What I learned from reading the Marginal Revolution magazine

(This post was written April 2013 and I'm not sure why it wasn't posted then)

I've been interested by the occasional posts by people who read a magazine cover to cover, then report on what they learned. These couple next posts are based loosely on that idea. I've been thoroughly busy and stressed this semester without much time for semi-curricular reading, which means the posts have been piling up in my reader.

While our NUC accreditors were at AUN, though, I needed to be on-call to answer questions. Completely unable to concentrate on research writing, I did a lot of reading. Below are a few of the things I learned reading every post from a few weeks' worth of Marginal Revolution:

LDS Aid in Ethiopia - 1984

I've been reading up on how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown in Nigeria. In the process, I found an interesting article from the 1988 August Ensign talking about the church's efforts during the 1984 Ethiopia famine and other aid projects. In response to the famine in Ethiopia, the Church sent out a special request for the entire membership to go without food or water for 24 hours (a fast) and give the money they would have spent or more specifically to help the people in Ethiopia:

Big Bag of Ethical Endorsements

Tabarrok endorses GiveWell's endorsement of the Against Malaria Foundation as a good charity to give money to. This sparked a debate in the comments about whether you should really give money to just one charity or to many and why we give in the first place. One argument (Landsburg's) says that if your contribution is small relative to the size of their total budget and if you are primarily seeking to do the most good with your money, you should only invest in one charity. Your small donation won't run into diminishing marginal returns, so there's no reason to diversify. On  the other hand, if you are concerned about other things, you may want to do something else:

• if I receive increasing marginal utility to the number of organizations I give to (up to a point), then I'd rather give a small amount to several organizations than a larger amount to only one; [translation: I feel like I'm a better human being because I give to 10 organizations than if I only donated to one]
• if I am uncertain which problem is the worst, it makes sense to donate to several organizations working on different problems (say, measles, climate change, and gender discrimination); [Note: if this is your difficulty, you might want to check out the Copenhagen Consensus, whose Nobel Laureate panel agreed child hunger was global problem #1)

Boudreaux meanwhile endorses Caplan on the perceived moral difference between nepotism and nationalism:

Despite its mighty evolutionary basis, almost everyone recognizes moral strictures against familial favoritism.  Almost everyone knows that “It would help my son” is not a good reason to commit murder, break someone’s arm, or steal. ...
Nationalism, in contrast, is widely seen as an acceptable excuse for horrific crimes against outgroups.  Do you plan to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent foreign civilians?  Just say, “It will save American [German/Japanese/Russian/whatever] lives” – and other members of your tribe will nod their heads.  Do you want to deprive millions of foreigners of the basic human rights to sell their labor to willing buyers, rent apartments from willing landlords, and buy groceries from willing merchants?  Just say, “It’s necessary to protect American jobs” in a self-righteous tone, then bask in the admiration of your fellow citizens.

Yglesias endorses cash donations, even as a way to teach children about the value of giving well:

Food drives do teach a lot of valuable lessons to kids. Until, that is, you learn that giving $10 will buy twenty times as much food for poor people aswould donating $10 worth of canned goods. Once you actually know the facts, then all it seems like you're doing is teaching kids to be too lazy to scrutinize the world. ... We shouldn't be teaching kids that it's okay to be indifferent between helping one family and helping twenty families. It's a huge difference!

Cook endorses de Tocqueville:

The greatest advantage of religion is to inspire … principles. There is no religion which does not place the object of man’s desires above and beyond the treasure of earth, and which does not naturally raise his soul to regions far above those of the senses.

Because in part that is my tradition as well, I wondered at Wronging Rights  perceiving religion solely as being in conflict with human rights. I pointed out in my comments that this in part stems from a confusion about what is meant by "religion". I wrote in part:

Big Bag of Africa: Agriculture and Millennium Villages

A new paper is out that finds almost zero impact from the Millennium Villages Project. Wanjala and Muradian surveyed Kenyan MVP recipients and their non-recipient neighbors in the district and found that while "the project caused a 70% increase in agricultural productivity among the treated households, tending to increase household income, it also caused less diversification of household economic activity into profitable non-farm employment, tending to decrease household income." To say Clemens cheers would not do his sentiments justice, but Blattman certainly has a more skeptical take on the paper. He shows that there may be a problem with their evaluation strategy, effectively matching away the most important gains. If so, then "MVs actually raise incomes by 10% and assets by a third." The cordial debate between Clemens and Blattman on the latter's blog is impressive and worth reading. (HT: The .Plan that got it from MR, who got it from CGD, which is where I ought to have read it in the first place.)

Record heat in Zimbabwe killed several hundred livestock recently due to lack of water and good grazing land. Climate change is of course suspected to have contributed. The difficulty is in identifying how many cattle would have died had temperatures been just 1 degree Celsius less, or how much more likely this event was as a result of climate change.

In Nigeria, there are increasing tensions between cattle-herders and farmers in Abia as cattle are reported to have destroyed crops worth millions of Naira (tens of thousands of US dollars). Note, the article has a heavy pro-farmer bias.

Closer to my home, a new national government program in Adamawa State hopes to increase farmer yields by 300% with improved varieties of sorghum. The project is led by Prof. Babtunde Obilana, who plans that the government will buy more of the sorghum to use for its school feeding program.

Meanwhile, the LDS Church has a third stake in Port Harcourt. A stake is a group of congregations, and this means that church membership in and around Port Harcourt has grown by around 50% since 2002 when the last stake was created. It is very likely that new stakes will also be formed in Benin City, where the three current stakes have grown to some of the largest in the Church worldwide and could easily be split into 5-6 stakes.

Mozambique's national statistics arm has a new report showing that 99.9% of their agriculture is for subsistence only.

Botswana's government tries to make sure that government subsidies don't go to farms that are not being actively used, a process called black listing. This article discusses blacklisting figures for the last few years and the costs involved.

Big Bag of Development: Signalling commitment and WWGD

How do you signal your commitment? This is one of the big questions in my own research, and there are two interesting recent answers:

1. Pakistan has begun to normalize trade relations with India. India had granted most favored nation (MFN) status to Pakistan in the mid-90s. In addition to the real effects from open trade, this is a costly signal of, I hope, better things in the future.

2. The Center for Global Development has an index measuring developed countries' commitment to development. I had heard of the index before, but it is now apparently more interactive, allowing you to see at a glance why countries scored what they did, comparing where each is strong and weak. Factors that go into it include amount and quality of foreign assistance (aid), trade, allowing in migrants, not selling weapons to unstable states, and others. Also handily, you can break the index down not only by component, but by region: how committed is this country or that to development in Africa vs. in Southeast Asia?  Barder and Roodman discuss.

A glorious World Bank paper that is almost certain to make its way into my intermediate microeconomics final this year (if you're a student reading this, you're welcome and thanks for reading) uses the language of income and substitution effects to demonstrate the different impacts that conditional cash transfers have vs. if they were only unconditional cash transfers. That is, how much more do we get for our conditions? By their argument, the cash transfer is an income effect and the conditionality is a substitution effect. Part one of a two part series by the authors of the paper.

Barder also shares some thoughts on an interesting development question: What Would Google Do? Specifically, how would Google run aid coordination/collaboration/correlation efforts? The answer is remarkably obvious when framed that way: set up one repository like a Google document or map to which every aid agency contributes. Instead of trying to hound down every possible aid agency that might or might not be working in your area before you deploy, you go to the one website and see if your planned measles vaccination project has already been done or is being planned by another group. More resources go where they are more needed and there is greater accountability.

LDS Aid

Two professors, one a Cornell-trained BYU professor of nutrition, have been working to improve the Atmit porridge that is often given out in LDS care packages. The hope is that it will be even better for small children with a better mix of micronutrients (particularly more iron) but without compromising on shelf-life. Another article describes its dissemination in poor areas of Peru.

A single serving provides 34 percent of the recommended daily allowance of protein, 43 percent of calcium, 99 percent of iron, and high percentages for a dozen vitamins and minerals for children under 5 years old. ... 
In 2010, 645,000 pounds of Atmit were shipped by LDS Charities to four countries. Depending upon the age and size of the children, that's enough to feed 100,000 to 130,000 children for one month. The cost? Less than $6 (USD) per child.

LDS efforts to help those suffering from the famine in the Horn of Africa:

In Ethiopia, projects to aid more than 100,000 refugees are under way, including water tanks, trucking services, sanitation supplies and hygiene training for 15 villages; supplementary food for 8,700 malnourished children; nutrition centers and sanitation facilities for Somali refugees in Dollo Ado; and 5,000 hygiene kits.
The Church also plans to provide water catchment and storage structures, as well as soap and washbasins to serve tens of thousands of other residents in the communities surrounding the Dollo Ado camps.

Other projects in Kenya, Uganda, and Somalia are also underway and briefly described at the link.



At the most recent General Conference, Church President Thomas S. Monson reminded members about the General Temple Patron Fund. Donations from members around the world are used to help members who live far from a temple travel there. A recent article highlighted some of the saints in southeastern Africa who have been blessed by the Fund:

Perpetual Education Fund facts

The Perpetual Education Fund is essential a microfinance operation run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). It provides small education loans to LDS return missionaries in Latin America and a few other countries. They repay the loan with minimal interest (somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-2% annual) so the funds can be used to help someone else.

For those of you having trouble downloading the graphic, it shows there have been 46,000 participants in the program's first 10 years in 45 countries. The average education program takes 2.5 years. Slightly more than half of the participants are women. The average loan goes to a 24 year old who triples or quintuples their income.

(Edit 2019 - I'm not sure why this is the post that has attracted the most spam comments, but it seems to be a magnet. I apologize for their behavior.)

LDS service in Latin America

In Seamay, Guatemala:

A retired civil engineer, Elder Curtiss supervised the construction of a water tank that helped bring water into the homes of the 2,000 villagers, who had never had running water in their homes [right]. In the meantime, he and his wife taught sanitation classes at the Church and helped begin construction on a new school that will soon have a library and a computer lab. While the Church paid for the water tank and facilitated construction of the school, the villagers did the labor themselves, which Elder Curtiss says helped them feel ownership of the changes occurring in their village.

In Brazil during an LDS national day of service, July 31:

More than 6,000 volunteers were mobilized to fight against dengue fever, a virus-based disease spread by mosquitoes, through a door-to-door education campaign. In Santa Catarina, near the Brazilian coast, volunteers gathered nearly 17 tons of food to be used by institutions for needy families.
Mormon Helping Hands volunteers also facilitated the donation of blood to local blood banks. Other projects included cleaning beaches, marshes, parks and public squares and the distribution of newborn kits for hospitals.

The LDS Africa day of service will be August 31, as we learned while meeting with the saints in Abuja. In Abuja they will be repairing a local school. I'm not yet sure what we in Yola will be doing because we only just got here.


I was also touched by this story of an LDS reporter who went to Tonga and found everything chaotic and not according to plan. She was advised that while there, many things would not go "right," but that she would find unexpected treasures that delight, comfort, and enable her to do what needed to be done.

As was evident in the Tonga airport, things in that island nation did not go as she expected they should. She did not have a telephone or Internet connection in her room. The building had no food services. The refrigerator across the hall started beeping at 3 a.m. — every night — and never stopped. And there were few road signs and no fast food restaurants in the country.
But — thanks to sweet direction from a faithful temple president — she found things far greater. Church members hung bananas outside her room. They helped her use a computer at the Church's administrative offices on the campus of the LDS high school. And they invited her into their homes for dinner.

Such a story sounds much more familiar than it did a few weeks ago.

Big Bag of Interesting Sentences

Marron: Zanran is Google for data.
 

Economist: The alternative-medicine industry plainly excels as a placebo delivery service.
 

Blattman: Why use spray cans when you can simply strategically clean dirt?  [right]
 

McArdle via The .Plan: [Affluent white people in Manhattan] tend not to view themselves as affluent because they believe that living in Manhattan is a natural condition, like psoriasis, rather than a very expensive personal choice.

Yglesias on racism and egalitarianism in colonial America: there are multiple dimensions of inequality and social privilege, and tradeoffs between them do happen at the margin.

Fromson (via The .Plan) tells us that health food was created by cults (I’ve always felt there was something cultish about health food fads): The 1974 edition of the Spiritual Community Guide, "The Yellow Pages of the New Age Movement," listed 2,470 addresses throughout the country. ... 31.2 percent of the total, were health-food stores or restaurants. ... [U]nlike large religions, which can sustain themselves with tithes and donations, smaller groups usually have to generate revenue through actual businesses—and the restaurant industry has low barriers to entry.

Some of my soon-to-be colleagues at AUN evaluated Nigeria’s mobile phone network, finding that service has not improved in the last decade. Among the problems they want the government to address is corruption in activating SIM cards: "The registration and activation of SIM cards for MTN and Airtel took beyond seven days in Yola. This has led to some level of corruption on the part of their agents or employees, who expect some gratification before they would upload the registration request to head office," the report said.

The Economist on India’s new foreign policy efforts: Mr Singh promised $5 billion of loans on easy terms over the next three years for Africans willing to trade with India, plus another $1 billion to pay for education, railways and peacekeeping. It is a steep rise in aid and assistance—last year India gave a mere $25m to Africa

Aid effectiveness on a bad day

But all three books make the case that the ineffectiveness of much philanthropy is actually the fault of the philanthropist. They applaud the motives for giving, but all make the point that people too often let their philanthropy be guided by their hearts alone. “Deciding what you will do to make change happen is a choice that requires both your head and your heart”, write Messrs Fleishman and Tierney in the best chapter in “Give Smart”, entitled “What Am I Accountable For?” The biggest problem for philanthropists, they argue, may be that “they are essentially accountable to no one but themselves.”

Some of the problems:

1 - There’s the overall lack of evaluations being done, and even when we do them we can’t simply aggregate the results and call it done, as Blattman points out:

We’re selective in which programs we evaluate, and ten[d] towards the decentralized, uncoordinated, and less sensitive programs. I call it the “non-random impact of random impacts”

2 - Then there's the question of who receives the aid. Do we give to "bad governments"? On the one side, giving aid supports a corrupt regime. On the other, removing aid is likely to harm the poorest instead of the targets. Admittedly, there is a lot of disagreement about the model here: aid is hurting when it goes in and when it goes out. One of the ethical underpinnings, though may just be "strongly determined by how much you discount future suffering versus suffering today," writes Aid Thoughts.

Note: in the case being discussed at Aid Thoughts (Malawi and the British) I do not intend to imply that the Malawi government is “bad” on the basis of their insulting an ambassador. A little more care should be given, in my view, to differentiating between “behavior we don’t like” and actual villainy. If someone wants to argue that the government is villainous, then the debate should be about whether aid should be cut for that reason, rather than because a diplomat was expelled. Although, from an economist's perspective, I guess it reveals the true British preferences.

3 - And then Tales from the Hood tells us it may be time for aid -- all international aid -- to leave Haiti. His argument is that Haiti has been constantly interfered with without ever being given the chance to govern itself.

Tucker argues that this may not be the best thing, that the root cause of Haitian poverty is lack of capital, and the root cause of lack of capital is incredibly bad governance. He concludes unusually, however:

Now, to be sure, there are plenty of Americans who are firmly convinced that we would all be better off if we grew our own food, bought only locally, kept firms small, eschewed modern conveniences like home appliances, went back to using only natural products, expropriated wealthy savers, harassed the capitalistic class until it felt itself unwelcome and vanished. This paradise has a name, and it is Haiti.

Where Tucker gets the idea that Haiti only eats the food it produces is a little beyond me. Starvation is high, but so are food imports. The standard story (which Erica Philips and I debate in a forthcoming case study) is that massive US rice imports have harmed local agriculture significantly.

The most amazing people in aid

1. The guy who changed his domestic ways to become a loving, caring husband after having been exposed once at a road-crossing to a billboard that said: "Stop GBV Now! (HRI with support from Country South of Canada)";
2. The Donor representative who, every month, reads every one of the 76 reports they receive from relevant HRI affiliates and therefore has a very clear idea of what each affiliate is doing and where they need most support;
3. The inhabitant of the village in "Africa" whose life has changed to the better once she received a slightly used pair of shoes from a mythical place South of Canada;
4. The government employee who has successfully made the transition from a cynical, underpaid, mis-qualified relative-of-someone-important to a dynamic, modern element of change in the government, after having interacted with a HRI "Technical Advisor" during a capacity building workshop;
5. The guy who returned part of his per-diem after a trip to Nairobi, claiming that the three meals and tea offered during the training were quite sufficient for his subsistence; 

More celebrated individuals at Hand Relief. 

Less sardonically, Aid Watch had a more serious paper praising and shaming various bilateral aid organizations. Water Wellness also celebrates a community where the impossible dream of proper water project maintenance is happening.

Health Policy: Demand and Supply

How can we increase the demand for health interventions? One study found that when they gave households a voucher for a free, treated bed net, they were not only more likely to go get their bed net and use it than households given a voucher for a reduced price bed net, but when the researchers returned a year later those households were also more willing to pay for a new bed net than those who had received the smaller vouchers. On the other hand, another study showed an opposite effect for deworming medicine: households found out about the side effects and were less eager to try it again.

A recent DFID paper argues that cash transfer problems are better at addressing demand-side constraints to receiving health or education services than they are at addressing supply-side constraints. Thinking about it like that, this ought to be obvious. Simply handing people money, even handing money with conditions attached, is not going to significantly improve outcomes if teachers or medical staff don’t show up, or if their illness is poorly diagnosed.

It’s not just developing countries that have serious supply-side constraints and even absenteeism. From a report on education problems in southern California (HT: Newmark):

Colgan came to Southern California in 2008 and went to work at Charles R. Drew Middle School, where she taught eighth-grade math. Her message the first day was unequivocal: She expected her students to achieve, and she would do her part to see that they did. "I will show up every day," she told them.


They did not immediately believe her. At the end of that first day, several of her students asked if they would see her again. Many had not had consecutive weeks with the same teacher for years.

Even granting the bias obvious in the rest of the article and its desire for overly simplified public choice narratives, that ought to be a clear signal of something seriously wrong with the system. Vouchers or fairly large cash transfers could begin addressing that, but only if there is enough room in private schools for all those students and only if the education system allows that freedom of choice.

Corruption: keeping it relative

Basu, Cornell prof on loan to the Indian government as chief economic advisor, argues that we can lower corruption by making the interests of bribe-payer and bribe-receiver diverge. Specifically, if a person is asked to pay a bribe to receive something they ought to anyway, don’t prosecute them – only the person receiving the bribe. That gives the bribe-payer an incentive to turn in the bribe-receiver after the transaction both by removing the disincentive of prosecution and promising restoration of the bribe money. Knowing this, officials should ask for fewer bribes.

The latest corruption report in graphical form (hat tip: PNB). Click to see it in glorious detail.

On keeping corruption relative for non-relativists:

To think that there is a low income country with zero corruption to which the United States can provide aid is foolish; it doesn’t exist at the high end of the income scale either. … The question is whether the MCC is investing in countries with relatively better records of controlling corruption. … Seventeen of the 21 MCC countries currently score better on control of corruption than their comparators, and 14 of the 21 countries have had better corruption scores than their comparators for the past six years.

Relatedly (to me, but not to him), Barder takes apart the idea of aid fungibility, specifically how difficult it is to get the right counterfactual:

A USAID assessment of Mozambique alleges that, “more than $100 million of donor funds were used in 2001 to bail out the failed privatization of the Commercial Bank of Mozambique (BCM)”. … This assertion seems to require us to speculate that if the donors had not given aid to the government, the government would not have bailed out BCM. But is there any reason for thinking that if there had been no aid at all, the government would have felt obliged to spend its own resources on health and education first, instead of the bank bail out? … And if all the donors had run health and education projects themselves, instead of giving aid to the government, what would the government have done with its budget savings in these areas? Would it not have used the money for the bank bail out?

… The bank bail out would probably have happened anyway: in which case the effect of aid was that there was more provision of health and education services than there would otherwise have been. If so, then in ordinary language we would say that donor funds were used for heath and education (not for the bail out) because that’s the difference the aid made.

Furthermore, in this particular case, the fact that the donors were mainly giving budget support almost certainly resulted in higher spending on social services than if they had been giving only project aid. The donors giving budget support had robust discussion with the government of Mozambique about its plans to bail out the banks, and thereby perhaps limited the resources used for the bail out. If the donors had been giving all their aid through projects, they probably would have not been able to have that conversation at all. If budget support gives the government less room to reallocate its spending because donors have more influence, this suggests that aid provided through the budget is less ‘fungible’ than aid provided as projects.

Whether or not you agree with these judgments about what might have happened in Mozambique, the example shows that our talk about ‘fungibility’ is somewhere between meaningless and irrelevant.

LDS in Japan and elsewhere

One LDS missionary’s experience in the Japan quake:

For his part, Hiltbrand is itching to get back to the disaster zone.
“I really want to be in Tagajo helping people,” he says. “I have many friends in Tagajo and I don’t know how they are. I don’t know how they will clean it all up and I want to help.” ...

For example, under the direction of Branch President Brad Brough, members in Misawa donated food and warm blankets to those in need in nearby Hachinohe. Elder Holland [right] said that kind of caring is happening in wards and branches across the country.

MSNBC also praised Church efforts in Japan to supply aid, locate all members and missionaries, and prepare its people for just such emergencies so they can take care of each other and their communities.

Archeologists uncover 70 lead plates that COULD be authentic and, IF SO, COULD be quite significant as 1st century commentary on the resurrection and other Christian topics. IF they are what they appear to be, it would be another instance of people recording religion on metal plates, a phenomenon discovered in a number of places after Joseph Smith discovered the Book of Mormon on golden plates. At the time, the claim was that since no one had ever found metal plates before, the entire thing must be a hoax. Now that we know it was common, the claim is that there is no archeological evidence in favor of the Book of Mormon.

This year, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Welfare Program turns 75. They are encouraging members everywhere to engage in a day of service this year to celebrate.

The Vietnamese governments’ comments on the LDS Church

The Africa West area of the church will be introducing internet access to many of its offices, about 64 locations.

Post-liberation governance, aid effectiveness, and a less dismal science

On the difficulty of running a post-liberation government, with applications to Rwanda, Uganda, and South Sudan: 

the central challenge for power holders is often not economic, but political. Former rebels continue to use the informal mechanisms that suited them so well when conspiring outside government. Power consequently resides in a shadow state, characterised by the personal and reciprocal arrangements which developed in the struggle. … though optimists point to economic progress, the reality is one of intense intra-elite competition with incredible violent potential, as has been witnessed in all three countries in the past and as might soon occur again in Rwanda and South Sudan.

Last month’s violence in South Sudan between rebel groups and the government.   

“Satellite images released by US pressure group the Enough Project, appear to back up claims of troop reinforcements and northern ‘fortified encampments inside Abyei.’ … With the referendum over, [former peace] deals [between southern groups] are now falling apart as groups jockey for power.”

The ‘consensus’ still seems to be that outright war is unlikely, that enough people want to avoid it … but they don’t yet have the trust and social capital to make it a nonissue.

The Africa News Blog cynically posits that the lessons to be learned from Gbago’s fall are not the ones we might wish: don’t hold elections unless you know you’ll win, don’t let the news get out if they don’t, and do your election rigging well in advance (prevent opposition from getting out their voice) rather than trying to stuff ballot boxes.

How effective is aid in Madagascar? Aid doubled between 2008 and 2010 with few noticeable results.

How effective is aid in Haiti? Well, people would rather stay in the tent cities where conditions are much better thanks to the aid. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It’s just a good thing we don’t have to actually talk to poor people to find out how to do this kind of work (/sarc)

Over lunch two weeks ago, I wondered at the fact that media don’t run more positive stories about Africa like the successful, peaceful, free, and fair elections that happened recently. After all, since the West expects bad news, reporting more bad news is just “dog bites man,” it’s not news. When things go right, why don’t we see more news announcements “Something Goes Right in Africa.” … Might make an interesting blog title, that. 

One answer to why not is because, among the people who have information about the continent, it’s in very few people’s interest to widely spread good news. Another name for it is the Tragedy of the Commons in Selling Tragedy by Kenny, who has a book out trumpeting development successes: Remember Tolstoy’s maxim: “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” From its introduction, Kenny writes that

the proportion of the population of sub-Saharan Africa affected by famine averaged less than three-tenths of a percent. The proportion who were refugees in 2005 was five-tenths of a percent. The number who died in wars between 1965 and 2001 averaged one one-hundredth of a percent.

For instance, on the plus side the Somali government prevented the trafficking of a pair of endangered lion cubs. See, occasionally the news in Africa really is about lions!

Not giving aid to Japan

(A little late on this one) Who’s happy about the aid relief efforts trying to go to Japan? Remarkably few people in aid, that’s who.

Tales from the Hood isn’t happy:

Humanitarian aid is not broken so much as it has been prostituted. Despite the good that truly does get accomplished, accomplishing good is increasingly a back room function, a by-product of the industry’s core purpose which increasingly appears to be revenue-generation. … Real humanitarian need, for all practical purposes [are] being ignored. “We can’t raise money for conflicts”, say the marketing departments. And yet the good-hearted people of America have become convinced that the country which gives us Toyota, Nikon, Playstation III, that came very close to kicking our asses in WWII, and that almost owns us economically as it is, is somehow in dire need of our $10 donations (and apparently socks).

Aid Watch isn’t happy (I know. “When is it?” You quip):

The Japanese are world-renowned experts in disaster preparedness, relief and recovery, and Japan is the third largest economy in the world. There should be no mistake that the Japanese government and Japanese organizations are well-equipped to take the lead.

The Poverty News Blog isn’t unhappy, but is bemused:

Many critics say there is no need to give money to Japan because they are rich and becuase they are not asking for help. Yet, what we find funny about the whole debate, is that we don't recall similar things being said after Hurricane Katrina hit the US Gulf Coast. Fund-raising for that disaster went through the roof, despite the US being the richest nation in the world.

Only the Onion, it seems, can be happy:

Following the recent earthquake and tsunami that tragically took the lives of an estimated 20,000 Japanese citizens, the planet Earth was afforded a good 15 minutes during which its inhabitants behaved like actual human beings, sources reported.
… "Though its duration was incredibly brief, in this span of time the entire human race was able to temporarily forget all its petty political interests, narcissism, greed, and ironic detachment for a few moments and behave like real people with compassion and respect," social scientist Dr. Robert Westbrook said of the short-lived burst of basic decency. "There is no evidence of any significant bickering, lying, preening, or self-involvement during this period. In fact, it appears that all 6.7 billion human beings simply stopped for one quarter of an hour, became filled with genuine emotion, and said, 'Oh, no, those poor people,' while keeping their baser instincts in check."

Though even here, there is still room for skepticism:

"Frankly, I reject this notion that it takes tragic events like [the earthquake] for the people of Earth to act like real human beings for once," MIT sociology professor Samuel Lark told reporters. "After all, most modern research suggests that acting like a callous, unfeeling, vain [homo-economicus] is exactly what being a human being is."

WHO on people overreacting to radiation warnings Bottom line: don’t take potassium iodide unless you are specifically directed by public health authorities and definitely don’t take large amounts (tablespoons) of iodized table salt.

And here is a recent, lengthy working paper on the role of social safety nets both before and after disasters. (Pelham, Clay, and Braunholz (2011) “Natural disasters: What is the Role for Social Safety Nets?” World Bank Social Protection and Labor Discussion Paper 1102.)

Big Bag of Development: Good ideas and bad

What is rigorous impact evaluation and when is it not really needed? A Clemens video.

Unintended consequences: low flow toilets edition. Too little water per flush is ruining the sewer system.

Really bad idea: a tax on remittances to Mexico proposed in Texas. Remittances are one of the chief forms of aid, we know it gets to individuals, and it hurts legal immigrants who are making significant contributions to the country. We should be trying to reduce the costs of remittances, not increasing them. Here is an example of a business born from remittances, a group of women growing organic cacti commercially.  The effort is being credited with social transformation and significant public and private benefits.

Trust and development, Japan edition: why is there no looting

Hidden taxes: control of land prices as a means of lowering taxes in Hong Kong.

But this does not imply that the revenue system of Hong Kong creates `”huge distortions”. Quite the contrary. Taxes on land create almost no distortions because they have no effect on supply or demand.

The development of a low corruption pension system in Mexico City

The resource curse appears to be alive and well in Africa as the most resource rich countries fared worse than average from 1990-2008. 21 countries’ wealth grew faster than the global average and that growth has been associated with increasing human capital and institutional quality.

Big Bag of Ethics: Soylent Green, Mandela, and Aid

Terrible ideas in ethics: run the country like a business, Soylent Green edition. “If you’re trying to look at America from a balance-sheet perspective the problem is very clear … it’s the existence of old people. … The optimal economic growth policy isn’t to slash Social Security and Medicare benefits, it’s to euthanize 70 year-olds and harvest their organs for auctions.”

Much better thoughts on ethics about Mandela’s transformation into the Mandela we (think we) know today: “It was not because he was removed from others, removed from evil, removed from the weaknesses of a frail humanity, that he prevailed. It was by plunging into what was negative in himself and the aching world around him that he was able to develop “whatever is good,” as he puts it in his book. How to do this? One word keeps cropping up, over and over: integrity.”

Beyond a desire to save the world:

Someone very smart once said to me that “the reasons why you stay married are usually different from the reasons why you got married.” And very much like marriage, humanitarian work is one of those things that has good days and not so good days.”

On the ethics of pop stars associating with autocrats.

Catching Up: Development

I appear to be stuck in La Guardia overnight, so let's see what thoughts are in the big bags tonights...

A remarkably detailed depiction of how one city block developed over several hundred years.

Some excellent thoughts from Moss on the difficulties with the current aid model and where trends are going. My favorite:  “With only a few dozen really poor countries left, and still large pockets of poor people in middle-income countries, the big value in aid will be investing in solutions that have impacts beyond a single country’s borders.  This means investing more in new vaccines, agricultural technology, clean energy, regional infrastructure,  and other things that cannot be done by designing narrow country programs for Mali or Cambodia. “

India is turning to cash handouts to combat the corruption in its in-kind welfare programs. Well, electronic cash that they can access by bank or cellphone, anyway.

“Maybe, just maybe, we are all benevolent autocrat wannabes?” If you’re willing to drop the benevolent part, the list of things to keep in mind is always worth reading.

Rodrik tries to retell an inverted Kuznets curve (a U shape) for agriculture productivity (high in overall low-productivity and high-productivity countries, but lower in the middle as workers leave but before the remaining farmers invest in technology). In fact, he uses Kuznets’ methods: his “within country” U-curve is really three countries strung together, not one of which shows a U. I would think that the panel research on the Kuznets curve itself should provide a good guide for testing this hypothesis as well.

Mormons in Africa series

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints put out a series of news reports last week on the church's activity in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Church's Africa Fact Sheet can be found here. There are nearly 320,000 Mormons in Africa, roughly 100,000 of them in Nigeria. The fact sheet also provides statistics for the church's humanitarian aid. The initiatives are described in more detail here and I regularly link to more information.

Elder Richard G. Scott, a senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, visited Mozambique in January. In his last visit in 1999 there were 40 Mormons in Mozambique, while there are now over 5000. He spoke to members in several meetings, with some members traveling two days for a chance to be there, as well as to doctors and nurses teaching neonatal resuscitation techniques to 53,000 medical professionals so far. His message was one of hope, reassurance, and encouragement. Another apostle, Jeffrey R. Holland, prophesied in Burundi that “Africa will someday be seen as a bright land full of ... hope and happiness.” Several African Church leaders tell their stories here.

This article tells several personal stories: one from a rural family in Madagascar who spent 27 years searching for religious truth and two accounts from South Africa. One of them describes the love expressed by white and black members for each other during Apartheid:

Dominic had never seen that type of affection generated from a white person toward someone of darker skin. “You don’t understand how big that was, how amazing it was to see that — how shocking. It went against everything society had taught me.” ... He was baptized and started attending church and was again amazed by the acceptance he felt. “They taught the same thing to me as the white boy sitting next to me at church. That broke a lot of boundaries for me. That said to me in my heart and mind that we are equal.”

This is a first-hand account by an LDS Kenyan journalist. Another article talks in a very introductory way about the 7,000 members in Uganda. The fastest Church growth currently is in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Church runs a program called the Perpetual Education Fund which provides low-interest loans to help people to receive education, usually in order to secure better employment. PEF is helping 2,300 people in Africa so far. The average loan in Africa is $1,200 for a year of schooling. 570 people have finished their education with the program and have seen large increases in income. Funds come from donations by members, myself included, and is run by volunteers.

Most genealogical records are preserved orally in Africa. The Church's FamilySearch program is attempting to record and preserve these family history records. The article quotes a Ghanaian proverb: When an old man dies, it is as if a library has burnt down.