Results for “africa” 1238 found
Wednesday assorted links
1. MIE: “Travel to the summit of Africa’s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro, where Three Twins Ice Cream’s founder will hand-churn a batch of ice cream with glacial ice from the mountain’s summit. The mountain’s glaciers are predicted to disappear within the next 10-15 years due to climate change – and your purchase helps raise awareness of this fact with a five-figure contribution to an African environmental non-profit. The sundae’s price also includes first class airfare to Tanzania, five-star accommodations, a guided climb, as much ice cream as you can eat and a souvenir t-shirt made from organic cotton.”
2. New South Wales town mobbed by thirsty emus.
3. Cowen’s Second Law there is a literature on everything including autistic zebrafish (110 papers).
4. It matters how seriously students take PISA testing.
5. Superb Samuel Hammond piece on codetermination.
6. Annie Lowrey on is pot too strong?
7. My Farnham Street podcast, mostly about how to reason, came out very well I thought. And you can buy a transcript at the link.
Sunday assorted links
1. The Profanity Embroidery Group.
2. What is the African word you use most frequently?
4. The culture and polity that is Swiss.
5. How are the prospects for Irish unification looking these days? What is the correct underlying model here?
6. “People’s recollections after driving a familiar road were very poor, with most memories involving the bad behavior of other motorists.” Link here.
7. Witchcraft in the #MeToo era (NYT, satire).
My musical self-education
Musick-er requests:
I’ve noticed that you tend to have pretty wide ranging tastes in music, and your recommendation on introduction to classical music was pretty spot-on. I’m wondering what training/expertise you have in music theory/aural skills?…As someone who is obviously very intelligent but not a musician (that I know of), I wonder how you interact with Bach or other master composers – what criteria do you listen for? What makes great works stand out from the merely good?
My history is this:
1. I learned how to play the guitar when I was twelve or so, and also figured out how a piano works.
2. I spent about six years studying jazz chords, American popular song, some classic rock, early acoustic blues and ragtime, Fahey/Kottke, and Bach. I also learned how to listen with a score, at least for guitar and piano pieces.
3. Later in life, I focused on trying to make sense of early to mid 20th century classical music and Indian classical music, both excellent entry points for many of the other difficult musical genres and styles. I tried to learn at least something about micro-tonal musics and ragas.
4. Starting in my thirties, I tried to develop a basic familiarity with world musics, not so much the European folkie stuff as those based on different conceptual principles, such as some of the Arab musics, Chinese music, and African musics including the Pygmies.
5. I cultivated “music mentors” to help me understand these musics. Overall this is not a very book-intensive endeavor, though you will enjoy reading accompanying biographies.
I am not saying that is the right path for everyone, but I found it very rewarding, including for my broader understanding of history.
To address one of the specific questions, I think of Bach-Stravinsky, classic rock, and Indian classical music (live only) as covering some of mankind’s greatest cultural achievements, with only cinema in the running for possible parity. Most of all just listen plenty, noting that the canonical opinions about what is best are actually pretty much on the mark.
*Prohibition: A Concise History*
That is a new and truly excellent book by W.J. Rorabaugh. It is a perfect 116 pp. of text and a model for what many other books should be.
From 1825 to 1850, the per capita consumption of alcohol in the United States dropped by half, due largely to religious influence.
As late as 1914, alcohol taxes accounted for 35 percent of the revenue of the federal government.
The Russian government moved to prohibition during WWI, and the resulting loss of revenue was a significant factor contributing to the downfall of the regime.
Note that “per capita consumption of alcohol was reduced for a very long time.” If you were born in 1900, for instance, you could not legally drink until 1933, at the age of thirty-three, a relatively late age for this habit to form.
Today “more than half of Mexican American women are teetotalers.” And: “African Americans continue to be light drinkers, and more than half of black women do not drink.”
Strongly recommended. If all books were like this, it would be hard for me to tear myself away from them.
Carbon taxes and food security
By Tomoko Hasgawa, et.al. in Nature:
Food insecurity can be directly exacerbated by climate change due to crop-production-related impacts of warmer and drier conditions that are expected in important agricultural regions. However, efforts to mitigate climate change through comprehensive, economy-wide GHG emissions reductions may also negatively affect food security, due to indirect impacts on prices and supplies of key agricultural commodities. Here we conduct a multiple model assessment on the combined effects of climate change and climate mitigation efforts on agricultural commodity prices, dietary energy availability and the population at risk of hunger. A robust finding is that by 2050, stringent climate mitigation policy, if implemented evenly across all sectors and regions, would have a greater negative impact on global hunger and food consumption than the direct impacts of climate change. The negative impacts would be most prevalent in vulnerable, low-income regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where food security problems are already acute.
In other words, one needs to be very careful with a carbon tax. For the pointer, I thank Charles Klingman.
Envy and status in politics
2. People will oppose policies that benefit themselves and their community if they think it will lower their within-group status.
McClendon uses survey data from South Africa and the United States to show that status motivations change the way that people think about redistributive economic policies. This is even true within ethnic groups, including marginalized ethnic groups like African Americans. As McClendon notes:
“The worse off people are than their coethnic neighbors, the more supportive they are of greater redistribution (regardless of how personally costly this support is); the better off people are than their coethnic neighbors, the less supportive they are of redistribution.”
In other words, even when a policy might make someone materially better off (by, say, improving their housing conditions), they are likely to oppose it if the government doing so for everyone in their community would harm their relative status position.
That is from Laura Seay at The Washington Post, drawing on work from the new Envy in Politics, by Gwyneth H. McClendon. I have just ordered that book.
Will the AIDS pandemic worsen again?
A 63-nation survey funded by WHO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found anywhere from 6 to 11 percent of new infections involved drug-resistant forms of HIV, and the trend was dire, with resistance increasing as high as 23 percent annually. Once individuals were put on their daily treatments, in 2017 failure rates due to drug resistance were as high as 90 percent in some countries, meaning new infections in those regions could no longer be controlled with the $75-a-year first-line therapies. The first such survey conducted in Cameroon, recently published, found that the majority of patients failing their primary treatments—up to 88 percent of them—were infected with resistant strains of HIV, and overall drug resistance rates in the West African nation in 2018 approach 18 percent.
Meanwhile, preventing HIV infection has fallen off the priority list, both in funding and individual action.
There is more of interest at the link, that is from Laurie Garrett, writing at Foreign Policy.
Cross-Mediterranean migration to Europe is falling
Fewer successes, more deaths:
Between 2015 and 2017, according to United Nations data analyzed by The Washington Post, about 95 percent of migrants taking the so-called central Mediterranean route ended up on this continent’s shores.
Last month, however, the success rate was 45 percent — the lowest of any month in at least four years. A large proportion of migrants were intercepted and returned to North Africa. But deaths have spiked. According to the International Organization for Migration, 564 people died in June — or more than 7 percent of those who attempted the crossing. That is the highest percentage in any month since at least 2015. For the year, 3.4 percent have died attempting the journey, compared with 2.1 percent last year.
“Outsourcing” seems to be a major reason for this change:
Many migrants don’t make it to Europe because they don’t make it past the fleet of Libyan patrol vessels. The coast guard, rebuilt with E.U. and Italian funding, has become the most important player in the Mediterranean. Though the unit has been patrolling its coastal waters for more than a year and a half, data suggests it is becoming far more proficient at its job: intercepting migrants, placing them in detention on Libyan shores and keeping them from Europe.
In 2017, the Libyan coast guard managed to catch about 1 in 9 migrants attempting the journey. This year, it is intercepting almost 2 in 5. In June, it intercepted 47 percent.
Here is the full WaPo story by Chico Harlan.
Monday assorted links
Thursday assorted links
1. Does legalizing marijuana boost housing values?
2. the subtext covers innovation in Africa.
3. Secret life of an autistic stripper.
4. Why people like exaggerated stories.
5. “They also revealed that the eventual decision about who should leave the cave first was not based on strength, but decided by the boys themselves. It was based on who lived furthest away from the cave and therefore would have the longest cycle back home.” Link here.
6. Lawn average is over (WSJ).
Madagascar fact of the day
Madagascar, one of world’s poorest countries, has the fastest broadband internet speed in Africa and has average speeds much faster than some of the world’s wealthiest nations, according to a broadband speed league table from UK analytics firm Cable, which collects data from 200 countries.
At 24.9 megabits per second, Madagascar’s broadband speed is more than twice the global average. Not only does this mean the African island nation has the fastest internet speed on the continent, but it places 22nd in the world, out-pacing Canada, France, and the UK.
Here is the full story. Here is the previous installment of Madagascar fact of the day, namely that per capita income was almost twice as high in 1960.
Gendered language
Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign many — sometimes all — nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. Drawing on a broad range of historical and linguistic sources, this paper constructs a measure of the proportion of each country’s population whose native language is a gender language. At the cross-country level, this paper documents a robust negative relationship between the prevalence of gender languages and women’s labor force participation. It also shows that traditional views of gender roles are more common in countries with more native speakers of gender languages. In African countries where indigenous languages vary in terms of their gender structure, educational attainment and female labor force participation are lower among those whose native languages are gender languages. Cross-country and individual-level differences in labor force participation are large in both absolute and relative terms (when women are compared to men), suggesting that the observed patterns are not driven by development or some unobserved aspect of culture that affects men and women equally. Following the procedures proposed by Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005) and Oster (2017), this paper shows that the observed correlations are unlikely to be driven by unobservables. Using a permutation test based on the structure of the language tree and the distribution of languages across countries, this paper demonstrate that the results are not driven by spurious correlations within language families. Gender languages appear to reduce women’s labor force participation and perpetuate support for unequal treatment of women.
That is from a new World Bank working paper by Pamela Jakiela and Owen Ozier, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. Kevin also points us to a new study indicating that East Asians smile fifty percent less than Americans.
Are asylum rights misguided?
Per capita income in Eritrea is about $600 a year (estimates vary however), and in El Salvador about $8000 a year, PPP-adjusted. We hear a lot about the horrible violence in El Salvador, and indeed I have been to the country only twice, and yet saw a murdered dead body simply lying alongside the highway. Here are various anecdotes about the problem, noting that not all of them involve death. Nonetheless keep in mind that life expectancy in El Salvador is a bit over 73 years. Life expectancy in Eritrea is about 64.
Yet a person from El Salvador can make his or her way to the U.S. border and plead for asylum rights, often with some justification I might add. (More generally, the number of asylum seekers from Latin America is rising rapidly.) It is much harder for an Eritrean to do the same, most of all because there is no direct land route and furthermore the paucity of resources in Eritrea makes almost any kind of action harder to pull off. Eritreans do however request and sometimes receive asylum rights through the U.S. Embassy in Eritrea itself.
So asylum rights favor El Salvadorans relative to Eritreans, at least once people realize there is an incentive to try to migrate north. Does that make sense? In general, Latin American countries are wealthier and healthier than most of the world’s other poorer countries, though they are on average more violent.
To be clear, I do not wish to revoke or limit asylum rights today. That would lead to less humane outcomes with no offsetting advantage. But say we were designing an ideal immigration policy from scratch. Would you not want to pare back asylum rights in return for allowing more legal immigration from very needy countries?
Keep in mind that a stronger chance of asylum rights for Latin Americans, or those in the Caribbean, means more dangerous journeys to get here, and thus a greater exhaustion of “migration rents” through the very process of trying. It would be possible to offer greater legal migration rights to more Eritreans, if only through a lottery (though I suspect a better method yet can be found), without inducing comparably risky or costly behavior.
Asylum rights still could be kept for situations of special humanitarian, cultural, or political importance, such as the Holocaust, Soviet Jews, or the current situation in Syria. But ask yourself a simple question: when the genocide was going on in Rwanda, how many Rwandans did the U.S. grant asylum rights to? Does that not indicate something is broken about the current system?
Consider these figures:
Immigration court records show that more asylum cases were denied over the previous five years than have been granted. In fiscal year 2016, 62 percent of asylum cases were denied, compared with 44.5 percent five years earlier. Among Mexicans and Central Americans, the approval rate is substantially lower.
You might think that is a sign of the system working along the ex post dimension, but it also indicates there is too much ex ante “regulatory arbitrage” across different immigration categories.
It seems that hundreds of millions of people in today’s world are worthy of asylum, given the criteria as written. Yet during the Obama years a typical intake was about 60,000 asylum seekers yearly, which suggests an extreme degree of moral arbitrariness. Is there not a better way to write asylum law to target…whatever you think is most worth of being targeted? Admittedly opinions on the proper standard will differ.
Or consider this:
The best case for a broad application of asylum rights is simply that it gives the authorities more discretion to accept a larger number of very worthy cases. For instance, teenager Martina Navratilova received asylum in the United States, and for the better, even though she was not facing death or torture back home in Czechoslovakia. Keep in mind, though, that (for the moment) we are designing an ideal immigration system from scratch. Cases such as Navratilova’s suggest that ordinary immigration policy ought to be more geared to taking in especially talented individuals, with or without an asylum case.
You should note, by the way, that Australia has relatively tough asylum rights, but takes in a large number of legal immigrants. The country also goes to great lengths to stop people from showing up at the border in boats and claiming asylum. So it seems there is at least one case where this is a sustainable posture.
In closing, I would note that asylum rights seem to be creating major political problems for Europe. Partially for non-rational reasons, many voters view asylum-linked immigration as “more out of control” than other kinds of migration. And the EU arguably has poorly designed institutions for handling asylum, and doling out relative responsibilities to member nations. Plus Europe is very close to the Middle East and Africa. Reforming the treatment of asylum in Europe might well improve the functioning of democracy there and actually put immigration on a more stable path.
Who has a good personality?
“Asian-American applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time only in the top academic index decile. By contrast, white applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time in the top six deciles,” wrote Mr. Arcidiacono. “Hispanics receive such personal scores more than 20% of the time in the top seven deciles, and African Americans receive such scores more than 20% of the time in the top eight deciles.”
That is from Wesley Yang (NYT), citing Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, and of course it is obvious what is going on here…
Final installment of stochastically best books to read on each country
These are past suggestions from MR readers, pulled from the comments, endorsed by me only on a stochastic basis:
Michela Wrong, Eritrea
Rwanda: something Prunier, probably Rwanda Crisis though it stops in 1996
Uganda: Season of Thomas Tebo, though it’s fiction (is that disqualifying?)
Eastern Congo: Jason Stearns Dancing with Monsters (like China, the country is too big for one book)
The Government of Ethiopia – Margery Perham’s Ethiopian answer to Ruth Benedict’s Japanese The Sword and the Chrysanthemum.
Ethiopia: – Wax and Gold by Donald Levine – Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia (edited by E. Ficquet & G. Prunier
Pre-colonial Africa: The Scramble for Africa
For DRCongo, I recommend The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja. It does a great job of distinguishing between the dizzying array of political factions in Congolese history. It’s shortcomings are in culture and economics. Not a lot to choose from with DRC unfortunately!
From Genocide to Continental War, by Gérard Prunier
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz was excellent, as was King Leopold’s ghost on the DRC.
Zimbabwe – The Struggle Continues: 50 Years of Tyranny in Zimbabwe by David Coltart
Great Lakes region: this was actually good https://www.amazon.com/Great-Lakes-Africa-Thousand-History/dp/1890951358/
On Australia: Robert Hughes’ “The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding”
On Hong Kong: Gordon Mathews’ “Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong”
Tyler mentioned Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s book on the Caribbean for the region, so how about Paul Theroux’s book about the South Pacific, “The Happy Isles of Oceania”?
And if Boston were a country: J. Anthony Lukas’ “Common Ground” J. Anthony Lukas
What about outer space? Best book on Mars? The moon?