Results for “africa” 1240 found
Monday assorted links
1. Why whales got so big. And too tall for the NBA?
2. Inside the world of instruction manuals.
3. Attempts to encourage science in Africa (The Economist).
4. Michael Anton will now be taking a flight to Hillsdale, Michigan. I don’t expect it to crash.
6. The great Kamel Daoud on leaving Algeria (NYT).
7. “Tropes like the pursuit of individual rights do not speak to a majority of Chinese filmgoers.“
*The Away Game: The Epic Search for Soccer’s Next Superstars*
I found this book by Sebastian Abbot very stimulating, though I wished for a more social-scientific treatment. The focus is on Africa, here is one bit on the more conceptual side:
But focusing on a young player’s technique still tells a scout relatively little about whether the kid will reach the top level, even when the observations are paired with physical measures of speed and agility. A study published in 2016 looked at the results from a battery of five tests conducted by the German soccer federation on over 20,000 of the top Under-12 players in the country. The tests measured speed, agility, dribbling, passing, and shooting. The researchers assessed the utility of the tests in determining how high the kids would progress once they reached the Under-16 to Under-19 level. The study found that players who scored in the 99th percentile or higher in the tests still only had a 6 percent chance of making the youth national team.
So what else might you look to?:
They assessed the game intelligence of players by freezing match footage at different moments and asking players to predict what would happen next or what decision a player on the field should make. Elite players were faster and more accurate in their ability to scan the field, pick up cues from an opponent’s position, and recognize, recall, and predict patterns of play.
And:
Researchers have found that the key ingredient is not how much formal practice or how many official games players had as kids, but how much pickup soccer they played in informal settings like the street or schoolyard.
The implications for economics study and speed chess are obvious. Finally:
Researchers found that athletes have a 25 percent larger attention window than nonathletes.
Is that true for successful CEOs as well? By the way, I hope to blog soon about why human talent is in so many endeavors the truly binding constraint.
This is an interesting Africa book, too.
My Conversation with Martina Navratilova
Here is the podcast and transcript, Martina was in top form and dare I say quick on her feet? Here is part of the summary:
In their conversation, she and Tyler cover her illustrious tennis career, her experience defecting from Czechoslovakia and later becoming a dual citizen, the wage gap in tennis competition and commentary, gender stereotypes in sports, her work regimen and training schedule, technological progress in tennis, her need for speed, journaling and constant self-improvement, some of her most shocking realizations about American life, the best way to see East Africa, her struggle to get her children to put the dishes in the dishwasher, and more.
Here is one bit:
NAVRATILOVA: I just wanted to leave no stone unturned, really. The coach, obviously, was technique and tactics. The physical part was training, working very hard. I’ll give you my typical day in a minute. The eating was so that I could train hard and not get injured. So it all came together.
The typical day, then, when I really was humming was four hours of tennis, 10:00 to 2:00, two hours of drills and maybe two hours of sets. Then I would do some running drills on the court for 15, 20 minutes, sprints that if I did them now, I wouldn’t be able to walk the next day.
[laughter]
NAVRATILOVA: You know, 15- to 30-second sprinting drills. Then we would eat lunch. Then I would go either play basketball full-court, two on two for an hour and a half or little man-big man. It’s two on one. I don’t know, those people that play basketball. You just run. You just run.
COWEN: Which one were you?
NAVRATILOVA: It switches. Whoever has the ball is the little man. No, whoever has the ball, it’s one against two. Then you play little man, the person plays defense, and then the big man plays center. It’s not two on one, it’s one against one and then one. Then whoever gets the ball goes the other way. It’s run, run, run.
Then I would lift weights and have dinner either before lifting weights or after. So it was a full day of training.
COWEN: What about 9:00 A.M. to 10:00 A.M.?
And this:
COWEN:Billie Jean King once suggested that you use writing in a journal every day to help you accomplish your goals. How does that work for you? What is it you do? Why do you think it works?
NAVRATILOVA: It worked because it really centers you. It narrows it down, whatever long-term goal you have. It becomes more real and more current because it narrows it down in that, “What do you need to do today?” and “Did you accomplish that goal?” You have a big goal. You break it into smaller goals, into smaller goals, until you get into, “OK, what do I do today to get to that goal?”
…Try to be honest with yourself. Be honest but also be nice to yourself. You see that with most champions. They’re perfectionists. You beat yourself up too much. I preach and I try to strive for excellence rather than perfection.
If you strive for excellence, perfection may happen. [laughs] It’s good enough to be excellent. That’s good enough. You don’t need to be perfect because perfection just happens by accident.
I asked her this:
COWEN: What was it like to go skiing with Donald Trump?
My favorite part was this:
NAVRATILOVA: Tyler, you need to drink more water. You’re not hydrating at all.
Remember, above all else, sports is cognitive! These are some of the smartest humans of our time, even if it is not always the kind of intelligence you respect most.
Saturday assorted links
1. The consequences of economic development.
2. A postulate for rival firms with common owners.
3. 44 African countries sign a free trade deal (though not Nigeria).
5. “He said the stone defence was intended as a last resort if evacuations failed.”
6. “…we estimate that approximately 95% of the potential predictive accuracy attainable for an individual is available within the social ties of that individual only, without requiring the individual’s data.” Link here.
Why an American third party remains unlikely
Donald Trump would not be President today if he had tried to mount a third-party candidacy rather than running as a Republican. Bernie Sanders would not be a national leader if he had just stayed in third-party politics in backwater Vermont rather than caucusing with the Democrats and contesting for control of the Democratic Party. So the existing parties are a shortcut to power for ambitious politicians. The parties are porous to those ambitions. In the process, they take on new influences, and new policy priorities.
So it’s really remarkable when you reflect back on what the Republican Party was at its founding and look at what it is today. And the Democratic Party as well. They’ve literally exchanged places. The Republican Party was a Northern party that was for African-American rights, high-taxes, and internal improvements.
That is by Frances Lee, the entire symposium is interesting. Christopher Caldwell tells us: “The Democrats have become the party of sexual morality.”
The decline of German food in America
German food’s decline “reflects the cultural mix of this country toward more Latin American, Asian and African American culture, and less of the mainstay Germanic culture that influenced this country for many decades,” said Arnim von Friedeburg, an importer of German foods and the founder of Germanfoods.org. “The cultural shift is going on, and German culture has to fight or compete to keep its relevance.”
Here is more from Maura Judkis at WaPo.
Markets in everything, probably more where this came from edition
Mr. Sarkozy, 63, was taken into custody in Nanterre, northwest of Paris, after answering a police summons, according to a French judicial official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, in line with department policy…
The suspicions behind this case first emerged in 2012, when the investigative news website Mediapart published a report suggesting that Mr. Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign had received up to 50 million euros, or nearly $62 million at current exchange rates, from the regime of Colonel Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan strongman who was killed in 2011. Such support would have violated France’s strict campaign finance laws, which cap spending and prohibit foreign funding.
Here is the NYT account. Here is my earlier post on Gerhard Schröder.
Tanzania fact of the day
Since coming to power in the country of 55m on the east coast of Africa in 2015, Mr Magufuli, nicknamed “the bulldozer” from his time as roads minister, has bashed foreign-owned businesses with impossible tax demands, ordered pregnant girls to be kicked out of school, shut down newspapers and locked up “immoral” musicians who criticise him. A journalist and opposition party members have disappeared, political rallies have been banned and mutilated bodies have washed up on the shores of Coco Beach in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital. Mr Magufuli is fast transforming Tanzania from a flawed democracy into one of Africa’s more brutal dictatorships. It is a lesson in how easily weak institutions can be hijacked and how quickly democratic progress can be undone.
…The main lesson of Tanzania is that constitutions which concentrate power in the presidency can quickly be subverted.
Here is more from The Economist.
Titus Levi on *Black Panther*
Titus emails to me:
I had an atypical reaction: I left the theatre feeling very, very sad.
First, for the reasons enumerated here.
Second, because everything good and noble turned out to be incredibly fragile. All it took was an alternate vision of how to use power and Paradise degenerated into civil conflict. Mind you, this is a civil war that lasted only a few hours, but still.
Third, it’s heartbreaking to look up to a place… that doesn’t exist. The whole “what if Africa (or some part of it) hadn’t been colonized?” question unsettled me. We lost so much.
Fourth, T’Challa never told Killmonger, “My father was wrong to abandon you.” Never. And he felt it strongly. Strongly enough to challenge his father in a vision. Why did he say nothing about this?
Fifth, after the civil conflict everything goes… right back to normal. No reconciliation process. No sense for how to address the resentments lingering in the shadows. Nada. That struck me as facile.
Anyway, leave it to me to be a killjoy in response to a feel-good movie.
Agh.
Niger (U.S.) fact of the day
Green Berets working with government forces in Niger killed 11 Islamic State militants in a firefight in December, the American military acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday. The battle occurred two months after four United States soldiers died in an ambush in another part of Niger — and after senior commanders had imposed stricter limits on military missions in the West African country.
No American or Nigerien forces were harmed in the December gun battle. But the combat — along with at least 10 other previously unreported attacks on American troops in West Africa between 2015 and 2017 — indicates that the deadly Oct. 4 ambush was not an isolated episode in a nation where the United States is building a major drone base.
Here is the full NYT story, another mini-war it seems. Probably I’ll be doing a wee bit more Africa coverage on MR than has typically been the case.
My Conversation with Chris Blattman
The very very highly rated but still underrated Chris Blattman was in top form, here is the transcript and audio. We had a chance to do this one when he was in town for a week. We talked about the problem with cash transfers, violence, child soldiers, charter cities, Rene Girard, how to do an Africa trip, Battlestar Galactica, why Ethiopia is growing rapidly, why civil war has become less common, why Colombia and the New World have been so violent, the mysteries of Botswana, and Chris’s favorite Australian TV show, among other topics, including of course the Chris Blattman production function. Here is one excerpt:
BLATTMAN: There’s this famous paper on Vietnam veterans in the US where they find that being conscripted into fighting in Vietnam had positive effects on the wages of blacks and negative effects on the wages of whites. The reason was, it was really down to, what was your alternative labor market and training experience in the absence of this war?
We found something similar in Uganda, something eerily familiar, which is that the women economically weren’t so worse off. I wouldn’t say they were better off, but they weren’t necessarily affected adversely in an economic sense — they were adversely affected in other ways 5 or 10 or 15 years down the road — while the men were.
It spoke to just how terrible women’s options were. Being conscripted and abducted to be a rebel wife, to some degree, wasn’t that different than what your marriage opportunities looked like if there wasn’t a war.
For men, it just meant that you were out of the civilian labor market, getting a bunch of skills that had turned out not to be very useful. It was bad for them. A different war, a different context, and a different labor market, and that can switch.
COWEN: How many northern Ugandan child soldiers have you interviewed?
BLATTMAN: A few hundred. At least a couple hundred, maybe more. It depends if you count someone who’s involved for a month versus two years. Certainly, the long, long-term soldiers who were there for many, many years are few, maybe only a couple dozen.
COWEN: Those contacts, those conversations, how have they changed your outlook on life emotionally, intellectually, otherwise?
And:
COWEN: True or false, most humans are bad at violence?
BLATTMAN: I think they learn quickly. Probably they’re bad at first.
COWEN: In the micro evidence on violence, and the more individual-level evidence, and then finally macro evidence — like will there be a civil war? — do you think there’s ultimately an overarching theory that ties these all together? Or are they just separate levels of investigation, where you have empirical results, and they stand somewhat separate, and they’ll always be distinct areas?
How optimistic are you about a grand unified theory of violence?
BLATTMAN: I think these individual, how I react in the moment, fight-or-flight-type mechanisms are quite distinct from the way that small groups or large groups or nations go to war. But once you get beyond that to the level of small groups and larger groups and nations, I see a lot of unity in the theory.
Do read or listen to the whole thing. By the way, he says the Canadian political system is overrated.
Ghana fact of the day
After a sluggish period, Ghana seems to be doing well again:
…Ghana is on track to make a remarkable claim for a country mired in poverty not long ago: It is likely to have one of the world’s fastest-growing economies this year, according to the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Brookings Institution.
Its projected growth in 2018, between 8.3 and 8.9 percent, might outpace even India, with its booming tech sector, and Ethiopia, which over the last decade has been one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies thanks to expanding agricultural production and coffee exports.
According to the I.M.F.’s projections, only Bhutan, with a minuscule economy, and Libya, whose war-ravaged economy plunged in recent years, may have a higher rate of growth this year.
The danger is that commodities — oil and cocoa — are driving the boom. Here is more from Tim McDonnell at the NYT.
The foreign culture that is Congolese
Two Burundi officials have been imprisoned after the African country’s president was allegedly “roughed up” in a football match they organised.
President Pierre Nkurunziza is a ‘born-again’ evangelical Christian who spends much of his time travelling Burundi with his own team, Haleluya FC. He travels with his own choir, “Komeza gusenga”, which means “pray non-stop” in the local Kirundi language.
On 3 February, his team faced a side from the northern town of Kiremba.
Normally, the opposition is well aware they are playing against the country’s president, and it has been said they go easy in the games, even perhaps allowing Nkurunziza to score.
But as the Kiremba team contained Congolese refugees who did not know they were playing against Burundi’s president, they “attacked each time he had the ball and made him fall several times”, a witness told AFP.
Kiremba’s administrator Cyriaque Nkezabahizi and his assistant, Michel Mutama, were imprisoned on Thursday, the news agency reports.
AFP cited a judicial source as saying they had been arrested on charges of “conspiracy against the president”.
Here is more, via Ray Lopez.
The political economy of Black Panther’s Wakanda
Black Panther is the hereditary leader of the African nation of Wakanda, a small, natural resource rich country, which lacks access to the sea. Historically the political leadership has tried to hide Wakanda‘s existence from other countries which has limited its economic integration with the rest of the world. In spite of its geographic endowments, notably the incredibly rare ore vibranium, Wakanda has attained unprecedented technological development. This chapter explores the political economy of Wakanda and its leader, Black Panther. After explaining the origins of Black Panther, the chapter turns to the economic puzzle of Wakanda by exploring the geographic and economic implications of isolation. This is followed by an investigation into the way Wakanda has avoided the resource curse that has plagued so many other countries. Next, a comparison is made between Wakanda and the nation of Botswana. While there are some telling similarities, the lack of democracy in Wakanda is a glaring difference. It will discuss how it has developed high levels of technology that help advance the Black Panther’s dictatorship. Finally, it will address the potential for democracy to emerge in Wakanda. Black Panther offers an opportunity to understand the role of political institutions in affecting the long-run economic, political, and technological development of a country.
That is a new paper from J. Robert Subrick.
Quinn Slobodian’s *Globalists*
The subtitle is The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Imagine a novel and interesting coverage of the post-war Austrian School, here relabeled the “Geneva School,” a well-done partial history of the WTO and EU, and a book where the central characters are not only Mises and Hayek, but also Alexander Rüstow, Wilhelm Röpke, and Michael Heilperin.
And it’s written by a Wellesley historian who appears to be entirely sane and responsible throughout.
The main lesson, and here these are my own words not those directly of the author, is that various liberals came to realize that their dreams for a free world order in fact involved quite an extensive international legal apparatus, far removed from the traditional nightwatchman state. The EU and the “Four Freedoms” are in this view the actual instantiation of historic classical liberalism, arguably more than anything the United States has done of late. And if you don’t like the over-regulation and excess bureaucracy of the EU, well maybe you’d better realize those are difficult to avoid secondary consequences of having the international law be so strong as to actually constrain state power (again my words, not Slobodian, though his book may lead you to this idea).
Wilhelm Röpke it turns out is the (a?) bad guy, and I have to say I always considered him a third-rate, misguided agrarian thinker. It turns out his views on Africa were not entirely sound, and furthermore he sought to pull the rest of the liberals away their “economic libertarianism,” keeping in mind that Hayek already favored a social welfare state and socialized health insurance, among other interventions.
I folded over 12 separate pages in this book, which is considerably higher than average.
That all said, I don’t quite buy onto the whole story. I read Hayek as rebelling against the vanquished Austro-Hungarian Empire, rather than keeping it as a mental model for reform. Nor am I persuaded by the idea of a identifiable “Geneva School,” whether as an independent group or as a sub-branch of the Austrians. In my view, the connections running through Geneva are historical ones (various people and institutions got put there), not intellectual in nature. Haberler and Machlup I would have covered in greater detail, and that would have strengthened the author’s core thesis. Oddly, there is no mention of Melchior Palyi at all.
pp.271-272 have a good fifteen-point summary of what the Geneva School is supposed to stand for, you might try #5: “World law trumps a world state. International institutions should act as mechanisms for protecting and furthering competition without offering spaces for popular claims-making.”
Henry Farrell has very good remarks on the book. You can pre-order it here.
And by the way, use of the word “neoliberalism” in a book’s title is almost always a major negative signal, but here it is actually appropriate.