Results for “africa”
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What is an Emergency? The Case for Rapid Malaria Vaccination

Compare two otherwise similar towns. In Town A  there have always been 1000 deaths every month from disease X. In contrast, Town B has been free of disease X for as long as anyone can remember until very recently when disease X suddenly started to kill 1000 people per month. A vaccine for disease X is developed. Which town should receive expedited vaccinations? 

From a utilitarian perspective, both towns present equally compelling cases for immediate vaccination (1). Vaccination will avert 1,000 deaths per month in either location. The ethical imperative is thus to act swiftly in both instances. Lives are lives. However, given human psychology and societal norms, Town B is more likely to be perceived as facing an “emergency,” whereas Town A’s situation may be erroneously dismissed as less dire because deaths are the status quo.

A case in point. The WHO just approved a malaria vaccine for use in children, the R21/Matrix-M vaccine. Great! There are still some 247 million malaria cases globally every year causing 619,000 deaths including 476 thousand deaths of children under the age of 5. That’s not 1000 deaths a month but more than 1000 deaths of children every day. The WHO, however, is planning on rolling out the vaccine next year.

Adrian Hill, one of the key scientists behind the vaccine is dismayed by the lack of urgency:

“Why would you allow children to die instead of distributing the vaccine? There’s no sensible answer to that — of course you wouldn’t,” Hill told the Financial Times. The SII said it “already” had capacity to produce 100mn doses annually.

…“There’s plenty of vaccine, let’s get it out there this year. We’ve done our best to answer huge amounts of questions, none of which a mother with a child at risk of malaria would be interested in.”

Hill is correct: the case for urgency is strong. More than a thousand children are dying daily and the Serum Institute already has 20 million doses on ice and is capable of producing 100 million doses a year. Why not treat this as an emergency?! Implicitly, however, people think that the case for urgency in Africa is weak because “what will another few months matter?” The benefits of vaccination in Africa are treated as small because they are measured relative to the total deaths that have already occurred. In contrast, vaccination for say COVID in the developed world (Town B) ended the emergency and restored normality thus saving a large percent of the deaths that might have occurred. But the percentages are irrelevant. This is a base rate fallacy, albeit the opposite of the one usually considered. Lives are lives, irrespective of the historical context.

Hill, director of the university’s Jenner Institute, compared the timeframe with the swift rollout of the first Covid vaccines, which were distributed “within weeks” of approval.

“We’d like to see the same importance given to the malaria vaccine for children in Africa. We don’t want them sitting in a fridge in India,” he said. “We don’t think this would be fair to rural African countries if they were not provided with the same rapidity of review and supply.”

The term “emergency” inherently embodies the conundrum I highlight. Emergency is defined as an unexpected set of events or the resulting state that calls for immediate action. When formulating a response to an emergency, however, the focus should not be on whether the events were unexpected but on the resulting state. The resulting state is what is important. The resulting state is the end that legitimizes the means. The unexpected draws our attention–our emotional systems, like our visual systems, alert on change and movement–but what matters is not what draws our attention but the situational reality.

Lives are lives and we should act with all justifiable speed to save lives. The WHO should accelerate malaria vaccination for children in Africa.

(1) You might argue that in Town B the 1000 deaths are more unusual and thus more disruptive but you might also argue that Town A has undergone the deaths for so much longer that the case for speed as matter of justice is even greater. These are quibbles.

PEPFAR has been a great achievement

PEPFAR is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, started by George W. Bush in 2003. Overseen by the State Department, the program provides treatment for HIV-AIDS and derivative maladies (such as tuberculosis) through training, medical infrastructure, support for orphans and vulnerable children, and, most important, antiretroviral drugs.

By some estimates, the program has saved 25 million lives over the last two decades, spending about $90 billion for treatments that many Africans otherwise could not have afforded or gotten access to. Not only has PEPFAR saved African lives (in a very cost-effective way, I might add), it’s also improved the quality of life for many Africans and helped the economies of many African nations. The burnishing of America’s reputation is a bonus.

And this:

What does it mean that two of the most successful policies of the last 20 years have originated with Republican administrations? Or that two of the people most associated with these initiatives — Condoleezza Rice (PEPFAR) and Jared Kushner (OWS) — have never received proper recognition for their efforts? They should, in spite of whatever other objections one might have to their other decisions.

Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column.

*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…

Does America or France have better food?

Philippe Lemoine tweeted:

Americans *genuinely* believe they have better food than France. They really believe it. It’s truly extraordinary.

Twitter is full of opinions, I will give you mine.  First, I am pretty close to Nate Silver:

A person in the 90th percentile of giving a shit about food will generally eat better in the US than France. Median close, may lean France. 20th percentile more strongly France.

But I have a few more points to add:

1. It is important to distinguish between supermarket food and restaurant food.  If you are content with a limited number of quality supermarket items, France clearly has better food.

2. If you go to a French food market (“Marché”), and are willing to spend 25-30 euros, you can get something much better than what is available in the United States, given the kind of meal you are assembling, with bread, cheese, strawberries, sausage, etc.  And you all should do this if you are visiting France.  That said, America has been gaining in this department, and French quality is static (at a very high level).

3. If you prefer to eat Asian and Latino cuisines in restaurants, the American options are radically superior.  It is not even close.  France does have better North African options.

4. Too many French restaurants have limited hours, limited seating options, low quality service, and so on, relative to their American peers.  I am not sure if those variables count in this debate, but they do for me.  So often eating in France is a pain in the neck.

5. While Paris may have the best restaurants in France, the best actual dining options — price and availability taken into account — are very much outside of Paris.  I would rather spend five days dining in Toulouse, and furthermore many of your best individual meals will come in small towns that have single specialties, such as “roast chicken,” etc.  Parts of Texas and Louisiana and New Mexico excepted, America does not really have anything comparable to this phenomenon.

6. France has better desserts, though I do not count that for much, others might.

If you are wondering, I’ve spent maybe eight months of my life living in France, total?

*Landscape with Invisible Hand*

Despite its only middling at best reviews, I found this one of the most original and intriguing movies of the year.  The formula “African-American family movie plus Only Fans for space aliens” isn’t exactly exhausted, or for that matter even plausible as the basis for anything.  Yet the whole production comes off surprisingly well once you accept the absurdist premise, and it feels freshly cinematic.  The movie also has a lot of economics, and self-consciously so, though not exactly in a free market direction.  Here is the trailer.

Saturday assorted links

1. #lazygirljob (WSJ).

2. The economic foundations of Kenyan street protests.  And some interest groups are rebelling against Nigerian reforms.

3. Product liability for defective AI.  A law and economics study.

4. Diagnostic medical errors are a huge problem.

5. Lebanese man holds up bank to get his own money out (NYT).

6. More Okie-dokie about fabricated research.

7. Good Tim Lee primer on how LLMs work.

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).

3. The making of Yunnan.

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.

Tuesday assorted links

1. A skeptical view of the economics of Threads.  I am more optimistic, believing it is possible to grow total engagement.

2. More reasons why freezing your head won’t work.

3. Data on forecasting existential risks.  A Tetlock project.

4. The Pequod rates books, core book reviewing web site here.

5. “On the Importance of African Traditional Religion for Economic Behavior.

6. GPT-4 research, some of it is gated.

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.

Nigeria reform of the day

Nigeria will save more than 21 trillion naira ($28 billion) in two years after scrapping gasoline subsidies and allowing its currency to weaken, according to the World Bank.

The savings will help President Bola Tinubu’s government cut its record fiscal deficit and a debt-service burden that surpassed revenue in 2022, the Washington-based lender said in a report. The budget shortfall will narrow to 3.9% of gross domestic product by 2025 from 5.1% this year, according to the report.

Scrapping the fuel cap will enable Nigeria’s state oil company to export crude instead of setting it aside to pay for the subsidies. Easing foreign-exchange controls will help the government convert overseas earnings at market prices rather than at “overvalued” rates, the bank said.

It forecast Africa’s biggest economy will expand 4% from 2024 should it implement urgently required reforms.

Here is more from Anthony Osae-Brown at Bloomberg.  And yes, Nigeria reform of the day is in fact on the verge of becoming a thing…

Markets in everything Alaska regulatory arbitrage edition, tribal qualifier added

The shrinking village of Karluk, on the western shore of Kodiak Island, is trying to keep its school viable. So it’s willing to pay a couple of families with three or four children apiece to move there of a year, so that it can draw down state education funds.

Public schools in Alaska need to maintain an enrollment of 10 students to get state funding. Karluk, which had a population of 37 during the 2010 U.S. Census, is now down to about 21 people. The demographics are Native American: 82.14%; two or more races: 17.86%; White: 0%; Black or African American: 0%.

Karluk Tribal Council’s ad says that it will pay a couple of families with enough kids — three or four — to move to the village, all expenses paid, for a year, and will even provide jobs. That money, without question, is passed through from the U.S. and State taxpayer, to pay families so that the village can draw down more government money and open its school.

If this were any other kind of enterprise other than a tribe, these definitions for acceptable applicants would be considered a federal equal opportunity violation. But this is a tribe.

Here is the full story, including means for contacting the village.  Via Martin Kennedy.

Kenya development of the day

The European Union signed a trade agreement with Kenya, giving the nation duty- and quota-free access to the bloc, a long-negotiated deal it said is open for other East African countries join.

The economic partnership agreement has been under discussion for at least a decade. While Kenya agreed to a joint pact in 2016, four East African Community members — Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda — didn’t approve a regional deal. Except for Kenya, all EAC partner states are considered least developed countries and still enjoy duty-free and quota-free access to the EU market.

“This deal is open for other members of East African Community to join,” European Commission Executive Vice-President and Commissioner for Trade Valdis Dombrovskis said at a ceremony in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. “The agreement between EU and Kenya is in fact a bilateral implementation of a regional agreement with Eastern African Community.”

…The pact will promote Kenyan agricultural exports and also encourage European companies to set up operations in the country to process raw materials. Kenya exports more than 70% of its flowers to the EU. The EU is Kenya’s second-largest trading partner with €3.3 billion ($3.61 billion) trade volumes in 2022, an increase of 27% compared to 2018, according to the bloc.

Here is more from Eric Ombok at Bloomberg.

Food in Kenya, and yes you should go

In Nairobi the best meals are to be had at the upscale Indian restaurants, and it seems all or most of them are quite good — choose what fits your location and traffic constraints.  The basic style usually is derived from Punjabi dishes.

The “British colonial” food is not bad, but I don’t think I would consume it repeatedly if I lived in Kenya.

Chapati and hummus are regularly interspersed amongst regular “Kenyan” food.

Ugali, a kind of corn meal that comes in many different forms, is the Kenyan national dish.  It is good, albeit predictable, and often you have to ask for it to get it.  I also like the dish with the sliced tomatoes and the chiles.

Blueberries are the fruit to try, and they are both sweeter and more tart than the U.S. product.

The food at the safari camp was very good, though it paid off to be asking all the time for more Kenyan dishes.

By the way, I can recommend the Naboisho Camp highly.  Very friendly staff, excellent guides, and the supposed “tents” are more like high-quality hotel rooms.  As comfortable as any place you could hope to stay at, the general weather usually is perfect, and you can sit and eat breakfast and watch the birds fly and the animals stroll by (at some distance).  At night the hyenas start chattering and sometimes there are lions too.  They do not allow you to walk to your room at night unless you are accompanied by a Masai man with a spear, but that only adds to the fun.  The guides typically consider the ill-tempered buffalo to, in practical terms, be the most dangerous animal around for the humans.  You won’t see rhinos there (Nairobi National Park suffices for that), but even cheetahs and leopards you are likely to come across, not to mention the certainty of numerous elephants, lions, hippos, giraffes, hyenas, wildebeest, warthogs, and much more.  Recommended!

Kenya Airways is about to start daily direct flights from New York to Nairobi, and I found flying with them (from London) to be perfectly fine, albeit not close to an Emirates standard.

Will Kenya take the lead in carbon removal?

Because the earth’s crust is thinner than usual along the rift, it has vast geothermal potential. The American government reckons Kenya alone could generate 10,000mw of geothermal power, more than ten times the amount it currently produces. A by-product of such power stations is plenty of waste steam, which can then be used to heat dac machines. Moreover, since close to 90% of Kenya’s power is renewable, the electricity these machines consume does not contribute to more global warming.

Capturing carbon dioxide is just part of the process. Next it has to be safely locked away. The rift’s geology is particularly good for this, too. It has bands of porous basalt (a volcanic rock) that stretch across thousands of square kilometres. This makes the region “ideal” for carbon capture and storage, according to a paper published in 2021 by George Otieno Okoko and Lydia Olaka, both of the University of Nairobi. After carbon dioxide has been sucked from the air it is dissolved in water (in the same way one would make sparkling water). This slightly acidic and bubbly liquid is then injected into the rock. There it reacts with the basalt to form carbon-rich minerals—in essence, rocks—which means the gas will not leak back into the atmosphere…

Martin Freimüller, the founder of Octavia Carbon, a Kenyan startup, is working to build the world’s second-biggest dac plant in the Rift Valley. He hopes it will be able to sequester carbon dioxide far more cheaply than Climeworks can, in part thanks to cheap renewable electricity and geothermal steam, and in part because hiring skilled engineers and chemists costs less in Kenya than in the rich world.

Octavia’s pilot plant, scheduled for completion next year, is forecast to have costs of well below $500 a tonne. Mr Freimüller aims to cut this to below $100 within five years. That is far cheaper than industry-wide forecasts of $300-400 by bcg, a consulting firm.

Here is more from The Economist.  Kenya is insufficiently known as a green energy pioneer.