Results for “africa”
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Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Higher intergenerational mobility for African Christians than Muslims, demographically adjusted.

2. The oldest plans to scale of humanmade mega-structures.

3. An LLM trained on the Dark Web.  (Remember when you all were complaining about how “Woke” some of the current products are?)

4. Henry Oliver on Edmonds on Parfit.

5. “Here we report the discovery of a temperate Earth-sized planet orbiting the cool M6 dwarf LP 791-18.”

6. Why do people listen to sad songs? (NYT)  And Girardian orcas.

7. FT Rana Foroohar lunch with Daron Acemoglu.

Population and Welfare: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number

by  Tyler Cowen

That is a new paper by Peter J. Klenow, Charles I. Jones, Mark Bils, and Mohamad Adhami, reject its implications at your peril:

Economic growth is typically measured in per capita terms. But social welfare should arguably include the number of people as well as their standard of living. We decompose social welfare growth — measured in consumptionequivalent units — into contributions from rising population and rising per capita consumption. Because of diminishing marginal utility of consumption, population growth is scaled up by a value-of-life factor that substantially exceeds one and empirically averages around 2.7 across countries and over time. Population increases are therefore consistently the dominant contributor, and consumption-equivalent welfare growth around the world averages more than 6% per year since 1960, as opposed to 2% per year for consumption growth. Countries such as Mexico and South Africa rise sharply in the growth rankings once population growth is incorporated, whereas China, Germany and Japan plummet. We show the robustness of these results to incorporating parental time use and fertility decisions using data from the U.S., the Netherlands, Japan, and South Korea. The effects of falling parental utility from having fewer kids are roughly offset by increases in the “quality” of kids associated with rising time investment per child.

If you worry about fertility rates, do you not have to accept something like this framework?  Mexico — underrated!

In general, I think people should visit the high population countries more.  For the pointer I thank Oliver Wang.

What should I ask Stephen Jennings?

by  Tyler Cowen

I will be doing a Conversation with him:

Stephen Jennings is the Founder & CEO of Rendeavour, Africa’s largest urban developer, with over 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres) of satellite city developments near high-growth cities in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo.

Link here.  I also know Stephen from his time working on reforms in New Zealand, way back when in the early 1990s.  Here are various links about Stephen.  So what should I ask?

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. “Schumacher family planning legal action over AI ‘interview’ with F1 great.”

2. More Brian Potter on how solar power got cheap.

3. “In a study to be published this summer, they find that the median ai expert gave a 3.9% chance to an existential catastrophe (where fewer than 5,000 humans survive) owing to ai by 2100. The median superforecaster, by contrast, gave a chance of 0.38%.”  From The Economist.

4. New charter city for Nigeria? (p.s. silly header on the article).  And some CCI corrections to the piece.

5. The scientist who didn’t exist?

6. Crisis over unsold vanilla in Madagascar.

Econ Journal Watch — new issue

by  Tyler Cowen in

In this issue:Hospitals, communication, and dispute resolution: Florence R. LeCraw, Daniel Montanera, and Thomas A. Mroz criticize the statistical methods of a 2018 article in Health Affairs, and tell of their effort to get their criticisms into Health Affairs.Health Insurance Mandates and the Marriage of Young Adults: Aaron Gamino comments on the statistical modeling in a 2022 Journal of Human Resources article, whose authors Scott Barkowski and Joanne Song McLaughlin reply.Origins of the Opioid Crisis Reexamined: A 2022 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics on the origins of the opioid crisis assigns considerable explanatory weight to the introduction and promotion of OxyContin. Robert Kaestner looks at the empirics behind the conclusion and suggests that it is without much foundation.Temperature and Economic Growth: As he did in the previous issue of this journal, David Barker investigates a piece of Federal Reserve research purporting to show that high temperatures decrease the rate of economic growth. Barker looks under the hood, replicates, and reports.Classical Liberalism in Romania, Past and Present: Radu Nechita and Vlad Tarko narrate the classical liberal movements in Romania, from the beginning of the 19th century, through the awful times of the 20th century, and down to today. The article extends the series on Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country.Edward Westermarck’s Lectures on Adam Smith, delivered in 1914 at the University of Helsinki. Westermarck, of Finland, was an influential sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher. His lectures are remarkably attentive toward Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The lectures are translated and introduced by Otto Pipatti.French economic liberalism versus occupational privilege: In 1753, Vincent Gournay wrote a memorial blasting the exclusionary privileges conferred upon guilds. The Chamber of Commerce of Lyon replied, and Gournay then responded with another memorial. The three-part exchange is translated here for the first time, and introduced by Benoît Malbranque.Professor McCloskey’s 1988 Letter Responding to a Letter from the President of Penn State: In 1988, Donald (now Deirdre) McCloskey received a letter about a passage in The Applied Theory of Price in an exercise on discrimination in labor markets. The letter and McCloskey’s response are reproduced here.EJW Audio:

EJW books from CL Press:

Where are all the Indonesians?

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is an old reader email query from 2015:

I started by asking, why are there so few Indonesians in the US? The email subject is just a juicy comparison. Indonesians are outnumbered in the U.S. by 14 other Asian-American sub-groups. Most estimates give an answer of about 100,000 total, this from a country of 250+ million.

Theories:

History – Indonesia’s colonial experience is Dutch (although less than 500,000 live in the Netherlands). There do not seem to be many self-identifying South African Americans. The country has more recent independence/consolidation than some.

Religion – Islam reduces immigration demand and supply

Economics – Indonesians are very poor and/or less skilled for particular types of migrant labor. Perhaps why so many are in the Middle East (maybe 1.5 million in Saudi Arabia, although this seems more a recent phenomenon).

Internal markets – Indonesia is large and diverse. Opportunity and adventure are an island away, not a country.

Conflict – Sukharno/Suharto rule uniquely dampened emigration.

Reporting – The range of Indonesian ethnicities is not suitable to census counts. Ask Sir Jervoise Baines about this.

Some combination of the Philippines, Pakistan, India, and Myanmar nix all of the above. The more I think and ask others, the more my answer is “the sum of the valid remainder of all the other explanations.” It is not satisfying.

I am in Indonesia now and ask the question often. Most Indonesians don’t know that there are so few, relatively speaking. One told me about the roughly 500 Indonesians at her alma mater Ohio State University, home of the Center of SouthEast Asia Studies and Professor R. William Liddle (that is why she went there).

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The (new) Krugman version of the sectoral shifts hypothesis (NYT).

2. My short essay “Do Non-profits Drive Social Change?”

3. Africa fact of the day: “Today there are more city dwellers in Kenya than there were in all of Africa in 1950”

4. Robots performing Hindu rituals.

5. AI-generated Django (sort of), note the rapid improvement.

6. Use cases for ChatGPT (long).  And how to use Chat GPT to give better public talks.

Russia facts of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Consider that last year, the IMF predicted Russian GDP would shrink by 8.5% in 2022 and by 2.3% in 2023; for its part, the White House projected a year-on-year decline in Russian GDP of 15%. Last month, the IMF revised its growth estimate for Russia to 0.3% for 2023 and 2.1% in 2024—higher than the eurozone and the United Kingdom.

What happened? For the first eight months of the war, thanks to a 250% increase in hydrocarbon prices combined with an unavoidable lag in sealing off imports, Western sanctions actually raised Russian revenues from exports to the European Union. Sanctions only started to inflict significant damage on the Kremlin at the very end of 2022, after which the Russian Finance Ministry reported a budget deficit of nearly $25 billion for January, and an overall decline in revenue of 35%. In the meantime, however, Russia managed to tap gray and black trade markets across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia while continuing to sell oil around the world and provide petroleum services like maritime shipping and insurance. The EU has admitted to not knowing the quantity or nature of the Russian central bank assets it’s supposedly blocked. At the same time, thanks to China, Russia now imports more semiconductors than it did before the war.

Here is more from Jeremy Stern at Tablet.

Advice for the new World Bank chief

by  Tyler Cowen in

From my latest Bloomberg column:

First, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the World Bank should not make climate change more of a priority. Climate-change issues are more closely associated with rich and middle-income countries than with the poorest countries. The very poorest countries, because they have small economies, do not as a rule emit much carbon. Indoor air pollution, such as burning wood or fuel for heat or cooking, is usually more of a problem. Those emissions can be toxic, and the World Bank should try to help reduce them. But that won’t do much to cut carbon emissions.

The World Health Organization estimates that about seven million people die each year from the direct effects of air pollution. For poorer countries, alleviating that problem should be a greater priority than fighting global climate change.

The reality is that if the World Bank can help elevate some very poor countries into middle-income countries, climate-change problems will become somewhat worse — at least in the short to medium run. “We make climate-change problems worse” is not a marketable slogan. But it is selfish to try to get the World Bank to do more good for the wealthiest nations and less good for the poorest nations, which is essentially what prioritizing climate change would do. And of course the world’s wealthier nations are broadly coincidental with the major shareholders of the World Bank…

If there is any area where the World Bank should double down, it is in public-health interventions. Over the last several decades, the successes have been extraordinary. In Africa, for instance, child mortality rates have plummeted, and many public-health indicators have improved considerably, especially outside of major conflict zones. Why not invest more in what is working?

Recommended, with further arguments at the link.

Emergent Ventures winners, 24th cohort

by  Tyler Cowen in

Shakked Noy, MIT economics, to do RCTs on GPTs as teaching and learning tools.

Gabriel Birnbaum, Bay Area, from Fortaleza, Brazil, to investigate lithography as a key technology used in the manufacturing of microchips.

Moritz Wallawitsch, Berkeley. RemNote is his company, educational technology, and to develop a complementary podcast and for general career development.

Katherine Silk, Boston/Cambridge, general career support and to support advice for early-stage startups.

Benjamin Schneider, Brooklyn.  To write a book on the new urbanism.

Joseph Walker, Sydney, Australia, to run and expand the Jolly Swagman podcast.

Avital Balwit, Bay area, travel grant and general career development.

Benjamin Chang, Cambridge, MA. General career support, “I will develop novel RNA riboswitches for gene therapy control in human cells using machine learning.”

Daniel Kang, Berkeley/Champagne-Urbana, biometrics and crypto.

Aamna Zulfifiqar, Karachi, Pakistan, to attend UK higher education to study economics.

Jeremy Stern, Glendale, CA, Tablet magazine.  To write a book.

James Meech, PhD student, Cambridge, UK, to work on a random number generator for better computer architectures.

Arthur Allshire, University of Toronto, background also in Ireland and Australia, robotics and support to attend conferences.

Jason Hausenloy, 17, Singapore, travel and general career development, issues surrounding artificial intelligence.

Sofia Sanchez, Metepec, Mexico, biology and agricultural productivity, to spend a summer at a Stanford lab.

Ukraine tranche:

Andrey Liscovich, eastern Ukraine, formerly of Harvard, to provide equipment for public transportation, communication and emergency power generation to civilian authorities of frontline-adjacent areas in Ukraine which have lost vital infrastructure.

Chris Nicholson, Bay area, working as a broker to maintain internet connectivity in Ukraine.

Andrii Nikolaiev, Arsenii Nikolaiev, Zarina Kodyrova, Kvanta, to advance Ukrainian mathematics, help and train math Olympiad winners.

As usual, India and Africa/Caribbean tranches will be reported separately.

Democratic Republic of Congo growth estimate of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

I worry about the distribution, but of course the news could be worse:

The International Monetary Fund said a mining boom helped the Democratic Republic of Congo’s economy perform “significantly stronger” last year than earlier forecast.

The economy of the mining giant is estimated to have grown 8.5%, compared with an earlier projection of 6.6%, the IMF said Wednesday in an emailed statement.

The fund also raised its growth forecast for this year to 8% from 6.7%, as it warned of downside risks “from the armed conflict in the east, uncertainty ahead of the elections, the continued effect of the war in Ukraine, and adverse terms-of-trade shocks.”

Congo produces almost 70% of the world’s key battery mineral cobalt and tied Peru last year as the second-largest copper producer, according to the US Geological Survey. The central African nation also produces significant amounts of gold and tin. Its mining industry as a whole grew 20% last year, the IMF said.

Here is more from Michael J. Kavanagh at Bloomberg.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. The Russian fleet of spy balloons.

2. MIE, for prompts.  And Portuguese language interview with me about Chat.  And Valentine’s Day markets in everything (uh-oh).

3. New book: Classical Liberalism by Country, volume one.  Free pdf download at the site as well.

4. Why aren’t there more natural resource billionaires in Africa?

5. Albert Hirschman on TV?

6. Any chance of a comeback for Argentina?