Michael Kevane

Ambassador Mushingi is doing an amazing job of putting a human (and likable) face to American diplomacy in Burkina.  I don’t think I’ve seen articles about the Russian or Chinese ambassadors… or even the French… that are so frequent and so positive.  He’s really doing the groundwork for people-to-people diplomacy.  Will it work when the system breaks down?  Hopefully.  We have no “social science” on this.  But the alternative (meet in the Embassy and in Ouagadougou with elite political figures) seems complementary rather than substitutable.

C’est enfin l’apothéose de la grande tournée entamée par l’Ambassadeur américain, le Dr Tulinabo MUSHINGI, dans les 13 régions depuis septembre 2013. L’American Road Show, puisque c’est de cela qu’il s’agit, a pris fin ce jeudi 22 mai 2014 dans le Centre-sud à Manga puis à Pô. A l’instar des visites antérieures, l’objectif reste le même : visiter les fruits de la coopération Nord-Sud entre les Etats-Unis et le Burkina Faso et toucher du doigt les réalités des populations.

via Dernière visite de l’American Road Show dans le Centre-Sud : l’Ambassadeur Tulinabo MUSHINGI à l’Académie Militaire Georges NAMOANO – leFaso.net, l’actualité au Burkina Faso.

You can still see some of her work on her website, including some series from Kordofan and South Sudan.

Conflicts on the African continent claimed another journalist last week. Camille Lepage, a 26-year-old French photojournalist, is the latest reporter to pay the ultimate price for trying to inform the world of the violence against unarmed civilians in the Central African Republic (CAR).  Lepage’s body was found on May 15 by French peacekeepers in a village near the town of Bouar, CAR, in a car driven by Christian militia fighters known as Anti-Balaka.

via The Courageous Career of Slain French Photojournalist Camille Lepage · Global Voices.

Looks like inflation rate is actually coming down to around 15%, but past several years it has been above 20%.  In 2007 the cedi was redenominated and reissued, basically at 1 cedi per dollar.  The cedi now is at about 3 per dollar.  So the dollar has gone up 300% in just 7 years… implies about a 16% inflation rate if dollar has not also been appreciating or depreciating.    Now, an inflation rate of 15% annual is high by world standards in the 2000s….  why is there so little discontent?

GDP per capita growth, in real terms, has been solid 3% a year or more. Who cares about inflation in that context?

Caroline Tuina, according to press accounts, presented a report on a meeting of the union of media workers (SYNATIC) in her evening news program.  The editor at RTB asked her five minutes before the news program to not run it. She ran it anyway.  Asked why he told her not to run it, he says (see below): “I’m the editor. The meeting was about criticizing the RTB director.  I have a problem with that.”

Joint au téléphone pour avoir sa version des faits, Adjima Thiombiano a simplement qualifié d’ « acte d’indiscipline » ce qu’a fait Caroline Ouanré. Il aurait donné des directives qui n’ont pas été suivies. Etant chargé de valider les titres, Il affirme qu’à 5 minutes du journal, il a « courtoisement » demandé à la présentatrice Ouanre d’enlever l’élément sur le SYNATIC à la ‘’Une’’ des titres du JT. « Elle a refusé, en allant contre ma décision » affirmera M. Thiombiano. Mais, pourquoi enlever l’élément sur le SYNATIC ? Il explique ce choix par le fait qu’il est le Rédacteur en Chef, et qu’étant le responsable chargé de valider les titres, tous les éléments qui passent au journal l’engagent en premier lieu. Pour lui, il était difficile d’annoncer à la ‘’Une’’ un élément qui était contre le directeur de la télé. Sur la question du SMS que la présentatrice a reçu, Thiombiano affirme ne s’être pas trompé et soutient l’avoir sciemment fait pour que Tuina soit informée. Pour le reste, le Rédacteur en Chef dit ne pas vouloir rentrer dans les détails. « C’est administrativement que je vais régler ça », a-t-il conclus.

via Menaces de suspension de Caroline Tuina Ouanré à la RTB : Le SYNATIC tient une AG extra. et annonce un sit-in – leFaso.net, l’actualité au Burkina Faso.

And it is not just their obsessive listening to Pharell Williams!

In short, “it’s remarkable” how just the presence of children seems to protect against declining happiness, Ifcher said.Herbst and Ifcher offer three theories why parents are becoming happier—and what that means for American society.First, there’s the phenomenon that Robert Putnam identified in his 2000 book Bowling Alone—that Americans were becoming increasingly isolated from community and family. Herbst and Ifcher argue that families are the “last vestige of community life in American society.”“Parents are more likely to spend time with friends, get the news, be interested in politics, think people are honest, have faith in the economy, be trusting,” Herbst said. “We think that parents remain better attached to society, and we think the linchpin of that attachment is kids.”Moreover, contrary to the notion that kids hinder the social lives of mom and dad, children help parents stay social. Think PTA meetings, playdates with fellow parents in tow, and taking part in the sociopolitical fabric of the neighborhood.Second, the financial hardship brought on by children has lessened over time. The U.S. now has a more generous earned income tax credit and childcare tax credits, which means parents have more of a financial cushion than they used to.“The social safety net has begun to favor parents more over time than non-parents,” Herbst said. In short: “Parents may have more money in their pocket, and more money translates to more happiness.”Finally, who is having a kid these days is different than who had children in previous decades—and their reasons for doing so have changed. Median marriage ages are increasing, and having a birth out of wedlock isn’t as socially frowned upon as it used to be.

via Does Having Kids Make Parents Happy After All? – Tanya Basu – The Atlantic.

Girls are bombarded with messages about how they should look.  The male gaze is always upon them.

Most boys, and men, barely look in the mirror.  Dandruff?  Really?  Oh, I’ll brush it off.  Comb-over is not in style?  Oh, but still I think it looks good.  My belly’s hanging over my belt?  … stop… what does a guy do when he thinks that?  He rubs his belly… “good old belly… always there for me.”  So my point it, most guys could care less. Duh, deep down, occasionally, they care. But not the way girls care.

Then today my daughter tells me. “Dad, why don’t you shave your arms and your legs.  All that hair.  It’s weird.”  Sigh.  I’ll never see my body as the same old friendly “me” again.  I don’t even measure up for someone who has known me all her life.  Imagine what a stranger must think looking at me!

The author, Coral Davenport, needs to go to an LRA meeting (Lazy Reporters Anonymous)…. “Hi my name is Coral and writing that the Sahara was expanding through Mali could have been wrong so I added “slow” and that way nobody can say it isn’t right because maybe I meant over the next 1000 years…”  and then… “I do know that “starving” means to  suffer severely or die from hunger, and that “farmers” would be taken by most people to mean “ordinary people in the region”, but actually if more than one person who also farms suffers from hunger, then it is technically true that “farmers are starving.””  and then finally, “Of course everyone knows that starving farmers, before they die, pledge blood oaths to Al-Qaeda, which then gives them enough food to fatten them up to become suicide bombers.  How does everyone know this?  Well I read it in a report prepared by a military think-tank.”

The most recent scientific reports on climate change warn that increasing drought in Africa is now turning arable land to desert. The national security report’s authors conclude that the slow but steady expansion of the Sahara through Mali, which is killing crops and leaving farmers starving, may have been a contributing force in the jihadist uprising in that African country in 2012. Since then, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has seized control of northern Mali and remains in conflict with the Malian government.

I’m happy to be pointed to evidence that (1) the Sahara is steadily advancing in Mali, (2) farmers are starving, (3) starving farmers are connected somehow  to Al-Qaeda, other than being in the same region.

via Climate Change Deemed Growing Security Threat by Military Researchers – NYTimes.com.

“Tribes are killing each other over water today,” Mr. Kerry said. “Think of what happens if you have massive dislocation, or the drying up of the waters of the Nile, of the major rivers in China and India. The intelligence community takes it seriously, and it’s translated into action.”

Of course, as Elechi Amadi knew quite well and wrote about so eloquently in his novel The Great Ponds, tribes were “killing” each other over water in precolonial Nigeria, too. Before climate change!  This seems like a great way to spend money on consultants… the world desperately needs reports about “what to do if the Nile dries up.”

via Climate Change Deemed Growing Security Threat by Military Researchers – NYTimes.com.

One of my undergraduate student’s wants to use the World Bank’s Gender database for a class project.  Turns out that the data is in “long” format.  Each variable and country is a row, and the years are columns.  Most statistical analysis of cross-country panel data starts with the data in “long” format, where each observation is a country-year and the columns are variables.  Getting R to reshape the data isn’t as easy as one would think.  (In Stata is was not so easy either.)  The problem is never reshaping with a single variable, but rather reshaping with many variables and also preserving all the labels.

Stack overflow has some useful posts on reshaping WDI data that are relevant.  See here, and here.  And the folks at UCLA have a nice introduction to the subject of reshaping.  I finally settled on this:

# First set your working directory to be the directory with the data

# Load a couple packages that are needed

library(plyr)
library(stringr)

# Load the gender stats database into R
WGgender <-  read.csv(“GenderStats_Data.csv”)

# Subset data with countries for analysis
WGgenderLA = subset(WGgender, ( Country.Name==”Peru” |Country.Name==”Chile” ) )
# make a list of variables that need
clist <- c(“SP.DYN.LE00.IN”, “SP.DYN.TFRT.IN”)

# loop through the list of variable names
for (i in clist) {
# subset data to only include that variable
atemp = subset(WGgenderLA, ( Indicator.Code==i ) )
# drop the indicator name and code
axtemp <- subset(atemp, select = -c(Indicator.Code, Indicator.Name))
# reshape the data into long
ax2temp <- reshape(axtemp, direction=”long”, varying=list(names(axtemp)[3:56]), v.names=i,
idvar=c(“Country.Name”,”Country.Code”), timevar=”Year”, times=1960:2013)
# a little trick to get the variable name to be assigned to the data.frame name
nameToUse <- str_sub(string=i, start=1, end=14)
assign(x=nameToUse, value=ax2temp)
# cleanup the temporary variables
rm(atemp, i, nameToUse, ax2temp, axtemp)
}

# merge the two data.frames
WBgender <- join(x = SP.DYN.LE00.IN, y = SP.DYN.TFRT.IN, by = c(“Country.Name”,”Country.Code”, “Year”))

# more cleanup
rm(clist, WGgender, WGgenderLA, SP.DYN.LE00.IN, SP.DYN.TFRT.IN)

# Now you are ready for panel cross-country analysis
# See http://www.princeton.edu/~otorres/Panel101R.pdf
# See http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/plm/vignettes/plm.pdf
plot(SP.DYN.TFRT.IN~Year, data=WBgender)
plot(SP.DYN.LE00.IN~Year, data=WBgender)

It is probably very clunky.  You have to decide in advance which variables to use.  And then a lot of cutting and pasting to get all the variables in the code.  There must be an easier way but I did not find it.  (Of course, the WDI package in R does most of this easily, but here the student wanted to use the Gender database which you download as a csv file.)

A great resource from Oscar Torres-Reyna at Princeton of  panel analysis in R.

Why four? Why not.  Hell isn’t empty.

1. What if the oil billions had been distributed evenly to private citizens of South Sudan (as some people including yours truly advocated).  The statist “gimmie the consulting job” elite (both national and international) of course was never going to let this happen but the political-economy logic of reducing the stakes, of letting soldiers have a nice stipend and go home, or women setting up small businesses, of kids pursuing further education…. was pretty reasonable, to me.
2. What if South Sudan had declared itself to be a Paul Romer-style charter city, with management handed over, for a modest fee, to a management team with 50 years of experience doing exactly what South Sudan needed (CARE, CRS or World Vision).  Compensation could have been tied to non-oil GDP why not?
3. What if South Sudan had set up a real sovereign wealth fund that put itself under management of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund… and had put $1 b a year away… by now there’d be several billion saved for regular people rather than having been squandered.
4. What if South Sudan had …. you fill in the blank….

It’s the sweet smell of reasonableness…

After overcoming years of fiscal dysfunction that stemmed in part from an antitax ballot referendum, Gov. Jerry Brown is trying to call California voters to the ballot again — this time to approve a constitutional amendment requiring that surpluses be used to pay down municipal debt and create an emergency fund.  The proposal comes as the state has ended years of multibillion-dollar budget gaps and is in the midst of another boom, bringing in billions more than it predicted in tax revenue this year and facing a budget surplus even more flush than anticipated just months ago.

via With Eye on Re-election, Brown Pushes Rainy-Day Fund – NYTimes.com.