Author Archives: mkevane

Seven films come immediately to mind. (With cut and paste description blurbs.) 1) A Panther in Africa – On October 30, 1969, Pete O’Neal, a young Black Panther in Kansas City, Missouri, was arrested for transporting a gun across state … Continue reading →

Apparently youth in Seno have blocked the mining trucks, demanding more local hires, more training, more transparency. Les engins de la Société minière ESSAKANE SA sont bloqués depuis le 19 mars dernier à l’entrée de la ville de Dori. Selon … Continue reading →

From lefaso.net, a UPC political rally in front of the CLAC of Boromo.  Will Diabré emerge as the serious competitor for the CDP candidate(s)?  That the rally was at the CLAC is meaningful really only to me! L’Union pour le … Continue reading →

I was at a conference today at George Washington University on liberal learning in undergraduate business education, and Bernanke kicked us out of his room so he could kill the gold standard people…. “Unfortunately, gold standards are far from perfect … Continue reading →

My daughter Sukie watched the whole video last night (she’s 9) and then she had a bad dream. But when Leslie questioned whether it was OK for her to be watching, Sukie piped up, “Gaby already watched it and she’s … Continue reading →

We had a great informal seminar by Noam Yuchtman of UC Berkeley yesterday, talking about a paper he is completing on the effects of medieval universities in acting as a “supply shock” to economic growth by providing more of the … Continue reading →

From an article Robinson and Acemoglu posted to their blog, hopefully just a typo: In this essay we provide an interpretation of why Africa is poor.  Our basic approach is, institutional. My basic reaction is, ugh.

An excellent summary by Tim Taylor…. Back in the Paleolithic era when I was learning economics, Germany’s hyperinflation of the 1920s was the classic example of hyperinflation. When I was teaching intro economics classes in the late 1980s, I would … Continue reading →

Apparently the advocacy advertising agency Invisible Children has used Facebook to go viral with a video about Joseph Kony of the Lords Resistance Army, the same week as yours truly watched the really bad TV show about “how to tell … Continue reading →

I went up to Stanford African Studies Center last Thursday for a talk by Matthew Jukes on a paper he is working on with data from The Gambia (where he taught in a school in the 1990s apparently, fun picture … Continue reading →

The big news of the primaries, for intellectuals, is that libertarianism as an actionable political philosophy represented by someone with considerable political experience and success (Ron Paul) cannot even attract 10% of the dedicated “base” of Republicans who vote in … Continue reading →

From Deric Bownds’ mindblog… Jonathan Haidt does a nice job of bringing contemporary relevance to Tomasello and colleagues’ work comparing and contrasting the social behaviors of young humans and chimpanzees. (As these two previous MindBlog posts show (1,2), this laboratory … Continue reading →

A wonderful Amazon.com review by A.J. Sutter of the now almost 5 years old  Competing on Analytics, of little relevance to African economic development except for the mobile phone companies and Western Union/Moneygram! A. FALLACY (and related sins): The most … Continue reading →

Despite all the positive growth numbers coming out of Africa, the future looks bleak indeed over the shorter-term horizon.  Lots of autocracies, more and more weapons, porous borders, massive corruption, multinationals very willing to fund private armies, drug cartels discovering … Continue reading →