Results for “lagos” 51 found
*The Tenth Parallel*
The author is Eliza Griswold and the subtitle is Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Excerpt:
Church is no staid ritual in Nigeria; it is a carnival. One Friday night, I went to the Redeemed Christian Church of Christ at an all-night church ground with three hundred thousand other people. The figure is larger than the number of Quakers in America — the equivalent of an entire American denomination worshipping at the edge of Lagos. With no traffic, the church ground is an hour's drive from Lagos. The choir was a phalanx of thousands of young people sitting under a tent, and I wandered among them, swallowed by the rush of their voices. Most attendees would spend the night dozing in their chairs of buying peanuts and soda and tapes and T-shirts and a host of other amusements. The service started at eight. Around midnight, I left to face hours of traffic and the sizable risk of a carjacking by the bandits who freely roamed the highways, picking off tired churchgoers.
This is the book which everyone is reading, and reviewing, right now. It has good coverage of Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and the clash between religions in those areas. I can definitely recommend it. My major complaint has to do with framing. The author reminds us that "the main fault lines are within Islam," or something like that, etc., yet if you read only this book, or for that matter its subtitle, you would come away with a different impression altogether. The very premise of the book selects for clash among the two major religions surveyed and I don't think the author quite comes to terms with this fact. She is torn by conflicting impulses to pursue her initial premise to its logical conclusion, and yet also to provide a more politically correct account than what she sees in front of her eyes.
Assorted links
1. What econ bloggers worry about.
3. Intedrbreeding with Neandertals: a summary of recent discoveries, and here.
4. Trying to calculate the odds, vis-a-vis dating.
5. 1:45.
African Successes
From Shanta Devajaran at the World Bank’s blog Africa Can…End Poverty, a post on African Successes.
In recent years, a broad swath of African countries has begun to show a remarkable dynamism. From Mozambique’s impressive growth rate (averaging 8% p.a. for more than a decade) to Kenya’s emergence as a major global supplier of cut flowers, from M-pesa’s mobile phone-based cash transfers to KickStart’s low-cost irrigation technology for small-holder farmers, and from Rwanda’s gorilla tourism to Lagos City’s Bus Rapid Transit system, Africa is seeing a dramatic transformation. This favorable trend is spurred by, among other things, stronger leadership, better governance, an improving business climate, innovation, market-based solutions, a more involved citizenry, and an increasing reliance on home-grown solutions. More and more, Africans are driving African development.
A very interesting list of examples and case studies follows. My colleague at the Independent Institute, Alvaro Vargas Llosa has also edited a recent book on this theme titled, Lessons from the Poor.
Question: How does focusing on successes change our view of development?
Hat tip J-J Rosa.
Betting markets in everything
Right now the odds are running 4-1.
I thank Chris F. Masse for the pointer.
Speaking of markets and empirical verification, here is $300 million for the University of Chicago Business School.
And here is how markets clear in Nigeria.
Book Forum: Harford and Kevin Grier on Cities
Kevin Grier at Kids Prefer Cheese continues our book forum on the Logic of Life with a discussion of The World is Spiky.
Here is my summary of Tim’s argument. Cities are expensive, and that
expense is above and beyond paying the necessary rents to gain access
to their unique amenities. Cities are marked by knowledge spillovers, a
positive externality (don’t get mad Bryan)
where human capital grows faster when one is around more humans. And
the internet, rather than reducing the positive effects of cities on
productivity, actually enhances them. Thus, rather than subsidizing
rural areas, perhaps we should consider subsidizing cities.
Luckily
for Tim and his prospective book sales, he tells this story in a much
more entertaining way than I just did. But I still have some questions,
suggestions, and quibbles.
The claim is made that salary
differences don’t match up with cost of living differences and the
reason for this is knowledge spillovers, but it is not spelled out
exactly how that would work. An alternative seems to me that zoning
restrictions create these big rents and pre-existing property owners
are sucking a lot of the consumer surplus out of people with high
valuations on cool experiences…..
Tim discusses
“failing cities” and describes (correctly I think) why people still
live there, but gives no explanation for why they failed if indeed
cities produce these positive externalities. There is no discussion of
some of the very biggest cities in the world; Mexico City, Lagos,
Jakarta. It would be nice to know where the argument works, where it
doesn’t and how to know which is which…
More here.
Nigeria gets a movie theater
No, not an open-air cinema, or a DVD player projecting onto a large screen, but rather a real movie theater:
Lagos is the biggest city in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa, but until recently it did not even have any cinemas.
Lagos now has its first multi-screen cinema complex – a rarity in Africa
That is all the more surprising given that Nigerians love watching films: the country is famous for its thriving and expanding home-video industry.
Now, however, that has all changed, thanks to the Silverbird Cinemas – an upmarket five-screen Cineplex in the heart of Victoria Island.
The project has faced numerous obstacles:
There were cinemas in Lagos in the 1960s, but they began going out of business in the 1970s – partly because of the difficulties of operating under military dictatorship.
Cinemas closed down across the country and today many are used as Pentecostal churches or Islamic education centres.
But even with Ben Murray-Bruce’s enthusiasm, this was not the easiest project to get off the ground.
Nigeria has an erratic power supply, which means that seven generators have been installed to make sure that the films do not stop mid-show and the air-conditioning does not break down.
Mr Murray-Bruce has also had to convince film distributors that it is safe to send prints to Lagos – a city already awash with pirated DVDs of top Hollywood films.
Here is the full story.
Think about this account next time you hear someone blame the small number of African films on Hollywood or Bollywood cultural imperialism.