Author Archives: mkevane

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About mkevane

Economist at Santa Clara University and Director of Friends of African Village Libraries.

Zéphirin Diabré sounds like a Republican moralizer here

I wish I knew more about what he has in mind, exactly.  Burkina Faso has more divorced people, and kids of divorced parents maybe suffer some psychological traumas… but are those traumas greater than growing up in a home without … Continue reading

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Zéphirin Diabré the man of the hour in Burkina Faso

Diabré is a former deputy of the National Assembly in the 1990s, a Minister of Finance, he then served a time at UNDP, and also the French nuclear group Areva.  He was a fellow for a year at Harvard (where … Continue reading

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Hijab and self-image

Perusing the catalog of a children’s publisher Kalimat in Emirates, suddenly realized that almost none of the women and girls depicted were wearing head scarves.  Says something about what professional women want their children to think is “normal”: no head … Continue reading

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Make cracks about Stata, you gotta listen then to original Grog Moin from Haiti, and a cute dance version!

Posted in Burkina Faso | Comments Off on Make cracks about Stata, you gotta listen then to original Grog Moin from Haiti, and a cute dance version!

Transposing and reshaping with string in Stata

stata transpose string variable without xpose « Economics should be open. http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?xpose http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/modules/reshapel.htm

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100 pages of projects for South Sudan and no libraries, no books… sigh.

South Sudan, poorest place on earth, but with a LOT of aid and oil money… large swathes of public services are run by the United Nations.  Lee Crawford points to the newly issued Humanitarian Appeal for South Sudan and I … Continue reading

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Basic reinforcement of personhood for adolescent girls in West Africa

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Ross Douthat and Tyler Cowen need to read Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street

I am reading Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, over the last few days, and I could swear one of the characters in the small town of Gopher Prairie, about which Lewis feels so ambivalent, mouths exactly Douthat’s lament… and that was … Continue reading

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Cell phones make people feel bad

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How to understand African economies like that of Burkina Faso

National statistics tell one part of the story, and Burkina Faso’s GDP per capita has been fairly steadily growing at about 2% per year for 20 years (but starting at a $500 per person base, that means the country is … Continue reading

Posted in Economy | Comments Off on How to understand African economies like that of Burkina Faso

“Bull” by Mo Yan

I just read the story, by 2012 Nobel prize winner Mo Yan, last night.  Pretty riveting, but also hard to understand without the full context.  You wonder about how much is working as a broad allegory (and what it might … Continue reading

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To my peeps in the Bay Area… Rainy Day Dream Away

Posted in Burkina Faso | Comments Off on To my peeps in the Bay Area… Rainy Day Dream Away

Ouattara dissolves Ivorian government over marriage law: must be more to story than this

Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara has sacked his government in a row over a new marriage law which would make wives joint heads of the household.  Mr Ouattara’s party supported the changes but the members of the ruling coalition were … Continue reading

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Education and health and fertility in the United States

A quick glance at a paper by McCrary and Royer.  They find: 1. School entry policies have large effects on schooling at motherhood: one-fourth of young Texas mothers born after the school entry date have a year less education than … Continue reading

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Geranium Cat’s Bookshelf: Thursbitch by Alan Garner

Thursbitch feels very much like a sequel to Red Shift to me, although the only connection is the intensity of its sense of place, and a setting geographically close, since Garner likes to write about the area around his home. … Continue reading

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Inestimable Susan Straight, author of short-story “Mines” with a timely opinion piece

SOMETIMES life is like a fun-house mirror, the glass and then the real thing. I had just watched the TV show “The New Normal,” a comedy about what used to be called untraditional families, for the first time, and the … Continue reading

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Cute, but the audience idolatry a little off-putting…. I’ve been able to be that kind of rabid “fan” who laughs and cheers at literally anything…. “a music stand”

Posted in Burkina Faso | Comments Off on Cute, but the audience idolatry a little off-putting…. I’ve been able to be that kind of rabid “fan” who laughs and cheers at literally anything…. “a music stand”

Justifications for spending public money….

A big part of development economics is about justifying expenditures of public monies.  Why are people better off with spending tax money this way? Who is better off?  Who is worse off? Why are those better off not able or … Continue reading

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Scary reporting from Adam Nossiter of NYT on Guinea-Bissau

Strictly for the Afro-pessimists…. Since the April 12 coup, more small twin-engine planes than ever are making the 1,600-mile Atlantic crossing from Latin America to the edge of Africa’s western bulge, landing in Guinea-Bissau’s fields, uninhabited islands and remote estuaries. … Continue reading

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