Results for “lagos” 51 found
Nigeria markets in everything
Nigeria has confiscated 2.5 tonnes of “plastic rice” smuggled into the country by unscrupulous businessmen, the customs service says.
Lagos customs chief Haruna Mamudu said the fake rice was intended to be sold in markets during the festive season.
He said the rice was very sticky after it was boiled and “only God knows what would have happened” if people ate it.
It is not clear where the seized sacks came from but rice made from plastic pellets was found in China last year.
Rice is the most popular staple food in Nigeria.
Here is the full story, via Jodi Ettenberg.
Addendum: Here is an update, as the story spirals into increasing confusion.
The best non-fiction books of 2016
In most cases, my review is behind the link, though a few times it leads merely to the Amazon page. If I wrote only a few words about the book, I have reproduced them directly in this post. And the books are listed, more or less, in the order I read them. Apologies if I forgot your book, each year I do neglect a few. Here goes:
Robert J. Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, my review is here.
Marco Santagana, Dante: The Story of His Life.
Melancholy, by László F. Földényi.
Ji Xianlin, The Cowshed: Memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The classic account of its kind, in this edition brilliantly translated and presented.
Robin Hanson, The Age of Em. Unlike any other on this list, this work created a new genre.
Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries.
Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve. Fun, engaging, and informative, worthy of the “best of the year non-fiction” list.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History.
Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia.
Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Continental Drift: Britain and Europe from the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism.
Marie Kondo, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying.
Peter Parker, Housman Country: Into the Heart of England. It’s already out in the UK, which is where I bought my copy.
Lawrence Rosen, Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew: Entangled Lives in Morocco. Superb descriptive anthropology.
Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. Due out in February, the UK edition is already out. Substantive and delightful on every page.
Kerry Brown, CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping.
Richard van Glahn, The Economic History of China: From Antiquity through the 19th Century.
Christopher Goscha, The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam. The best general history of Vietnam I know, and it does not obsess over “the Vietnam War.” Readable and instructive on pretty much every page.
Andrew Scott Cooper, The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran.
William Domnarski, Richard Posner.
Peter Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs.
Daniel Gormally, Insanity, Passion, and Addiction: A Year Inside the Chess World. A personal favorite, you can read this as a study in labor economics as to why people hang on to crummy jobs.
Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders. Short descriptions of places you ought to visit, such as ossuaries, micronations, museums of invisible microbes, the floating school of Lagos, the Mistake House of Elsah, Illinois, Bangkok’s Museum of Counterfeit Goods, and the world’s largest Tesla coil in Makarau, controlled by Alan Gibbs of New Zealand. The selection is conceptual, so I like it. I will keep this book.
Jean Lucey Pratt, A Notable Woman.
Ben H. Shepherd, Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich.
Sebastian Mallaby, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan
Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives.
Julian Gewirtz, Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China.
Marina Abramović, Walk Through Walls.
Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts.
Here is Arnold Kling’s list. Here is my list of the year’s best fiction.
I would describe this year as thick in wonderful, superb books, though I remain uncertain which of these is truly the year’s winner. So many plausible contenders! I can only promise I’ll continue to cover what comes out between now and the end of the year, and apologies if one or two of those above are from late 2015.
What I’ve been reading
1. Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders. Short descriptions of places you ought to visit, such as ossuaries, micronations, museums of invisible microbes, the floating school of Lagos, the Mistake House of Elsah, Illinois, Bangkok’s Museum of Counterfeit Goods, and the world’s largest Tesla coil in Makarau, controlled by Alan Gibbs of New Zealand. The selection is conceptual, so I like it. I will keep this book.
2. James T. Hamilton, Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism. A highly original look at exactly what the subtitle promises, I thank Jay for keeping Cowen’s Second Law valid. Has this topic ever been more important than this year?
3. Andre Schlueter, Institutions and Small Settler Economies: A Comparative Study of New Zealand and Uruguay, 1870-2008. There should be more such books! New Zealand and Uruguay had roughly comparable per capita incomes in 1920, yet New Zealand pulled away and never gave back much of that lead. One factor, according to the author, was that the Kiwis had about 40% public ownership of farm land in 1930, resulting in a greater distribution of gains from agriculture and eventually a more egalitarian polity. Uruguay, in contrast, had engaged in some badly-run land privatizations and ended up with excess concentration. New Zealand also took the lead on frozen meat shipments, and New Zealand had a much more rapid recovery from the Great Depression, among other factors, and in Uruguay the enforceability of contract rights slipped away considerably in the 1940s and 1950s. In sum, Uruguay ended up with more rent-seeking policies that redistributed resources toward elites. I can’t believe this one wasn’t a bestseller.
4. John Richard Boren, For Intellectual Property: The Property Ideas of Andrew J. Galambos. As far as I can tell from this intriguing but maddeningly vague book, and based on what I have heard, Galambos was a 1960s-70s libertarian astrophysicist who believed in intellectual property rights for all ideas, indeed in ideas and not just for the expression of ideas as under current law. The rumor, possibly apocryphal, was that those who knew his true doctrines were forbidden to explain them to others without first making the requisite payments. I saw this in the bibliography in the back of the book:
Sic Itur Ad Astra, Volume One by Andrew J. Galambos. This is the transcript of his 1968 delivery of Courses V-50 and V-50X. The book discloses the basics of the Science of Volition but has been removed from sale by Galambos’ trustees. Used copies are sometimes available. Some of Galambos’ recorded lectures…can be heard online at the FEI website, www.fei-ajg.com, where the trustees have imposed significant restrictions on access. Only one Galambos course, V-76…is available for purchase on CD without restrictions.
In fact I know more than I am letting on.
5. James Joyce, Ulysses, always worth a reread, in bits and pieces. Don’t start on p.1. That way, you won’t be discouraged by not knowing what is going on. That is serious advice.
I have browsed the useful-seeming Johan A. Lybeck, The Future of Financial Regulation: Who Should Pay for the Failure of American and European Banks? Most books with titles like that are bad and boring, this seems to be a very useful collection of facts about previous bailouts.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Redux on my 2013 post “A simple theory of recent American intellectual history.”
3. Adam Gopnik on Jane Jacobs.
4. “A dedicated hedgehog officer has started work after seeing off worldwide competition for the role.” (the culture that is Ipswich)
Can Currency Competition Work?
There is a new model and NBER paper to come from Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde and Daniel Sanches (pdf, ungated), here is the abstract:
Can competition among privately issued fiat currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum work? Only sometimes. To show this, we build a model of competition among privately issued at currencies. We modify the current workhorse of monetary economics, the Lagos-Wright environment, by including entrepreneurs who can issue their own fiat currencies in order to maximize their utility. Otherwise, the model is standard. We show that there exists an equilibrium in which price stability is consistent with competing private monies, but also that there exists a continuum of equilibrium trajectories with the property that the value of private currencies monotonically converges to zero. These latter equilibria disappear, however, when we introduce productive capital. We also investigate the properties of hybrid monetary arrangements with private and government monies, of automata issuing money, and the role of network effects.
I would stress a few points. First, the world is going to have some form of currency competition whether one likes it or not. That is already the case today, so these are very real questions, not just thought games for libertarians.
Second, the Bitcoin and broader cryptocurrency experience indicate that the marginal cost of issuing a new private currency is well above zero, contra some of the literature from the 1970s, which viewed the enterprise in terms of printing money and paying only for the additional paper. Bitcoin can be interpreted as a commodity currency of sorts, where the relevant expenditures are on codebreaking and electricity, rather than digging up gold from the ground. Once it is focal enough, it might be able to provide some version of rough price stability in terms of its unit.
Third, if your government is halfway legitimate and not broke, its currency is likely to be a dominant winner in these forms of currency competition, especially to the extent that currency is supported by the fiscal authority. In this sense it is almost impossible to get away from a legitimate or even semi-legitimate government-issued currency.
Low Cost Private Schools in the Developing World
Private schools for the poor are growing rapidly throughout the developing world. The Economist has a review:
Private schools enroll a much bigger share of primary-school pupils in poor countries than in rich ones: a fifth, according to data compiled from official sources, up from a tenth two decades ago (see chart 1). Since they are often unregistered, this is sure to be an underestimate. A school census in Lagos in 2010-11, for example, found four times as many private schools as in government records. UNESCO, the UN agency responsible for education, estimates that half of all spending on education in poor countries comes out of parents’ pockets (see chart 2). In rich countries the share is much lower.
Overall, there is good evidence that private school systems tend to create small but meaningful increases in achievement (e.g. here, here, here, here) and especially good evidence that they do so with large costs savings. The large costs savings suggest that with the right institutional structure, which might involve vouchers and nationally comparable testing, an entrepreneurial private sector could create very large gains. Karthik Muralidharan who has done key work on private schools and performance pay in India puts it this way:
Since private schools achieved equal or better outcomes at one-third the cost, the fundamental question that needs to be asked is “How much better could private management do if they had three times their current level of per-child spending?”
The Economist notes that another promising development is national chains which can scale and more quickly adopt best practices:
…Bridge International Academies, which runs around 400 primary schools in Kenya and Uganda, and plans to open more in Nigeria and India, is the biggest, with backers including Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. Omega Schools has 38 institutions in Ghana. (Pearson, which owns 50% of The Economist, has stakes in both Bridge and Omega.) Low-cost chains with a dozen schools or fewer have recently been established in India, Nigeria, the Philippines and South Africa.
Bridge’s cost-cutting strategies include using standardised buildings made of unfinished wooden beams, corrugated steel and iron mesh, and scripted lessons that teachers recite from hand-held computers linked to a central system. That saves on teacher training and monitoring.
The Economist is somewhat skeptical of scripted lessons, known as Direct Instruction in the education world, but in fact no other teaching method has as strong a record of proven success in randomized experiments (see also here and here).
Need I also point out that online education can bring some of the best teachers in the world to everyone, everywhere at low cost? An article in Technology Review titled India loves MOOCs points out that students from India are a large fraction of online students (fyi, we are also finding many Indian students at Marginal Revolution University)
Throughout India, online education is gaining favor as a career accelerator, particularly in technical fields. Indian enrollments account for about 8 percent of worldwide activity in Coursera and 12 percent in edX, the two leading providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Only the United States’ share is clearly higher; China’s is roughly comparable.
Education is changing very rapidly and its the developing world which is leading the way.
When foundations and behavioral economists write soap operas
Brendan Greeley has the scoop:
Before she won an Academy Award in 2014 for her role in 12 Years a Slave, Lupita Nyong’o starred in two seasons of the TV drama Shuga. Set first in Nairobi and then in Lagos, Shuga features young, attractive people who sleep with each other. It’s wildly popular and shown on broadcast channels that reach 500 million people, mostly in Africa.
“I would say that it’s an African version of Gossip Girl, but with sexual-health messages weaved through,” says Georgia Arnold, executive director of MTV’s Staying Alive Foundation, which produces the show with the twin goals of promoting safer sex and removing the taboo around HIV. Shuga isn’t a commercial project; it’s sponsored by donors including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Now in its fourth season, the show recently added a new member to its production team: Eliana La Ferrara, a professor at the University of Bocconi in Italy who specializes in a mix of behavioral and development economics. La Ferrara wasn’t hired for her writing talent. MTV and its donors want to apply a more rigorous approach to make sure Shuga’s message actually creates change where it airs.
The article has numerous other points of interest.
Ebola and the FDA
The Telegraph reports:
The two American doctors who have caught Ebola have been treated with a new “secret serum” which could potentially save their lives.
…A source close to the Atlanta hospital, where Dr Brantly is being treated, told CNN: “Within an hour of receiving the medication, Brantly’s condition was nearly reversed. His breathing improved; the rash over his trunk faded away.”
One of his doctors reportedly described the events as “miraculous.”
…Dr Writebol was also administrated with the drug, which was transported to Liberia in a special sub-zero container. She showed a less remarkable recovery, but is hoped to travel to the US on Tuesday to continue her treatment.
According to CNN, the drug was developed by the biotech firm Mapp Biopharmaceutical, based in California. The patients were told that this treatment had never been tried before in a human being but had shown promise in small experiments with monkeys.
…health workers said drugs that could fight Ebola are not particularly complicated but pharmaceutical firms see no economic reason to invest in making them because the virus’ few victims are poor Africans.
Of course, pharmaceutical firms are not going to invest millions in getting a drug through FDA trials for a disease that has only killed a few thousand people since being discovered in 1976. Nevertheless, some people find this simple logic difficult to accept.
Prof John Ashton, Britain’s leading public health doctor, termed the “moral bankruptcy” of profit-driven drugs developers.
The logic of profit-driven drug developers is no different than the logic of profit driving automobile manufactures. It isn’t profitable to make cars for people who can’t afford them but the auto firms are rarely called morally bankrupt for not giving cars away to the poor. Moreover, it’s not at all obvious why the burden of producing unprofitable drugs should fall on the drug manufacturers. To the extent that there is an ethical case for developing drugs for the poor it’s a burden that falls on all of us.
As Eric Crampton notes there are at least two possible solutions. Either ensure at taxpayer expense a return on investment by subsidizing, offering prizes (as I suggested in Launching) or publicly investing in orphan drugs or
…ease up the FDA trials for drugs in this kind of category. Does it really make sense to mandate placebo trials for drugs hitting diseases with 60% fatality rates? We are condemning people to a very high risk of death for the sake of ensuring that there aren’t drug side effects and that the drugs are more effective than placebos (pretty easy to tell quickly where the fatality rate is otherwise 60%!).
Cities at or near their all-time peaks of excellence
I would cite a few:
1. Berlin
2. Kuala Lumpur
3. Mexico City
4. San Francisco
5. Seoul
6. Toronto
7. Stockholm
8. Lagos
Higher living standards count toward this designation, but they are not enough. Vienna’s general excellence was higher in the 20s, even though the city was much poorer back then, and so Vienna cannot make the list.
Los Angeles probably peaked in the 80s and New York arguably peaked in the postwar period through the 1970s or 80s. Chicago might have a claim. Can you think of others? Does Shanghai have a chance, or did it peak around 2000 or so, before it got so polluted and crowded?
Assorted links
1. Is raising the Medicare age the right way to go? I recommend focusing on the doc fix instead.
2. Nigerian infrastructure markets in everything. Fun, yes, but also an interesting long thoughtful piece.
3. An update on A.C. Grayling’s university.
4. Rent-a-chicken, and the accumulation of experience.
5. On proposals for abolishing the third year of law school.
Book splat
Timothy Taylor, The Instant Economist: Everything You Need to Know About How the Economy Works is too elementary for most MR readers but it is well executed and would make a good gift for anyone needing an introduction to economic reasoning.
Larry Kotlikoff and Scott Burns have their new The Clash of Generations: Saving Ourselves, Our Kids, and Our Economy, due out in March. I believe they are still fiscal pessimists.
There is Ruchir Sharma, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles, due out in April.
I reviewed Ruth Grant’s new Strings Attached: When do Incentives Corrupt? here, for Science, university readers can get through the gate.
Alessandra Casella, Storable Votes: Protecting the Minority Voice, calls for a system where you can abstain from voting on one measure and receive an extra vote on something else.
Christopher Balding, Sovereign Wealth Funds: The New Intersection of Wealth and Politics is a useful overview.
Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State is a good and also conceptual history of 19th century road building.
I loved Arthur Schnitzler’s Casanova’s Homecoming, free on Kindle, which I never had read before. Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse, is a very good look at her life (she is the sister) and the life of the James family.
There is The Southern Tiger: Chile’s Fight for a Democratic and Prosperous Future, by Ricardo Lagos, Elizabeth Dickinson, and Blake Hounshell, next up on my Kindle.
I recommend Michael Grabell, Money Well-Spent?: The Truth Behind the Trillion-Dollar Stimulus, The Biggest Economic Recovery Plan in History. It is a very good journalistic account of how the money was spent, and less scandal-mongering than the title might indicate. I found it to be quite an objective account. There should be more books like this, looking at the nuts and bolts of economic legislation.
Nigerian markets in everything facts of the day
Lagos bigwigs have long paid on-duty local cops to speed them through jams by riding shotgun with machine guns and menacing other drivers with bullwhips.
And:
In 2009, the latest year for such data, more than 2,600 Lagosians were forced to take a psychiatric exam at the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital because of wrong-way driving, according to the state transportation commissioner.
Officials at the hospital say that the number was slightly lower and that they couldn’t recall the last person to fail the test. Failure would trigger more outpatient tests—and mean continued impoundment for the offending car, officials say.
The article is interesting throughout.
Car thieves are not locavores, or the law of one price
The men who carjacked Dunkley on March 17 were professional thieves, members of a sophisticated transatlantic car theft ring, police said. Their plan — thwarted by Prince George’s County detectives who arrested them this month — was to ship her 2009 silver Toyota thousands of miles to Lagos, Nigeria, authorities said.
The story is here. What is the incentive to steal?
In the Prince George’s ring, the thieves are paid according to the vehicles they carjack or steal — $1,500 for a Toyota Camry, $2,500 for a RAV4, $5,000 for a Porsche Cayenne…
Did you guess that tariffs on legitimately imported cars to Nigeria are quite high, much higher than those fees?
Ten memorable Nigerian books
Natalie has been staying with us, so I have been searching for interesting reads on Nigeria; here is an account of ten important novels about the country.
I am told that on Lagos island rents can run $60-70k a year and have to be paid two years in advance. Here is a short Rem Koolhaas video on Lagos. Lagos may soon be the third largest city in the world, and yet other than informal buses the city has virtually no mass transit. The traffic jams are legendary. A journey to nearby Benin should only take three hours but now it can last days.
Some say that Nigeria is the largest user of motorcycles in the world; many hospitals in the country have a ward named after the motorcycles. In Lagos, there is a recent partial ban on their use.
Here is a good article on the maturation of Nollywood. Here is a good, regular source of information about Nigeria, namely 234Next.com.
Here is the renowned BBC Lagos special.