what to do in Johannesburg [be warned: this is a travelogue]

David Evans1 Comment

After a week of work in Pretoria, on Friday evening I took a taxi to Johannesburg, to the home of my cousin (first cousin once removed, specifically) EP and his family. We talked until late into the night, and around 2pm my brother Daniel arrived in his rental car from Maseru, Lesotho.What to do with one day?

1. In the morning we visited the Apartheid Museum. While I believe the museum could be better organized, it was still powerful to see how this horrible set of policies evolved and then how people of many races and classes fought to bring it to an end. Three hours well spent.

2. We drove to the Soweto township. After seeing Sarafina in the early 1990s, I was very interested in seeing the location of several important events in the struggle against Apartheid. We had only a few minutes, so we just drove for a bit. The parts we saw looked much nicer than some of the townships I saw in Cape Town.

3. We went to a professional rugby match, a steal at US$12 per ticket! We saw a New Zealand team, the Hurricanes, destroy a South African team, the Vodacom Blue Bulls. I’ve never seen a rugby game: men without padding run into each other and form giant piles. It was loads of fun: I also ate a bag of some powerful jerky bought from a vendor. (No hot dogs, but plenty of jerky.)

4. We ate ostrich burgers at a mall food court, surrounded by South African teens and pre-teens. Only one element of that experience was unfamiliar, but it was delicious. And then we browsed a bookstore, discussing options loudly; this is a must for any gathering of members of my family. (The per-trip “zoo visit” threatens to replace the bookstore browse, but we need to hold the line.)

A great day.

enamorado de la isla de los amores infinitos

David Evans1 Comment

Comencé a leer otro libro por Daína Chaviano (antes leí este que me encantó y este que me aburrió) y me está encantando de nuevo. Se llama «La isla de los amores infinitos» [The Island of Eternal Love] y aquí hay una línea que me gustó bastante. Tiene que ver con un cuento que escucha una señorita de una anciana:

Las escenas se desprendían de algún resquicio del universo como si alguien hubiera abierto un agujero por donde escaparan los recuerdos de un mundo olvidado.

Me gusta el sonido de esa oración y también porque evoca la fantasía sin meterse en ella y porque la idea de un punto de donde se escapan muchas cosas me acuerda del aleph del cuento de Jorge Luis Borges.

want an invention? have a contest!

David Evans1 Comment

England, the 1700s:

In traditional methods, the spinning of cotton was far more labor intensive than weaving, as it generally required between four and eight spinners to keep one weaver supplied with yarn.  In desperation, the British government began to sponsor competitions and award prizes to those offering solutions to the
spinning bottlenecks.

James Hargreaves rose to the challenge and patented his spinning jenny in 1770.*

A modern application of this approach to innovation is Advance Market
Commitments for vaccines, announced in today’s news:

Vaccines Deal To Help Poor States

“Six donors are close to approving a groundbreaking $1.5 billion mechanism designed to boost the development and affordable supply of new vaccines to the developing world.

The governments of Italy, the UK, Canada, Russia and Norway, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will by June agree their support for final recommendations released today on a pilot Advance Market Commitment (AMC) to supply vaccines against pneumococcal disease, which kills 1.6 million people a year.

The AMC provides a guaranteed market for pneumococcal vaccines, underwritten by donors but with an agreement that recipient countries will assume an increasing share of the purchase cost over its lifetime until 2020. …

If judged successful, existing and new donors including Spain, Ireland and the US have already expressed interest in supporting up to two further proposed AMCs: one for malaria vaccines and one for tuberculosis. Initial estimates suggest malaria AMC would require $2.3 billion. …” [The Financial Times (UK)]

* from the painstaking The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An
Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade, p74-75.

brazilian monkeys picking cotton

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As farmers sought to establish the cotton industry in Texas and tried to deal with the big challenge of needing labor at unpredictable times of year:

Planters imported monkeys from Brazil and tried to teach them to pick cotton, but the animals in the end were uncooperative.  And geese, it turned out, will weed a cotton field when fenced in…[but] geese could not be trained not to trample cotton plants.

from The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, p23

stories vs statistics

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Some of my research has related to the impact of losing a parent on a child’s education in various African contexts. In this work, I have been impressed by the disparity between the dire stories reported in the media and the more hopeful patterns revealed in my statistical analysis.My training is in statistical analysis, but I have been thinking about the value of stories recently. In a recent (excellent) edition of This American Life, I heard the tragic story of a young woman whose mother illegally brought her to the United States as an infant. Now this daughter is finishing college but cannot get a job because of a choice completely out of her hands. The story is sad and yet, without some relevant statistics (How many people are affected by this? to start).

That’s not to say that statistics are always convincing: often they are misleading, either by design or through ignorant misuse. Still, when handled right, they can elucidate the broad patterns in a population. Alternatively, statistics rarely reveal intimate dynamics. (This is not because they couldn’t in principle but because the right data is rarely gathered.) There, a story can illuminate.

Dani Rodrik enunciates a nice (if not earth-shattering) balance in his new book One Economics, Many Recipes:

I believe in the need for both cross-country regressions and detailed country studies. Any cross-country regression giving results that are not validated by case studies needs to be regarded with suspicion. But any policy conclusion that derives from a case study and flies in the face of cross-national evidence needs to be similarly scrutinized. Ultimately, we need both kinds of evidence to guide our views of how the world works. (p4)

the truth about economists?

David Evans1 Comment

A good friend of mine (who is not an economist but who has worked with her share) shared the following:

Scene: Our kitchen this afternoon. Ten-year-old fourth grader is eating his after-school snack.

Son: Here is my explanation of the economy: when people have money,
they buy things.
Mom: That’s how economists explain it too.
Son: But they do it in a more complicated and boring way, right?
Mom: Right.

!!!

reseña del libro: La novela del milenio pasado, por Roberto Quesada

David Evans4 Comments

I just finished listening to this audiobook by a Honduran writer (my first).  It was fun if not exceptional.  My thoughts:

cuento agradable y divertido de una familia hondureña y un supuesto autor

Este libro contiene dos narrativas paralelas. La primera cuenta los esfuerzos (mayormente sin éxito) de un hombre neoyorquino que quiere ser autor pero no logra escribir. La segunda cuenta la vida de Fernandez y Alejandra, habitantes de un pueblo chiquito en Honduras quienes se conocen, se casan, y crían una familia a través de tres décadas.

La historia de Fernandez y Alejandra es refrescante; su amor siente auténtico. Mantienen una vida normal hasta que Fernandez cree recibir una visita celestial una noche, después de que se encuentra encargado con una misión excepcional. Experimentamos la reacción de su esposa y de sus varios hijos a través de todo y si no es irresistible, es complacido agradable y divertido.

Mientras tanto, las frustraciones del autor no dejan de entretener, y me imagino que todos que han empeñado escribir pueden relacionarse con los esfuerzos, las excusas, y el consejo no solicitado que recibe sin cesar de sus vecinos.

No es un libro para cambiar la vida, pero lo disfruté y lo recomendaría.

Escuché el audiolibro narrado por Walter Krochmal, publicado por Recorded Books Audiolibros (4 CDs).