 or more, reflecting that the coronavirus is highly contagious and it spreads very quickly.
It is then possible to have hundreds of cases in Washington state if most cases are asymptomatic, or with only slight symptoms. Yet when we look at the experiences of the coronavirus cruise ships, it seems a reasonable number of cases have symptoms of distress. For instance, on the Diamond Princess six people died and only about half are listed as having the virus but asymptomatic (see the previous link on the rhs). So many others seem to have reported being sick or requiring treatment.
So what gives? I see a few options, none of them obviously convincing:
1. People on the cruise ship were hit especially hard.
2. Significantly different strains of the virus are circulating (all of the sequence that has been done seems to run counter to this).
3. Washington state local public health infrastructure has in fact been overwhelmed as of late, we just thought it was all a very bad flu season.
4. Many of the people on the cruise ship who showed symptoms “thought they were supposed to” but were not actually so sick.
5. Most of the detected cases on the cruise ship in fact were asymptomatic, but the media has been misreporting the extent of actual illness among the passengers.
Any other suggestions? It is quite likely the cruise ship people are older than usual, but will that make up for the entire difference? People, what do you think is going on here?
Please restrict your comments to attempting to resolve this particular issue, as you can put your more general coronavirus observations on other posts.
Why have stock markets been falling so much?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, note first of all that the virus is a kind of referendum on global response capabilities, and so far we have been failing (with Singapore as a possible exception). Here is another bit:
…investors now have a better sense of what other investors think about risk. Before Covid-19, investors did not have much direct information about what other investors thought about the robustness of the global economy. Their expectations were not seriously being tested.
When a new shock to the system comes along, however, everyone gets to observe everyone else’s selling behavior. And investors have learned that the faith of their fellow investors is not as strong as they had thought. That raises the risk premium on holding stocks, and in turn causes share prices to fall more. Given how much this pandemic is a truly new event, and that the process of trading itself generates information about the forecasts of other investors, price volatility can be expected to continue.
And this:
The stock market is scared by the fact that it took so long for the stock market to be scared.
Developing…
Sunday assorted links
Öffentlichebibliotheksumbaurenovierungssammlungsbeschränkungsangst
My neologism for: The act of seeing a public library under renovation/expansion, and rightfully fearing that upon reopening the book collection will be smaller rather than larger.
This time it is Mary Riley Styles Library in Falls Church City.
Emergent Ventures winners, seventh cohort
Nicholas Whitaker of Brown, general career development grant in the area of Progress Studies.
Coleman Hughes, travel and career development grant.
Michael T. Foster, career development grant to study machine learning to predict which politicians will succeed and advance their careers.
Evan Horowitz, to start the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts, to impose greater rationality on policy discussions at the state level.
John Strider, a Progress Studies grant on how to reinvent the integrated corporate research lab.
Dryden Brown, to help build institutions and a financial center in Ghana, through his company Bluebook Cities.
Adaobi Adibe, to restructure credentialing, and build infrastructure for a more meritocratic world, helping workers create property rights in the evaluation of their own talent.
Shrirang Karandikar, and here (corrected link), to support an Indian project to get the kits to measure and understand local pollution.
Jassi Pannu, medical student at Stanford, to study best policy responses to pandemics.
Vasco Queirós, for his work on a Twitter browser app for superior threading and on-line communication.
Saturday assorted pandemic links
Age and high-growth entrepreneurship
Many observers, and many investors, believe that young people are especially likely to produce the most successful new firms. Integrating administrative data on firms, workers, and owners, we study start-ups systematically in the United States and find that successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young. The mean age at founding for the 1-in-1,000 fastest growing new ventures is 45.0. The findings are similar when considering high-technology sectors, entrepreneurial hubs, and successful firm exits. Prior experience in the specific industry predicts much greater rates of entrepreneurial success. These findings strongly reject common hypotheses that emphasize youth as a key trait of successful entrepreneurs.
That is from a newly published AER paper by Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda.
Friday assorted links
1. How Cuba manipulates infant mortality and life expectancy statistics.
2. “Drivers of higher cost cars were less likely to yield to pedestrians at a midblock crosswalk.” And: “Of 461 cars, 27.98% yielded to pedestrians. Cars yielded more frequently for females (31.33%) and whites (31.17%) compared to males (24.06%) and non-whites (24.78%). Cost of car was a significant predictor of driver yielding (OR = 0.97; p = 0.0307); odds of yielding decreased 3% per $1000 increase.”
3. New biosciences stuff you can buy on-line.
4. Path-dependence in 18th century jury decisions?
5. Why are women running more and running faster? (NYT) “He also cited the Shalane Flanagan Effect, noting how women, in particular, are pulling one another up to new levels of sub-elite running through communities found both online and in real life.” Quite an interesting thesis.
6. How Chinese bookstores are surviving the coronavirus (awesome photos too).
Contagion Themes
Good post from Nicholas Bagley in 2016 at the Incidental Economist.
Every disease provokes its own unique dread and its own complex public reaction, but themes recurred across outbreaks.
- Governments are typically unprepared, disorganized, and resistant to taking steps necessary to contain infectious diseases, especially in their early phases.
- Local, state, federal, and global governing bodies are apt to point fingers at one another over who’s responsible for taking action. Clear lines of authority are lacking.
- Calibrating the right governmental response is devilishly hard. Do too much and you squander public trust (Swine flu), do too little and people die unnecessarily (AIDS).
- Public officials are reluctant to publicize infections for fear of devastating the economy.
- Doctors rarely have good treatment options. Nursing care is often what’s needed most. Medical professionals of all kinds work themselves to the bone in the face of extraordinary danger.
- In the absence of an effective treatment, the public will reach for unscientific remedies.
- No matter what the route of transmission or the effectiveness of quarantine, there’s a desire to physically separate infected people.
- Victims of the disease are often thought to deserve the affliction, especially when those victims are mainly from marginalized groups.
- We plan, to the extent we plan at all, for the last pandemic. We don’t do enough to plan for the next one.
- Historical memory is short. When diseases fall from the headlines, the public forgets and preparation falters.
Not every one of those themes was present for every disease; the doughboys who died of the Spanish flu, for example, were not thought to deserve their fate. But the themes were persistent enough over time to establish a pattern.
The books we assigned were outstanding. If you want to learn about the intersection of infectious disease, history, and public health, you could do worse than to start with them:
- Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866.
- Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918.
- David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story.
- Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On.
- Thomas Abraham, Twenty-First Century Plague: The Story of SARS.
- David Quammen, Ebola: A Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus.
- Laurie Garrett, Ebola’s Lessons: How the WHO Mishandled the Crisis.