Results for “africa” 1080 found
Random impressions
Yes, I would buy Tanzania Fund.
The calm and reserved Dar Es Salaam is remarkably safe; I haven’t once felt threatened or even
"watched." It is the women who stare, not the men, as is common in Islamic countries. Throughout East Africa the country has a reputation for
politeness and courtesy.
If a 45-year-old Muslim woman tells you she took out a micro-credit
loan to open a "saloon," she usually means a "salon." In the interviews the Tanzanians are eager to be helpful, but they do not take over
the conversation, as might happen in West Africa.
Although there are no tourist sites of note, the city is a
pleasant green and backs into the water. You might see an Indian Dhow
pulling into the harbor. Every now and then you see an impressive Masai walking down the street.
Food prices are falling and the economy is
booming. Per capita gdp in Tanzania is about $700 but the city is
prosperous. Squalor can be found, but only with effort. There are plenty
of new buildings, a few real bookshops, and a bunch of OK shopping
malls. Spiderman 3 is already in the theatres. Given that
migration is possible, and the city is not crushingly overcrowded, how
bad can the countryside be? (Don’t answer that one.)
They carry eggs on the bicycles and everything else on the top of
womens’ heads. SUVs are common. Crafts are not impressive. Tanzania,
though large and populous, is far from an African cultural leader.
The Indian and Chinese restaurants are spicy and genuine. The crab and the vegetables are superb. Ugali is the native
dish; you get some ground cornmeal, roll it in a ball with your
fingers, and then dip it into a coconut sauce with vegetables. They
cook "pullau" rice with cloves, cinnamon, black pepper, and coriander. Goat biryani is also common; it bears only a passing resemblance to the Indian concept of the same name.
Zanzibar, a two hour ferry ride away, has splendid old Arabic and
Indian doors and many Arabic-style buildings. Children play in the
narrow streets. Most of the women wear headscarves and a few wear the
full veil. The beaches appear perfect though I did not have time to
swim. For nightly street food there is spicy lobster, grilled fish,
large fresh prawns, and french fries.
My guide in Zanzibar explained:
I decide to sell to muzungu [in Swahili this means "white person," plus
some local nuances of expression] for my living. The Tanzanian custom is go to witch doctors. The muzungu custom is go to travels.
How to prepare for your trips, culturally
At this point in life the answer is usually that I do nothing other than call up memories of previous cultural consumption. If you are not at that point, Wikipedia is an excellent source for fiction and movies from a country. When it comes to music, consult the various Rough Guides to music; I mean the books, not the mediocre CD collections or the so-so travel guides. Also try the AllMusic guide, either paper or on-line; when it comes to music neither Amazon nor Wikipedia is to be trusted ("why not?" is an interesting question, is it because too many people feel entitled to have an opinion about music?). Bring music on cassette, CD, or iPod, as soundtrack for your trip, and ask your driver to put on Radio East Africa. Finding the best non-fiction books is the hardest category to master. I still prefer shelf browsing at libraries and book superstores.
An MR request is another option. Matt Dreyer asks what I recommend for a trip to Greece and Turkey. Offhand I’ll say Herodotus, the usual Greek classics, Pamuk’s Snow and Istanbul books, Sarkan (a Turkish singer), Sufi music, Greek traditional music from 1930-1950 (there are some wonderful collections, look for the word rembetika), a study of Turkish and also Greek textiles, a picture book on Cycladic art, a book on Greek sculpture at the National Museum in Athens, Norwich on the Byzantine empire, Michael Grant on the ancient world, Lord Kinross on the Ottoman centuries, a biography of Ataturk and there are a few good recent books which survey contemporary Turkey.
Your tips, either general or specific, are of course welcome.
Cell phone monies
I heard a report that in northern Tanzania they are using cell phone credits in lieu of traditional money. If you want to pay for something, just make a call to the provider and transfer cell phone credits to the other trader’s account. Why should those credits be any less liquid than currency? They are easier to store and transfer and just about everybody uses them.
Monetary economics in Africa is very, very difficult. It must start with the presumption that money is the asset with the highest carrying costs, if only because your relatives find it so easy to take away from you.
The cultural foundations of capitalism
Sahil, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I
read your blog post about Roger Scruton’s new book, which you praised
for giving a "good sense of just how much cultural background is needed
to sustain liberty." That’s an interesting notion. Do you have
recommendation for books that examine this very idea in a more
systematic way? I’m sure they’re out there, and I’d be interested to
read them.
I’ll offer a few suggestions: all of Max Weber, the books by Lawrence Harrison, Alan MacFarlane on English individualism, Jonathan Israel on the Dutch Republic, Joseph Conrad, Levi-Strauss’s Triste Tropiques, Rene Girard on Christianity, anything good on English history, Hoskyns on Russian history, Albion’s Seed, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Gilbert Freyre on Brazil, de Tocqueville, Sarmiento on Argentina, Louis Hartz, and John Gunther on America. The book "The Influence of the African-American Tradition on the American Ideal of Liberty" remains to be written. Nor have I scratched the all-important and largely non-European notions of liberty from the Nordic regions, which fed into the English success.
Pro-commercial norms are not scarce, as is evident here in Zanzibar. But those norms get you only to a medieval standard of living; as Mancur Olson stressed, they do not on their own support the structures of large-scale capitalism. It is harder to convince people to place larger abstract ideas above immediate duties to friends, family, and clan, but that is indeed the central feature of the problem.
Comments are open, what do you all recommend?
My Favorite Things Tanzania
1. Music: Opt for Taarab, the Arabic style from Zanzibar, start here. Bongo Flava: Swahili Rap from Tanzania is above average for its genre. By the way, the Rough Guide Tanzania music CD is a bit lame.
Then there is Freddie Mercury, who was born in Zanzibar. Right now I’d rate "Killer Queen" and the "Bicycle/Fat Bottomed Girls" medley as my favorites. The Manichean element (Mercury’s parents were Parsees) is evident in "Bohemian Rhapsody," among other songs. Queen remains underrated, and I never tire of listening.
2. Cinema: This movie comes recommended, I’ve never seen it. Darwin’s Nightmare is set in the country, I haven’t seen it.
3. Film, set in: Hatari!, with John Wayne, isn’t bad in a jokey sort of way. It is, after all, directed by Howard Hawks. Hatari, by the way, means "danger" in Swahili.
4. Sculpture: Makonde is the dominant style. Try this older one.
5. Painting: The best-known naive style is Tingatinga. Here is one of the better pieces. It doesn’t compare to Haiti. Here is more. The leading Tanzanian naive painter was — can you guess? — E.S. Tingatinga.
6. Fiction? Ask me again once I’ve learned Swahili.
The bottom line: Freddy is long gone, and they play Congolese "lingala" music in the clubs, so it’s culturally a little dull here; in any case I am working on a micro-credit project with Karol Boudreaux.
Beggars and rent exhaustion
Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist, reports:
Rent exhaustion is no economists’ fantasy – go to any place with
rich tourists and poor locals (Dar es Salaam, the first African city I
visited, fits the description nicely), and you’ll see lots of people
waiting for the one generous tip or overpriced taxi fare. If the
tourists become more generous or gullible, the local guides don’t get
richer, they just multiply. The bigger paydays become less frequent.Tyler
Cowen – an economics professor with a popular blog – argues in his
forthcoming book, Discover Your Inner Economist, that for these reasons
you may wish to give money away by wandering around a poor country, far
away from the tourist trail, and handing cash to people who look busy.
Vicious fights over prime begging spots are yet another example of rent exhaustion in this context. If the begging spot is worth say $50 a year, beggars will devote up to $50 a year to keep the spot. Here is my previous post on whether you should give money to beggars.
Darth Vader’s wife likes micro-finance
Ms Portman, the 25-year-old Harvard graduate who co-chairs the Village Banking campaign, said it would seek to use social networking to galvanise her generation to support microfinance.
"I have seen that ending poverty is possible – it is just a mouse click away," said Ms Portman, whose video diary about Finca’s work will feature on its page on MySpace, the social networking website. "People check their MySpace pages 10 times a day, why not harness that tool to build support for microfinance."
Here is the story. Complain all you wish, as celebrity activism goes this is a step up. Here is an article on micro-finance spreading to Africa.
Jeff Sach’s Millennium Village project
There are two current pieces on Jeff Sach’s Millennium Village project; the first is in Harper’s, the second and far superior, by Sam Rich, is in The Wilson Quarterly (I don’t see the article on-line yet). Rich reports the following about the village of Sauri, Kenya:
1. Every year the project invests about $100 for each of the 5000 village inhabitants.
2. The villagers are much healthier now and the schools are better.
3. Some babies in the village have been named "Millennium."
4. The subsidies of the project have pushed villagers into high-risk crops and possibly depleted the soil.
5. Many of the giveaways, such as fertilizer, are simply resold on external markets.
6. The creation of a committee for allocating project resources has weakened the village’s government and in effect created a more powerful shadow government in the village.
7. People who live or work in the village have financial incentives not to speak honestly about what is going on there.
8. Witchcraft still plays a major role in village elections and decisions.
9. It is not clear what will happen when the project ends in three years’ time. Or should I say it is clear?
In my view Sach’s work is admirable and will do much to improve the lives of a small percentage of Africans. But I do not think it is scalable. First, I believe the candidate villages are cherry-picked for possible improvement. Armed conflict remains a huge problem on the continent. Second, one key non-scalable ingredient is Sachs himself. His reputation is worth a great deal to him, and these projects will receive scrutiny and study; he has strong incentives to make sure everything goes as well and as honestly as possible. That incentive vanishes once we implement such ideas on a bigger scale and through other institutions. File this one under "Wonderful but oversold."
Emily Oster sentence of the day
I also show suggestive evidence, based on a very simple calibration, that the magnitude of behavioral response in Africa [to AIDS] is of a similar order of magnitude to that among gay men in the United States, once differences in income and life expectancy are taken into account.
Here is the link. Here is a non-gated version.
What I’ve been reading
1. Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and its Secret Past, by Giles Tremlett. An engaging survey of contemporary Spain.
2. Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, by John Ghazvinian. Why Africa is even more messed up than you think; this book has lots of good economics.
3. Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives. I’ve gone on about him before, but this newly translated work (the translation gets an A+) is one of the major Latin American novels of the twentieth century.
4. It’s enough to think you are exercising.
6. Thomas McNamee, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. A good history of the restaurant, plus it makes you wonder what percent of the female population is motivated primarily by ***ual desire.
Does eliminating disease spur economic growth?
A loyal MR reader asks:
…is the flow of research against malaria and other targeted diseases
good or bad (or mixed) for the recipients? I have been a believer that
eliminating diseases would have a big impact on economic growth, but
Foreign Affairs recently had an article attacking the concentration of
charity dollars in a few diseases as tending to distort funding
allocations away from the most important local needs.
The fight against disease, taken alone, won’t improve matters much. There are, let’s say, thirty different major problems in sub-Saharan Africa. Eliminating any one of these problems will hardly matter, even if there is no Malthusian trap. Economic growth is all about complementary factors, and more generally it is hard to produce outputs of real economic value.
I favor Michael Kremer’s plan to offer prizes for vaccines against diseases in poor countries. It doesn’t cost a fortune, and its successes are as likely to boost other forms of aid as take away from them. The lives are worth saving for their own sake, and perhaps it will herald a larger push out of misery. But, taken alone, such an initiative won’t much improve measured economic growth.
On the other side of the debate, this Jeff Sachs paper argues that disease kills the young, thereby requiring excessively large families as a form of insurance, and underinvestment in the human capital of each child. Limiting disease might reverse this negative dynamic, though I am less inclined to see any unique lever in this kind of vicious cycle.
#42 out of 50.
Who do you want for the GOP ticket in ’08 Dr. Cowen?
So asks Chris in the comments. Right now I don’t have favored candidates in any of the parties, either here or abroad. Furthermore I will deliberately resist developing such favorites, and insofar as I can’t help having them, I won’t tell you who they are. I don’t mean this in a libertarian "they are all crooks" sort of way, though that may be true. It still really does matter who governs, and so we should take this process of candidate evaluation seriously. It is just that I don’t want to be part of it.
As a blogger rather than decision-maker I am allowed my small space for protest. I wish to protest our excessive tendency to choose sides with one group of people rather than another. I wish to protest excess partisanship, and in particular excess partisanship motivated by the construction of "imaginary good" and "imaginary bad" political personalities.
As biological creatures we are programmed to respond to faces, voices, names, and identities. We praise them, follow them, condemn them, figure out what side they are on, just like good ol’ East African Plains Apes. Who is not excited to see a President of the United States attending a Wizards game in a nearby box? I know I was, and I didn’t even vote for him. Chimps will give up bananas, just to be able to gaze at photos of high-status other chimps.
I would like for my posts on MR to be one small space where these necessary but ignoble human tendencies toward personalization are resisted and sometimes even criticized. I am biased, just as you are. But for aesthetic reasons I would rather my biases be played out in the realm of ideas, rather than directed at people. And at the margin, some of you should be just a little more like me.
Austan Goolsbee is not a credit snob
The Center for Responsible Lending estimated that in 2005, a
majority of home loans to African-Americans and 40 percent of home
loans to Hispanics were subprime loans. The existence and spread of
subprime lending helps explain the drastic growth of homeownership for
these same groups. Since 1995, for example, the number of
African-American households has risen by about 20 percent, but the
number of African-American homeowners has risen almost twice that rate,
by about 35 percent. For Hispanics, the number of households is up
about 45 percent and the number of homeowning households is up by
almost 70 percent.And do not forget that the vast majority of
even subprime borrowers have been making their payments. Indeed, fewer
than 15 percent of borrowers in this most risky group have even been
delinquent on a payment, much less defaulted.
Here is more.
100 Greatest Trips
That’s the title of a fun, new book. Here is my personal selection of 10, in no particular order, and not counting the U.S.:
1. Glottertal to St. Maergen, through the Black Forest. Maybe only two hours by car, but sheer magic.
2. The East Coast of Taiwan, Suao down to Hualien and then into Taroko, the marble gorge. The best coastal route I know.
3. Mostar and Sarajevo, to remind us of the thinness of civilization. They’re also beautiful cities with great food and moving graveyards.
4. Susten Pass, in Switzerland, the best route through the Alps.
5. The bus from Punta Arenas to Torres del Paine, Patagonia, Chile. You see flamingos, rheas, and end up in a stunning national park.
6. The Panama Canal
— perhaps the most underrated sight; you feel like you are in the jungle,
you are in a jungle, then a large steamer comes by. The tour of
Rotterdam Harbor is a close runner-up.
7. To and through the Tiong Bahru food stalls in Singapore.
8. Thingvellir, Iceland, home of the first Icelandic Parliament. Such a long trip to see just four homes.
9. A walk through Ginza District in Tokyo, or perhaps Shinjuku subway station, with its dozens of maze-like paths to varioius streets. Don’t even try the map, just be happy with wherever you end up.
10. Walking Paris end to end, pick just about any route.
I’ve never been to East Africa, and I’m not counting the Iron Market in Port-Au-Prince.
Digital currency with meta information
A loyal MR reader asks:
What is currency and what are the potential implications of a
completely digital currency that could have unlimited meta information
attached to it? [Some obvious implications would be tracking
transactions and the government’s ability to enforce taxes, etc., some
more esoteric stuff would be attaching conditions much like covenants,
say that a particular payment could only be used to buy products that
were carbon neutral, possibly down the road having policy implications.]
Higher taxes and carbon offsets we’ve already covered. More generally, the use of "covenant currency," as I shall call it, would raise prices. Restricted money simply isn’t worth as much. It also would lead to a secondary market in currency. Say you paid with me with money that can only be used to buy corn from Africa. I’ll try to resell that money to the people who were going to buy corn in Africa anyway. Of course the supply of targeted covenant money for that end may exceed the demand for it, and then price will adjust; think of this as an extreme form of legal tender laws.
Would it ever be efficient to use covenant money? I doubt it. It is a tax — on the holding and use of cash balances — when a simple transfer would do. Use regular money for your transactions and, if you wish, send some cash to the corn sellers of Africa.
Inflation is also a tax on cash balances, and few people think that is the right or the best fiscal way to finance subsidies to various worthy groups.
#11 in a series of 50.