Results for “africa” 1080 found
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!
Chronic School Absenteeism
SFStandard: Chronic absenteeism in the San Francisco Unified School District has more than doubled from pre-pandemic levels, rising from 14% to 28%, according to preliminary data for 2021-22. A student is considered chronically absent when they miss 10% of the 180-day school year.
Chronic Absentism doubled for most students–chronic absenteeism among Asians, for example, doubled from 4% to 9%–but among African Americans chronic absenteeism increased from 38% to a stunning 64%. As a result, some schools with a large percentage of African American students have 80% or more of their student body chronically absent.
The wisdom of Bono
I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism. I spend a lot of time in countries all over Africa, and they’re like, Eh, we wouldn’t mind a little more globalization actually.
And:
Isn’t citing Thomas Piketty a little dicey for you, given what he says about fairer taxation?
Yes, he has a system of progressive taxation and I get it, but the question that I’m compelled to answer is: How are things going for the bottom billion? Be careful to placard the poorest of the poor on politics when they are fighting for their lives. It’s very easy to become patronizing. Capitalism is a wild beast. We need to tame it. But globalization has brought more people out of poverty than any other -ism. If somebody comes to me with a better idea, I’ll sign up. I didn’t grow up to like the idea that we’ve made heroes out of businesspeople, but if you’re bringing jobs to a community and treating people well, then you are a hero. That’s where I’ve ended up. God spare us from lyricists who quote themselves, but if I wrote only one lyric that was any good, it might have been: Choose your enemies carefully because they will define you. Turning the establishment into the enemy — it’s a little easy, isn’t it?
Here is the full NYT interview.
Nigeria fact of the day
Nigeria’s petrol spending will eat up more federal spending than federal spending on health, education and welfare combined.
Here is more from The Economist, about the pending election, interesting more generally.
Sunday assorted links
1. Guy who knew Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife is publishing a book soon.
2. City charters really matter. And the same guy — Austin Berg — runs a YouTube channel on Rare African Vinyl.
3. Does an overreliance on English hinder cognitive science?
4. US will support sending ‘multinational rapid action force’ to Haiti.
5. “When not on vacation my life is boring and my nighttime dreams are dull. On vacation, time slows down and my life becomes full of novel events, and this triggers much more intense and vivid dreams at night. I have a hard time estimating the importance of this factor, but it might well be more important than all of my daytime utility during the vacation.” Link here.
6. “Pensions may be in trouble, but long term debt is great for governments. So long, that is, as the government doesn’t turn around and bail out everyone to whom it sold long term debt!” Link here.
Overrated or underrated?
Ramagopal asks: Peter Bauer, Mises, Joan Robinson
1. Peter Bauer is underrated. He was a brilliant development economist who wrote seminal early and detailed books on the rubber sector and also networks of West African trade. He also recognized the importance of the informal sector early on. He then moved into a more polemic mode, writing books on market-oriented development strategies and very critical of foreign aid. I believe at the time he was largely correct about foreign aid, though I would recognize also that since then the quality and effectiveness of foreign aid has improved considerably, most of all because the receiving governments have on average improved in quality.
His family had a coat of arms, linked above at his name.
I once met Bauer at a seminar at NYU, way back when. He reminded me of a character from LOTR and he had a thick mane of white hair. I believe Bauer was also one of the first well-known economists to come out as gay.
2. Mises is underrated. His 1922 book Socialism is still the best and also historically most important critique of socialism, ever. His earlier articles about the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism are among the most important economics articles, ever. Those are already some pretty important contributions, and yet he is often talked of as a crank, perhaps because in part some of his followers were indeed cranks.
Liberalism I quite like. His book Bureaucracy is underdeveloped but still pretty interesting, and his hypotheses about the logic of cascading interventionism, if not entirely correct, still are an important contribution to public choice. They do explain a lot of the data. Human Action is big, cranky, and dogmatic, but for some people a useful tonic and alternative to the usual stuff. I can’t say I have ever really liked it, and in an odd way the whole emphasis on “Man acts” undoes at least one part of marginalism. The early Theory of Money and Credit was a pretty good early 20th century book on monetary theory.
Hayek somehow ended up as “the reasonable face of classical liberalism,” but in fact Mises was far more politically correct by current standards.
Obviously there is a sliver of people who very much overrate Mises. Here is a guy who hardly anyone rates properly. I’m still sticking with considerably underrated.
3. Joan Robinson’s Theory of Imperfect Competition was a very important book, and it laid the groundwork for a lot of later thinking about market structure, both geometrically and conceptually. But she didn’t understand actual economics, was a Maoist, and seemed to like the regime of North Korea. So I have to say overrated. Her Accumulation of Capital also was no great shakes, though hardly her greatest sin. Her growth theory was far too Marxian, and far too fond of “Golden Rule” constructs, which are mechanistic rather than insightful as models ought to be. Her writings in Economic Philosophy were not profound. So she has one truly major contribution, but I can’t get past the really bad stuff.
My Conversation with the excellent Walter Russell Mead
Here is the audio and transcript, here is the summary:
He joined Tyler to discuss how the decline of American religiosity has influenced US foreign policy, which American presidents best and least understood the Middle East, the shrewd reasons Stalin supported Israel, the Saudi secret to political stability, the fate of Pakistan, the most likely scenario for China moving on Taiwan, the gun pointed at the head of German business, the US’s “murderous fetishization of ideology over reality” in Sub-Saharan Africa, the inherent weakness in having a foreign policy establishment dominated by academics, what he learned from attending the Groton School, and much more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How would you change or improve the training that goes into America’s foreign policy elite?
MEAD: Well, I would start by trying to draw people’s attention to that, over the last 40 years, there’s been an enormous increase in the number of PhD grads engaged in the formation of American foreign policy. There’s also been an extraordinary decline in the effectiveness of American foreign policy. We really ought to take that to heart.
COWEN: Do you think of it as an advantage that you don’t have a PhD?
MEAD: Huge advantage.
COWEN: How would you describe that advantage?
MEAD: I don’t really believe in disciplines. I see connections between things. I start from reality. I’m not trying to be anti-intellectual here. You need ideas to help you organize your perceptions of reality. But I think there’s a tendency in a lot of social science disciplines — you start from a bunch of really smart, engaged people who have been thinking about a set of questions and say, “We’ll do a lot better if we stop randomly thinking about everything that pops up and try, in some systematic way, to organize our thinking of this.”
I think you do get some gains from that, but you see, over time, the focus of the discipline has this tendency to shift. The discipline tends to become more inward navel-gazing. “What’s the history of our efforts to systematize our thinking about this?” The discipline becomes more and more, in a sense, ideological and internally focused and less pragmatic.
I think that some of the problem, though, is not so much in the intellectual weaknesses of a lot of conventional postgrad education, but simply almost the crime against humanity of having whole generations of smart people spend the first 30, 35 years of their lives in a total bubble, where they’re in this academic setting, and the rule . . . They become socialized into the academy, just as much as prisoners get socialized into the routines of a prison.
The American academy is actually a terrible place for coming to understand how world politics works. Recently, I had a conversation with an American official who was very proud of the way that the US had broken the mold by revealing intelligence about Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine, and pointed out how that had really helped build the NATO coalition against Russian aggression, and so on.
So far as he goes, it’s true. But I said, however, if you really look at the total message the US was projecting to Russia in those critical months, there were two messages. One is, “We’ve got great intelligence on you. We actually understand you much better than you think.” It was shocking. I think it shocked the Russians. But on the other hand, we’re saying, “We think you’re going to win quickly in Ukraine. We’re offering Zelenskyy a plane ride out of Kyiv. We’re pulling out all our diplomats and urging other countries to pull out their diplomats.”
The message, actually the totality of the message that we sent to Putin is, “You are going to win if you do this.”
And this, on what makes for talent in the foreign policy arena:
…you can’t know too much history. A hunger for travel. I think too many foreign policy types don’t actually get out into the field nearly as much as they should. Curiosity about other cultures. A strong grounding in a faith of your own, which can be a secular ideology, perhaps, in some cases, but more often is likely to be a great religious tradition of some kind.
A very good conversation. And I am happy to recommend Walter’s new book The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.
What should I ask Paul Salopek?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is Wikipedia:
Paul Salopek (born February 9, 1962 in Barstow, California) is a journalist and writer from the United States. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and was raised in central Mexico. Salopek has reported globally for the Chicago Tribune, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, National Geographic Magazine and many other publications. In January 2013, Salopek embarked on the “Out of Eden Walk”, originally projected to be a seven-year walk along one of the routes taken by early humans to migrate out of Africa, a transcontinental foot journey that was planned to cover more than 20,000 miles funded by the National Geographic Society, the Knight Foundation and the Abundance Foundation.
Salopek received a degree in environmental biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1984. Salopek has worked intermittently as a commercial fisherman, shrimp-fishing out of Carnarvon, and most recently with the scallop fleet out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1991. His career in journalism began in 1985 when his motorcycle broke in Roswell, New Mexico and he took a police-reporting job at the local newspaper to earn repair money.
As far as the walk goes, he has made it to China. So what should I ask him?
My Conversation with Byron Auguste
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is my introduction:
TYLER COWEN: Today I am here…with Byron Auguste, who is president and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a civic enterprise which aims to improve the US labor market. Byron served for two years in the White House as deputy assistant to the president for economic policy and deputy director to the National Economic Council. Until 2013, he was senior partner at McKinsey and worked there for many years. He has also been an economist at LMC International, Oxford University, and the African Development Bank.
He is author of a 1995 book called The Economics of International Payments Unions and Clearing Houses. He has a doctorate of philosophy and economics from Oxford University, an undergraduate econ degree from Yale, and has been a Marshall Scholar. Welcome.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: As you know, more and more top universities are moving away from requiring standardized testing for people applying. Is this good or bad from your point of view?
AUGUSTE: I think it’s really too early to tell because the question is —
COWEN: But you want alternative markers, not just what kind of family you came from, what kind of prep you had. If you’re just smart, why shouldn’t we let you standardize test?
AUGUSTE: I think alternative markers are key. This is actually a pretty complicated issue, and I’ve talked to university administrators and admissions people, and it’s interesting, the variety of different ways they’re trying to work on this.
But I will say this. If you think about something like the SAT, when it first started — I’m talking about in the 1930s essentially — it was an alternative route into a college. It started with the Ivies. It was started with James Conant and Harvard and the Ivies and the Seven Sisters and the rest, and then it gradually moved out.
The problem they were trying to solve back in the ’30s was that up until that point, the way you got into, say, Dartmouth is the headmaster of Choate would write to Dartmouth and say, “Here’s our 15 candidates for Dartmouth.” Dartmouth would mostly take them because Choate knew what Dartmouth wanted. Then you had the high school movement in the US, where between 1909 and 1939, you went from 9 percent of American teenagers going to high school to 79 percent going to high school.
Now, suddenly, you had high school students applying to college. They were at Dubuque Normal School in Iowa. How does Dartmouth know whether this person was . . . The people from Choate didn’t start taking the SATs, but the SAT — even though it was a pretty terrible test at the time, it was better than nothing. It was a way that someone who was out there — not in the normal feeder schools — could distinguish themselves.
I think that is a very valuable role to play. As you know, Tyler, the SAT does, to some extent, still play that role. But also, because now that everybody has had to use it, it also is something that can be gamed more — test prep and all the rest of it.
COWEN: But it tracks IQ pretty closely. And a lot of Asian schools way overemphasize standard testing, I would say, and they’ve risen to very high levels of quality very quickly. It just seems like a good thing to do.
Most of all we cover jobs, training/retraining, and education. Interesting throughout.
Nigeria facts of the day
On the supply side, dollar revenues from oil have plummeted because of massive theft, pushing down official daily production of crude to 1.1mn barrels, far below Nigeria’s Opec quota of 1.8mn b/d. Angola has now usurped Nigeria as Africa’s biggest oil producer.
Nigeria’s petrol subsidy, under which its car owners enjoy among the cheapest fuel in the world ($0.40/litre), means the federal government receives less revenue. The higher the oil price, the bigger the gap between the real and the subsidised price and the higher the bill for the government. Nigeria will spend an estimated $9.6bn on petroleum subsidies this year, about 2 per cent of gross domestic product and almost 10 times the budgeted amount.
Here is more from the FT, in other words Nigeria is failing to benefit from much higher oil prices.
What I’ve been reading
Michael Strachan, The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate. Coryate was an intrepid traveler from 17th century England. He walked along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, through Persia and Afghanistan, and into the heart of the Moghul empire. He was the first Englishman to visit India “for the heck of it,” and he walked. Quite possibly he introduced the table fork to England, and the word “umbrella” to the English language. Non-complacent from top to bottom, he died at age forty, of dystentery, while underway in Surat.
Johan Fourie, Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom: Lessons from 100,000 Years of Human History. An unusual narrative take on the broad sweep of economic history, Africa-centered, original, unusual, broken up into different stories. The author is professor of economics and history at Stellenbosch, here is his home page.
Ronald H. Spector, A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955. This book is an excellent way to pick up knowledge on a critical period that most Westerners do not know enough about. Most interesting to me were the sections on how many people thought the Indonesians would gladly return to Dutch colonial rule. Narrator: They didn’t.
S Encel, Equality and Authority: a Study of Class, Status and Power in Australia. Might this be the best explanatory book on Australia ever? Explains the odd mix of egalitarianism, individualism, plus bureaucratic authoritarianism that characterizes the Aussies. There should of course be many more books like this, books attempting to explain countries to us. From 1970 but still highly relevant.
W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. A very good book outlining status and signaling arguments for explaining how culture works and changes. My main gripe is that it doesn’t seem at all aware of Simler and Hanson, and Robin Hanson more generally and for that matter my own What Price Fame? (among other writings). So while I like the content, on the grounds of both scholarships and originality I have to give it a pretty big ding.
Arrived in my pile are:
Kevin Erdmann, Building from the Ground Up: Reclaiming the American Housing Boom, and
Daniel B. Klein and Jason Briggeman, Hume, Smith, Burke, Geijer, Menger, d’Argenson.
Annie Duke, Quit. A defense of quitting, which is often necessary to reallocate resources properly.
Mandated vaccine boosters for the AEA meetings?
Yes, the new AEA regulations will mandate vaccine boosters for attendance at the New Orleans meetings. Not just two jabs but yes boosters, at least one of them.
Like the N-95 (or stronger) mask mandate, this seems off base and possibly harmful to public health as well. Here are a few points:
1. The regulations valorize “booster with an older strain,” and count “infection with a recent strain” for nothing. In fact, the latter is considerably more valuable, most of all to estimate a person’s public safety impact on others. So the regulations simply target the wrong variable.
1b. People who are boosted might even be less likely to have caught the newer strains (presumably the boosters are at least somewhat useful). Thus they are potentially more dangerous to others, not less, being on average immunologically more naive. Ideally you want a batch of attendees who just had Covid two or three months ago.
2. More than three-quarters of Americans have not had a booster to date. Very likely the percentage of potential AEA attendees with boosters stands at a considerably higher level. Still, this is a fairly exclusionary policy, and pretty far from what most Americans consider to be an acceptable regulation.
2b. To be clear, I had my booster right away, even though I expected it would make me sick for two days (it did). I am far from being anti-booster. I am glad I had my booster, but I also understand full well the distinction between “getting a booster at the time was the right decision,” and “we should mandate booster shots today.” They are very different! Don’t just positively mood affiliate with boosters. Think through the actual policies.
3. Blacks are a relatively undervaccinated group, and probably they are less boosted as well. The same may or may not be true for black potential AEA attendees, but it is certainly possible. After all the talk of DEI, and I for one would like to see more inclusion, why are we making inclusion harder? And for no good medical reason.
3b. How about potential attendees from Africa, Latin America, and other regions where boosters are harder to come by? What are their rates of being boosted? Do they all have to fly to America a few days earlier, line up boosters, and hope the ill effects wear off by the time of the meetings? Why are we doing this to them?
3c. Will the same booster requirements be applied to hotel staff and contractors? Somehow I think not. Maybe that is a sign the boosters are not so important for conference well-being after all?
4. Many people are in a position, right now, where they should not boost. Let’s say you had Covid a few months ago, and are wondering if you should get a booster now or soon. I looked into this recently, and found the weight of opinion was that you should wait at least six months for your immune system to process the recent infection. That did not seem to be “settled science,” but rather a series of judgments, admittedly with uncertainty. So now let’s take those people who were not boosted, had a new strain of Covid recently, and want to go to the AEA meetings. (The first two of three there cover a lot of people.) They have to get boosted. And in expected value terms, boosting is bad for them. Did this argument even occur to the decision-makers at the AEA?
5. The AEA mentions nothing about religious or other exceptions to the policy. Maybe there are “under the table” exceptions, but really? Why not spell out the actual policy here, and if there are no exceptions come right out and tell us. And explain why so few other institutions have chosen the “no exceptions” path, and why the AEA should be different. (As a side note, it is not so easy to process exceptions for the subset of the 13,000 possible attendees who want them. Does the AEA have this capacity?)
Again, this is simply a poorly thought out policy, whether for N-95 masks or for boosters. I hope the AEA will discard it as soon as possible. Or how about a simple, open poll of membership, simple yes or not on the current proposal?
India forecast of the day
India is likely to be the fastest-growing Asian economy in the Asian region in 2022-23, according to analysts at Morgan Stanley, who expect the expect India’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth to average 7 per cent during this period – the strongest among the largest economies – and contributing 28 per cent and 22 per cent to Asian and global growth, respectively. The Indian economy, they said, is set for its best run in over a decade, as pent-up demand is being unleashed.
Here is further detail. How many other countries can expect to average even five percent growth over the next decade? Bangladesh? A few of the smaller nations in West Africa? Who else? Possibly Indonesia? It is hard not to be (relatively) optimistic about India, economically speaking at least.
Which is the hingy-est century?
A while back I linked to Holden Karnofsky’s argument that forthcoming times are likely to be the most important for determining the course of subsequent history, or “hingy-est” of all time. So I thought I should address the issue directly myself.
In my view the greatest danger to civilization is war, rather than AGI. Rather than rehashing that debate (see Holden’s view here), let’s just take the war view as given and see where it leads.
I see a few distinct possibilities:
1. The relatively peaceful world order since WWII will continue for the indefinite future, albeit with ongoing evolutions and modifications. If that is true then the second half of the twentieth century might be the hingy-est time because that was when we built enduring peace.
1b. But the postwar era doesn’t have to be the hingy-ist time under that view. It might be that “the finding of peace” was highly likely or inevitable, sooner or later. Maybe it was the Industrial Revolution that was more contingent, and without that we would have found ongoing peace but at much lower living standards. In that case the British seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could well be the hingy-est time.
But sadly, while I see #1 and #1b as possibly true, they are not for me the most likely scenarios. There is also:
2. Humanity will fight a very destructive war at some point. It will not kill everyone but it will slaughter a significant portion of the earth’s population and put the rest into something like “African living standards plus Balkans governance.” With no turnaround in sight, if only because it is so hard to cast off those institutions once they are in place. Protection against subsequent existential risks will be harder as well.
In that case the hingy-est time or century would be whenever that war comes, or whenever some set of preconditions made such a war inevitable.
To be clear, I think the chance of such a war is quite low in any given year. You don’t need to be shorting the market. Still, if you let the clock tick long enough, such a war is bound to come.
Now is the next 50-100 years the most likely era for such a war to arrive? I don’t see a strong argument why we should have such a definite intuition here. We’ve had some version of MAD with nuclear weapons for quite a few decades, and it has mostly worked out OK. At some point upping the firepower might shift that balance (drone assassins of political leaders? Or something that comes 137 years from now?). I don’t find it easy to have good intuitions on this question.
I am reminded of my earlier post on how long it took the NBA to truly adopt and exploit the logic of the three-point shot.
Even introducing strong AI doesn’t settle it for me. Strong AI might lengthen the reign of (relative) peace, rather than shortening it.
Many things, both positive and destructive, can take longer than you think. And as a general reminder, foreign policy outcomes are extremely difficult to predict, even across a small number of years much less decades.
So I don’t know when the hingy-est century or era is likely to be.
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!