Link Banana

Calling to mind this post, new evidence suggests that vengeance decreases parallel to poverty:

The findings suggest that vengeful feelings of people are subdued as a country develops economically and becomes more stable politically and socially and that both country characteristics and personal attributes are important determinants of vengeance.

Perhaps more interesting:

Females, older people, working people, people who live in high-crime areas of their country and people who are at the bottom 50% of their country’s income distribution are more vengeful.

PS: My technological inability to link to a real copy of this study seems like a good chance to reiterate that all academic papers and publications — especially the publically funded ones — should be freely available.

The Boston Globe’s Ideas section recently featured this interesting idea: natural disaster may actually be an economic good for the affected country.

Rebuilding efforts serve as a short-term boost by attracting resources to a country, and the disasters themselves, by destroying old factories and old roads, airports, and bridges, allow new and more efficient public and private infrastructure to be built, forcing the transition to a sleeker, more productive economy in the long term.

“When something is destroyed you don’t necessarily rebuild the same thing that you had. You might use updated technology, you might do things more efficiently. It bumps you up,” says Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University. “Disasters help people think about things differently.”

But there is this cogent counter-argument:

“Over any reasonably relevant period of time, society is not made wealthier by destroying resources,” he adds. If it were, “Beirut should be one of the wealthiest places in the world.”

The Financial Times recently ran an interesting story profiling seven “average” people from the country of 1.1 billion.

A generation ago, the “Indian dream” would almost certainly have involved a ticket to Vancouver, London or New York. That is less true today. Daru, like so many of her peers, thinks she can best build her future here. “India now has enough opportunities for my generation,” she says. “I have friends who have gone to the US and to the UK to earn some money, but then they come back. I see a lot of youngsters thinking of coming back to their friends and family.”

(via MeFi)

Roger Cohen made the interesting — if intellectually dubious — contention yesterday that the world isn’t actually flat, it’s inverted:

To understand it, invert your thinking. See the developed world as depending on the developing world, rather than the other way round. Understand that two-thirds of global economic growth last year came from emerging countries, whose economies will expand about 6.7 percent in 2008, against 1.3 percent for the United States, Japan and euro zone states.

If you’re willing to accept the fact that The Times of India’s website commits no small number of sins, Gems Sty found an interesting story about the impact cellphones have had there.

For the cellphones are now in the hands of people who would not have presumed, a generation ago, to put themselves on those eight-year-long waiting-lists. If you are chauffeur-driven these days, you can be sure that your driver carries a cellphone. If you visit a friend in a Delhi suburb, the istri wallah on the side-streets — with his wooden cart, using a coal-fired steam iron to iron clothes from the neighbourhood — carries a cellphone, to know which apartment needs his services. Farmers carry cellphones; just being able to call the nearest town to find out whether the market is open and what prices are being charged saves a farming family hours of fruitless walking. In Kerala, fisherfolk carry cellphones, so they can call in to the coastal towns after their catch, to know where they should sail to in order to obtain the best prices for their fish.

The cellphone is not a panacea; it will not single-handedly usher in the development that our country has been striving for since Independence. But it is making a huge difference. Above all, it has empowered the Indian underclass in ways in which 45 years of talk about socialism singularly failed to do.

This David Brooks column, like his recent one of Rank-Link Imbalance, seems a tad to generic for it’s own good. But I liked this bit:

But the new do-gooders have absorbed the disappointments of the past decades. They have a much more decentralized worldview. They don’t believe government on its own can be innovative. A thousand different private groups have to try new things. Then we measure to see what works.

It strikes me as a good counterargument to Thomas Friedman’s slightly silly concerns in “Generation Q”, which I took issue with at the time.

In school, I was told that “the rule of law” was good for stability and good for economic growth. What exactly “the rule of law” was I was never completely sure of. Turns out there are essentially two definitions:

Thick definitions treat the rule of law as the core of a just society. In this version, the concept is inextricably linked to liberty and democracy. Its adherents say a country can be spoken of as being ruled by law only if the state’s power is constrained and if basic freedoms, such as those of speech and association, are guaranteed. …

Thin definitions are more formal. The important things, on this account, are not democracy and morality but property rights and the efficient administration of justice. Laws must provide stability. They do not necessarily have to be moral or promote human rights. America’s southern states in the Jim Crow era were governed by the rule of law on thin definitions, but not on thick.

James Suroweicki says that microloans don’t work very well. It’s an interesting idea that makes more sense than I might like to admit.

The idealized view of microfinance is that budding entrepreneurs use the loans to start and grow businesses—expanding operations, boosting inventory, and so on. The reality is more complicated. Microloans are often used to “smooth consumption”—tiding a borrower over in times of crisis. They’re also, as Karol Boudreaux and Tyler Cowen point out in a recent paper, often used for non-business expenses, such as a child’s education. It’s less common to find them used to fund major business expansions or to hire new employees. In part, this is because the loans can be very small—frequently as little as fifty or a hundred dollars—and generally come with very high interest rates, often above thirty or forty per cent. But it’s also because most microbusinesses aren’t looking to take on more workers. The vast majority have only one paid employee: the owner. As the economist Jonathan Morduch has put it, microfinance “rarely generates new jobs for others.”

The Economist argues that trade bans may actually do more harm them good for the animals they seek to protect. They offer these solutions:

A better policy is to make wildlife more valuable to man, not less. One way that suits everybody is tourism. The gorillas in the Virunga mountains of Rwanda attract a lot of money from visitors. They are doing well, unlike their cousins over the border in Congo which do not earn their keep, and are prey to hunters who want to clear them out and take their land. Tourism is one way to help the Indian tiger, which is much rarer than people thought.

A second, less popular way to make money is to exploit animals sustainably. Killing individual creatures need not harm populations. Many animals may be farmed or ranched to create a valuable legal trade. That is what has happened with the vicuña, and with crocodiles and their kind. Rhino horns can be cut off without even killing rhinos.

The Christian Science Monitor tells of increasing vigilante violence in Mozambique. It all seems to share some similarities with the just-resolved conflict in Kenya.

Rising crime and vigilante justice are quickly becoming serious problems for this donor darling, long considered a stable, postconflict African success story.

The violence reflects growing inequality and increasing mistrust of authorities, observers say – sentiments often hidden beneath widely praised macroeconomic figures showing consistent growth.

“When people do not have trust in the system, when people do not feel that they are part and parcel of problem-solving, they organize themselves,” says Themba Masuku, a senior researcher at the Centre for Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg, South Africa, who has studied vigilante justice. “And they take the law into their own hands.”

The Ho Chi Minh trail, one of the most prominent features of what the Vietnamese know as “the American war,” is being turned into a highway. David Lamb’s trip down the road delves into history and modern Vietnam, but I found this anecdote both odd and charming:

“It may sound strange, but although it was a terrible time, my four years on Truong Son was a very beautiful period in my life,” said Le Minh Khue, who defied her parents and at age 15 joined a youth volunteer brigade on the trail, filling bomb craters, digging bunkers, burying corpses and ending each day covered head to toe with so much mud and dirt that the girls called each other “black demons.”

Khue, a writer whose short stories about the war have been translated into four languages, went on: “There was great love between us. It was a fast, passionate love, carefree and selfless, but without that kind of love, people could not survive. They [the soldiers] all looked so handsome and brave. We lived together in fire and smoke, slept in bunkers and caves. Yet we shared so much and believed so deeply in our cause that in my heart I felt completely happy.

(via brijit)

The Economist is rather keen on celebrating the year of the potato:

Unlikely though it seems, the potato promoted economic development by underpinning the industrial revolution in England in the 19th century. It provided a cheap source of calories and was easy to cultivate, so it liberated workers from the land. Potatoes became popular in the north of England, as people there specialised in livestock farming and domestic industry, while farmers in the south (where the soil was more suitable) concentrated on wheat production. By a happy accident, this concentrated industrial activity in the regions where coal was readily available, and a potato-driven population boom provided ample workers for the new factories. Friedrich Engels even declared that the potato was the equal of iron for its “historically revolutionary role”.

I was rather surprised to hear that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has detractors. After examining their claims, however, The Economist decides that they’re (mostly) meritless.

Therein lies an irony. The WHO, one of whose captains now calls the Gates Foundation monopolistic, used itself to hold a monopoly in the fight against malaria, and it did a lousy job as a result. Indeed, Dr Kochi himself has been refreshingly frank about the WHO’s poor record in fighting the disease. The agency has also been criticised for accepting poor data from member countries which may downplay bad news. As Dr Chan says candidly, that charge “is a reality”. It is not her role, she says, to “name and shame” countries; she prefers to exert private pressure. But she acknowledges that some public pressure is essential, and applauds the role played by the media and charities in “shining the light” on previously obscure places.

A big new non-government organisation, crashing into the jungle like a young elephant, is bound to cause resentment, and perhaps bound to have unintended ripple effects. But without this elephant’s input of new money and ideas, the battle-front against malaria and other deadly diseases might present an even worse picture, especially if the field were left to governments and inter-governmental bodies.

In what amount to a literature review of Ben Olken’s papers on developmental economics — with all the slightly boringness that implies — Michael Moynihan explains that Robert Putnam may have been on to something.

So when he decided to test the validity of the much-debated “bowling alone” theory—Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s argument that television, among other “individualizing” cultural phenomena, has had a negative effect on the social fabric of the West—he found himself in Indonesia, a country not affected by many of the cultural externalities that compromise Putnam’s American-based study.

… “The main results suggest that each additional channel of television reception is associated with 7 percent fewer social groups existing in the village, and with each adult in the village attending 12 per­cent fewer group meetings.” That would seem to confirm Putnam’s thesis. But the results were nuanced. Olken noted that “despite the impact on social capital, improved [TV] reception does not appear to affect village governance, at least as measured by discussions in village-level meetings.”

The Economist brings word of a troubling but not suprising development.

The practical argument for action is simpler: the tobacco industry is getting the world’s poor hooked before governments can respond. In recent years, as rich countries have clamped down on smoking, tobacco firms have shifted their focus to poorer places. A study by Britain’s Bath University found that by using aggressive tactics, such as targeting women, international tobacco firms had helped to double smoking rates in Russia since 1991.

The tobacco industry is regrouping in order to focus on “promising” markets and escape the pesky lawsuits it is likely to face in rich, litigious countries. For example, Altria, a global tobacco concern based in the United States, plans to spin off Philip Morris International as a stand-alone foreign entity in late March. China is now home to more than a quarter of the world’s smokers; it will soon be manufacturing Marlboro cigarettes for Philip Morris, and the firm will be exporting Chinese tobacco to other countries.

The Economist — using the World Bank’s recent study — takes an interesting look at the way that technologies are adopted in developing counties, finding that they often arrive and are adopted by the elite, but rarely penetrate down to the majority of the citizenry. They also found that though cell phone have shown that some technology can jump in and leapfrog over infrastructure inadequacies, this is the exception not some new norm. But they do end on a hopeful note:

Yet it would be wrong to be gloomy about the technological outlook of emerging economies. The channels of technology transfer have widened enormously over the past ten years. Technological literacy has risen, especially among the young. But all this has helped emerging economies mainly in the first stage: absorption. The second stage—diffusion—has so far proved much more testing.

Making a case similar to Mr. Brilliant’s, The Economist argues that the situation in the world’s better than most think, and still improving.

Indeed, for a great many people the way things are is pretty rotten: Burmese monks, for instance, or the Luo in Kenya. Life is not too bright for investors at the moment, either. But is the broader proposition true? Is the world really becoming worse for the majority of mankind? We argue that it is not.

To some extent, our qualified optimism is borne out by impartial data. In this article we look at three pieces of evidence: the underlying social conditions in poor countries; poverty alleviation over the past decade; and the incidence of wars and political violence. By those measures the world seems to be in rather better shape than most people realise.

At Fortune, Patricia Sellers has a great piece about Melinda Gates that ranges from her childhood use of an Apple II (gasp!) to the intimidation she feels before adressing a roomful of malaria experts.

The impact [of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation] comes from the combination of Melinda’s holistic vision and Bill’s brainpower. Bono, the rock star-humanitarian who is both a friend of the Gateses and a grantee (through his One antipoverty campaign), calls their relationship “symbiotic.” Noting Bill’s fierceness, Bono says, “Sometimes I call him Kill Bill. Lots of people like him - and I include myself - are enraged, and we sweep ourselves into a fury at the wanton loss of lives. What we need is a much slower pulse to help us be rational. Melinda is that pulse.” Buffett also believes that Melinda makes Bill a better decision-maker. “He’s smart as hell, obviously,” Buffett says. “But in terms of seeing the whole picture, she’s smarter.” Would Buffett have given the Gates Foundation his fortune if Melinda were not in the picture? “That’s a great question,” he replies. “And the answer is, I’m not sure.”

(via Gizmodo)

In a very interesting article for The American, Amity Shlaes talks fondly of his family’s love for infrastructure tourism. In infra-touring the Panama Canal, she delves into the history of Panama, the realities of global trade, and the damage America has done the country.

Panama, the canal, inspired; but Panama, the country, seemed to move without a hitch from being the region’s “canal country” to being its drug country. The United States certainly cannot be blamed for all that is wrong in Panama; but it did its share by being cavalier about sovereignty (TR), by enabling villains like Manuel Noriega, and by fostering a lot of trouble in between. A century after the canal opened, and nearly two decades after the U.S. invasion, Panamanians are still ambivalent about the United States. They seek confirmation that Washington will follow through on the good things that it promises.

Correspondent Diaries are one of the best features of the The Economist’s website, and this weeks was especially interesting to me. The magazine’s South-East Asia correspondent spent some time in the Isaan region of Thailand before the recent election, and gives a very interesting picture of what many Bangkok residents think is the country’s most backward region.

Until the early 19th century Isaan was a sort of buffer zone between the kingdoms of Siam (Thailand’s old name) and Laos. After Siam annexed the region, in 1827, it suffered various uprisings against the Bangkok bureaucracy’s domination and centralisation. It continued to be a hotbed of radicalism until the 1960s and 1970s, when it was one of the battlegrounds for the Thai state’s fight against a communist insurgency.

Now, unlike in Thailand’s strife-torn southern provinces (where the locals are mostly Muslim and ethnically Malay), there is little talk of Isaan separatism. Isaan’s people are proud of their traditions but they are also loyal Thais, as demonstrated by the ever-present portraits of King Bhumibol in shops, homes and public places.