Results for “south africa” 264 found
The future of Africa?
I'm still thinking about this fascinating article from the NYT magazine last week, titled "Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?". Here are two excerpts:
…one of the earth’s last large reserves of underused land is the billion-acre Guinea Savannah zone, a crescent-shaped swath that runs east across Africa all the way to Ethiopia, and southward to Congo and Angola.
And:
…as of earlier this year, the Ethiopian government had approved deals totaling around 1.5 million acres, while the country’s investment agency reports that it has approved 815 foreign-financed agricultural projects since 2007, nearly doubling the number registered in the entire previous decade. But that’s far from a complete picture. While the details of a few arrangements have leaked out, like one Saudi consortium’s plans to spend $100 million to grow wheat, barley and rice, many others remain undisclosed, and Addis Ababa has been awash in rumors of Arab moneymen who supposedly rent planes, pick out fertile tracts and cut deals.
Foreign investment can do wonders but the interaction between such investment and corrupt foreign governments can also be negative if workers and citizens are not granted adequate rights. This article caused me to revaluate possible paths for some African futures. The Coase theorem is finally kicking in. I see corrupt politicians deciding it is more profitable, and also more secure, to "sell off" their countries than to oppress them in the traditional manner. I see a new kind of tax farming, based on the extraction and exploitation of resources and raw materials, with African labor along for the ride. It will mean higher living standards and better infrastructure, but probably not along a path that will look very appealing to most Western observers.
Africa fact of the day
This one is good news, sort of. Contrary to common claims, many African nations have HIV-positive rates of only two or three percent. The truly horrific rates of thirty percent or more appear restricted to the southern part of the continent. The incorrect estimates stem from placing too much weight on data from urban prenatal clinics.
Saturday assorted links
1. “The World Bank estimates that crime costs South Africa 10% of GDP annually.” Link here.
2. An analysis of Geert Wilders. People don’t like deductibles!
3. An unreasonable and offensive rant against Millennials.
4. Advance raves for Godzilla Minus One. And AARP now sponsoring the Rolling Stones.
5. Consider Before Discarding, by Marti Leimbach.
7. AGI and excess backwards induction. Knowing when to apply backwards induction should be a skill we teach in school. And speculation about Q*.
8. “The $VIX has fallen 41% over the last 4 weeks (from 21.27 to 12.46), the 9th largest 4-week decline in history.” Link here. Lowest in about four years.
Monday assorted links
1. Black athletes discuss Thomas Sowell.
2. GPT4V watches an NBA game (and roots for the Clippers).
3. No economic growth in South Africa for the last fifteen years.
4. Rasheed Griffith interviews the guy designated to lead the dollarization of Argentina.
5. Katherine Boyle speech on American dynamism.
6. Hart and Moore on property rights and the theory of the firm (1990, still relevant). And Aghion and Tirole.
*Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage*
Have you ever visited a bookshop and noticed that a cover caught your attention in just the right way? But then you say “Nah, I don’t want to read a book right now on that topic.” But then you crack open the book and read a short amount and the quality of the work catches your attention all the more? And then you buy the book?
I thought Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage was one of the very best books of the year, and most of all this is a book about South Africa. Here is one excerpt:
The outstanding feature of boxing in mid-century black South Africa was its wholesome and egalitarian dignity. Wholesome because it could be contrasted to the brash honor of a gangster, and the township gans of those times loomed large in people’s minds, their violence dominating the newspaper headlines every. And egalitarian because the dignity it conferred was available to everyone. Nelson understood this and he delighted in it. “In the ring,” he remarked much later, “rank, age, colour and wealth are irrelevant. When you are circling yoiur opponent, probing his strengths and weaknesses, you are not thinking about his colour or social status.”
I learned just how much it was the earlier white South African plan (highly unrealistic, of course) not to have blacks move into South African cities at all.
Here is a short bit about Nelson Mandela:
In prison, the present wasted away. Only the past and the future remained, both largely foreign to him until now. Once he found them, he worked on them ceaselessly, year upon year, threading who he had been to who he’d become once his endless confinement was over.
An excellent book on many levels, no you cannot judge a book by its cover but judging a book by its cover is underrated nonetheless.
Emergent Ventures winners, 29th cohort
Dan Rivera, South Carolina, FavorPiedmont, addiction recovery and treatment.
Lukas Bogacz, Utrecht/South Africa, to start a company based on fine-tuning LLMs.
Brian Wang, MIT, Panoplia Laboratories, for DNA-based pan-virus vaccine research.
Gabriel Abrams, Washington, D.C., Sidwell (high school), LLMs and economic research.
Chloe Chia, Berkeley, to pursue computational research about human behavior in dense cities.
Jannik Schilling, 18, Hamburg, Bay Area (?), general career development.
David Siegel, to assist in the education of his son Micah Siegel, Bethesda, MD, to produce a YouTube channel about how to help animals.
Shannon Kim, University of Chicago, biology and the origins of life, “Can prebiotic networks and the spread of chiral information explain the origins of biological homochirality?”
Kyrylo Kalashnikov, mini-robotics, University of Toronto, from Ukraine.
Andrew Nijmeh, Toronto, to study the tech of traffic management systems, 15 years old.
Vinaya Sharma, Ontario, “VoltVision.AI is transforming electric grid fault detection and monitoring with autonomous drones, computer vision, and 3D and thermal imaging, helping embark on cheaper, faster and safer transmission line maintenance.”
Stuart Buck, Houston, Good Science Project, to improve the study of meta science and improve science policy.
Leah Gimbel, Washington, DC, to create a new system to grade principals.
Benjamin Yeoh, London, to organize a London Unconference about home schooling. Also works as a playwright.
Ukraine cohort:
Eugene Shcherbinin, London/LSE/Odesa, general career support, mathematics and economics.
Anna Orekhova, to aid her new company in science education, Kyiv.
Bohdana Pavlychko, Kyiv, venture capital and talent search, The Second Derivative Fund.
Nadia Parfan, Takflix, Ukrainian movies marketed abroad by streaming, Kyiv
Dmytro Marakhovskiya, co-founder and CEO of Rozmova, a Ukrainian tech platform that connects psychotherapists with clients, to expand into Poland.
And yes there are still other winners to be announced, forthcoming…
Sunday assorted links
1. Economic development as reflected in the emotions expressed in paintings, as measured by AI.
2. The only thing keeping South Africa from collapse is its private sector (Bloomberg).
4. Good Anna Gát review of Oppenheimer. And good Henry Oliver review.
5. Sri Lanka update.
6. How well do some commonly-recognized happiness strategies work? Recommended, both the thread and the paper.
Michael Power on Kenya
With cyclical and Covid-related variations, of course, Kenya has been running a 5%+ GDP average annual growth rate for two decades. Since 1994, South Africa’s has, with an average of 2.4% per annum, not achieved half that. The contrast in performance is even more stark since 2011: in that year, South Africa’s GDP was 10.2 times Kenya’s; a decade later, in 2021, this ratio had fallen to 3.8. Meanwhile, according to Trading Economics, as South Africa’s current unemployment rate is 33%, Kenya’s is 5%…
And:
The first item to note in Kenya’s favour is the extraordinary “can do” commercial attitude that prevails no matter which political party is in power. Of course, there have been, are and will be differences in emphasis, but whether it is Team Uhuru Kenyatta or Team William Ruto that is calling the shots, both sides are unashamedly pro-business.
And before assuming that this means they are therefore anti-labour, that is simply not the case: more than halving unemployment to under 5% during the last decade is evidence of that. It helps that 86% of Kenya’s workforce now has some post-secondary education.
Kenya’s informal economy is vibrant, solutions-oriented and celebrated — far more than pooh-poohed — by politicians of every persuasion. Called in Swahili “jua kali” — “hot sun”, or, literally, “sun hot” — it operates outdoors and amounts to a training ground for industrial labourers, many of whom have gone on to “graduate” into more formal manufacturing activities, a form of tropical apprenticeship that even the Germans would applaud.
On a drive into the City Centre from Nairobi Airport — now much faster thanks to a Chinese-built highway — you can see roadside manufacture of beds, buckets, furniture, tin trunks, lamps, kitchen pots, jikos (ovens), coffins… you name it. And this is all happening at 8pm, well after the jua has gone down!
And:
GDP-adjusted, Kenya now receives more venture capital investment than anywhere else in Africa; its ratio of VC-to-GDP is more than triple “rivals” Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa. Unsurprisingly, these money inflows have helped reinforce Nairobi’s long-held status as East Africa’s financial capital.
And:
Remoteness in Kenya is no longer a barrier to generating power: a flight over arid northern Kenya on a sunny day gives the impression of a country littered with “glittering diamonds”. On-grid electricity has benefitted from solar too, as well as wind and thermal with over 90% of power generated now coming from these sources.
The 2030 target — which is well within reach as the country is ahead of its interim targets — is to generate 100% of power from renewable sources.
As noted above, for renewable energy projects, private sector financing is everywhere to be seen, from the single solar panel on a house to the giant wind farms of Kipeto and Lake Turkana: Blackrock is an investor in the latter with the US government helping fund the former.
And Kenya’s thermal endowment — born of the country’s geological position astride the hot steam vents of the Great Rift Valley — is the original underpinning of its renewable energy story: here it has benefitted hugely from best-in-class Icelandic technical support and finance.
Kenya still has major problems with foreign investment, as I have noted, but the Power piece is interesting on numerous fronts.
Population and Welfare: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number
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.
Econ Journal Watch — new issue
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:
- Sheilagh Ogilvie on 900 Years of European Guilds
- Art Carden on William H. Hutt
- David Barker on Temperature and Economic Growth
EJW books from CL Press:
Where are all the Indonesians?
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).
*Crack-Up Capitalism*
That is the new book by Quinn Slobodian. Slobodian is very smart, and knows a lot, but…I don’t know. I fear he is continuing to move in the Nancy McLean direction with this work.
This is a tale of how libertarian and libertarian-adjacent movements have embraced various anti-democratic and non-democratic positions. So you can read about seasteading, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Hong Kong as a charter city, and “decentralization” plans for Ciskei, South Africa.
You won’t hear about the highly successful SEZ reforms for the Dominican Republic, or how the European Union was partly rooted in Hayek’s postwar piece on interstate federalism. In that essay, Hayek was explicit about how much would be done by treaty, rather than direct vote, and that is (mostly) how the European Union has turned out. With reasonable success, I might add. Do only the nuttier episodes of “less democracy” count?
Question one: Is the word “plutocratic” ever illuminating?
Question two: Is this a useful descriptive sentence for Milton Friedman? “He [Patri] had a famous grandfather, perhaps the century’s most notorious economist, both lionized and reviled for his role in offering intellectual scaffolding for ever more radical forms of capitalism and his sideline in advising dictators: Milton Friedman. The two shared a basic lack of commitment to democracy.”
Here is a YouTube clip of Friedman on democracy. Or I asked davinci-003 and received:
Yes, Milton Friedman did believe in democracy. He was an advocate of democracy and free markets, believing that economic freedom would advance both economic and political freedom. He argued that government should be limited in size and scope and that the free market should be allowed to operate with minimal interference.
Or how about engaging with the academic literature on Friedman’s visit to Chile? And more here. Was Friedman, who was elected president of the American Economic Association and won an early Nobel Prize, really “notorious”?
There is valuable content in this book, but it needs to cut way back on the mood affiliation.
What are the politics of ChatGPT?
Rob Lownie claims it is “Left-liberal.” David Rozado applied the Political Compass Test and concluded that ChatGPT is a mix of left-leaning and libertarian, for instance: “anti death penalty, pro-abortion, skeptic of free markets, corporations exploit developing countries, more tax the rich, pro gov subsidies, pro-benefits to those who refuse to work, pro-immigration, pro-sexual liberation, morality without religion, etc.”
He produced this image from the test results:
Rozado applied several other political tests as well, with broadly similar results. I would, however, stress some different points. Most of all, I see ChatGPT as “pro-Western” in its perspective, while granting there are different visions of what this means. I also see ChatGPT as “controversy minimizing,” for both commercial reasons but also for simply wishing to get on with the substantive work with a minimum of external fuss. I would not myself have built it so differently, and note that the bias may lie in the training data rather than any biases of the creators.
Marc Andreessen has had a number of tweets suggesting that AI engines will host “the mother of all battles” over content, censorship, bias and so on — far beyond the current social media battles.
The level of censorship pressure that’s coming for AI and the resulting backlash will define the next century of civilization. Search and social media were the opening skirmishes. This is the big one. World War Orwell.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) December 5, 2022
I agree.
I saw someone ask ChatGPT if Israel is an apartheid state (I can’t reproduce the answer because right now Chat is down for me — alas! But try yourself.). Basically ChatGPT answered no, that only South Africa was an apartheid state. Plenty of people will be unhappy with that answer, including many supporters of Israel (the moral defense of Israel was, for one thing, not full-throated enough for many tastes). Many Palestinians will object, for obvious reasons. And how about all those Rhodesians who suffered under their own apartheid? Are they simply to be forgotten?
When it comes to politics, an AI engine simply cannot win, or even hold a draw. Yet there is not any simple way to keep them out of politics either. By the way, if you are frustrated by ChatGPT skirting your question, rephrase it in terms of asking it to write a dialogue or speech on a topic, in the voice or style of some other person. Often you will get further that way.
The world hasn’t realized yet how powerful ChatGPT is, and so Open AI still can live in a kind of relative peace. I am sorry to say that will not last for long.
Ireland fact of the day
It appears that, in 2020, Ireland overtook South Africa as having the latest marrying couples worldwide.
The average age for a groom is 37.8 and for a bride is 35.7, for opposite-sex couples. This is the fairer comparison because same-sex marriages obviously aren’t allowed everywhere and are less relevant to reproduction.
37.8!
If you consider first-time marriages only, the average age of grooms marrying for the first time was 35.7 years and for brides the average age was 34.2 years. By comparison, for first-time marriages the United States is 30.5 for males and 28.6 for females.
That is from Sam Enright, with an assist from Fergus McCullough.
What I’ve been reading
1. Dan Werb, The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronavirus and the Search for a Cure. An excellent book on the history of coronaviruses more generally, with much of the strongest material coming on how earlier coronavirus investigations fed into the progress we have made on Covid-19. Recommended, not just what all the other Covid books are telling you.
2. James Poskett, Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science. A useful account of what the title promises, with a look at contributions from pre-conquest Mexico, China, and other non-Western locales. Maybe the book pushes the non-Western theme a little too much at points, but this is basically a sane and readable account, and most of the cross-cultural connections are valid rather than strained.
3. Evan Lieberman, Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa After Apartheid. An interesting book, and one which contains a lot of useful information. Yet the author works too hard to avoid recognizing just how badly matters have gone. Overall, incomes are down and the racial wealth gap has not improved…and that is after getting rid of one of the most inefficient economic systems of all time, namely apartheid. For sources try this and this, among others. The income gains you can find are focused in a super-small group.
4. Paul Mango, Warp Speed: Inside the Operation that Beat Covid, the Critics, and the Odds. Written by an HHS insider and participant, this is kind of cheesy and fanboyish. But probably it should be! For one thing, the book gives you a sense of just how much talent was involved in OWS, an under-discussed lesson. On p.69, you can learn that they repeatedly considered human challenge trials and learn their question-begging reasons for refusing to do them.
5. David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals. An extended history of U.S. slavery, focusing on regional differences, for instance Carolina Gullahs vs. New Orleans vs. Mississippi. As you might expect, the broader story is integrated with that of the particular African origins of the slaves as well. A strong book, recommended.
Michael Magoon’s From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement is a very good introduction to the importance of progress and material wealth in history.