I just don’t follow U.S. politics close enough to be reasonably sure about many things. Last night I was reading this profile of Preet Bharara, from the May 2016 The New Yorker. The piece was presumably in part anticipating that Bharara would be in the running as Attorney General of a Hilary Clinton administration. It makes you wonder about the demonization of Comey.
In debriefing Comey before his testimony, Bharara heard a more extraordinary tale than he had expected. On the night of March 10, 2004, Comey had learned that Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, were heading to a Washington hospital, where John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, suffering from gallstone pancreatitis, was in intensive care. Gonzales and Card wanted Ashcroft to reauthorize a government surveillance program that Comey and his staff had concluded was unlawful. Comey and Robert Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, raced, sirens blaring, to beat Gonzales and Card to Ashcroft’s bedside. In a tense confrontation at the hospital, Ashcroft told Gonzales and Card that, since Comey was Acting Attorney General, the decision was his to make.
Moreover, the article’s focus on Bharara’s prosecution of the leaders of the Democratic establishment in Albany, the state capital of New York, makes clear that petty corruption (only in the tens of millions) ruled the day. If you were a Republican, might you not reasonably think that Trump was no worse than Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the Assembly?
Beginning in 2005, after Taub’s referrals began, Silver used a state health-care fund that he controlled to send a total of five hundred thousand dollars to the clinic. Silver’s disbursements to Taub illustrated his power as Speaker. As Bharara put it, “He was parcelling out money to this doctor, Dr. Taub, for his mesothelioma clinic, and nobody had to agree to it. There was no oversight, and nobody had to know about it, and his fingerprints didn’t have to be on it.” The circle was complete: taxpayer money went to Taub’s clinics, the referrals went to Weitz & Luxenberg, and the fees went to Silver.
Stepping back from the immediate question of whether the CCES in fact shows a low rate of voting among non-citizens, our analysis carries a much broader lesson and caution about the analysis of big databases to study low frequency characteristics and behaviors. Very low levels of measurement error are easily tolerated in samples of 1,000 to 2,000 persons. But in very large sample surveys, classification errors in a high-frequency category can readily contaminate a low-frequency category, such as non-citizens. As a result, researchers may draw incorrect inferences concerning the behavior of relatively rare individuals in a population when there is even a very low level of misclassification.
Good short analysis of the political and economic situation in Burkina Faso. I disagree with the last point made though, that economic policy success depends on “finding the resources.” I think that an engaged president could do much more to jump-start the Burkinabè economic scene than hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, grants and loans could. It is very clear that much foreign assistance has very low efficacy. The Millennium Challenge Corporation granted maybe $50-$100 million to Burkina Faso government to spend on land reform and titling efforts; my hunch from the lack of evidence is that five years from now there will be little detectable effects from that program.
A president who was willing to take the time to learn about policy effectiveness, who then “willed” that effectiveness into being through 100% personal engagement (instead of flying around the world 180 days of the year to summits and meetings with dictators who have done nothing for their countries), and who crafted institutions and rhetoric (like transparency and genuine participation and communication) that would outlast a presidential term… such a president could do a lot. I think that is possible and hope more voices help make it happen.
A l’issue de l’insurrection, ces mouvements, malgré leur grande diversité, se sont coalisés autour d’une plateforme commune et désigné le Pr Luc Marius Ibriga, du Front de résistance citoyenne (FRC) comme porte-parole. Après l’avènement du nouveau pouvoir, la tendance à la dynamique unitaire au sein de la coalition des insurgés semble s’effriter progressivement. Le nouveau parti au pouvoir a engagé une campagne de dénigrement des acteurs de la transition. L’objectif est d’affaiblir la société civile et les anciens leaders de la transition afin de briser tout contrepoids au MPP. Cette campagne a ciblé non seulement l’ancien premier ministre Yacouba Isaak Zida, soupçonné d’avoir des ambitions politiques, mais aussi des leaders de la société civile tels qu’Hervé Ouattara, Maître Guy Hervé Kam et Marcel Tankoano.
Après une année de présidence, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré a préservé la stabilité du Burkina Faso. Il a ouvert de nombreux chantiers de réformes inspirées de son programme politique. L’enclenchement de la réforme constitutionnelle en vue du passage à une nouvelle République reste au plan politique le principal chantier inauguré. Si la vie politique est relativement stable, la fracture politique née de l’insurrection demeure béante. L’opposition et la société civile, bien que dynamiques, restent traversées par des divergences internes qui affaiblissent leur capacité d’influence.
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Au plan économique, c’est l’adoption d’un nouveau référentiel de développement, le Plan de développement économique et social, qui a caractérisé cette première année du quinquennat. Le défi majeur à ce niveau reste la mobilisation des ressources pour financer ce programme qui est censé sortir le pays de la précarité économique
Because I am reading Baroque Times in Old Mexico, and Argalus and Parthenia is one of those poems that people read back in the 1600s! And I wondered what it was about. And then I learn that Francis Quarles is an ancestor of Langston Hughes. My mind spins. And I get to read bloggers like parthenissa:
When I was thinking about English neoplatonism I kept returning to Francis Quarles’s Argalus and Parthenia (1629). It’s a narrative poem based very closely on a story from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. In it, Parthenia is pursued by Demagoras but he is thwarted by the fact that she and Argalus are in love. Incensed, Demagoras smears her face with poison and disfigures her. Parthenia, wanting to release Argalus from his romantic obligation to her, flees. Here the heroine’s disfigurement is involuntary, but like Thamire with Celidée, Argalus proves his constancy to Parthenia. It’s a happy ending (until Argalus has to fight at the castle of Amphialus, but I digress…). I quite like what Quarles did to Sidney’s story – he added a fantastically villainous mother who schemes with Demagoras to poison Argalus, and a maid, Athleia, who is initially in on the plot, but who ends up taking the poison herself out of remorse. It was an publishing sensation; the first publication of the poem appeared in 1629 and there were 16 editions between then and 1692 – and even a stage version in 1639 by William Glapthorne (it looks like the 1661 production of the play used a William Lawes song but I haven’t tracked that down yet). I do think, though, what made it so popular in the Caroline era was this neoplatonic version of perfect love that disdained the shell of the body.
The overall objective sought by the terrorists is to provoke the withdrawal of the operation Barkhane troupes. Indeed, for the main cities of northern Mali, these troupes constitute the only credible protection. The end of Barkhane would cause a collapse of the security architecture in the Sahel. That would, de facto, allow terrorists to reach their 2013 target which is capturing Mali southern regions including Bamako… The Malian authorities, having failed to adopt a coherent defense and security policy, have placed the country in an uncomfortable situation. At this stage, the end of Operation Barkhane is not desirable but, today, no one can predict its continuation in case of an alternation to power in France. By then, one can only hope that no heavy loss will occur, within the French forces. Indeed that could spell disaster for Mali security.
The refuge from a depressing present (Roch Marc Christian Kaboré since winning the election last year has done almost nothing, and Burkina Faso’s prospects for a vibrant economy and polity seem to fade with each passing week ) is in science fiction. Early November I was mesmerized by Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest. At one level they are both fairly conventional Vernor Vinge-style big space opera novels (the two are part of a trilogy). At another level the two novels wallow in an enduring theme of human art, the loneliness of being human. The Dark Forest in particular ends with its spectacular image, as the crews of the ship start to appreciate their (and our) condition.
Arrival, like Solaris, Silent Running, 2001: A Space Odyssey likewise tightly focuses on emotion. You could be crying through the whole film if you had already read Ted Chaing’s novella and knew of essence of the story. Director Denis Villeneuve relentlessly pushes back against science fiction conventions: It feels like 30 percent of the running time is devoted to the shots of Amy Adams and her daughter. Music, too, is incredibly important for the movie, which is all about that mood of loneliness. Not only are the aliens other humans, but even our selves are alien to us.
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Oliver Mutukudzi’s song Todii is one of the saddest but most beautiful songs to emerge out of the Southern African music scene. Worth a listen; here he is at Tiny Desk concert at NPR performing a quiet acoustic version.
I have read Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga three times now, and on each reading the novel seems to get better! The writing is really very good, and every few pages the narrator, Tambudzai, offers some clear and sharp insight about her own psyche or the interpersonal relationships around her.
For all her passionate aspiration, in other words, Tambudzai is put in a position of such deep ambivalence that the best way to introduce herself is with a negative. She begins by telling us that she did not feel what she was supposed to feel: that is the key to her experience. For all that she has a definite personality, the fundamental expression of herself – which spoke so resonantly to Busia’s mother – is simply that she is not able to occupy her ‘expected’ role, however she might try. This is an honest girl speaking out of a context so oppressive that her very first words to us must refer to that context if we are to understand anything else about her. She does not have the luxury of defining herself as separate from her circumstances.
The many reviews on goodreads.com are also generally excellent. Search for a nice review by Zanna:
Nyasha, though materially privileged and extremely intelligent, is in the most literal nervous condition of all. Her early life experience of living in England has made her into a ‘hybrid’, and she no longer fits in with her family or school friends. She calls her experiences in England ‘exposure’, which suggests something traumatic and damaging. Her problem is clearly not merely an excess of knowledge and it goes beyond a shift in beliefs – she is in a state of dis-ease with her own self, holding contractory desires that threaten to tear her apart. But Dangarembga does not present the nervous conditions that affect Nyasha and Nhamo as inevitable. Nyasha fights towards a subjecthood she can survive, and while Tambu is grateful for some aspects of Nyasha’s guidance, she is able to remain critical of some of her cousin’s actions and ideas, and she resists the influences that Nhamo succumbed to. Nyasha’s brother Chido also seems to have retained a degree of balance. His explanation of how he got into a pretigious mixed (black and white) school is every bit as acute in its analysis of coloniser-colonised relations as anything in Fanon.
Nervous Conditions explores the intimate arena of emotions, feelings, psyche. It is a text rich in psychological and psychoanalytic insight. Though material circumstances are richly drawn, the arena of conflict is not that of a search for sustenance, equity, or material improvement. Rather, conflicts develop over the emotional fortitude of individuals to deal with their own experience of power and their own awareness of the complex contours of resistance and opposition. While education in schools is centered as an opportunity structure to gain a better future, various characters reflect on such formative programs as conceit, as destruction, from the very first, extraordinary and notorious sentence of the novel: “I was not sorry when my brother died.” … A death that opened a new and contradictory filled passageway for Tambudzai.
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Our whole conference has been about anomalies. Some of those anomalies are pretty fundamental. Why has G.D.P. growth been slow? Why has the labor force participation rate come down so much? Why haven’t we hit 2 percent inflation more quickly? Those are all really interesting questions for an academic. For a policy maker you actually have to make a determination with imperfect information about what the answers to those questions are. So an academic gets to work on exciting ideas and there’s not much cost to being wrong. Anybody who’s in a policy-making role knows there is cost and so that makes it more challenging.
Marlon James A Brief History of Seven Killings I finally got around to reading this and am almost over. It is a hard book to read. Multiple narration, Jamaican patois (with a lot of vocabulary that has to be inferred from context), lots of swearing, raw sex, and violence, and an assumed familiarity with Jamaican history. I grew up listening to reggae (The Harder They Come was one of the first albums I owned, and Bob Marley was very big at Georgetown, naturally, in 1979 and after, and one could reasonably expect to encounter people who had opinions about Peter Tosh vs. Marley). But still a surprising thing for me about the novel is how much I hear a set of voices in the dialogue. In particular, whenever I am reading the Papa-Lo segments, the sound is always the singing voice of the older Lee “Scratch” Perry. I have no idea how that happened. The other voices don’t have counterparts with identifiable figures, but I hear them. Not many novels produce that effect. Now, the novel itself is sprawling and complex. Reminds me a lot of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. I do not always like experimental fiction (every now and then we get fast forwards, dreams, disorienting first person narration, unattributed dialogue), but James is certainly pulling it off. I would recommend, but it is not an easy read and take a hundred pages to settle into the rhythm and overlook some of the more grating voices.
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I assigned James Fenske’s excellent survey, meta-analysis, and re-analysis for my African Economic Development class. In some ways, the lesson to draw is how little can be generalized. There are many reasons for why few studies find a strong positive relationship between “more complete” land rights (by which is usually meant all rights bundled together and held by a single person or household) and measures of farming practices (especially those that have long term term implications for land productivity, such as fallowing, tree-planting, soil management, terracing, etc). Fenske does a great job of going through why that might be the case.
One possibility that he does not consider (unless I missed it, which is always possible) is that maybe there are some advantages to “less complete” tenure rights (by which typically is meant secondary and joint rights, and prohibitions against sale). Off the top of my head, five come to mind:
Joint ownership can work in theory just like joint equity ownership anywhere, as a way to pool capital and spread risk, and so carry out more investment. Separation of ownership and management is what should be studied, then… how has joint tenure led to institutions (customs, norms) for effective management?
Joint ownership can lead to better decisions. If land is constantly being subdivided and placed under the control of young people when they become adults, maybe a lot of relatively inexperienced farm managers take bad decisions that ultimately lower productivity. If young adults are more impatient than older adults, they will increase farm profitability in the short term and threaten the longer term.
Secondary rights means, usually, specialized rights. Why shouldn’t tree product processors have the rights to tree products? They will then manage the trees (pruning, gathering, nurturing) better than a generalist. So the research agenda to be studied then is: Just how much effort is put by women, say, into nurturing trees that will be economically useful? The avenues may not be obvious: women gather firewood and cut down trees. If they do not have rights to tree products, then maybe they would just cut down useful trees. Note that the investment may then be very mismeasured: the farmer who “owns” the main rights to the field is not the one doing the investment, the woman with tree rights is.
The large kin group is a very complex organization, but in most places in Africa women are second-order stakeholders. Also, many village, agrarian social systems have strong social norms against women freely selling their labor in a competitive labor market. In an individualized system, every wife is basically a single seller of labor to her husband (the monopsonist). When the agrarian production unit is larger, however, then two collective entities (the husbands on one side and the wives and daughters on the other) are negotiating. It might be that women do much better for themselves in that situation, and so objectively prefer the communal tenure and resist individualized tenure.
Same point as above, but now thinking of the implications of land as an asset. If the husband controls land freehold, his threats regarding the asset are credible (“I will see the farm, dammit, and then where will you go?”) whereas in a communal system with no land sales he has no credible threat regarding disposition of the asset.
My Dad gave this to me to read after he had finished. A good, serviceable, honest thriller. Very earnest in some ways, but what can you expect from the snowy plains of Minnesota. I enjoyed it, even as I longed for Dalgleish. But Eskens did a really nice job capturing the reality of the Midwest, where young and old are trapped by geography… everything takes so long… and limited opportunities…. community college, or not?… and expectations.
I was listening to John Cochrane, now at Hoover Institute, giving an EconTalk Podcast with Russ Roberts. One of the main problems with the over-regulatory administrative state that the United States is becoming, according to Cochrane, is that “the rules” are no longer clear and so regulatory agencies make the rules and the rules are discretionary and situational so people in business have to “be quiet” for fear of angering the regulators. (BTW, I am paraphrasing, not quoting.) Russ Roberts, for the first time in many a podcast (and I have listened to a lot, he has excellent guests) pushed back. “Hasn’t that always been true? What evidence is there that there is more arbitrariness?” Cochrane was not that convincing. His argument sounds better than it tastes.
But that is not why I suddenly decided to write. Reading about Trump’s threat to have his attorney general appoint a special prosecutor to “lock her up” I thought to myself: Who do we fear, really? The Republican and Democrat well-intentioned, if-revolving-door regulators of the U.S. government? Or someone who cavalierly brushes aside a long-standing norm about the administration of criminal justice (a norm reinforced after Richard Nixon’s disgrace)? Here is Benjamin Wittes on the issue:
One of these norms is that the Justice Department doesn’t use the criminal enforcement powers of the federal government to go after the administration’s political opponents. This is the idea of impartial justice. But don’t kid yourself. The Constitution does not require impartial justice. The president has enormous discretion—which, put more crudely, means that we expect him to discriminate. One possible basis for this discrimination is how much he likes or dislikes you. Most people have committed crimes if you look hard enough to find them. What prevents administrations from focusing on the crimes of their opponents, rather than the most serious crimes committed by whomever, is nothing more than the institutional expectations we have of the executive branch—and it has of itself. These expectations sound less in law than they do in decency and civic virtue. What Trump is promising here is precisely war on that decency and civic virtue.
Back to Cochrane. Turns out a grumpy Republican economist a the Hoover Institute thinks just like a cheerful economist (generally… how can you not be cheerful living in northern California, compared to, oh, Burkina Faso?) at Santa Clara University. The evidence is from his blog:
The leading candidates have already promised which way they’re going. For example, Ms. Clinton, quoted by Kim Strassel, promises to use Treasury regulation to punish companies that legally reduce taxes by moving abroad. And Mr. Trump outrages the law and constitution daily.
If you have to choose the least-bad, I think Cochrane is telling us who he will choose. One proposes to outrage a regulation. The other outrages the law and constitution daily.
Postscript: Can an amateur blogger compete? Tyler Cowen wrote about this issue back in March, unfavorably in regards to Trump. When very libertarian economists find common ground with non-ideological economists, that is something. WTF is a “non-ideological economist” you might ask. Here’s my working definition: Because I don’t have a strong ideology, I don’t feel compelled to have or to express an opinion about everything. Ideologues have to (or want to) fit everything into the perspective of the ideology. They enjoy and see as important figuring out how their ideology applies to every issue that crosses their plate. They are the foodies of intellectuals. Everything has to be evaluated. (Most ideologues, but certainly not Tyler Cowen, limit themselves in other ways… Libertarian economists rarely have any interest in what happens in foreign countries, leading to their occasional Aleppo moments, to use the phrase that is au courant… Socialist economists never seem to quite know what to do with consumer behavior…)
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More than anything, though, the precipitous drop [in the pound] seemed to attest to an increasingly unmistakable reality: Britain’s vote to exit the European Union — Brexit, in common parlance — has put its commercial relationships with the world on uncertain and potentially perilous ground. That poses risks for the British economy, making its money less attractive to hold. “The world believes that the U.K. is going to be poorer in the future, and find it more expensive to trade,” said Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent research institution in London. “Essentially, the world is betting against the pound.” And against the British economy. The immediate cause of the plunge appeared to be a speech by the French president, François Hollande, on Thursday evening in Paris, in which he endorsed the view that Britain must be forced to swallow unpalatable terms of departure to discourage other European Union members from eyeing the exits. “The U.K. has decided to do a Brexit, I believe even a hard Brexit,” Mr. Hollande said. “Well, then, we must go all the way through the U.K.’s willingness to leave the E.U. We have to have this firmness. “If not,” he continued, “we would jeopardize the fundamental principles of the E.U. Other countries would want to leave the E.U. to get the supposed advantages without the obligations.”
For my African Economic Development class we are reading a paper that uses the randomized control trial methodology to evaluate a program to encourage farmers to produce crops for export. The presumption is that new crops like french beans, passion fruit, and baby corn could be sources of higher incomes for farm households. The paper is “Finding Missing Markets (and a disturbing epilogue): Evidence from an Export Crop Adoption and Marketing Intervention in Kenya” by Nava Ashraf, Xavier Giné, Dean Karlan and appeared in American Journal of Agricultural Economics in 2009.
The RCT involved randomly allocating “self-help” groups of farmers into three categories: control, those receiving extension services about export crops, and those receiving extension and also credit. The program was offered by a Kenyan outfit known as DrumNet (for profit? non-profit? unclear to me!). There were 12 groups in each arm, and each group consisted of about 30 farmers, so there were about 370 farmers in each treatment arm and control group. Overall, then, a total of about 1,200 farmers were involved. If, however, the farmers in the self-help groups were very homogeneous (their characteristics are closely correlated), then the sample size was in effect just 12 in each arm. So that clustering of the treatment into possibly very homogeneous farmer groups has to be taken into account in the analysis.
Interestingly, and not explained in the paper, is that fewer than half of the self-help groups and only 27% of the farmers selected chose to actually participate in the treatment arm that was just “expert advice” and marketing assistance. That is a low take-up rate. It seemed that middle income farmers (and not low or very high income farmers) were more likely to participate in the program. But the researchers apparently did not actually ask farmers why they did not avail themselves of the project.
To evaluate the impact of the program, the researchers conduct a regression difference-in-difference analysis using baseline values of certain variables and seeing how the outcomes were different after a year, according to which treatment the farmers received. The researchers estimate what is sometimes called the “intent to treat” effect, and seemed not to incorporate the knowledge that many farmers refused to participate into the analysis (by estimating an average treatment effect using the treatment assignment as an instrumental variable for the actual participation variable). The researchers also do no adjustment for the fact that they are examining the intent to treat effect on ten different outcome variables. Usually one might set a tighter standard for concluding that an effect is statistically significant at conventional levels.
In any case, here is the researchers summary conclusion from the regression analysis: “We find that the program succeeds in getting farmers to switch crops, and that the middle income farmers were the most likely to take-up (relative to low-income and high-income). Comparing members that were offered credit to those that were not, we find that credit increases participation in DrumNet but does not translate into higher income gains relative to the non-credit treatment group. This suggests that access to credit is not necessarily the primary explanation for why farmers are not accessing these markets on their own. We find a significant increase in household income but only for farmers who were not previously accessing export markets.” [emphasis added]
I do not like that last heterogeneous treatment effect. After they find no effect on household income in the main regression analysis, they decide to look for interaction effects. How does the reader know they did not try a dozen different interaction effects, and have only reported the one that was significant?
The paper could prompt a lot of hypotheses and interesting research projects. For example, at one point the authors mention that the farmers generally rejected the passion fruit technology. The only reason offered is that passion fruit is “challenging” even though “profitable.” Gee, isn’t everything that is profitable challenging? It is only the lucky entrepreneur who says, “Making money is easy!” But actually when you read the passion fruit success stories, like this one from Nzaui and this one from Murang’a, it does sound easy. Another example is that the entire export promotion effort by DrumNet (a spinoff of something called Africa Pride), apparently collapsed and farmers lost a lot of money. The authors allude to this in their “epilogue” but offer few details. None of them seemed to have that investigative reporter instinct to follow a story. The more I web-search DrumNet and Africa Pride, the more suspicious I get of the organization. It would be nice for someone at the World Bank and the Gates Foundation to clarify just how much concessional funding (grants? loans?) they channeled to the organization.
Incidentally, a replication study by 3iE using the original data found the original analysis to be basically replicable, though the replicated estimated impacts were smaller than the original. But the replication study authors did note that the study was very under-powered (the sample size was much too low): “In terms of the statistically insignificant increases to household income, our analysis suggests future evaluation would need to substantially increase sample sizes, on the order of quadrupling the original sample size, to be able to detect a statistically significant difference between treatment and control groups in this regard.”
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