Results for “Ethiopia”
154 found

Historical Migration, Vitamin D Deficiency, and Health

In an interesting new paper, Andersen et al. (2021) use the Putterman-Weil historical migration index to show that life-expectancy is lower in countries where a large proportion of that country’s population emigrated from places with more sunlight (UV-R). Ethiopians in Israel, Indians in the UK and blacks in the United States, for example, tend to have Vitamin D deficiency and higher levels of mortality and morbidity from a wide variety of diseases. The effect at the global level is small but significant, about the same order of magnitude as the effect of income, inequality, and schooling.

Lots of other things are going on globally, of course, so the authors go to some lengths to control for confounding. They show, for example, that the same relationship exists within the United States. Unfortunately, they don’t have a direct measure of Vitamin D deficiency by place but they suggest based on previous research that Vitamin D deficiency is a cause of allergies so they look for whether differences in sunlight between current location and the ancestor population (DIFFUV) can explain epinephrine autoinjector prescription rates. Admittedly, there quite a few links in that causal chain but the idea is clever!

we utilize the link between vitamin D deficiency and anaphylaxis; the latter being a serious allergic reaction (often caused by food), which is rapid in onset and may even cause death. A growing body of evidence suggests that vitamin D deficiency is an important cause of anaphylaxis (Mullins and Camargo, 2012). Laboratory evidence, for instance, suggests several mechanisms through which vitamin D affects allergic reactions in general and anaphylaxis in particular (Camargo et al., 2007). Studies also show a clear relationship between season of birth (fall and winter, the least sunny months) and food allergy prevalence (Sharief et al., 2011). A large US survey shows higher rates of food sensitization in infants born to mothers with low vitamin D intake during pregnancy (Nwaru et al., 2010). Finally, several studies document that epinephrine (a medicine used for life-threatening allergic reactions) autoinjector prescription rates vary with latitude (proxy for exposure to sunlight) in Australia, the UK, and the USA (Peroni and Boner, 2013).

Accordingly, we propose to employ epinephrine autoinjector prescription rates (EAPRs) as a crude proxy for actual vitamin D deficiency across US states. The questions we are then able to pose are the following: Does DIFFUV predict EAPR? Does EAPR correlate with life expectancy once we omit DIFFUV? Naturally, if both answers are in the affirmative then this further supports the interpretation of our main findings. Table 7 provides answers to these questions. In the first five columns we explore whether DIFFUV is a predictor of EAPR. In interpreting EAPR as a proxy for health we also control for our baseline variables: income, inequality, and human capital, as well as regional fixed effects. As can be seen upon inspection of the said columns, DIFFUV indeed correlates with EAPR in the expected way.

Hat tip: Kevin Lewis.

Is Africa losing its growth window?

The macro side of the story here is underreported, alas:

One of the saddest stories of the year has gone largely unreported: the slowdown of political and economic progress in sub-Saharan Africa. There is no longer a clear path to be seen, or a simple story to be told, about how the world’s poorest continent might claw its way up to middle-income status. Africa has amazing human talent and brilliant cultural heritages, but its major political centers are, to put it bluntly, falling apart.

Three countries are more geopolitically central than the others. Ethiopia, with a population of 118 million, is sub-Saharan Africa’s second-most populous nation and the most significant node in East Africa. Nigeria has the most people (212 million) and the largest GDP on the continent. South Africa, population 60 million, is the region’s wealthiest nation, and it is the central economic and political presence in the southern part of the continent.

Within the last two years, all three of these nations have fallen into very serious trouble.

And:

Based on size and historical and cultural import, Democratic Republic of the Congo ought to be another contender as an influential African nation. But the country has been wracked by conflict for decades. It is not in a position to fill the void created by the failings of Ethiopia, Nigeria and South Africa.

The last few decades have been a relatively propitious time for Africa. There have been a minimum of major wars in the world, and a dearth of major new pandemics (until recently). China was interested in building up African infrastructure, and across the continent countries made great advances in public health.

Could it be that this window has shut, and the time for major gains has passed? And that is not even reckoning with the likelihood of additional damage from Covid on a continent with a very low level of vaccination.

These sub-Saharan political regressions might just be a coincidence in their timing. But another disturbing possibility is that the technologies and ideologies of our time are not favorable for underdeveloped nation-states with weak governments and many inharmonious ethnic groups. In that case, all this bad luck could be a precursor of even worse times ahead.

Here is the link to the full Bloomberg column.

Wednesday assorted links

1. More on the NYT masking in schools Op-ed: it looks pretty bad.  It’s really the public health establishment I blame here, not the NYT.

2. “Since the pandemic recession bottomed out in the spring of 2020, the nation’s gross domestic product has more than fully recovered, with second-quarter output 0.8 percent higher than before coronavirus. The number of jobs decreased 4.4 percent in the same span.” (“Model that!”…NYT link)

3. “In general, pornography use trended downward over the pandemic, for both men and women.

4. “Parents in  Japan are sending bags of rice that weigh the same as their newborn babies to relatives who are unable to visit them due to the pandemic.

5. Excellent (but tragic) Ethiopia musings.

6. More returns of stolen crypto than you might think.

7. The commies opine on Cuomo and democracy.  Not the worst take I have read.

Should you make it easier for people to apply?

We study how search frictions in the labor market affect firms’ ability to recruit talented workers. In a field experiment in Ethiopia, we show that an employer can attract more talented applicants by offering a small monetary incentive for making a job application. Estimates from a structural model suggest that the intervention is effective because the cost of making a job application is large, and positively correlated with jobseeker ability. We provide evidence that this positive correlation is driven by dynamic selection. In a second experiment, we show that local recruiters underestimate the positive impacts of application incentives.

That is from a new AER piece by Girum Abebe, A. Stefano Caria, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina.  I find this claim very interesting, though not completely general.  You will note these results are for clerical positions in Ethiopia, and note further “The impact of ability of application incentives is driven by women, and by those jobseekers who are currently unemployed and less-experienced.”  It is possible that the ease of application improves the applicant pool for those with a confidence gap, yet who are talented nonetheless.  I might add that the easy nature of the Emergent Ventures application (it really doesn’t take long and requires no reference letters or vita) reflects a similar logic.

In the context of this study, it is not just that some of the higher quality candidates apply for the money, rather the money is also a signal that the application process truly is open.  Otherwise why pay for applicants?

That said, for jobs or awards that are more creative than just clerical labor, you want to give each application close scrutiny and that may militate against encouraging more and more applicants.  You might even want “knowing to apply in the first place” to be the biggest test standing before the final prize.  What better way to test for networks?

So the mix of “hard to know about at all, easy to apply once you do” will in fact fit some situations fairly well.

Saturday assorted links

1. Your Ponzi career?

2. People systematically overlook subtractive changes.  And a Patrick Collison comment: “An obvious point that took me way too long to appreciate: in software engineering, you should probably optimize for speed even when you don’t have to, because it’s one of the easiest/best ways to prioritize subtraction and parsimony in the solution space.”

3. Against alcohol.

4. Ezra Klein interviews Brian Deese about the economic thinking of the Biden Administration (with transcript).  A good instantiation of “where they are at.”

5. Various observations on the Biden corporate tax plan.

6. ‘Sense of Disappointment’ on the Left as the N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race Unfolds.” (NYT)  Again, I’m going to double down on my earlier claim that the progressive Left has peaked (which is not to claim that statism has peaked, it hasn’t).  This is NYC people!

7. Fact and fiction about Ethiopia’s ethnofederalism?  The content is hardly controversial to most readers I suspect, or even deeply committal on main issues, but the author chose anonymity nonetheless, which is itself a meta-comment on the piece’s own topic.

8. Map of all the physics particles and forces, highly useful, good explication, I don’t find any of this stuff intuitive.  “Strangely, there are no right-handed W bosons in nature.”  What is wrong with you people!?  Why can’t it all be windowless monads?  Or is it?

Sunday assorted links

1. Andrew Gelman on driving and the stock market.

2. Covid and complexity (Scott Sumner, I would note that much of Africa seems to fit this same story).

3. Sanity about Sweden (both sides were wrong).

4. Diane Coyle book list.

5. China Belgium fact of the day: racing pigeon sells for $1.9 million.

6. It seems Al Zajeera has better coverage of Ethiopia?

7. Covid in Milan in September 2019? (speculative).  Here is the paper.  Cross-contamination, or might this be Cowen’s 17th Law: Most phenomena have origins earlier than you are at first inclined to think.  It is true for “the marginal revolution” as well!

Sunday assorted links

1. Redux of my early August piece on why you should moralize less about national coronavirus performance (now ungated).

2. Jet Suit assault teams.

3. Local experimentation with the Chinese vaccine seems to be proceeding very well.

4. The progress of Africa’s largest dam, and the international relations problems it is causing.

5. Can they build a Netflix TV series around a woman chess player?  The article has other interesting features.

6. Good signs for Covid lung damage recovery (NYT).  Not the final word, but you will note I have not been pushing the “long-term damage” line here at MR.  Just as I have not been pushing the Vitamin D thing, weak theory in my view and it gets pulled out of the hat with empirical correlations for all sorts of maladies.

Where and when does herd immunity kick in?

Here is the abstract of a new paper by Axel S LexmondCarlijn JA Nouwen, and John Paul Callan. So herd immunity yes, but at some point after fifty percent:

We have studied the evolution of COVID-19 in 12 low and middle income countries in which reported cases have peaked and declined rapidly in the past 2-3 months. In most of these countries the declines happened while control measures were consistent or even relaxing, and without signs of significant increases in cases that might indicate second waves. For the 12 countries we studied, the hypothesis that these countries have reached herd immunity warrants serious consideration. The Reed-Frost model, perhaps the simplest description for the evolution of cases in an epidemic, with only a few constant parameters, fits the observed case data remarkably well, and yields parameter values that are reasonable. The best-fitting curves suggest that the effective basic reproduction number in these countries ranged between 1.5 and 2.0, indicating that the curve was flattened in some countries but not suppressed by pushing the reproduction number below 1. The results suggest that between 51 and 80% of the population in these countries have been infected, and that between 0.05% and 2.50% of cases have been detected; values which are consistent with findings from serological and T-cell immunity studies. The infection rates, combined with data and estimates for deaths from COVID-19, allow us to estimate overall infection fatality rates for three of the countries. The values are lower than expected from reported infection fatality rates by age, based on data from several high-income countries, and the country population by age. COVID-19 may have a lower mortality risk in these three countries (to differing degrees in each country) than in high-income countries, due to differences in immune response, prior exposure to coronaviruses, disease characteristics or other factors. We find that the herd immunity hypothesis would not have fit the evolution of reported cases in several European countries, even just after the initial peaks; and subsequent resurgences of cases obviously prove that those countries have infection rates well below herd immunity levels. Our hypothesis that the 12 countries we studied have reached herd immunity should now be tested further, through serological and T cell immunity studies.

They offer an implied exposure estimate of 72% for Afghanistan, 67% for Ethiopia, 74% for Kenya, and 80% for Madagascar.  Pakistan clocks in at 72%, South Africa at 71%.  Notice those are not case counts, rather it is working backwards, using a model, to infer exposure rates from the data we do have, assuming that not all cases are being measured.

Here is mostly good NYT coverage on herd immunity theories, though in my view unfair on T-Cell immunity issues — they confuse uncertainty with “there is no reason to believe anything here.”  Here is a new and good NYT article on the Swedish approach.  The different pieces still do not all fit together.

Via Alan Goldhammer.

Addendum: From Catinthehat in the comments:

It’s a simple homogeneous model Ni(t+1)= Ni(t) * Ro * Si(t) / Ntot -> Infected at time t+1 = Infected at time t * Ro * the proportion ( of the population) susceptible at time t. where t is discretized.
They fit the step t to an infection duration , then they fit Ro, to reproduce the shape of the curve for each country and at each step they multiply the infected by a parameter p (the undetected case ratio) to fit to the total population. This acts as an accelerant to the epidemic . Each country has its own p.
The main issue is that you can look at any epidemic curve and fit it that way and you will rather automatically reproduce this high immunity threshold which comes from your homogenous model.

In Europe you can’t assume the undetected ratio is so high ( 1000x to 2000 x) so you must conclude social distancing stopped the epidemic, because your strategy would not fit experimental data.

In the countries fitted , the paper must conclude the epidemic raged fairly undetected, fairly quickly and infected most of the population.

Toward a simple theory of YouTube and gaming

Outsiders and critics often think of YouTube and computer gaming as entertaining and quite superficial modes of cultural consumption.  I have increasingly moved away from that point of view, and to pursue the argument I will note that lately my favorite YouTube video is Magnus Carlsen doing 100 chess endgames in 30 minutes.  That is not recommended for most of you, but I believe that is part of the point.  I now think of YouTube as a communications medium with (often, not always) high upfront “investment in context” costs.  So if a lot of videos seem stupid to you, well sometimes they are but other times you don’t have enough context to understand them, or for that matter to condemn them for the right reasons.  This “high upfront costs” model is consistent with the semi-addictive behavior exhibited by many loyal YouTube users.  Once you start going down a rabbit hole, it can be hard to stop, and the “YouTube is superficial” models don’t really predict that kind of user behavior, rather they predict mere channel-surfing.

Did you know that Yonas, my Ethiopian contact in Lalibela, and recipient of royalties from my book Stubborn Attachments, loves YouTube videos on early Armenian church history?  He seems to know all about that topic.  A lot of those same videos would not make much sense to me.  I could follow them, but they wouldn’t communicate much meaning, whereas the Ethiopian and Armenian Christian churches have a fair amount in common, including in their early histories.

Has the popularity of PewDiePie — 103 million subscribers — ever mystified you?  I have in fact come to understand the material is brilliant, though not in a way I care about or wish to come to grasp in any kind of detailed way.  For me the entry costs are just too high relative to the kind of payoff I would achieve.  You really have to watch a lot of videos to get anywhere with grasping the contexts of his various jokes and remarks.

This also helps explain why there is no simple way to find “the best videos on YouTube.”

Perhaps computer games have some of the same properties.  They have great meaning to those who know their ins and outs, but leave many others quite cold.  Sometimes I hear people that things like “Twenty or thirty years from now, computer games will develop into great works of art.”  I doubt that.  To whatever extent computer games are/will be aesthetically notable, those properties are probably already in place, just with fairly high upfront context costs and thus inaccessible to someone such as I.

The high upfront costs, of course, mean a high degree of market segmentation and thus perhaps relatively high profits for suppliers, at least in the aggregate if not in every case.

Could it be that these top cultural forms of today have higher upfront costs than say appreciating 18th century Rococo painting?

In any case, trying to understand the cultural codes of 2020 is a truly difficult enterprise.

For this material, I wish to thank a related conversation with S.

Monday assorted links

1. Coleman Hughes is starting a podcast.

2. How textbooks vary across Texas and California (NYT).

3. Personnel recruitment and retention in the U.S. military.

4. World Bank forecasts 6.3% growth for Ethiopia.

5. Hilary Hahn on daydreaming as a form of practice.

6. Tribute to Roger Scruton.  And a short excerpt from my 2011 debate with Scruton on friendship, here is the whole thing.

7. Randian response to Greta, over the top, not recommended.