Results for “africa” 1078 found
*Empire, Incorporated*
The author is Philip J. Stern, and the subtitle is The Corporations that Built British Colonialism. Too many history books run through various motions, whereas this one tries to explain “how things really were” for the interested reader.
Here is one representative bit:
As great as its ambitions were, at its origins the East India Company was, like its predecessors and contemporaries, essentially a tentative experiment fueled by a hesitant and hybrid institutional and financial structure. The “company” did not have a single permanent stock. Rather, it was organized as a series of consecutive quasi-independent stock subscriptions, at first opened on a per venture basis and later established for set terms in years. In its early days, the limited number of shareholders could “take in men under them,” in theory dividing any individual share into a subsidiary, shadow joint stock. As in many other ventures, the East India Company spent its early years chasing down under- and unpaid subscriptions.
The book has plenty of good coverage of Borneo and also Africa as well, the latter sections being especially relevant to some of the charter cities plans of our current day. And there is plenty of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who brought the ideas of agglomeration externalities into economics, and promoted a version of charter cities for southern Australia. How sadly neglected he is these days.
I had not known that the Falklands Island Company still controls so much in the Falklands. Recommended, due out in May.
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.
Ethnic Remoteness Reduces the Peace Dividend from Trade Access
This paper shows that ethnically remote locations do not reap the full peace dividend from increased market access. Exploiting the staggered implementation of the US-initiated Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and using high-resolution data on ethnic composition and violent conflict for sub-Saharan Africa, our analysis finds that in the wake of improved trade access conflict declines less in locations that are ethnically remote from the rest of the country. We hypothesize that ethnic remoteness acts as a barrier that hampers participation in the global economy. Consistent with this hypothesis, satellite-based luminosity data show that the income gains from improved trade access are smaller in ethnically remote locations, and survey data indicate that ethnically more distant individuals do not benefit from the same positive income shocks when exposed to increased market access. These results underscore the importance of ethnic barriers when analyzing which locations and groups might be left behind by globalization.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Klaus Desmet and Joseph F. Gomes.
Thursday assorted links
1. Extraterrestrial life, according to Kevin Kelly. I for one do not think we are quite that boring!
2. The NIH should set up a clinical trials committee.
The major revolutions I have seen in my lifetime
The nature, size of impact, and time horizons on all these vary greatly, but here is my list:
1. Moon landing, 1969. Most of the impact still not felt, except for satellites. My parents did let me stay up late at night to watch it.
2. The collapse of communism (1989-????). Poland is a lovely country to visit, Shanghai is amazing. I flew to eastern Europe once I could in 1989.
3. The rise of Asia. Japan and South Korea starting around the time of my birth. The rise of China for sure, and currently the rise of India is a likely addition.
4. Feminization, ongoing, no firm date. Impact plenty.
5. The realization of the internet. Hard to date, but I’ll say the 1990s and ongoing.
6. The smartphone — 2007. Impact in your face. Bought an iPhone the first day, was mocked by MR readers as an “Apple fan boy.”
7. Effective Large Language Models/AI. Impact still to be seen.
The “African population explosion” is perhaps next in line…
Thursday assorted links
2. Five trends that will shape urban Africa.
3. Is the Fed losing money on QE?
4. Do Asian-Americans have the world’s highest life expectancy?
5. On immigration (and authority) Daniel Klein is correct.
6. Can ChatGPT pass medical licensing exams? Speculative GPT thoughts. And “I taught ChatGPT a language.” And “The return of the Socratic method, at scale and on demand.” Get ready people! “Rewrite this article so it sounds like a human.” And Chat GPT recommends the best books on AI. Get with the program! Yes, I mean you. Only yesterday I found the beast very helpful in prepping questions for Glenn Loury (thanks Glenn, that was a great episode!).
7. Roman vs. modern concrete, updated and revised.
Lead and violence: all the evidence
Kevin Drum offers a response to a recent meta-study on the link between lead and violence, blogged by me here.
I’ll take this moment to explain why the lead-violence connection never has sat that well with me.
Let’s say we are trying to explain why 2022 America is richer than the Stone Age. We could cite “incentives, policy, and culture,” noting that any accumulated stock of wealth also came from these (and possibly other) factors. You might disagree about which policies, or which cultural features of modernity, and so on, but the answer to the question pretty clearly lies in that direction.
Now let us say we are trying to explain why America today is richer than Albania today. You would do just fine to start with “incentives, policy, and culture.” You could add in some additional factors, such as superior natural resources, but you would be on the same track as with the Stone Age comparison. You would not have to summon up an entirely new theory.
Why is Nashville richer than Chattanooga? Again, start with “incentives, policy, and culture,” noting you might need again supplementary factors.
Broadly the same theory is applying to all of these different comparisons. Across time, across space, across countries, and across cities. There is something about this broad unity that is methodologically satisfying, and it helps confirm our view that we are on the right track in our inquiries.
Now consider the lead-crime connection. Insofar as you elevate the connection as very strong, you are tossing out the chance of achieving that kind of unity.
Why was violent crime so often more frequent in earlier periods of human history? It wasn’t lead, at least not for most periods, perhaps not for any of the much earlier periods.
Why was there more peace in Ethiopia five years ago than in the last few years? Again, whatever the reasons it wasn’t a change in lead exposure.
Why is the murder rate in Haiti today much higher than during the Duvaliers? Again, no one thinks the answer has much to do with changes in lead exposure. Mainly it is because political order has collapsed, and the country is ruled by gangs rather than by an autocratic tyranny.
How about the violence rate in the very peaceful parts of Africa compared to the very violent parts? Again, lead is rarely if ever going to be the answer to that one.
So we know in the true, overall model big changes in violence can happen without lead exposure being the driving force. Very big changes. In fact those big changes in violence rates, without lead being a major factor, happen all the time.
And many of those big changes are mysterious in their causes. It really isn’t so simple to explain why different parts of Africa have different murder rates, often by very significant amounts. You can hack away at the problem (e.g, Kenya and Tanzania have very different histories), but there is no simple “go to” theory. Furthermore, since both violence and peace often feed upon themselves, in a “broken windows” increasing returns sort of way, the initial causes behind big differences in violence outcomes might sometimes be fairly slight and hard to find.
That to my mind makes “the true model” somewhat biased against lead being a major factor in changes in violence rates. In the broader scheme of things, lead exposure seems to be a supplementary factor rather than a major factor. It doesn’t rule out lead as a major factor, either logically or statistically, if you wish to explain why U.S. violence fell from the 1960s to today. But the true model has a lot of non-lead, major shifts in violence, often unexplained or hard to explain.
Addendum: I am also surprised by Kevin’s comment that there isn’t likely to be much publication bias in lead-violence studies. I take publication bias to be a default assumption, namely the desire to show a positive result to get published. That hardly seems unlikely to me at all. And in this particular case there is even a particular political reason to wish to pin a lot of the blame on lead exposure. Correctly or not, people on the Left are much more likely to elevate lead exposure as a cause of social problems.
And to repeat myself, just to be perfectly clear, it strikes me as unlikely that the effect of lead exposure on violence in zero is the last seventy years of the United States.
The EU’s carbon tariffs
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one excerpt, starting with the basic idea:
Importers would have to register to receive authorization to import goods, and they would pay a tax per ton of carbon dioxide produced. These fees are intended to match those already applied within the EU, which are currently about 90 euros per ton. The policy is also intended to place EU industry on a more competitive footing and encourage foreign countries to adopt greener energy policies.
But will it work?:
But would it? Economic changes take place at the margin, and currently the EU is engaged in substitution toward coal, a very dirty energy source.
In light of that reality, consider the proposed tariffs as having (at least) two effects. First, they will push some production out of foreign nations and into the EU. Second, they will induce some foreign nations to move to greener energy sources over time, to avoid the tax.
In the short run, the first effect dominates: The tariffs will lead to more coal use and a dirtier energy supply.
Be suspicious of green energy policies which at first make the problem worse. However promising the longer-run promises may sound, there is always the risk that bureaucratic inertia will intervene and the short-run policy effects will dominate.
The rationale for the beneficial long-run effects of the tariffs is that foreign nations, including some relatively poor nations such as India, will move toward greener energy at a more rapid pace. That might happen. But look at the EU itself over the past year. Its energy prices went up, due to the Russian attack on Ukraine, but the EU did not move toward greener energy, such as more nuclear or wind power. It moved toward dirtier energy, in part because domestic interest groups opposed the more beneficial adjustments.
So, despite about as strong an incentive as possible — a war — the EU made the harmful rather than the beneficial adjustment. Now it is expecting that much poorer nations, often with worse governance structures, to do better. Not only is this naïve, but it is also protectionist.
And this:
Even the positive long-run effects are up for grabs. On one hand, the tariff hike provides an incentive to move toward greener energy. On the other, it makes the exporting nations poorer than they otherwise would be. Poorer nations tend to be less interested in improving their environments, as clean environments are largely a luxury good. And extreme poverty worsens other global problems, including issues stemming from migration. Should EU policy make it more difficult for Africa to industrialize?
One also has to wonder whether the promise of lower tariffs in return for greener energy is credible. Once protectionist measures are in place, they are hard to reverse. The EU would be reaping tariff revenue, and domestic EU industries would be receiving trade protection. Any reclassification of the imports as fundamentally “greener” would require an investigation across borders and clearance through multiple levels of bureaucracy. Such changes will not be easy to accomplish, especially in an era increasingly enamored of trade restrictions.
Worth a ponder. EU coal consumption has been up over the last two years. And what is relevant here is energy supply at the margin.
The return of economic orthodoxy
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
This year has turned out to be a very good one for classical and traditional approaches to economics. Exotic doctrines have performed poorly, while standard predictions — based on common sense and straightforward mechanisms of operation — have done well.
Start with macroeconomics. The big story of the year has been inflation, and the two biggest culprits are in line with standard theory: growth in the money supply and hikes in energy prices. Over a recent two-year period, the US Federal Reserve allowed the M2 money supply to rise by about 40%. It is no surprise that prices increased so much…
One of the most classical of economic lessons is that supply constraints truly matter. Along these lines, energy price hikes, most of all in Europe, showed that downturns and recessions can be brought on by old-fashioned scarcity. Sadly, this was the year that Nobel Laureate Edward C. Prescott passed away. Critics mocked Prescott for emphasizing the supply side as a force behind business cycles, but this year showed that Prescott was right. If not for the war in Ukraine and its associated energy supply disruptions, the global economy would be in much better shape.
And the close:
As for the UK: Economists predicted that a move away from free trade with the EU would hurt the British economy. And it has.
Some years induce us to question established theory, and to see new and unusual possibilities for the future. Not 2022. This is the year that orthodoxy took its revenge.
Next year will perhaps be doctrinally weirder! Or maybe not.
Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides
We examine the causes and consequences of an important cultural and psychological trait: the extent to which one views the world in zero-sum terms – i.e., that benefits to one person or group tend to come at the cost of others. We implement a survey among approximately 15,000 individuals living in the United States that measures zero-sum thinking, political and policy views, and a rich set of characteristics about their ancestry. We find that a more zero-sum view is strongly correlated with several policy views about the importance of government, the value of redistributive policies, the impact of immigration, and one’s political orientation. We find that zero-sum thinking can be explained by experiences of an individual’s ancestors (parents and grandparents), including the amount of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, the degree of economic hardship they suffered, whether they immigrated to the United States or were exposed to more immigrants, and whether they had experiences with enslavement. These findings underscore the importance of psychological traits, and how they are transmitted inter-generationally, in explaining current political divides in the United States.
That is from a new paper by Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva. The paper has many interesting particular results, here is one:
Respondents living in Utah exhibit the least zero-sum thinking, on average, and respondents living in Montana, Oklahoma and Mississippi exhibit the most. Importantly, there is no significant geographic clustering and the geographic distribution of zero-sum beliefs is not obviously correlated with that of political leanings.
And this:
If a respondent was born outside the U.S., then they tend to have a less zero-sum view of the world.
African-Americans have more zero-sum thinking than average, and also this:
Zero-sum thinking is also associated with more liberal [TC: the wrong word, right here the misuse is especially glaring!] economic policies and a political alignment with the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party.
Recommended.
Friday assorted links
*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.
How to process the FTX news — a test
Here is one MR comment that illustrates my point:
Is the EA movement dead?
No.
To be clear, I am not “an EA person,” though I do have sympathies with considerable parts of the movement. Most of all it has struck me, as I have remarked in the past, just how much young talent the movement has attracted. Money enabled the attracting of that talent, but I never had the sense that the money was the reason why the talent was showing up at EA events. So a less well-funded EA movement still will be potent, at least assuming it gets over the immediate trauma. That trauma may even help to drive away some of the less serious poseurs who thought EA was the easiest path to polyamory, or whatever..
Intellectual movements can be quite influential on small sums of money. What exactly was the budget for the Apostles? Or take libertarianism, which arguably saw peak influence in the last 1970s and early 1980s, when it was much less well funded than in later times.
How much money did the Benthamites have? Nonetheless they influenced policy a great deal.
As a side note, Open Philanthropy spent over $400 million in 2021. I know zero about their plans, but I don’t see any reason to think they will be unimportant in the future. That is plenty of funding right there.
A mere month ago, I witnessed the game of young people sitting around, speculating how many future billionaires will be attracted to EA. Probably that number has fallen, for reasons related to the current bad publicity, but I don’t see why it has to have fallen to zero. The next set of billionaires might simply choose a different set of labels.
I do anticipate a boring short-run trend, where most of the EA people scurry to signal their personal association with virtue ethics. Fine, I understand the reasons for doing that, but at the same time grandma, in her attachment to common sense morality, is not telling you to fly to Africa to save the starving children (though you should finish everything on your plate). Nor would she sign off on Singer (1972). While I disagree with the sharper forms of EA, I also find them more useful and interesting than the namby-pamby versions.
Tyrone knocks at the door: “Tyler, you are failing to state the truth about SBF! He did maximize social welfare! And sacrificed himself to that end. What indeed is Christ without Judas? Judas sacrificed his reputation. So did SBF. Now the jump-started EA ideas will live on for eternity. And those who hold crypto through Caribbean exchanges are about the most deserving losers you can think of. Those assets did not represent social value anyway. And isn’t discouraging crypto investment exactly what we should be doing? (SBF is good for the environment!) And you need a celebrity example of wrongdoing for that lesson to stick, not just a few random price drops for bitcoin. He is surely a true angel…” At which point I had to ask Tyrone to leave the penthouse and shut his dirty mouth…he is not a valid boy!
From MR commentator Ineffective Grifterism.
I would say if the FTX debacle first leads you to increase your condemnation of EA, utilitarianism, philosophy, crypto, and so on that is a kind of red flag for your thought processes. They probably could stand some improvement, even if your particular conclusion might be correct. As I’ve argued lately, it is easier to carry and amplify damning sympathies when you can channel your negative emotions through the symbolism of a particular individual. Especially when others are doing the same — do not forget Girard!
It is better to simply file the data point away and add it to your mental regressions, but not right now to get too emotional or condemnatory about it.
If you would like, here are a few better questions for occupying your time:
1. Which 19th century novel does this story most resemble?
2. If you had to flee the Bahamas, and sought out a locale with no extradition treaty, which one would you choose? (Indonesia, for me, not Dubai.)
3. What kind of love story exactly is that of Sam and Caroline? I mean this query seriously and I am not looking for a hostile or sarcastic answer.
4. Which parts of the SBF worldview remain correct and will end up undervalued?
5. What does the scenario look like where this is good for crypto as a whole?
6. How should remaining EA philanthropists rethink their giving and also their PR?
7. How will this affect economic development in the Bahamas?
You can work yourself on completing this list. My claim is that, over time, you will end up much smarter if you focus on questions like these rather than “reliving” collective condemnations like those of Ineffective Grifterism. Nominative determinism occasionally does hold!