Post Conflicted

Back in Uganda

2009-10-31T16:31:00.003-04:00

This is the view of downtown Kampala from my room, which is on the 5th floor of a shopping complex. Wonderful.

Economic development, Sherlock Holmes and medical science

2009-10-15T13:46:00.004-04:00

These are the three things I think a lot about these days, and they're more related than you might think.

In the latest NYRB, Jerome Groopman (article not yet available online) reviews two new books on the intersection of medical science and sleuthing.

This statement often comes as a shock to most people when I say it: most medical doctors are not scientists. They are detectives and artists. Not only do most not participate in medical trials, but if you ask your medical doctor about the trials and studies the drugs they are prescribing are based on, few can tell you any details and will find the questions silly. Most see their profession as determining the problem, and after that, they simply follow the rule: when faced with x problem, prescribe y, then observe more and, if faced with z, prescribe some w.

Not that there's a problem with that. Division of labor works well here, and few people could keep all of this information straight in their head. Groopman has done a fine job in the past exploring the detective nature of medical doctors, and he deserves to be read for that reason. He also has written about the problems modern medicine faces for doctors to spend the necessary time on each patient, and for this argument he falls short.

In the NYRB article, Groopman laments the dwindling time doctors have to spend on patients, in large part becuase of the way their time has, in his mind, become commoditified by the system. Each minute a doctor spends with a patient is billed, and so most are forced to spend just enough time to figure out whats wrong, or close enough to it, then move along quickly.

Groopman is correct that doctors time has been commodified, but its not the system he should be blaming, its doctors. America pays its medical doctors far more than anywhere else in the world, mostly because this is what doctors have demanded in recent years. The commodification of doctors time is because doctors are very expensive, and thats mostly the fault of doctors.

But what does this have to do with economic development? The tools that medical science uses are very close to the tools I use in my work: the scientific method, close scrutiny of any claim, a bit of artisty and a dash of detective work.

I follow medical studies and, 9 studies out of 10 that I see quoted in the newspaper, I look up and observe the methodology closely. Many studies make more errors than you might think, and a close scepticism of any reported result is important. Even more importantly though, the tools of medical science have a lot to teach economists still.

E coli outbreak

2009-10-04T13:23:00.003-04:00

The NYT has a great video about the consequences and causes of an E Coli outbreak recently that left one woman paralyzed. I've blogged previously about the lack of proper government oversight of meat producers, and this is more evidence that we need more regulation.

Roman history

2009-09-28T16:14:00.002-04:00

I recently finished reading Julius Ceasar's commentary on The Gallic War which was so interesting I quickly read through Goldsworthy's excellent biography Caesar: Life of a Colossus. Its one of the most interesting and balanced portrayals of the man ever written.

For anyone interested in Roman economic history, I also suggest this collection of research: The Ancient Economy, or a new post over at Brad DeLong on the end of Roman agriculture slavery.

Strange links

2009-09-13T08:32:00.001-04:00

National Geographic has a wonderful interactive map of Manhattan where you can make direct comparisons with before and after the city was developed.

In South Africa, pigeons are faster than the internet.

Its not the appendix's fault for being useless, its our modern world.

Duncan Green notes a 2004 paper on percieved weather changes in Ethiopia and finds that farmers are more pessimistic than the rainfall data warrents.

Is the OLPC dead?

2009-09-12T10:35:00.000-04:00

The OLPC has been getting a lot of heat lately in the blogsphere.

First, Timothy Ogden (HT PSD Blog) argued that the effect of computers on education is abysmal (in developed countries at least), and that proven education boosters, like deworming, are much more cost effective ($4/year versus $200). I will argue below that neither of these means much.

Then UN Distpatch argued the dream is over, with too many cost overruns and poor delivery. The founder makes a reply here, arguing there are some positive stories coming out. He also notes that the $400 netbook did not exist before the OLPC.

This has a personal note for me. For my neices first birthday, I bought her an OLPC through Amazon. I paid $400 in total, one for her, one to be donated.

Yes, I know 1 is too young to have a laptop. It has saved my sister plenty of headache though as my neice no longer tries to sit on her lap while my sister's on the computer. Instead my neice just pretends to be her mother with a mostly indestructible chew and drool proof computer. It also means that my neice will know how to type as soon as she knows how to spell, and computer programs, including the Linux opperating system, will not seem mysterious to her.

In the developed world, this matters a lot. Teaching at two colleges in the US has left me baffeled at the lack of computer literacy amoung those that finished highschool. I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of people from 18 to 25 in this country did not have a working knowledge of Excel, and only basic word skills.

But does it matter in the developing world? Maybe. Computers are not a necessity, but they are very much sought after. I get orders to bring 2-3+ laptops every time I go to Uganda. People want to be connected to the world, and they are desperatly seeking to learn how to do just that. Internet cafes and training centers are all over northern Uganda now.

I don't know about OLPC specifically, but I think it's too early to call the dream of cheap computers to the developing world dead. The impact of computers on education is more than the literature cited by Ogden. The effect of computer training in a developing country means a lot more than it does in a developed country because there are no other options in poor places. The general equilibrium effects could be massive, and this could take a long time to see.

And just because a computer is more expensive than another option is a meaningless comparison if we don't know the individual effects. In any case, why think of it as an either/or problem? Given the lost cost of deworming, I would suggest bundling them together in places that need the medicine.

Big brother is powerless

2009-09-10T08:17:00.002-04:00

Anyone that has visited the UK in the last few years has probably seen signs around warning that they are being monitored by a camera. There are over 1 million of them in the country. Well, it looks like that massively invasive idea has proved pretty much useless.

The BBC reports that cameras helped solve only one crime per 1,000 cameras.

That doesn't reflect the number of crimes prevented, and the feeling of extra security. Of course, putting the military in charge of a country would also do both of those things, but the value of social freedom and privacy are high as well.

I say to Gordon Brown: tear down those cameras!

California wildfires

2009-09-03T16:54:00.001-04:00

My memories of southern California definitely include the massive summer wildfires. The Daily Mail has some amazing photos of whats going on there right now.

Feeling rejected?

2009-09-02T12:37:00.001-04:00

Don't feel too bad. Literary Saloon links to an interesting article on how some of our favorite authors were shot down many, many times.

Not mentioned is my personal favorite: the original Dune book by Frank Herbert, one of my favorite pieces of sci-fi, was rejected by over 20 publishers before being published.

Problems with econ blogs

2009-09-01T12:16:00.001-04:00

I recently admitted to being unable to read through Greg Makiw's blog anymore. After a few horrendous posts, I am also beginning to lean that way with Freakonomics. I am a big fan of the original book, and Levitt's analysis of Venkatesh's work in Chicago, but Mark Toma gives good evidence the love affair with a "rogue economist" may go sour.

Navigating a menu

2009-08-31T14:09:00.000-04:00

For those enjoying restaurant week here in DC, and anyone going out to dinner at a nice restaurant, Chris Blattman quotes some good advice for navigating the menu from the NYT.

Personally, I always fail to take this advice at Thai restaurants, and so always leave feeling unsatisfied. Outside of Thailand and my own kitchen, no one takes the time to make Pad Thai even remotely edible.

Income and intelligence

2009-08-30T14:49:00.004-04:00

Due to a lack of reasonable postings, I stopped reading Greg Mankiw's blog a while ago. Specifically, there were at least 5 (there could have been more) posts in a row where his blind ideology got in the way of a reasonable interpretation of the facts.

It looks like he's done it again, though this time I only know about it because there has been such an uproar over his comments on intelligence and income. It looks like he thinks the rich are just naturally smarter.

Some interesting discussions of the data though have come out of it. Brad DeLong argues there is in fact a big piece of the correlation lacking, and Paul Krugman argues that it may just be the income that's doing all of the work.

Then, to make the details more interesting, Alex Tabarrok at MR looks at adopted kids and finds no effect of income, but as the comments make clear, there are plenty of problems with looking at adoptees.

I really don't know the answer myself, though I am more and more convinced that it is unanswerable. Let the nature versus nurture debate continue ...

Women and the LRA

2009-08-29T14:52:00.000-04:00

Chris Blattman has posted an excellent new paper he has done with some co-authors on the role of women and girls in the LRA. The paper challenges some conventional thinking of women as only passive sex objects. It is well worth a read.

For me, the most important point is how the LRA presented very similar opportunities for women as those not abducted; i.e. not many. Acholi women have historically had very few chances to be more than wives, mothers and servants.

A sad, but very real truth, is that a woman abducted by the LRA and forced to marry a high ranking leader often had many more opportunities for herself and her children than if she had staid at home.

Polyface Farms

2009-08-28T15:45:00.000-04:00

I have been critical of Joel Salatin's Polyface Farms in the past, but a recent interview with him in Food, Inc. (transcript here) has some interesting points. Highlights include:

MG: How can we best trust what's in our food?

JS: Know your farmer. Turn off--or get rid of--the TV, and spend the next year turning all your recreational, educational, info-tainment time and energy into a treasure hunt in your locality to find integrity food.

MG: In your opinion, what's the biggest problem with the food industry in the U.S.?

JS: Wow, where do I start? Number one is that it destroys soil ...

[second,] hubris. The food industry views everything through the skewed paradigm of faith in human cleverness rather than dependence on nature's design ...

Which opens up the next big problem: safe food. And this runs the gamut from nutrition to outright danger.

Which brings me to the final point: disrespect of the inherent uniqueness of the living world.

How can you kill your brother?

2009-08-27T16:21:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading the new graphic novel Unknown Soldier, set in northern Uganda. I must be honest and say that, despite my earlier reservations, its not as bad as I feared.

The story revolves around an Acholi, raised and trained in the US as a medical doctor, who goes to northern Uganda in 2002 to help in the IDP camps. He goes crazy from the violence he witnesses and is possessed by some kind of demon soldier (This is the part that had me lost. I think its based on an older comic from the Vietnam era).

He eventually becomes embroiled in a gun fight to save a group of kidnapped girls from an orphanage. The kidnapping is taken from one of my personal favorite tellings of the conflict in the book Aboke Girls.

There's also a CIA link put in here, which seems completely misplaced given the US government has only recently been interested in dealing with the situation. I see it as an excuse to put a white person in here somewhere (see: The Last King of Scotland)

There is plenty of violence and killing, but the comic gets an important part of the situation in northern Uganda correct in a way that few others writing's about the place have understood, or cared to mention: the fighters are the sons and brothers of the people they are fighting.

The title of this post comes from an Acholi friend, who, when I asked about why the Acholi have not fought back harder against the LRA, said "How can you kill your brother? When he comes to kill you, you don't fight him, you hide. The only other option is worse."

By about 3/4's of the way through the comic it seems the author has understood this: the protagonists direct fighting of the LRA has clearly only made things worse for everyone.

It also reflects the religious and political (i.e. anti-Museveni) component of the LRA well.

The last 1/4 though gets off track and reflects what many foreigners visiting Uganda experience: revenge fantasy on the leaders of the rebels. In this comic, it entails the mutilation of an LRA lieutenant and the ominous claim that the protagonist is going after Kony next. This is what the 15 year old in many of us, realizing our lack of power to stop inhuman suffering, yearns to do.

US economic mobility

2009-08-26T12:21:00.002-04:00

Economist View links to a comment from the Understanding Society blog on how US economic mobility is far worse than most think, and much lower than other developed countries. In fact, the "United States ranks second to last among Great Britain, US, France, Canada, and Denmark when it comes to the rate of income improvement over four generations for poor families."

How do we know this? By looking at the correlation between parent and child income, education and class. As Mark Thoma remarks, "in a society in which there is substantial equality of opportunity across all social groups, we would expect there to be little or no correlation between the SES of the parent and the child."

I have suspicions though that correlation is not a well defined method of observing equality of opportunity because being at the top and losing your wealth is much less likely than being at the bottom and gaining wealth. I make this claim for 2 reasons, the first one Thoma mentions but does not fully explore the implications of:

1. Every nation allows wealth to be passed from generation to generation, such as paying for education or wills.

2. Once people have money, they have more resources to take good care of their money.

So, we would expect there to be a very strong correlation between those at the top income, which America has a lot more of that most other nations. The real question is, whats the correlation between those at the bottom?

The report quoted by Understanding Society is by Tom Hertz, formerly of American University, and is available here. It goes into a lot of detail on US stats, but when looking at international comparisons it only looks at overall correlation of income. Hertz gets his data though from Miles Corak (paper available here), who is much more cautious about making strong conclusions from the results.

Don't get me wrong, mobility is very hard. Besides myself, I know of only one other person who came from a low income/low education background and has pulled himself out. I also suspect its worse in the US than most people think.

Two odd environmental links

2009-08-20T23:31:00.001-04:00

Could Walmart become the green leader? If they take their sustainability index seriously, I think so.
If the military is getting serious about climate change, will the "skeptics" finally listen?

Organic versus factory food

2009-08-18T16:25:00.001-04:00

Two recent reports are suggesting that organic food is not healthier than non-organic. The reports can be found here and here, with a summary from the UK Food Standards Agency here.

The reports have attracted some controversy. Bad Science makes the case that the attacks by the Soil Association (who knew there was such an association?) on the research is unfounded and misleading, such as misdirecting the question to the environmental aspect of food (Which is a problem. See a New Scientist article on this here.).

The reports are meta-studies that look at the literature over the last 50 years on organic farming and sorts work by quality. It is not a full on critique of organic for two reasons: first, it only looks at health, not environment, etc. Second, the report makes clear there are a lot of shortcomings in current research and suggests

[H]igh quality randomised controlled trials should be conducted which have samples of sufficient size to reliably detect the presence of effects, longer and more realistic dietary exposures, and more accurate and objective approaches to measuring dietary intake and health outcomes.

The most important part of these studies then is to draw attention to the lack of good knowledge on the effects of organic.

Personally, I am not surprised by this finding. Our bodies are remarkably good at making good use of a lot of what we put into it, and unless you believe organic food has a secret ingredient that is missing in non-organic, the difference should be trivial. The truth of the matter though should be left to evidence, and so far that has not looked promising for organic.

Microfinance

2009-08-17T17:00:00.002-04:00

I just finished reading The Economics of Microfinance by Beatriz Armendariz and Jonathan Morduch. My knowledge of microfinance is limited, so it was a good introduction to some of the issues involved with getting credit to the poor and evaluating the effects. Some parts are a little technical, but overall its a good, accessable description of why we care.

While reading it I kept thinking back to a blog post from Rachel Strohm where she quotes her father saying that microloans are more like credit cards in that people use them to smooth over their consumption and have something in case of emergency.

Interest rates may be high, and the effect on poverty is mixed, but they offer flexibility that many people sorely need.

Chevy Volt, you are no Prius (or Tesla either)

2009-08-15T16:39:00.000-04:00

A while ago I calculated the environmental impact of the Tesla Roadster electric car and found that, depending on the amount of coal used to produce electricity, the Tesla may actually be worse for the environment than the Prius.

The Chevy Volt, as discussed over at TreeHugger, is being marketed as great for the environment. Is it really? Not so much.

For electric cars, watt hour per mile is the determinant of efficiency. The Tesla takes 180 watt hours per mile. The Volt takes 250 (better than the original 400 they had originally stated). Depending on where you live in America, that could be up to 0.5 lbs of CO2 per mile. Compare that to the Prius, which comes in at only 0.4 lbs per mile.

Of course, this is still better than the 0.7 lbs per mile the average American sedan produces.

When theorists talk about randomization

2009-08-14T15:52:00.002-04:00

What happens when an economic theorists/historian talks about randomization? One answer comes from Murat Iyigun when reviewing a new paper by Erik Meyersson on the role of Islamic parties on the education of women in Turkey.

Iyigun brings his knowledge of Turkish history to bear on the issue and makes a convincing case that there were some important institutional changes during the 1990s that make it difficult to argue for a regression discontinuity (RD) design that Meyersson uses. Iyigun makes the claim that

Now this paper is a very fine specimen of its kind, so this is in no way a critique of Erik's work in particular. Instead it is to highlight the pros and cons of the randomization approach to development in general ...

Why Iyigun uses this as a way to attack randomization in general, I can't quite figure out.

Myersson makes the unfortunate statement, which Iyigun latches on to, that his RD design is "as good as random". RD though is not the same as random. It is only a way of assuming an approach that has similar beneficial properties of randomness. If the assumptions behind the RD are disproved, as Iyigun does, then it is not "as good as random".

There are plenty of problems with randomization, but making a straw man out of something unrelated doesn't help the argument.

Northern Uganda market survey

2009-08-13T14:42:00.002-04:00

I have finished the market survey report for Acholiland in northern Uganda and have put it on my website here. I have also uploaded the data I collected for anyone that would like to look through it.

As always, comments are welcome.

Palin's resignation speach

2009-08-12T22:57:00.003-04:00

The always amazing William Shatner puts Palin's recent resignation speech in perspective.

A comic book about the Ugandan civil war. Really.

2009-08-12T12:22:00.002-04:00

Yesterday the NYT noted a comic book that Vertigo Comics has been publishing for the last few months called Unknown Soldier. The story is about a Ugandan that fled to the US, became a doctor, and returned to the country in 2002 with his wife to work in the north.

The author visited the country in 2007 and the book comes with the normal list of key words for Uganda: child soldier, LRA, Kony, etc.

But wait. It looks like the book also comes with a glossary and background information on the conflict. The authors website has even more stuff, including videos.

I will reserve judgement until I read the collected edition, which comes out August 26.

Maps, maps, maps and more maps

2009-08-11T16:49:00.000-04:00

Those that follow this blog have probably already figured out I love maps. This week certainly had plenty.

George Orwell, in his essay Why I Write, says of the aesthetic desire to write that "above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations".

It looks like we'll have to include railway guides as well. TreeHugger has a slide show of alternative subway maps. Some of them are very beautiful.

Some of my favorites include a redesigned New York map that is much cleaner than what we have today.

Then there is the redesigned Tokyo map. I've bought a poster of this from Zero Per Zero.

Scientists have also recently found what may be the oldest known map. Check out the overlay of animal drawings.

Finally, from the always reliably interesting Strange Maps, we have a reversed view of Europe.

Pro bono economics

2009-08-10T16:25:00.000-04:00

I've recently been trying to donate more of my time and skills to charitable causes, but I've noticed that this seems to not be an easy thing to do. I suspect there's two main reasons: (1) most charities don't think they need help from an economist, and (2) its hard to find one that will do anything for free.

Then I found ProBonoEconomics. They help match economists to charities that need some help. They appear to only be in the UK though.

Anyone know of another place that does something similar, perhaps in the US?

Academics and randomized trials

2009-08-07T15:45:00.001-04:00

The IPA blog has an interesting response to some of the debate going around about how important randomized trials are, and what role academics should have.

Martin Rotemberg concludes that academics are needed in RCTs as they can add to the quality of what is learned from the evaluation, and thus improve a program. I agree. I think that helping people is the most important part of our work, even beyond advancing the general science.

I would like though to add one more reason for academics to be in RCTs: an evaluation requires involvement in (say it isn't so!) the real world (caveat: with enough assistants its possible to avoid such messing things, but you probably have to already know a lot about the world to even try such a thing).

One day, I hope it will be impossible for an economist to make a model, run a regression, or otherwise talk about something he/she has never seen, or a place he/she has never been. One can only dream.

Immigration and climate change

2009-08-06T16:13:00.001-04:00

Tree Hugger has posted about an interesting idea: immigration actually causes more pollution.

The argument here is that immigration and population growth are not zero sum. When people move to another country, they do so because it offers better opportunities. With those better opportunities comes the possibility of having a larger family, and so world population will increase more than if the people had stayed home. This is then followed by a graph suggesting that the US population would be less than half what it is now if there had been no immigration since the founding of the country.

I have two problems with this argument. The first is that population growth is actually higher in developing countries. This happens for a number of reasons, but the relationship is clear. So, while we may think that moving to the US means you have a better opportunity to have a large family, after only one or two generations that effect is reversed.

Second, Tree Hugger is making the mistake of looking at the average effect of an American. A new immigrant probably does not consume as much meat, drive a car as much, or buy as much stuff in general that the average American does, at least for the first few generations. So, the impact of an immigrant is actually much smaller than this might suggest.

Envrionmental links

2009-08-05T15:06:00.001-04:00

Google maps has started posting greenhouse gas emissions for different countries.
Some mixed new news on the gulf dead zone. Looks like its not as bad as was originally thought, though its still 3,000 square miles.
More bad news about coal.

Randomized trial in Uganda

2009-08-04T22:57:00.002-04:00

Back in 2007 I was hired by Chris Blattman to assist in pre-testing and organizing an impact evaluation he was doing with an NGO partner in northern Uganda. Literally the day before we left the country for Christmas break we found out that the donor had backed out and everything was put on hold.

A year later Chris found a new donor, and the program was back on. I was busy on other work, so I couldn't be involved this time around. In my place he found a great, dedicated team. When I was in Uganda in June they had just finished the baseline and were working on running experimental games with the recipients.

Also there was a reporter for Freakonomics, Dwyer Gunn. She has posted about her trip here. Its a good description of whats going on in the country and what its like to be on the ground watching an evaluation take place.

Slow posting

2009-08-02T23:19:00.001-04:00

I've been busy with work, etc. and haven't had the chance to post much lately. I promise to pick up in the coming week.

Misc links

2009-07-29T16:46:00.000-04:00

The problem with calories. I have long argued that this type of accounting is silly. If you want a better solution, I recommend Food Matters.
If you're looking for good advice on international literature, check out Literary Saloon (ht to MR).
In the UK, suicide is expensive.
An interesting discussion about Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program.

Books I'm reading now

2009-07-28T12:31:00.002-04:00

I'm going through a pile of books right now, some good, some not so good.

The best is Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda. This is a must read for anyone that wants to understand what's been going on in northern Uganda for the last 20+ years. What makes it better than other accounts is that it doesn't oversimplify the situation, but instead shows it for the complicated nature it is.

And if complex histories of Africa don't scare you, I can't find a better description of what's been going on in central Africa for the last 15 years than Africa's World War.

Academic hustlers

2009-07-27T18:17:00.002-04:00

I just finished reading Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streetsby Sudhir Venkatesh. Venkatesh was a PhD student in sociology at the University of Chicago in the 1990s and spent much of his time in a Chicago project interviewing drug gang members and poor families. Most famously, he's the one that collected the data on gang member pay that eventually became part of the book Freakonomics (which I highly recommend for anyone that hasn't read it yet). I recommend Gang Leader for a Day to anyone that hasn't experienced poverty, especially in America.

I've been meaning to read it for a while and just got around to it. The timing was fortuitous as I've started watching the Sopranos. It also comes on the heels of the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest. The people who Venkatesh interviewed were very distrustful of the police and I expect none of them would be surprised about the arrest.

For me, the biggest contribution of the book is the reminder that poverty happens the same way everywhere in the world. Similar to my experience in Uganda and southeast Asia, people in the projects stick together and help each other out, using an extended family network to provide important temporary support.

Venkatesh labels himself a rebel sociologist because he does the unthinkable and actually goes out to talk to the poor. This is really not as strange as he makes it sound: anthropologists have been doing this for a long time. He does add a nice structure to the understanding of how the people interact that most anthropologists don't do, but it never really comes together. This is because he never is able to understand the whole picture, in part because of what it means to be doing the work he is doing. In order to get the information he needs he has to give up some freedom in order to secure his safety with the local gang.

Part of it is his freedom to move around. The gang does not want him to go everywhere and speak to everyone (the police and those most negatively affected by the drug gang, for instance), so in fact his access is very censured.

More importantly though, he loses his moral freedom. He watches, and in some cases participates in, some morally questionable activities and, scared to lose his access, does not speak up to the people around him. He presents himself as a naive person in the beginning, just trying to find out how things work.

In the end though, he recognizes a very important point about his own work, and I think an important point for all academics: he is a hustler. He wanted his data and he would do whatever it took to get it. Like the guys selling crack on the corner, the pimps, or the woman selling candy out of her apartment, he was looking out for his own benefit first.

This may sound like a harsh comparison, but, aside from a short lived writing class he taught and the talking therapy he gave to killers, he did nothing for the people of Robert Taylor Homes. Like a reporter that takes pictures of a burning building but won't help people get out, he simply recorded horrible events.

In a number of cases, he actually made many people's lives much more difficult, especially the people that told him about their side incomes. He shared this information with the gang leader, who promptly taxed their previously unknown income.

I have a strong moral requirement for research, and "do no harm" is just the beginning. While I loved the book, Venkatesh really is just suggesting that talking to people isn't what makes a rogue academic, its actually helping people.

Is there intelligent life out there?

2009-07-21T13:16:00.002-04:00

A famous Fermi problem, called the Drake equation, puts the number of life forms, depending on who you ask, at around 2.

I am not so sure these days. Exactly 15 years, perhaps to the day, after Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck Jupiter, something else hit the planet and left an Earth sized hole. This time though, no one saw it coming, and no one is sure what actually hit the planet.

Is there a lot more activity in space, even now, than we think? How long until something hits us again?

The man who found the hole in Jupiter thinks this is evidence that the planet is really important for our own survival:

Mr. Wesley told the Sydney Morning Herald that spotting the impact mark on Jupiter made him glad the huge planet is in Earth’s neighborhood: “If anything like that had hit the Earth it would have been curtains for us, so we can feel very happy that Jupiter is doing its vacuum-cleaner job and hoovering up all these large pieces before they come for us.”

How many other life forms in the galaxy have been wiped out because they didn't have a giant hoover next door?

Financial economics

2009-07-20T17:00:00.004-04:00

Flying home from the recent AEA conference in January, I sat next to two PhD candidates in financial economics at Wharton who had gone to the conference with their adviser. I asked them what they thought of the financial crisis and how it would affect them on the job market come the fall when they begin applying.

To my surprise, they confidently claimed the crisis wouldn't affect them. Without asking, they also volunteered their expected salaries of $150,000 starting. This is about a 50% premium over the average economist PhD, and 25% over an economist at a top school.

I was more taken aback by their hubris than their expected incomes. I would have hoped the crisis would have increased financial economists humility. Krugman notes a similar hubris with a financial economist, Eugene Fama, who doesn't believe in economic bubbles. In his defense, I think there is an argument to be made that that bubbles are based in part on rational risk taking, but this is clearly not a reasonable view when it comes to the housing market. People are not in fact as careful as he thinks when buying a house.

The Economist also has an interesting discussion of the future of the efficient market hypothesis, so well loved in financial economics. They end on a much more positive note for the future of the discipline.

Why modern media is so bad

2009-07-17T13:49:00.002-04:00

Sadly, a new video from the Onion News seems to be an all too accurate view of pundits and their desire to say whatever keeps them popular.

This is even more interesting after listening to yet another Bill Moyers Journal on the state of modern media. You know things are bad when this is a totally reasonable thing for Moyers to say:

When Tim Russert died, I thought they should ask Jon Stewart to take over at "Meet the Press" because he would go after the elites, and liberated everybody else in Washington would follow suit, and break up that cozy game.

The best we can do is love our crooked neighbors with our crooked hearts

2009-07-16T16:10:00.000-04:00

That's Cornell West paraphrasing W.H. Auden in a Bill Moyers Journal podcast. The topic was Faith and Social Justice and has to be the best podcast I have heard in a long time. The transcript is here.

What makes this so wonderful is that it is a reminder that, despite the popularity of religious conservatives in American politics, there is a religious movement that actually makes sense. It also is a reminder that Kant, perhaps the most important moral philosopher in history, was a religious progressive.

The entire discussion is very open for a secular moral philosophy that I can agree very strongly with. I especially appreciated Serene Jones' description of sin: "Sin, for me, describes the fact that we are born thrown into this world, and we are, no matter how hard we try, because of the complexity of how we're put together, destined to make massive mistakes."

Much of the discussion perhaps can best be described as about the moral implications of economics and the recent crisis. Again from West:

Are you concerned about those on the margins, or do we define a catastrophe only when it relates to investment bankers and Wall Street elites, as opposed to the precious children in chocolate cities? ... Tom Friedmans and others, they're looking at the world from the vantage point of the top. Very much like brother Obama's economic team. They're not looking at the world through the lens of poor people and working people. They got Wall Street elites as their buddies, their cronies, intimate ties, so the vantage point through which they look at the world is very, very different. Christians begin with the catastrophic.

They seem the financial crisis as a moral crisis, in the same way that many have critiqued capitalism as a morally vacant force. I don't like to give people the excuse of being immoral and unhappy simply because they live in a capitalistic economy though. I consider myself at the same time a capitalist, a moral person and very happy. It just takes a lot of work in this world to remind yourself that owning junk is not the secret to a good life.

Responding to Moyers' question "But isn't it a fantasy to think that love can tame capitalism?", West I think gets the answer right:

But that's part of the escapism. If they define success by how the world conceives of prosperity, rather than greatness. In the biblical text the greatness says what? He or she is greatest among you be your servant. There's a clash here. A very important clash.

But love is not a real small thing. Love is not just the key that unlocks the door to ultimate reality. But there would be no weekend if there were not a trade union movement that loved justice enough, and loved working people enough, so that bosses wouldn't treat them like commodities to be marginalized.

There would not be racial, the racial justice that we have of Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Phil Berrigan. There wouldn't be, without the love that you all had for justice, and the love enough for black people, to say, "Quit niggerizing these people. Quit intimidating them. Quit trying to make them so scared that they won't stand up and fight." Love is a serious thing. When you love your mamma, you take a bullet for her if she's treated unjustly. That's why justice is what love looks like in public.

Are depressions bad, or just necessary?

2009-07-15T22:51:00.002-04:00

Mark Thoma, over at Economist's View, bemoans the argument that financial crises are a normal and healthy part of any economy. I agree that this is a tired view, and have argued before that they are not as beneficial as one may think, at least for everyone but the top 20%.

Regulation may slow growth, but it also decreases the incidence of huge downturns. This recent one was a lot bigger than anyone would have thought, and is a good argument for a more cautious approach to avoid, as Nassim Taleb calls them, future black swan events. (For an interesting discussion with Taleb on this problem, check out his interview on Econ Talk)

While deregulating certain sectors can have positive benefits, like labor laws in India, it also means an increase in the likelihood of crises. As I argued yesterday, there is good reason to believe human society prefers a more cautious approach.

Low variance or convenience?

2009-07-14T15:29:00.003-04:00

The other night I had a long discussion with a friend about the carrying capacity of the Earth. I have posted on this before, and I'm convinced the Earth can sustain plenty more people than we currently have.

So, Malthus was wrong: we are not in a population trap. He assumed population would increase exponentially, which technology increases linearly. In fact, technology has been moving far faster than what we need.

So much faster, that I came up with the following hypothesis: if in the US we use our modern technology to produce our food, but revert our lifestyles back to the year 1800, a person would only need to work, on average, about 2-3 days a year in order to live.

Imagine it: if we allowed infant mortality rates, malnutrition and sanitation to go back to 1800 levels, and all gave up electricity, it would actually take very little to provide ourselves with the necessary things to live. An 1800 lifestyle is also pretty good by relative standards. People in 1600 would have loved the conveniences.

I contend then that Karl Marx's ideal of communism - take what you need, produce what you can - would then work perfectly fine. Except no one wants to be there. Life in 1800 was bad, even for the rich. Life today, while requiring plenty of work to get, is very good, even for the poorest American.

So, in 200 years from now, I suspect people will be working just as much as we do today and enjoy a lot more conveniences. So many in fact that they will find our lifestyles today miserable.

This hypothesis came up after discussing the implications of our species moving to agriculture. Some, like Jared Diamond, have claimed that agriculture was the worst mistake in the history of the human race. It actually decreased our average lifespan, at least for the first 10,000 years, and increased the work we all had to do.

But it did decrease the variance effect from environmental shocks and meant we could have many, many more people. It also meant that specialization of labor could happen, so doctors, philosophers and even economists could emerge.

I think we are a species that realizes the value of decreased variance. Financial regulation may decrease growth, but it also decreases the incidence of really bad crises. Living like someone from 1800 would give us all a lot more free time and probably make us happier, but it also increases the effect of disease.

Is organic efficient?

2009-07-13T15:20:00.003-04:00

I have long argued that organic farming is not as efficient as factory farming. Over at From Poverty to Power, Duncan Green points to a couple of reports, including one from the FAO, have found that switching to organic farming would decrease production in the developed world and improve production in the developing world, where farming techniques are often way behind the curve.

Organic production can reduce greenhouse gas production, but at a potentially serious cost to food security. I agree with Green that this does have a silver lining: if we start putting more research into farming practices and improving soil use, the benefits could be great. But lets not start moving "off the grid" as it will help no one.

Misc links

2009-07-12T13:02:00.003-04:00

I'm excited by this theory of incompetance in large organizations: "it is inevitable that individuals will be promoted until they reach their level of maximum incompetence." (HT to Cheep Talk)
Science has a liberal bias, according to Pew. My problem with this is they only interviewed people that belong to AAAS, which doesn't contain many social scientists, and who charges a fee to join. So I think the sample is pretty biased, but interesting none-the-less. (HT to Krugman)

A white mans burden

2009-07-10T00:43:00.004-04:00

Those that follow the blog Aid Watch won't be too surprised by most of the points presented in a paper in the newest JEL by Bill Easterly, Can the West Save Africa? Its definitely worth a read though. The paper presents Easterly's normal lists of why aid is a waste, but also has a number of additional interesting points.

Easterly sees two major strands of thought in development: the transformative approach, which he believes has had limited impact and suffers from a lack of learning, and the marginal approach, which he sees as having had some impact on individual lives.

He does of course admit that measuring the impact of transformational programs is a more difficult problem than measuring marginal programs. This is an important point: the best we can do with transformational programs is a cross-country regression, which presents serious causality problems. This is the point of doing randomized trials, which is a reason why marginal programs are getting more attention these days.

My favorite part of the paper is table 2, where Easterly argues against the hyperbole around Africa by presenting the “four horseman of the apocalypse”. Life is difficult in Africa, but it's not as bad as many have claimed.

I appreciated his criticisms of randomized evaluation (RE), most notably the preference of NGOs, and researchers, to focus on programs expected to perform well. I think this is a very important problem, though it does not invalidate the RE approach as it means the untested programs will (eventually, hopefully) fall out of favor and be discarded. This is the problem with the marginal approach to development: it moves slowly.

I disagree with Easterly on his depiction of poverty traps though. This is a topic on my mind recently, and my gut feeling right now is that it is very complicated. Easterly presents it as an excuse for the pro-aid crowd, but it also has an important place in the help people to help themselves argument. Savings traps are real, in Africa and in the US, and a major solution is to assist people in finding affordable alternatives.

I also disagree with this statement:

It would be hard to argue that Africa’s development problem is missing technical knowledge, as some transformational approaches claim, when some of that knowledge has already been around for 70 years. For example, why is there still malnutrition in Africa due to lack of vitamin A, when this problem and its solution has been well known for 70 years?

This is a strange argument to make, especially since it is no secret that, in the past and still today, African nations lag behind the rest of the world in technology adoption, mostly from a lack of capacity to use technology. Perhaps I am missing Easterly's point here.

Oh, and another paper in the same journal, Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field, does a good job of presenting recent experimental economics work. Despite our hopes, people are fairly irrational in their actions.

Do people behave optimally?

2009-07-09T16:15:00.001-04:00

As an economist, I want to believe that people optimize well, but I still have a lot of doubts. We know that people don't do a lot of things well, like planing for future health problems or randomizing numbers in their head.

Two new papers give evidence that people are in fact more rational than we think.

David Levine argues that behavioral economics is not the solution to all of our problems. In fact, the rational model is quite good for most people (HT to Cheap Talk).

Then there's Fed economist Laurie Pounder, who presents evidence that consumption smoothing (my favorite pastime) does in fact exist: "Households with high expected future income spend more today than households that have lower future income but identical current income and net worth. Omitting household-specific future income can cause mis-estimation of key consumption questions" (HT to Stumbling and Mumbling).

I will stay skeptical, but I appreciate the evidence that we act rationally more often than some of us might think.

Make DC green

2009-07-08T15:47:00.002-04:00

Carbonfree DC, an environmental group in the DC area that I belong to, is a finalist in a National Geographic competition. They have a great chance of winning $20,000 to green a low-income city block here in DC, but it will depend on how many votes they get. Currently of the 10 finalists, their vote count puts them in third place, but there are 12 days left to change that!

I urge everyone to go to Green Effect website and vote for the Carbonfree DC.

Misc links

2009-07-08T10:42:00.000-04:00

Reasons why the BMI is not a good measure of health.
The muriqui monkey, natures hippy, has a dark side when it's starved of sex.
Magic, sadly, cannot protect you from swine flu. It appears a few days of rest will though.

An unpopular comment on TED

2009-07-07T09:51:00.000-04:00

Am I the only one in the blog sphere that thinks the TED talks really aren't that good, and that most speakers are just rehashing other peoples work? Am I also the only one that thinks most of these people are really annoyingly smug during the talk?

Well, I did finally find one I liked. Check out this talk on the reason why geckos have tails. (HT to Freakonomics)

A paper by Paul Collier I like

2009-07-06T20:56:00.002-04:00

I have been critical of Collier's work before, but a new paper with him and Pedro Vicente, Votes and Violence: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Nigeria, is very interesting. They conduct an experiment in a random selection of neighborhoods in Nigeria using an anti-violence campaign during the 2007 general election.

They find that the program, no surprise, worked to reduce violence.

I am a little concerned though by their claim that "voter intimidation is effective in reducing voter turnout". I can't see how they can make such a strong claim on the results of the experiment. Yes, people in the treated communities voted more, but that could be a result of the additional attention on the election from the program. Certainly, more advertising for an election can bring out more people simply through the marketing effect.

Their sampling of what states to run the experiment in was also not random, but targeted toward the most violent states. We would expect the results of this experiment to be much larger than a scaled up program.

I also don't see any discussion of spillovers from the treated to the control neighborhoods. That though likely means their results could be biased downward.

Despite my critiques, I think its an interesting paper, and I am happy to offer some appreciation of the fine causal identification strategy.

Behind the times: Iran links

2009-07-04T15:59:00.000-04:00

These links are a little old, relatively speaking, but they're worth a look.

The Iranian elections are keeping people in Uganda nervous. I would be happy to see oil exploration end in Uganda as it is being done in one of the nicest parks in the country.
Is there evidence of vote rigging in the election results? Check the numbers. For more examples of how bad people are at faking numbers, check out Mind Hacks.

Misc links

2009-07-03T16:06:00.000-04:00

Choosing a career can be highly, and negatively, influenced by your friends.
Don't worry, a wandering mind is totally normal. I read War and Peace in 7th-8th grade, and I am sure I probably focused on only about half of the book. But that half was amazing.
Some good advice from Jonathan Shewchuk on giving an academic talk.
Obesity is not just a problem in the west. It looks like Uganda is feeling the problem as well.

Time to travel

2009-07-02T16:18:00.001-04:00

As usual, Strange Maps has a great post on travel distance. Rather than just shrinking the world, modern travel has actually warped space time:

Can good land use mitigate climate change?

2009-07-01T12:34:00.003-04:00

I just finished a new report from World Watch entitled Mitigating Climate Change Through Food and Land Use. It currently costs $12.95 to download, but I think its worth a read.

My interest was peaked with the discussion of how soil stores carbon. Improving land use is not a solution to greenhouse gases, but it does offer a reasonable short-term option, which is something the world desperately needs right now.

I was most interested in "climate-friendly livestock production", something I have argued against before. I wasn't sure what to expect from the report. Has a magic bullet for animal raising been found?

No. The answer, as always, is that "serious action on climate change will almost certainly require reductions in the global consumption of meat and dairy by today’s major consumers in industrial countries, as well as slowing the growth of demand in developing countries." Nutrient supplements, changes to feed, better manure management and even adding bacteria to the stomachs of cows all have some potential, but they only work on large farms, and they don't decrease the impact of animals by enough to justify the large quantities people in America eat.

There is no such thing as an environmentally friendly way to raise animals, especially cows. Only a decrease in consumption will have any real effect.

Climate change links

2009-06-30T15:46:00.002-04:00

I have heard the claim that CO2 is not a pollutant before. The problem is, its normally from nutty climate change denialists and those representing energy companies. Its disappointing to see it discussed seriously in the CS Monitor. (HT to UN Dispatch)
The US government has come out with a report on the effect of climate change on the US. New Scientist has an interactive map that shows the findings.
As I feared, the farm lobby got involved in the newest climate change bill and made a mockery of the issue. Americans pay less for food than anyone in the world by a large margin, and as a consequence we eat incredibly unhealthily, for ourselves and the environment. Its time to cut to welfare strings to big agriculture.

Meat recalls

2009-06-29T15:57:00.003-04:00

Most people don't really understand how the meat industry in America is regulated, or, that is, not regulated. For instance, a story entitled USDA Orders Largest Meat Recall in U.S. History from the Washington Post might give people the impression the USDA can actually order a recall.

It cannot.

Check out the report The USDA’s Authority to Recall Meat and Poultry Products, from The Congressional Research Service (CRS), a division of the Library of Congress. From the introduction to the report:

Currently, USDA does not have authority to mandate a recall of meat and poultry products. Rather, USDA, through FSIS, monitors food companies’ recalls. When FSIS learns of a potential recall, it convenes a recall committee, which makes recommendations based on information such as any pertinent production and distribution data provided by the company. Once the company initiates a recall, FSIS immediately issues a press release to notify the public, posts it on its website, and provides information directly to stakeholders — including Congress, the media, federal, state, and local officials, and constituents — via e-mail and faxes.

A little further on: "While USDA has statutory authority to prevent meat and poultry products from entering the food supply, it lacks authority to withdraw products already in the food supply."

All the USDA can do is a few inspections and inform people of voluntary recalls.

But surely businesses have the consumers health at heart, right? I mean, when was the last time you heard of a meat recall anyway? Vegetables get recalled all of the time.

The problem is, most people just don't hear about the recalls. For instance, did you know there have been 10 recalls of meat so far in June 2009 alone? And those are just the ones that are outstanding. Check out the full list at the FSIS active recalls. Then browse through the 53 archived from 2008.

Remember, these are only the ones the companies decided to tell us about.

High speed internet in Africa

2009-06-28T15:41:00.001-04:00

A high speed internet cable has come to Kenya, and, according to FP, we should see a lot more coming soon. I hope Kenya will be sharing: the desperate state of satellite internet in Uganda needs the boost.

The costs of the drug trade

2009-06-27T08:25:00.003-04:00

As I return to the US, the NYT has reminded me of the incredible violence happening because of the drug trade. Its a reminder that the insane violence in No Country For Old Men is not that far from reality.

Personally, I have no problem with marijuana. Its probably better for you than alcohol. But its not produced in any real quantity in the US, and so every time a person buys it, they are paying for this violence.

UN money at work

2009-06-26T08:18:00.001-04:00

This has been bothering me for 2 years now.

Here is the UNHCR compound in Gulu. Notice the two story hut in the middle.

That's not just any hut, its a bar, called the Cock and Bull. The UNHCR director built it a few years ago in order to practice running a bar for when he returned back to England.

The good news is it only cost $10,000 to build. I am not aware of anything the UN does for only $10,000.

Meat consumption in northern Uganda

2009-06-25T08:05:00.001-04:00

As we arrived in Anaka town last week, Deo, my research assistant jumped out of the car and, as if drawn by an invisible force, moved quickly towards a large drum with a pan on top of it. The drum then picked up my drivers curiosity, so I decided to follow as well.

Here is what I found when I go there:

I am told that is an entire goat in there.

It is no secret that I am a vegetarian, and I did find this personally distasteful, but I have trouble suggesting to an Acholi to give up meat. It is one of the most important parts of their nutrition, and so many are malnourished.

Some recent work I did on the effect of displacement in northern Uganda shows how bad the situation was. On average, those who were displaced, and so received all of their food from the WFP, ate meat 71% less frequently than those that were not displaced.

But the situation hasn't changed much. During our pre-testing of a questionnaire, no one we talked to had eaten meat in the last week.

Super micro businesses

2009-06-24T09:33:00.005-04:00

I presented my preliminary findings for the market survey of Gulu and Kitgum to AVSI yesterday. The comments were very positive, and the presentation generated a lot of interesting discussion about what businesses exist in Acholiland right now.

Some of the more interesting results:

The average seller used a starting capital of only 30,000 USH (less than $15).
The sellers make about 14,000 USH a week, or less than $1 a day.
The markets in Gulu are much more developed than in Kitgum, perhaps explaining why sellers in Gulu are making 50% more than those in Kitgum.
There are very few markets, and meat is very hard to find.
People that buy from the source and not a middleman are making 75% more a week.

I have posted the Power Point slides here. I welcome any comments. I expect to have a final report in the coming weeks.

Goodbye Gulu

2009-06-24T03:30:00.001-04:00

I have left Gulu for the last time on this trip. I always feel a
little sad to be leaving the place.

What is the carrying capacity of the Earth?

2009-06-23T07:10:00.002-04:00

This is a question that has plagued modern ecologists. I was not aware of the long history of the question though until reading a paper by Clark, Crutzen, and Schellnhuber. As they note:

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the great Dutch scholar, provided the first serious estimate on April 25, 1679, in Delft: 13.4 billion. Unfortunately—and most interestingly—the sequence of subsequent estimates does not converge to a well-defined number.

Here's a graphic with the different numbers people have come up with over time.

Its interesting that the mean is still near van Leeuwenhoek's number. My personal calculations, when working on a paper critical of the ecological footprint, suggests that using a footprint standard where carbon is sequestered by land, the Earth could easily sustain all 6.6 billion people, each consuming like Americans. Depending on how high crop yields can get (they are increasing at an incredible 2%+ per year for the last 40 years in Europe and the US), the number could be even higher.

Keep in mind this calculation is for every person consuming like Americans. If we just have an increase of the average world person, the Earth could sustain over 13.2 billion people, which is eerily close to van Leeuwenhoek. If we drop the idea that carbon can be sequestered, this number jumps considerably higher.

Fearing northern Uganda

2009-06-22T05:53:00.002-04:00

Chris Blattman recently blogged about the lack of knowledge Ugandans from the south have about the conditions in the north.

For me, the realization happened when on a bus from the capital to a city in the west two years ago. I got to talking to a Ugandan sitting in front of me. He was just back from Iraq (at last count, there were about 5,000 Ugandans working as security in Iraq) for vacation to visit his family.

When I mentioned I was living in Gulu, his eyes got big and he started shaking his head. "Those people are crazy" he said.

When I asked him why he was so worried about the place, especially since he was working in a war zone, he replied "In Iraq you can get used to the violence, but in Gulu, it can come any time".

Keep in mind, the last LRA attack in the area was over a year previous. but I get this fear from people from the south, even today.

Free development book

2009-06-21T05:44:00.003-04:00

That's what Charles Kenny is offering, along with the chance to offer some criticisms.

The book asks a larger question than just economic growth. On the "good life", he is very optimistic, especially about aid. "The good news...is that it does appear possible to extend global access to at least some elements of the good life, including health and education." An example is Onchocerciasis, a blindness caused by parasites. The international aid industry seems to have done a good job eradicating the disease.

I liked the books optimism, without being over the top, though he doesn't give much discussion to the problems of geography.

His view on the how Malthus has been proved wrong is also a little too optimistic. I personally think the fertility rate in Africa may make it difficult to develop as resources, including food, must be distributed more widely.

His discussion on the historical trajectory of countries is very interesting. I was not aware of this:

Ranking the 53 countries with 1820 and 2003 data, there is still a clear pattern –the average country has moved only ten places in the rankings over 183 years. Only six countries have managed to move out of the bottom half rankings into the top half during close to two centuries of economic change.

My favorite line is about the lack of optimism in development:

Why the right should have a monopoly on optimism is strange. Life, after all, has been getting better in a lot of countries that are unlikely to be shortlisted for the Ayn Rand Award for Doctrinaire Adherence to Laissez-Faire. Indeed, life has been getting better pretty much everywhere at pretty much the same rate –under (semi) socialist and (comparatively) free market regimes alike.

The ethics of ethicists

2009-06-20T05:27:00.004-04:00

A new paper out asks the question "are ethicists more ethical?" (HT to MR)

The results are a little surprising. When philosophers were asked to evaluate others ethical behavior, ethicists didn't do any better, and some were considered worse, than the average person. For instance, Kantians, for some reason, were seen to behave much worse than other ethicists.

It looks like training and thinking about ethics may not increase ethical actions. "Only a few (mostly ethicists) stood by the idea that the serious study of philosophical ethics is, on average, morally edifying".

Perhaps my favorite line of the paper:

Virtually everyone who received a questionnaire completed it. One respondent objected to the questionnaire on moral grounds...A number of people stole candy without completing a questionnaire or took more than their share without permission. One eminent Kantian ethicist grabbed a single Ghirardelli square in passing and announced, ‘I’m being evil!’ Unfortunately, we were unable to study this behaviour systematically.

Then there is the finding from one study mentioned in the paper that ethics books were more likely to be missing in libraries that non-ethics books. Is this like stealing a bible from a church?

I have some doubts about generalizing the findings too much though. As the authors note, "we are of course aware that responses are likely to be biased by a number of factors and at best represent beliefs based largely on behaviour as observed in professional contexts".

So, is the finding in fact that ethicists think other ethicists are in fact wrong? The authors make a comparison to economists who do not make optimal investment decisions. Economists though tend to disagree a lot with each other. One person's brilliant economist is another persons dolt. Is there also a lot of disagreement among ethicists? Perhaps this is simply measuring how much they disagree with each other.

Then there is the problem of judging ethical behavior. Knowing that someone is supposed to be trained as an ethicist, others might judge their one or two quirks harshly, or even too quickly. So, we may be looking at a very narrow definition of unethical.

I consider myself to be an especially ethical person. I have dedicate my life to fighting poverty and inequality. I do not (generally) steal, and I have not told a lie (even white) in about 10 years. Yes, this has been, as one friend once remarked, a "career limiting move", but I'm ok with that. I try to make it up in other ways.

While working on a semi-philosophical question of different forms of utilitarianism while an undergrad at ASU (check out rule versus act utilitarianism), I used to steal coffee. To be precise, I would buy a soda, drink some of the soda, then use the cup to get coffee. In the strict definition, this is stealing, and to some, it is unethical. Despite being a Kantian, I am not a fan of using hard set rules to live my life. My coffee stealing was a form of price descrimination. Einstein's Bagels couldn't do it efficiently (or legally), so I did it for them. I wouldn't have eaten there if I couldn't do it.

Now, I actually have an income, so I don't do this. But I don't apologize for my previous evil ways. If everyone were to do what I did, I think the economy, and larger society, would survive.

Links

2009-06-18T10:23:00.001-04:00

Taller people are happier and richer. (HT to Aid Watch)
According to the UNHCR, displaced populations are now at an all time high. Keep in mind though that the UN, in my experience, has done a very bad job of keeping track of populations in the past, and that now there are more people to be displaced. I wonder what the world per capita rate of displacement is? (HT to FP)
The value of a flat tax may be highly overblown, if we are to believe Russia's experience with it.
Does better health really encourage development?

The ethics of randomized trials

2009-06-16T12:18:00.000-04:00

Since the infamous social experiments of Milgram, the ethics of human subjects has become a hot point for researchers. By hot point I mean that we all moan and groan at having to go through the tedious application process of the institutional review board (IRB) that oversees all human subjects research.

Lest we think though that unethical use of human subjects is really just a problem of the past, a recent conflict over some work Jared Diamond did in Papua New Guinea should remind us all that this is still a serious issue.

Most researchers know that they should be careful with the people they are interviewing, but I find it strange that there is little (i.e. none that I can find) debate in the social sciences about the ethics of randomized evaluations. The benefits should by now be obvious to everyone, but why has there been no discussion about the costs?

Randomized evaluations have their roots in medical science. After 100 years of use though, there is still a debate among doctors about the ethics of randomizing. I see the debate as falling into two competing camps: the utilitarian (do the most good to the greatest number) and the Kantian (do not use people as a means to an end), with the Kantians winning in medicine. Patients who participate in medicine trials expect that they are not to be sacrificed for the sake of the trial. The World Medical Association in 1964 even declared that “concern for the interests of the subject must always prevail over the interests of science and society.”

There is also plenty of debate today still about the usefulness of randomized trials in medicine, and in statistics in general, but I am only aware of Dani Rodrick's excellent dissention for economists.

For me, oversubscription, while theoretically fine, is often used as a cruch. Sometimes programs purposefully look for oversubscription, but describe it as spontaneous in order to tell a more human story. Some researchers even suggest purposefully looking for it as a way to avoid legal troubles. Encouraging more people to apply though can reduce the average neediness of beneficiaries, especially if it is easier to reach better-off groups.

But why is oversubscription actually ethical? We would have to believe that everyone in the program deserves it equally, but that is rarely the case. Identifying the needy may not be easy, but we can do it, oftentimes at very little additional programing cost.

And when was the last time you heard of someone invoking the stopping rule for a social experiment?

There are potential solutions. Phasing in programs so that the control remains without the program for only a year or so is a way to be less heartless, but then it means asking people to wait for the program.

Of course, randomized experiments do have some positive effects. Most importantly, they can be used as a transparency tool, especially in programs that are already beset by corruption problems. Few can argue that a coin has been unfair to them, but the head of a program in a country beset by corruption is normally assumed to be biased.

I am a big fan of randomization. It is the best tool we have to answer questions that can at first seem incredibly difficult. But it is not the only way to evaluate a program or a hypothesis. I think a good debate about the ethics of randomization would serve both the public and the researchers in the end.

Iranian elections

2009-06-15T11:27:00.005-04:00

There's a lot of buzz around the internet suggesting that CNN has been doing a poor job of reporting on the Iranian elections, and that Twitter may be a better source of information.

To CNN, I would add that every other major news source is failing, except for Al Jazeera. Sitting in my hotel room here in Kampala, watching their televised English program, I am struck by how good the reporting has been. Everyone else seems to be at best repeating their reporting, and at worst shortening it so all of the useful information is lost (perhaps to make a very complex country more "digestible" for the average TV viewer?).

And for a good analysis of the insane idea that we could catch vote rigging through statistics, check out FiveThirtyEight.

Economists, the unfreindly presentations

2009-06-14T16:07:00.004-04:00

If you're not an economist and you've ever sat in on an academic economics talk, the experience can be a little unnerving.

I have been to a few economic presentations in my day, both as UC Irvine and the World Bank, that have gotten a little out of control in the badgering the presenter department. While it may sound heartless, looking back on it, I think it might just have been the optimal presentation method, given the material presented.

Brad DeLong is trying to defend such a method of interrupting the speaker during a talk. I think a good way of summarizing his point is that research is an interactive process. Passively sitting through a presentation and waiting for the end to ask questions may be more friendly, but it does little to improve the learning of everyone.

Development links

2009-06-13T16:17:00.004-04:00

From the NYT, food surpluses a few years ago, combined with the recent economic crisis, has lead to food research budgets being cut.
Heard of conflict diamonds? How about conflict metals?
New research on the agricultural impact of dams appears to confirm the conclusions of a great paper by Ester Duflo and Rohini Pande from a few years ago: those near the dam suffer, but those downstream benefit.
A new paper from Seema Jayachandran and Ilyana Kuziemko presents evidence that some of the missing girls in India may be due to breastfeeding practices.
NPR has an interesting story on behavioral economics approaches in the US, similar to programs often used in developing countries. Most interesting is the discussion about the difficulty of modeling irrational behavior in economics.

The future of Gulu town

2009-06-13T10:43:00.001-04:00

The view from my hotel shows a small range of the city.

In the foreground are pieces of some of the slums in the town. In the background is the hilly area refered to as quarters, where the old colonial seat was held. Just visible is the 5 floor addition to the luxury hotel being built, one of three luxury hotels in Gulu.

Now that peace is here, and emergency aid workers are leaving, I wonder who will fill these hotels? Will Sudanese traders pay $50 a night when they can find good housing for $10? Or will development aid workers move in to fill the supply?And if so, what will the place look like in 10 years?

Back to Gulu

2009-06-12T15:32:00.001-04:00

After a few days in the capital, I'm headed back up north to Gulu for a few days. It will be just enough time to miss the amazing Indian food in Kampala.

Misc links

2009-06-12T09:48:00.003-04:00

Photos of Sadam's palaces.
Ever wonder why you can't remember that ... what do you call it? Word, that's what I was thinking of. Honestly, this happens to me a lot. I even forgot my sisters name a few years ago at dinner with my family.
As usual, Strange Maps has a great collection of maps, from shipwrecks to the slow progress west of the mean U.S. population.
I was not aware that there was such a thing as sulfur mining. (HT to Freakonomics)
Another spoof paper has been accepted by a so called "refereed journal". I get a lot of unsolicited journal emails these days, and every one goes to the trash.

Environmental links

2009-06-11T11:37:00.001-04:00

It looks like canned and frozen vegies have about the same environmental impact.
When the full infrastructure system of different transport methods is included in analysis, it looks like trains may be worse than planes.
A discussion of the economic impact of climate change.

Critical mass of bloggers

2009-06-10T14:44:00.003-04:00

Do you need shoes? Tired of having to wait to get to the store to buy them? Why not pick some up while in traffic? That's what the lady in front of us today did at least.

The best part of this is that I am in a hotel, next door to Chris Blattman, who just posted about the traffic in Kampala.

Chris remarked on the way into town that the new evaluation he's working on may have the highest ratio of bloggers to researchers in history. In one car coming from Gulu there were four people: the driver, him, me, and a reporter from Freakonomics. Is there such a thing as too many bloggers in one car? I think not.

The businesses of the poor

2009-06-10T12:20:00.009-04:00

I'm back in Kampala for a few days, and that means I now have internet access again.

The last few days I've been working with an NGO in northern Uganda, AVSI, to explore the businesses in Acholiland. After 10 plus years of conflict, the people are beginning to return home from the IDP camps, many of them with very little (I have a working paper on the economic impact of the displacement of the people here, though it is still incomplete).

AVSI is starting a program, to be evaluated by Chris Blattman, where the most vulnerable individuals in the communities are given very small amounts of money, between $40 - $150, to begin small businesses.

The problem is there is not a lot of information on what businesses exist, how well they are doing, and what kind of business gives the best return. The government is supposed to have an idea, though when I spoke to some officials in Gulu they seemed unaware that someone could start a business with that little of money.

So I am here trying to figure out the state of what can only be called super-micro-enterprises. What are examples of SMEs? They're run by mostly women, and some start with as little as $10 in capital. The most popular are fish and vegetable sellers. Here's one of my ennumerators interviewing a woman in a market about 30 minutes outside of Gulu. This is her entire inventory. She makes enough in profit to cover some of her home expenses, and not much else.

The market is incredibly small, with maybe 20 businesses in total.

The markets though do get smaller. Here's Tesobar market, 40 minutes outside of Kitgum. In total, we found 6 businesses that cover about 4 villages, with around 100 people per village.

Obviously there's a lot of potential for expanding businesses, though most people don't have the money to buy from the sellers, and even more don't have the $10 to start a business. In many of the villages, if someone wants to buy some small vegetables, they have to walk 2-3 hours to the main sub-county market.

My work right now is to simply document the business prescence in some of Gulu and Kitgum districts. In the coming weeks I hope to get an idea of whats there, and what businesses are optimal for the very poor to begin.

For instance, this kind of small selling doesn't have as much profit as rearing goats, chickens or pigs, but it does have the benefit of a high turnover of cash. People can realize a modest return in a short time, and then have some extra cash to cover any needs their household may have.

Part of the shortage of businesses is that many people have only returned home in the last 3-6 months. While there is very little in the villages right now, there is a positive side: the place is beautiful. Here is one of the homesteads in Palwo parish, near Ogilii mountain.

I'll have a more detailed report in the next couple of days.

Environmental impact of cities

2009-06-03T10:57:00.002-04:00

This probably won't come as a huge surprise to anyone, but people that live closer to the center of cities drive less, and emit less CO2, than those that live farther away. Keep in mind though that some people have argued that cities have huge footprints, and that this is somehow bad.

These two graphs though make the difference between total CO2 production versus per household production clear:

HT to Tree Hugger

Sci-fi econ nerds unite

2009-06-02T10:45:00.000-04:00

I must add my voice to economists (Hal Varian most recently, along with Roger Myerson and Paul Krugman) admitting that Isaac Asimov’s Foundations Trilogy was a favorite of mine when I was young. Sadly, I have turned out to be no where near the quality of theorist these men are.

Since reading it the first time, I have become a literary snob (yes, James Joyce’s Ulysses is my favorite novel), so I must agree with Sandeep Baliga when he says "I enjoyed reading the first book in the trilogy and it’s clear how it might excite a teenage boy with an aptitude for maths. The next two books are much worse. I struggled through them just to find out how it all ended. Perhaps I read them when I was too old to appreciate them."

Economic effects of climate change

2009-06-01T11:36:00.002-04:00

There are two interesting links on the effects of climate change out this week:

A new report suggests that 500,000 people may die from climate change in 2030, and that 300,000 already have. (HT to New Scientist)
Richard Tol has a paper out summarizing the literature on the economic impact of climate change. I may be behind the times here, but I thought $10 per tonne was the norm. It looks like $50 per tonne is actually more accurate.

No reason to do nothing

2009-05-31T14:12:00.003-04:00

Greg Mankiw, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for George W. Bush, seems to think there was "logic for not doing much to address global climate change" during the Bush years.

What was this logic? He leaves it up to Keith Hennessey to summarize. The key piece of logic, I suppose, comes here:

I believe there is a small but non-trivial risk that there will be severe climate change over the next century or two. And so I am willing to consider significant and effective policy actions to slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions to reduce that risk. I do not, however, believe that risk is so great or so certain that we must immediately commit to drastic changes in our economy, or that we must ignore the costs of those policy actions. I treat this like any other policy question: Given tremendous quantitative uncertainty, what are the marginal costs and benefits of our current emissions path, compared with various recommended policy options?

Everything that follows from this statement is reasonable, but, as I feared, the logic of Hennessey, and the previous administration, was based on lack of any logic. It was in fact the assumption that they, and not the many, many scientists who disagreed with them, somehow knew that the risk was not really that great.

I'm not going to list the entire literature on the range of possible climate change outcomes. Its big, and no one is sure of the outcome. I'll just let Martin Hellman remind us that people don't do a good job of dealing with low probability, high risk events. (HT to Freakonomics)

Geography versus rulers

2009-05-30T13:54:00.005-04:00

I don't want to get involved with the (more) recent Easterly and Sachs debate, but Easterly has made a bold claim:

The other problem with Sach’s geography story is that it has already been refuted by other economists. The consensus among several academic papers is that destructive governments rather than destructive geography explains the poverty of nations. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2006), Easterly and Levine (2003), and Rodrik, Subramanian, and Trebbi (2004) all tested the geography story against the institutions story and came down on the side of institutions.

This is most certainly not the consensus.

First, the Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson paper has so many data issues, I would suggest it just stop being referenced in policy debates.

Second, the recent evidence is strongly against institutions and rule of law being more important than geography. Specifically, institutions are not robust to specifications and controls.

While I respect the work of many people on both sides of this issue, this response from Easterly seems similar to, as I have noted previously, the response from the institutions group to the mounting evidence for the geography camp: ignore that there is even a debate.

Francis Bacon

2009-05-30T10:31:00.000-04:00

My love of the work of Irish painter Francis Bacon has even frightened me on occasion. For much of college I had posters of his work on my walls, which lead to more than one conversation with people about how I could sleep with "it watching me".

I got to see a lot of his stuff in Dublin, including his studio. Luckily, a little closer to my new home, the Metropolitan Museum of Art now has a retrospective of his works. I have to agree with much of what the reviewer at the NYT says, if for nothing else than the immensely appropriate article title If Paintings Had Voices, Francis Bacon’s Would Shriek.

Besides the grotesque, what Bacon excelled at was movement. Peter Schjeldahl at the New Yorker admits to not liking Bacon's work, but in the end even he has to agree it has power. Perhaps the best way to sum up Bacon is as Schjeldahl does:

Bacon's paintings objectify the subjective ordeal of perishing bodies that harbor immortal longings. In this, the paintings are indeed great, standing for a [sic] historical condition even of people who can't abide them.

Bacon often graphically depicted homosexual love, but to me the work speaks to the passion and insanity of any kind of love, even that which is unrequited.

To Uganda, once again

2009-05-29T08:56:00.000-04:00

I am traveling to Uganda from May 29 until the end of June to work on a few projects. Posts will be more delayed than normal and will include a lot of updates on my field work.

Recent trip to Polyface farms

2009-05-27T23:55:00.000-04:00

I recently visited Polyface Farms in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. For those not familiar with the farm, run by Joel Salatin, I suggest the book Omnivore's Dilemma, which gives a great description of it.

What makes Polyface so interesting is the complete disregard for modern industrial farming practices. Joel makes a big deal about the moral aspects of his farming, and I have to say that, after seeing it myself, I have to agree. If I ate meat, I would only eat meat from Polyface. What makes the place so amazing is the symbiosis between the land and the animals.

That of course does not make it perfect. In fact, my visit has only confirmed my fears that Polyface, despite the claims of Joel, is not a sustainable or scalable model. Beyond the problem that the Shenandoah Valley is a very unique and amazing place to farm, the method is not as clean as many would like to believe. What follows are some photos and notes from the tour.

Chickens

The eggs are laid by hens in the "egg mobile", who are totally free to move around.

Here we see Joel moving the broiler cages. All of the chickens feed off the land with a supplemental protein feed mix. Moving the cage ensures that the animals are picking up fresh bugs, etc. from the ground, as well as interacting with the land in a more natural way than factory farmed chickens. There's no wasted time or infrastructure from scooping chicken waste.

While its great that the birds have actual contact with grass, it's not sustainable. Polyface does not raise the birds in winter, and so must buy eggs from other farms to replenish their stock each year. Each chicken on the farm was thus the child of a factory raised bird. Without a (very) small scale home farm, there's no way to keep the chickens 365 days a year like this.

So, buying Polyface chickens is best for the birds on Polyface farms, but it still means a factory life, and the promotion of a factory life, for other birds.

Cattle

Here we see Joel with his prized cattle. These are 100% grass fed for their entire lives. From watching them slowly move across the land, its not a bad life either.

Like all of the animals on Polyface, the cattle are a natural part of the land, not something that simply extracts from it, but also adding back. There are though at least three major problems with this system of raising animals.

First, as I have previously mentioned, there is the problem of land needed to raise cattle. In a factory farm, cows live for 400 days, yield 300 kgs of beef and requires 20.9 square meters of land per kg of beef. That's about 1.5 acres per cow per 400 days.

According to Joel (from the best of three answers I got about the raising of the animals), the land needs for the cattle on Polyface is 400 cow days per acre. The problem is that time to slaughter on Polyface takes 20-29 months. That's twice the lifespan of a factory cow, and so they take 33% more land. Pastoral cattle though normally produce about half the meat of a factory farm cattle, which makes this even worse. I don't know the final weight of the animal at Polyface, but this means a pound of Polyface beef takes at least 33% to as much as 167% as much land to produce. Given we are already using a lot of land to produce the meat people are already eating, this would not be a sustainable increase.

Second, in conjunction with the land needs, and along with the added costs of 100% grass farming, there is the price. A pound of beef at Polyface starts at $4.25 for ground beef and goes up from there. Average ground beef in the U.S. is about $2.50, going as low as $1.00.

The benefit of this is that Polyface beef is probably priced much closer to the real social price of beef, so I have no problem with the price. Scaling up of such a program, which Joel thinks is feasible, means that the days of $1 burgers at McDonalds would be gone. Again, fine with me, but there is no way Americans will be able to afford the amount of beef they eat now.

Finally, there is the environmental impact of the cows. I have gotten some letters from grass farmers in California and have responded to some concerns in the latest Scientific American letters section. The short of it is that pastoral cows are in fact still a major source of greenhouse gases, and they do not solve environmental issues.

One interesting note from Joel on the tour was his reference to the environmental benefits of grass farming. Specifically, to Carbon Farmers of America. This is where I must point out the disappointing part of Joel's rhetorical technique: his hatred of science, and (despite this) his dealing in absolutes.

During the tour, Joel made the claim that grass farming can sequester all of the carbon mankind is producing. This makes his farming method something of a panacea for the environment. Sadly, there is no evidence that sequestration works, or that grass farming can solve so much. The science is weak, and the numbers don't add up.

In Conclusion

Despite my above critiques, I stand by the farming methods of Polyface farms, but not for the reasons Joel and other grass farmers would have us believe. 300 million Americans cannot each eat 92 pounds of beef a year and get it from environmentally or morally friendly sources. Polyface is the only future of farming that has any moral grounding, and it means everyone eats a lot less meat.

Post-conflict development in America

2009-05-27T10:12:00.001-04:00

One of the hardest parts of providing a successful development project in a post-conflict area is how to help the people move past the conflict and begin rebuilding their lives. This is the story in Africa at least, where truth commissions and forgiveness is billed as an important step toward rebuilding the country.

Why, though, do we not do the same in America? From the DOJ, the U.S. prison population is exploding:

The U.S. is not a developing country, and we are not overcoming a recent civil war, but the magnitude of this is huge.

From my own research, I have found that all of the growth of the U.S. economy in 2002 was in fact from increased military and correctional spending. Once we take out the real spending increases for broad security, U.S. GDP and GDP growth no longer looks as good as we had thought back when we thought we were doing well. In fact, we lose about one-fifth of our economic growth we thought we had during the Bush administration.

This is not money we need to be spending. No matter what your political beliefs are, I think we can all agree that if we can find a cheaper way to ensure our domestic and international security, we would be much better off.

A new book by Sunny Schwartz, reviewed in the New York Review of Books, may give us a way out. The U.S. relies on punishment of offenders, but a new method, called restorative justice,

is based on the concept prevalent in more traditional societies that offenders must also try to repair, as far as possible, the harm they have caused others. In order to do this, offenders must first confront what they have done, and then make amends to their families, their communities, and, if possible, their victims as well.

Not to simplify too much, but this sounds a lot like a truth commission for U.S. inmates. I like the idea a lot, and I hope the evaluation cited in the article generalizes to a larger population. I also hope this is the beginning of the a new trend where the U.S. stops trying to tell the world to do one thing, while we in fact do the opposite.

Unconditional cash transfers

2009-05-26T11:22:00.000-04:00

Laura Freschi at Aid Watch makes the case for unconditional cash transfers. While I do not believe the poor always make good decisions with their money, I agree they are probably more likely to know what to do with it than an NGO worker that recently arrived on the scene.

For instance, a few years ago NGOs in northern Uganda were handing out free anti-bacterial soap to IDPs. They cost about $2 each bar. When I went to a small shop in one of the camps, I found a bunch of the bars on sale for less than $1. People had been selling the bars to the shops for (of course) less than that because they did not value the soap as much as what they could get with the small money from selling them. The NGOs had the needs of the people wrong.

Of course, there's no way to tell how much of the soap money made it to the local alcohol brewers ...

Environmental links

2009-05-25T15:48:00.000-04:00

Paul Krugman makes an interesting argument in favor of cap and trade over a carbon tax. I have to agree with this line: "think about how hard it would be to verify whether China was really implementing a promise to tax carbon emissions, as opposed to letting factory owners with the right connections off the hook. By contrast, it would be fairly easy to determine whether China was holding its total emissions below agreed-upon levels."
Tree Hugger links to a story at USA Today about Indiana paying $4.5 million to clean up a hog farm waste lagoon.
It looks like a town council in Ghent, Belgium has declared Thursday to be meatless. (HT to Bitten)

Eclectic links

2009-05-24T14:58:00.000-04:00

In addition to the recent finding that there are 14 original African groups, it looks like all non-Africans are related to just one of these, which migrated across the Red Sea 70,000 years ago.
Are some raindrops falling faster than we thought? This actually could be important for rainfall measures.
From MR, a labor perspective on Chinese versus English kiln history.
Are mass extinctions caused by cosmic rays? The original paper is here.
Subways drawn to scale. HT to FP.
Saving the best for last, the NYT has an article for those curious about the origin of the most perfect sauce in the world: Sriracha.

The newest doctor

2009-05-21T12:14:00.002-04:00

I haven't had the chance to post much the last few days because I've been in Irvine finishing up my PhD. On the morning of May 20th, I officially got all of my signatures and delivered the paperwork.

I am done!

More on soot

2009-05-18T23:19:00.001-04:00

I recently mentioned the problems of black carbon. A reader of this blog points to a cute video explaining the problem, and a simple way for individuals to take action.

History versus geography

2009-05-17T14:29:00.001-04:00

I spoke previously about the debate between those that argue that institutions matter, versus those that believe geography is the most important determinant of current income.

As the evidence seems to point squarely to the geography camp right now, the response from the institutions group has been to ... completely ignore that there is a debate. The core of the institutions camp, Daron Acemoglu, Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, have a new paper on the importance of Napoleon's spreading institutional changes when invading Europe. While an interesting idea, I am sad to see they don't have any controls for the geography of the parts of Prussia invaded.

Nathan Nunn also has a nice summary of what the institutions argument is about. Geography though comes in only at the end, and looks rather weak when he claims it has been controled for in many studies.

The evidence is not weak: geography, especially malaria ecology, trumps when correctly controled for.

Sachs is correct though when he argues that the variable of interest, GDP today, is incomplete. Why is GDP growth never looked at?

These are the things going through my mind for the last few days as I have been finanlizing my dissertation, which partially looks at this issue. Pouring through the data, I can't find any evidence for the claims of the importance of colonial origins for current GDP growth rates, or even any out of sample evidence of current GDP.

I don't want to write a paper about this. I really just want the work using colonial origins as an instrument for institutions to end. The evidence is clear that the data is flawed, and the results do not hold up to different sample specifications.

Does microfinance help?

2009-05-16T14:29:00.000-04:00

IPA points to a recent article in the Times Online that argues the craze over microfinance is ending.

Personally, I have always been skeptical of it. Anecdotes from friends that (used) to work at Kiva in Uganda suggest that the poor get no business help or training, and so often have no idea if their small businesses are profitable (many are not). Some are then caught with having to refinance their original loans indefinitely. Yunus was wrong, the poor do not have the innate ability for business. They may have the desire, but for many the skills are lacking.

I have not lost all hope. Caitlin Weaver at IPA is right to note that microfinance has a lot of uses beyond just solving poverty. Oftentimes it serves nothing more than keeping a family afloat. I have also personally seen when giving money to the right person can really pay off for them amnd their family.

The Times Online is correct though that the end goal, of ending poverty, is not necessarily being served by microfinance. I am writing up a project now to look at what mechanisms can help individual businesses improve, whether grant or loans. Specifically, I want to know how important impatience, credit and savings constraints are, and whether they can be solved through simple carrot (bonus funds at the end) or stick (community oversight and income accountability) mechanisms.

The end idea is to look at how to help grow a microbusiness (no employees) into a small business (a few employees).

Some environmental links

2009-05-15T14:36:00.004-04:00

Economists View expresses some doubts that we can trust corporate responsiblity for the environment. This also reminds me of problems I have had with "creative capitalism", a term used to describe for profit businesses partnering with development agencies, devised by Bill Gates.
While I think cap and trade is a second or third best option (FP breaks it down simply here), Matthew Yglesias reminds us that the best option, a tax, could be designed by congress much, much worse.
Of course, most Americans think cap and trade refers to Wall Street.
But then there is new news that a good carbon tax idea may be coming from the Republicans of all people. I like the idea of a payroll tax cut to make it "tax neutral" as the point is not really to make money. (Finally I agree with Mankiw about something)
I was not familiar with the term "black carbon", which refers to the soot from cooking stoves until a NYT article on it, linked by UN Dispatch. I am a big fan of solar cookers, though the upfront costs are high. This graphic suggests it may be worth it though:

Collier and data mining

2009-05-14T01:05:00.003-04:00

I am happy to report that my post from a few days ago on the problems of causality in Paul Collier's new book has received some attention in the econ blog sphere. MR linked to it, and Aid Watch delves much deeper into possible data mining.

An ASU exclusive

2009-05-13T21:32:00.003-04:00

The Daily Show just did a special report on Arizona State University's (my Alma Mater) refusal to give Barak Obama an honorary degree.

ASU has gotten hit a lot, much of it well deserved (take the Simpsons quote when Flanders thinks Homer has gotten into heave: "I guess heaven's easier to get into than Arizona State!"). It is though a good school in a lot of ways, and if you care about your education, you can get a good one.

(Of course, I don't agree with the econ department's practice of hiring cooky Nobel Prize winners to increase their ranking)

Oil industry special

2009-05-12T14:07:00.001-04:00

Economists View points to a great video from the 1950s explaining the virtues of oil and competition to a Martian visitor. Note how clean the oil extraction process is made to look. If you need only one reason to see There will be Blood, it is for the (literally) dirty history of oil exploration.

Then there is a new Chevron video, brought to us by Tree Hugger, that argues that they are innocent of the environmental problems caused by their oil fields in Ecuador. I really enjoy the pseudo journalist editing that focuses on everyone but the victims.

I must admit to being very biased in the issue. When told by a World Bank employee that Chevron was "one of the finest companies on the planet" recently, and then immediately having a Chevron representative tell me that complaints against Debeers in Africa and other diamond companies was over done because "didn't Debeers do good? Can't we find things they did that were of social value to local communities?", I realized I needed a shower to clean off the guilt.

Who should do aid?

2009-05-12T00:10:00.005-04:00

Scott MacLennan, over at Aid Watch, makes an interesting argument for small NGOs:

Only small NGOs it seems are able to actually get out in the field and get their hands dirty making things happen. Past a certain size (what is that size?) the demands for official looking papers, reports, audits and the like overshadow the demand to actually provide aid. Large donors are just too caught up in the appearance of good business and good government. Form without substance.

I agree that there is a problem here, but I'm not sure if I agree with his interpretation of the origin of the problem. In my experience, large NGOs and governments often run into a per diem issue where locals can have big expectations of field per diem pay. This can lead to massive overhead budgets. Small NGOs can get away with the argument that they can't afford to pay much, especially those NGOs run by locals, or volunteer international staff. The big guys, in the interest of "attracting the best people" end up with huge overheads.

I definitely don't buy though that "NGOs with barely enough budget to survive have little motivation and opportunity to corrupt the process". The NGOs may not, but the individuals, who are being paid very small amounts, definitely have incentives to be corrupt. Why aren't they then more corrupt?

I think there may be a causality problem here: individuals may be watched more easily in small NGOs, or perhaps better people are in fact attracted to the lower pay places. For example, there are a lot of NGOs in northern Uganda that I wouldn't work for at any price, but some of the smaller are full of dedicated people, but make half as much as everyone else. Because I know it takes a dedicated person to be paid so little, I am more likely to work for them. Low pay then becomes a signal.

Do you know what your publisher is doing right now?

2009-05-10T13:41:00.001-04:00

How about gun sales.

It looks like a few years ago Reed Elsevier, one of the biggest publishers of scientific journals, was in the international arms fair business. In June 2007 they pulled out after pressure. Check out a short description from the Campaign Against Arms Trade.

I found the link on a post over at Bad Science about how Elsevier has also been publishing drug company fanzines. Seems they made a "special edition" dedicated to the drugs Vioxx and Fosamax.

For those of us worried that drug companies were taking over medical scientists, we were thinking too small. They're also taking over science journals.

Post Conflicted

Back in Uganda

Economic development, Sherlock Holmes and medical science

E coli outbreak

Roman history

More odd links

Strange links

Is the OLPC dead?

Big brother is powerless

California wildfires

Feeling rejected?

Problems with econ blogs

Navigating a menu

Income and intelligence

Women and the LRA

Polyface Farms

How can you kill your brother?

US economic mobility

Two odd environmental links

Organic versus factory food

Microfinance

More strange links

Chevy Volt, you are no Prius (or Tesla either)

When theorists talk about randomization

Northern Uganda market survey

Palin's resignation speach

A comic book about the Ugandan civil war. Really.

Maps, maps, maps and more maps

Pro bono economics

Academics and randomized trials

Immigration and climate change

Envrionmental links

Randomized trial in Uganda

Slow posting

Misc links

Books I'm reading now

Academic hustlers

Is there intelligent life out there?

Financial economics

Why modern media is so bad

The best we can do is love our crooked neighbors with our crooked hearts

Are depressions bad, or just necessary?

Low variance or convenience?

Is organic efficient?

Misc links

A white mans burden

Do people behave optimally?

Make DC green

Misc links

An unpopular comment on TED

A paper by Paul Collier I like

Behind the times: Iran links

Misc links

Time to travel

Can good land use mitigate climate change?

Climate change links

Meat recalls

High speed internet in Africa

The costs of the drug trade

UN money at work

Meat consumption in northern Uganda

Super micro businesses

Goodbye Gulu

What is the carrying capacity of the Earth?

Fearing northern Uganda

Free development book

The ethics of ethicists

Links

The ethics of randomized trials

Iranian elections

Economists, the unfreindly presentations

Development links

The future of Gulu town

Back to Gulu

Misc links

Environmental links

Critical mass of bloggers

The businesses of the poor

Environmental impact of cities

Sci-fi econ nerds unite