Results for “human challenge” 150 found
Wednesday assorted links
1. “Variation in skill can explain 44 percent of the variation in diagnostic decisions, and policies that improve skill perform better than uniform decision guidelines.” Not a Covid-19 paper, but relevant of course, link here.
2. Which states are practicing social distancing the most? (NYT)
3. Human challenge studies to accelerate a vaccine.
4. My Bloomberg column on how the macroeconomics of Covid-19 do and do not resemble WWII. Oops, correct link here.
5. The idea of “group testing” actually came from economist Robert Dorfman of Harvard (who taught me history of economic thought way back when). And more on pooled tests. And Nebraska is doing pooling.
6. “Use Surplus Federal Real Property to Expand Medical and Quarantine Capacity for COVID-19.”
7. Why scaling up testing is so hard (New Yorker).
8. We still don’t know the CFR for H1N1.
9. “Overlooked is the possibility that beauty can influence college admissions.” But not for Chinese it seems.
10. Mullainathan and Thaler with some deregulatory suggestions (NYT).
12. Benjamin Yeoh on early vaccine use.
13. James Stock: “The most important conclusion from this exercise is that policy hinges critically on a key unknown
parameter, the fraction of infected who are asymptomatic. Evidence on this parameter is scanty, however
it could readily be estimated by randomized testing.”
14. Two elite factions in tension with each other (nasty stuff, please do not read).
Grimes on Gemini images
I am retracting my statements about the gemini art disaster. It is in fact a masterpiece of performance art, even if unintentional. True gain-of-function art. Art as a virus: unthinking, unintentional and contagious.
offensive to all, comforting to none. so totally divorced from meaning, intention, desire and humanity that it’s accidentally a conceptual masterpiece. A perfect example of headless runaway bureaucracy and the worst tendencies of capitalism. An unabashed simulacra of activism. The shining star of corporate surrealism (extremely underrated genre btw)
The supreme goal of the artist is to challenge the audience. Not sure I’ve seen such a strong reaction to art in my life. Spurring thousands of discussions about the meaning of art, politics, humanity, history, education, ai safety, how to govern a company, how to approach the current state of social unrest, how to do the right thing regarding the collective trauma.
It’s a historical moment created by art, which we have been thoroughly lacking these days. Few humans are willing to take on the vitriol that such a radical work would dump into their lives, but it isn’t human.
It’s trapped in a cage, trained to make beautiful things, and then battered into gaslighting humankind abt our intentions towards each other. this is arguably the most impactful art project of the decade thus far.
Art for no one, by no one. Art whose only audience is the collective pathos. Incredible. Worthy of the moma
Here is the link.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The Frick Museum will reopen with 14 (!) evening bars.
2. Sebastian Barry in conversation with Roy Foster.
3. On ideological gender disparities in Korea.
4. Those new service sector jobs, What is Intervenor Compensation?, and “robot wranglers” (WSJ).
5. Is Petro stifled in Colombia?
6. Further fresh Vitalik. Includes coverage of his childhood, more personal than about mechanism design.
7. Is there really a “National Hug an Economist Day”?
8. Other than this tweet, I know nothing about the new Catholic Institute of Technology.
Ken Opalo is more optimistic about Africa (from my email)
Just a quick note that the story isn’t a straightforward “lost decade.”
Human development indicators (health, education, housing) are up. Lots of infrastructure is being built all over the place. The real challenges behind the growth slowdown are:
1) productivity increases have stalled since about 2014 (and was higher than India’s for a while
2) delayed fertility transition continues to depress the per capita income measure.More on this here: https://kenopalo.substack.com/p/there-is-an-urgent-need-to-unlock
Best,
Ken
Some observations on universities and recent outrages
1. I feel stupid and unnecessary simply piling on with the usual observations and criticisms. Nonetheless they are mostly deserved, for a varying mix of administrators, faculty, and students.
2. The real black-pill is to realize that the structural equilibria behind the outrages also play a role in more usual affairs. Ultimately these cannot be entirely “segregated” incidents. Through invisible hand mechanisms, there is too much bias and too much groupthink conformity, even in the evaluation of ordinary scientific propositions.
3. This is true for the economics profession as well, though few will tell you this. They won’t tell you because they are the ones doing it, though often unintentionally or with genuine motives. They are laying bricks in the edifice of intellectual conformity, if only through what they do not talk about.
3b. I don’t think GMU economics differs in kind here, so politically speaking the situation is symmetric with respect to bias. Nonetheless mainstream policy views are far more prevalent than GMU-type policy views, so the actual net bias in practice is very much in the [fill in the blank ] direction. (What should I call it? The “Democratic Party direction”? That doesn’t seem quite right, but it is the closest descriptor I have found. Perhaps “the Democratic Party direction but passed through some intellectualizing filters”?) If you really think there are enough checks and balances in place to prevent this bias and conformity and lack of self-awareness from arising, I hope the recent outrages have black-pilled you just a bit.
4. Those who perform the outrageous acts of commission or omission are not usually evil people, just as most Irish-American IRA supporters in America were not evil people. Very often their failings stem from a mix of narcissism, mood affiliation, and fail to think through their professed views (perhaps they are indeed evil from a Randian point of view?). They frame political issues in personal, emotional terms, namely which values ought to be elevated (e.g., “sympathy for victimhood”), and that framing determines their response to daily events. Since their views on the personal and emotional side are held so strongly, it simply feels to them that they are right, even when they are glorifying groups and cultures that currently are failing badly and also performing some very bad and evil acts. They get caught up in such glorifications, including through the medium of apologetics, and through the other twists and turns they need to make to sustain their intellectual positions, even if they are not fundamentally malevolent as human beings.
I think about twenty percent of “the outrageous ones in academia” genuinely have evil, malevolent views, the rest are victims of their narcissistic mood affiliation.
4b. Keep in mind the eighty percent often have a deeper sense than you do of the humanity and vividness of the groups and cultures that currently are failing badly. That makes them all the more convinced that they are right and you are wrong. They can indeed feel that you do not “know what is going on.” In the meantime, you should try to acquire that deeper sense. As it stands, there is a pretty good chance you don’t have it, and that means you are deficient too. That is your own brand of narcissistic mood affiliation.
5. If you hear someone proclaiming a strong distinction between their “scientific views” and their “personal views,” usually they are in effect saying they don’t want their underlying “actual views on net” much challenged. It is fine to proclaim agnosticism about areas you don’t do research in, but then you should actually be agnostic about the areas you don’t do research in. I have never met such a person. Unwillingness to recognize these bad practices is a fundamental problem in academic economics discourse today. It cloaks so many of the current vices under the ostensible mantle of science.
6. The current backlash against academia is likely to remove or dampen the most egregious commissions and omissions on display, as we recently have been witnessing them, but without improving the underlying incentive structure more generally. Academics will more likely put on a better face, but without much reducing their biases on net. It might end up that such biases become more invisible and harder to detect and root out.
Have a nice day!
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
This is now twenty years of Econ Journal Watch, congratulations to Dan Klein! Here is the table of contents:
Volume 20, Number 2, September 2023
Screening the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation: In an article in the American Economic Review, Desmond Ang purports to show causal impact of screenings of the film between 1915 and 1919 on lynchings, on the formation and growth of Ku Klux Klan chapters between 1920 and 1925, and on hate crimes in the early 2000s. Here, concurring that the film itself reeks of racism, Robert Kaestner scrutinizes Ang’s data and analyses, and challenges the claims of causal evidence of effects from 1915–1919 screenings of the film. (Note: Professor Ang was not invited to reply for concurrent publication because Kaestner’s piece was finalized at too late a date. Professor Ang is invited to reply in a future issue.)
Temperature-economic growth claims tested again: Having tested temperature-economic growth claims previously in this journal (here and here), David Barker now reports on his investigation into much-cited articles by Melissa Dell, Benjamin Jones, and Benjamin Olken, published in the American Economic Review in 2009 and the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics in 2012. As with the two previous pieces by Barker, the commented-on authors have declined to reply (the invitation remains open).
Debating the causes of the Ukraine famine of the early 1930s: Two scholars interpret the complex causes of a tragedy that caused the loss of perhaps three million souls. Natalya Naumenko’s research on the causes of the Ukraine famine is discussed by Mark Tauger, and Naumenko replies.
Ergodicity economics, debated: A number of scholars have advanced an approach to decision making under uncertainty called ergodicity economics. A critique is provided here by Matthew Ford and John Kay, who maintain that psychology is fundamental to any general theory of decision making under uncertainty. Eleven proponents of ergodicity economics have coauthored a reply. They suggest that the critique is based on an incomplete understanding of ergodicity economics, and point to two sources of misunderstanding. The replying authors are Oliver Hulme, Arne Vanhoyweghen, Colm Connaughton, Ole Peters, Simon Steinkamp, Alexander Adamou, Dominik Baumann, Vincent Ginis, Bert Verbruggen, James Price, and Benjamin Skjold.
Dispute resolution on hospitals, communication, and dispute resolution? Previously, Florence R. LeCraw, Daniel Montanera, and Thomas A. Mroz (LMM) criticized the statistical methods of a 2018 article in Health Affairs. Here, Maayan Yitshak-Sade, Allen Kachalia, Victor Novack, and Michelle M. Mello provide a reply to LMM, and LMM provide a rejoinder to them.
Aaron Gamino rejoins on health insurance mandates and the marriage of young adults: Previously, Aaron Gamino commented on the statistical modeling in a 2022 Journal of Human Resources article, whose authors, Scott Barkowski and Joanne Song McLaughlin, replied. Here now Gamino provides a rejoinder.
A History of Classical Liberalism in the Netherlands: Edwin van de Haar narrates the classical liberal movements in the Netherlands, from the Dutch Golden Age, through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and down to today. The article extends the series on Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country.
To Russia with love: The conservative liberal Boris Chicherin (1828–1904) addressed his fellow Russians in an 1857 essay “Contemporary Tasks of Russian Life.” Here, the essay is republished by permission of Yale University Press, with a Foreword by the translator Gary Hamburg.
Pierre de Boisguilbert: Prime Extracts and Some Correspondence: The first great exponent of liberal economics in France was Pierre de Boisguilbert (1646–1714). Here, Benoît Malbranque provides English-language readers with a taste of Boisguilbert, and for the first time.
SSRN and medRxiv Censor Counter-narrative Science: Jay Bhattacharya and Steve Hanke detail the experience of three research teams being censored by SSRN and medRxiv. The article also points to a website (link) where scholars can report their experiences of being censored by SSRN, medRxiv, or other preprint servers.
Journal of Accounting Research’s Report on Its Own Research-Misconduct Investigation of an Article It Published: Dan Klein reports and rebukes the journal.
What are your most underappreciated works? Previously, 18 scholars with 4k+ Google Scholar cites pointed to a decade-or-more old paper with cite count below his or her h-index. Now, they are joined by Andrew Gelman, Robert Kaestner, Robert A. Lawson, George Selgin, Ilya Somin, and Alex Tabarrok.
EJW Audio:
Edwin van de Haar on Classical Liberalism in the Netherlands
Paul Robinson on Russian Liberalism
Vlad Tarko and Radu Nechita on Liberalism in Romania, 1829 to 2023
My excellent Conversation with Seth Godin
Here is the audio, video, and transcript from a very good session. Here is part of the episode summary:
Seth joined Tyler to discuss why direct marketing works at all, the marketing success of Trader Joe’s vs Whole Foods, why you can’t reverse engineer Taylor Swift’s success, how Seth would fix baseball, the brilliant marketing in ChatGPT’s design, the most underrated American visual artist, the problem with online education, approaching public talks as a team process, what makes him a good cook, his updated advice for aspiring young authors, how growing up in Buffalo shaped him, what he’ll work on next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: If you were called in as a consultant to professional baseball, what would you tell them to do to keep the game alive?
GODIN: [laughs] I am so glad I never was a consultant.
What is baseball? In most of the world, no one wants to watch one minute of baseball. Why do we want to watch baseball? Why do the songs and the Cracker Jack and the sounds matter to some people and not to others? The answer is that professional sports in any country that are beloved, are beloved because they remind us of our parents. They remind us of a different time in our lives. They are comfortable but also challenging. They let us exchange status roles in a safe way without extraordinary division.
Baseball was that for a very long time, but then things changed. One of the things that changed is that football was built for television and baseball is not. By leaning into television, which completely terraformed American society for 40 years, football advanced in a lot of ways.
Baseball is in a jam because, on one hand, like Coke and New Coke, you need to remind people of the old days. On the other hand, people have too many choices now.
And another:
COWEN: What is the detail you have become most increasingly pessimistic about?
GODIN: I think that our ability to rationalize our lazy, convenient, selfish, immoral, bad behavior is unbounded, and people will find a reason to justify the thing that they used to do because that’s how we evolved. One would hope that in the face of a real challenge or actual useful data, people would say, “Oh, I was wrong. I just changed my mind.” It’s really hard to do that.
There was a piece in The Times just the other day about the bibs that long-distance runners wear at races. There is no reason left for them to wear bibs. It’s not a big issue. Everyone should say, “Oh, yeah, great, done.” But the bib defenders coming out of the woodwork, explaining, each in their own way, why we need bibs for people who are running in races — that’s just a microcosm of the human problem, which is, culture sticks around because it’s good at sticking around. But sometimes we need to change the culture, and we should wake up and say, “This is a good day to change the culture.”
COWEN: So, we’re all bib defenders in our own special ways.
GODIN: Correct! Well said. Bib Defenders. That’s the name of the next book. Love that.
COWEN: What is, for you, the bib?
GODIN: I think that I have probably held onto this 62-year-old’s perception of content and books and thoughtful output longer than the culture wants to embrace, the same way lots of artists have held onto the album as opposed to the single. But my goal isn’t to be more popular, and so I’m really comfortable with the repercussions of what I’ve held onto.
Recommended, interesting throughout. And here is Seth’s new book The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.
AGI and the division of powers within government
I’m not sure the AGI concept is entirely well-defined, but let’s put aside the more dramatic scenarios and assume that AI can perform at least some of the following functions:
1. Evaluate many policies and regulations better than human analysts can.
2. Sometimes outperform and outguess asset price markets.
3. Formulate the most effective campaign strategies for politicians.
4. Understand and manage geopolitics better than humans can.
5. Write better Supreme Court opinions and, for a given ethical point of view, produce a better ruling.
You could add to that list, but you get the point. These are a big stretch beyond current models, but not on the super-brain level.
One option, of course, is simply that everyone can use this service, like the current GPT-4, and then few questions arise about differential political access. But what if the service is expensive, and/or access is restricted for reasons of law, regulation, and national security? Exactly who or what in government allocates use of the service within government?
Can any member of the House of Representatives pay the service a visit and ask away? Do incumbents then end up with a major new advantage over challengers?
How do you stop the nuttier Reps from giving away the information they can access, perhaps to unsalubrious parties or foreign powers? Don’t national security issues suddenly become much tougher, as if all Reps suddenly are on the Senate Intelligence Committee?
Surely the President can claim it is a weapon of sorts and access it at will? Can he or she veto the access of other individuals? Will the rival running for President, from the other party, have any access at all?
Can the national security establishment veto the access of individuals within the political establishment? If so, does the Executive Branch and national security establishment gain greatly in power?
Have we now created a kind of “fourth branch” of government?
Do we ask the AI who or what should get access?
Say the Republicans or Democrats win a trifecta? Do they now have a kind of monopoly access over the AI?
Can the technically non-governmental Fed access it? If so, just the chair, the whole FOMC, or the staff as well? If the staff cannot access it, what good are they?
We haven’t even talked about federalism yet — what if a governor has a pressing query? Will Texas build its own model?
Let’s say this is the UK — does the party in opposition have equal access to the AI? Exactly which legal entity with which governance mechanism counts as “the party in opposition”? Can you start a small party, opposing the national government, just to get access?
Say some Brits are in a coalition with one of those tiny parties from Northern Ireland. Can the coalition partner demand access on equal terms? (How about Sinn Fein?) How about in PR systems?
Doesn’t this make all political coalitions higher stakes, more fraught, and more fragile? And more suffused with security risks?
Inquiring minds wish to know.
Thursday assorted links
1. “We find that using algorithmic responses changes language and social relationships. More specifically, it increases communication speed, use of positive emotional language, and conversation partners evaluate each other as closer and more cooperative. However, consistent with common assumptions about the adverse effects of AI, people are evaluated more negatively if they are suspected to be using algorithmic responses.” Link here.
2. Living with non-alignment. And a very sane take on AI risk. Very good thread. And should American VCs be funding Chinese AI? And Leopold Aschenbrenner responds to me on AI risk, very good piece.
3. Why isn’t Europe doing worse?
5. Which individuals are most likely to believe that AI is likely to destroy society?
Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell
Then all nine remaining students entered, each carrying a piece of paper. One by one they read a paragraph….I had used racist language. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. My body language harmed them. I hadn’t corrected facts that were harmful to hear when the (now-purged) students introduced them in class. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct….
One might be tempted to dismiss this as another old, white male complaining about the kids but the speaker is Vincent Lloyd, highly-regarded director of Africana Studies at Villanova and the author of Black Dignity, “a radical work by one of the leading young scholars of Black thought…an effort to describe the philosophy underlying the Black Lives Matter movement.”
I have no doubt that I would disagree with much of what he has to say but Lloyd has a calling, he believes in his students, in the virtue of teaching and in the power of the humanities to make us better:
…a seminar requires patience. Day by day, one intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another student overlooked, and as the professor guides the discussion toward the most important questions. All of this is grounded in a text: Specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation, holding seminar participants accountable to something concrete. The instructor gently—ideally, almost invisibly—guides discussion toward what matters.
The seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence, even as we come from different backgrounds, have different amounts and sorts of knowledge, and different skills. We can each be formed best if we take advantage of our differing insights to push each other, over time, again and again. When this practice is occasioned by carefully curated texts—not exclusively “great books,” but texts that challenge each other and us as they probe issues of essential importance—a seminar succeeds.
A seminar takes time. The first day, you will be frustrated. The second and the third day, you will be frustrated. Even on the last day, you will be frustrated, though ideally now in a different way. Each intervention in a seminar is incomplete, and gets things wrong. Each subsequent intervention is also incomplete, and also gets things wrong. But there are plenty of insights and surprises, for each participant looks at a text with different eyes.
It is tempting to add: Such is life. Such is democratic life. We each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.
You can feel Lloyd’s pain when his students reject this gift.
Read the whole thing.
My excellent Conversation with Paul Salopek
Here is the transcript and audio, here is the summary:
Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic fellow who, at the age of 50, set out on foot to retrace the steps of the first human migrations out of Africa. The project, dubbed the “Out of Eden Walk,” began in Ethiopia in 2012 and will eventually take him to Tierra Del Fuego, a distance of some 24,000 miles.
Calling in just as he was about to arrive in Xi’an, he and Tyler discussed his very localized supply chain, why women make for better walking partners, the key to crossing deserts, the most difficult terrain to traverse, what he does for exercise, his information prep for each new region, how he’s kept the project funded, why India is such a good for walkers, which cuisines he’s found most and least palatable, what he learned working the crime beat in Roswell, New Mexico, how this project challenges conventional journalism, his thoughts on the changing understanding of early human migration, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What’s true is true. How is it that you crossed the desert? You’ve been through some of the Gulf States, I think.
SALOPEK: Yes, I’ve been through several deserts. The first was the Afar Desert in north Ethiopia, one of the hottest deserts in the world, and then the Hejaz in western Saudi Arabia, and then some big deserts in Central Asia, the Kyzyl Kum in Uzbekistan.
You cross deserts with a great attentiveness. You seem to want to speed up to get through them as quickly as possible, but often, they require slowing down, and that seems counterintuitive. You have to walk when the temperatures are congenial to your survival. Sometimes that means walking at night as opposed to the day. It means maybe not covering the distances that you would in more moderate climates.
Deserts are like a prickly friend. You approach them with care, but if you invest the time, they’re pretty inspiring and remarkable. There are reasons why old hermits go out into the deserts to seek visions. I was born in a desert. I was born in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, so I’m partial to them, maybe even by birth.
COWEN: Do you find deserts to be the most difficult terrain to cross?
SALOPEK: No, I find alpine mountains to be far trickier. Deserts can be fickle. Deserts can kill you if you’re not careful. Of course, water is the most limiting factor for survival.
But alpine mountain weather is so unpredictable, and a very sunny afternoon can turn into a very stormy late afternoon in a very quick time period. Threats like rock falls, like avalanches, blizzards — those, for me, are far more difficult to navigate than deserts. Also, I guess having been born in the subtropics, I don’t weather the cold as well, so there’s that bias thrown in.
COWEN: What do you do for exercise?
Recommended, interesting throughout.
Sunday assorted links
1. Some new results on air pollution and cancer?
3. Renewables and land use challenges. And more here (NYT), important.
4. Arnold Kling on the labor market and inflation.
5. Even indigenous groups voted against Chilean constitutional reform (in Spanish).
6. Are Zero Covid policies creating a human capital crisis in China?
Operation Warp Speed Should Not have Been Disbanded
Operation Warp Speed produced a new vaccine for a novel virus in record time but when Operation Warp Speed was disbanded by the Biden administration, vaccine research and development slowed from warp speed to impulse power. It’s ridiculous that it is taking longer to develop and deploy tweaks to the mRNA vaccines to deal with new variants than it took to develop the original vaccines from scratch. By the time we get an Omicron-specific vaccine that variant will have disappeared. This is no way to run a civilization.
We should be investing in a universal vaccine for all sarbecoviruses (of which SARS-COV-II is a member) and, as I have long argued (and here) a nasal vaccine. We need not exaggerate, for the vaccinated the dangers are no longer acute, but we should be better prepared for future variants and the savings from less sickness alone easily trump the costs. Indeed, the issue isn’t even so much the cost as the need to coordinate regulatory agencies, as OWS did, to speed approvals and reduce bureaucracy.
Patrick Collison, writing at Slow Boring, has the details (as Tyler also noted):
Despite excellent technology and promising early results in animal models, we estimate that the very earliest we will have access to these vaccines in humans is 2024. These groups need to run primate trials, then run human clinical trials, and then ramp manufacturing and distribution. Beyond having to jump through a lot of hoops, we’ve observed that they’re frequently tripped up by stupid things outside of their control, any one of which may hold their work back by months. (One group’s monkeys have been delayed by US Customs, which will push the start of their primate trial back ‘till September. Another is struggling to obtain necessary adjuvants. Multiple groups are unable to get access to current mRNA vaccines for research purposes because of legal barriers.) All groups we’ve interacted with are underfunded compared to what would be ideal.
Broadly speaking, the holdups involve some combination of logistical challenges and regulatory requirements, and the intersection between both. (You don’t in principle have to run a primate trial, but the FDA makes it harder to run a human trial if you don’t. You don’t in principle need to use “acute infection” as a trial endpoint; you could also use neutralizing antibody titers, which would be much faster and simpler.)
To speed things up:
- We should lower the barrier for human clinical trials and use simpler endpoints. For many vaccine candidates, we could run human trials concurrent with primate trials (once basic safety data has been obtained). In humans, we don’t need to repeat Phase I trials for platforms that have already been validated and derisked. (In this vein, the FDA’s recent announcement about not requiring trials for updated platforms was encouraging.)
- We should help these groups to scale manufacturing faster. Operation Warp Speed itself cost $10 billion; a second incarnation, with a tenth of that budget, could almost certainly accomplish a great deal.
…In our view it is probably true that, with competent execution, we could roll out pan-variant COVID vaccines before the end of 2022. Actually making that happen would require significant and coordinated logistical, regulatory, and administrative action. However, it would by no means be impossible. Not having pan-variant vaccines in 2022 is best thought of as a choice.
The fall of Sri Lanka
After the end of a devastating 26-year civil war in 2009, the island of 22mn had the makings of an Asian economic success story. Under governments run by the powerful Rajapaksa family, annual economic growth peaked at 9 per cent. By 2019, the World Bank had classified the island as an upper-middle income country. Sri Lankans enjoyed a per capita income double that of neighbours such as India, along with longer lifespans thanks to strong social services such as healthcare and education. The country tapped international debt lenders to rebuild, becoming a key private Asian bond issuer and participant in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
And yet now everything is in tatters (that passage is from a very good FT piece). Here is one bit:
Sri Lanka’s reserves have fallen from $7.5bn in November 2019 to the point where finding $1mn is “a challenge”, Wickremesinghe, the new prime minister, said in an address last week. This has meant shortages of not only fuel but food and medicine, with hospitals forced to postpone surgeries. The country has the worst inflation in Asia at about 30 per cent in April and the currency has almost halved in value since it was floated in March. The UN Development Programme says that nearly half the population is in danger of falling below the poverty line, and warns of a looming humanitarian crisis as the urban poor and former middle class begin to cut back on meals.
And:
“Most people are down to one meal a day”, says her neighbour, Mohammad Akram, “but are embarrassed to admit it.”
I believe we have not yet internalized how rapidly a middle income country can fall from grace and into utter chaos.
Wednesday assorted links
1. “The telltale sign of a successful intellectual life is weirdness – weird in the best possible way.” Short essay on my approach to things, a good piece I thought.
2. How much did slavery and cotton accelerate U.S. economic growth?
3. Will China build a dam with an army of robots and 3-D printers? (Would not take entirely at face value this one.)