Michael Kevane

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 lines. One year later, O’Neal fled the charge, and for over 30 years, he has lived in Tanzania, one of the last American exiles from an era when activists considered themselves at war with the U.S. government. Today, this community organizer confronts very different challenges and finds himself living between two worlds – America and Africa, his radical past and his uncertain future.

2) Chocolat – A depiction of the relationships between colonist and colonized set in Cameroon prior to its independence as seen through the eyes of a young white girl and her black servant.  By Claire Denis.

3) Mississipi Masala – An Indian family is expelled from Uganda when Idi Amin takes power. They move to Mississippi and time passes. The Indian daughter falls in love with a black man, and the respective families have to come to terms with it.

4) Little Senegal – This beautifully photographed, touching film follows Alloune, a man who gives tours of the Senegal coastline where long ago his ancestors where imprisoned and shipped across the Atlantic in the slave trade. Through a slender doorway looking out to the wide ocean beyond, participants in Alloune’s tour are moved, saddened, and quieted by the thought of what once was. Then one day, Alloune decides that he must track the path of his own ancestors, and so he travels to the southern United States. He wanders from one former plantation to the next, asking questions, looking in libraries, and researching an extended family tree, always carrying the weight of history on his small, long, thin frame. Finally his search leads him to New York City, where he locates a young nephew, and then a female cousin who is about his same age, in her fifties. Taking a job for his cousin as a security guard at her Harlem newspaper stand, Alloune begins the difficult task of adapting to city life. The relationship between Alloune and his cousin starts off as professional, changes to family relation, and finally ends up as a love affair. However, the distance between Africa and New York, history and present, can never be escaped or forgotten.

5) Lumumba: La Mort Du Prophète – (Raoul Peck’s early film) The life and legacy of Patrice Lumumba, one of the legendary figures of modern Africa’s struggle for self-determination, is reconstructed and examined through home movies, photographs, old newsreels and interviews with Belgian journalists and Lumumba’s own daughter.

6) Rouch in Reverse – A critique of visual anthropology through the work of Jean Rouch looks at European anthropology from an African perspective. Jean Rouch and filmmaker Manthia Diawara compare their interpretations of clips from Rouch’s work.

7) Umgidi (Shadow Dancing) –  Sipho is a former political prisoner on Robben Island who decides to return to his home town to complete the Xhosa initiation ritual he began while in prison. But his younger brother, Vuyo is quite reluctant to have his own ceremony, partly because he is gay and is conflicted about adopting traditional practices. This film explores a family and a country trying to embrace both modernity and tradition

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 nos sources, les véhicules de IAM Gold sont interdits d’accès à leur site par les jeunes du Séno. Ils reprochent à cette entreprise de n’avoir pas tenu promesse vis-à-vis de sa politique locale en matière d’emploi et son manque de transparence dans l’exploitation des ressources locales. Ils citent en exemple, la promesse non tenue de cette société de recruter et de former des jeunes en conduite d’engins miniers. Sur sept points de revendication, les jeunes en furie exigent la révision par cette société minière, du mode de recrutement avec une quote-part pour les jeunes de la localité, la mise en place d’un comité de suivi de l’exploitation du métal précieux du Séno impliquant les jeunes et les parties prenantes de la province, un bilan de l’étude d’impact environnemental de l’exploitation minière dans la zone avant tout autre projet d’extension.

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 progrès et le changement (UPC) continue son maillage du Burkina avec cette récente installation du correspondant provincial des Balé qui a eu lieu à Boromo le samedi 17 mars 2012. Devant le président du parti et des militants ravis, Kassoum Traoré a été investi du pouvoir de défendre les idéaux et les intérêts de ce regroupement politique dans la zone.  Sur l’esplanade du Centre de lecture et d’animation culturelle de Boromo, une ferveur toute particulière y régnait. Les enceintes acoustiques d’un orchestre dépêché directement de Ouagadougou, avec le maestro Abdoulaye Cissé, crachaient des tonalités qui poussaient à la danse. Côté mobilisation, il n’y avait pas grand-chose à redire, avec ces nombreuses délégations venues de la capitale des Balé, de ses communes et villages. Le degré d’ambiance a atteint son paroxysme avec l’arrivée de la mission venue de la capitale, conduite par le président du parti, Zéphirin Diabré. La preuve que, visiblement, l’UPC (Union pour le progrès et le changement) a sonné le grand cor des retrouvailles et n’a pas ménagé aucun moyen pour que sa rentrée politique reste longtemps gravée dans les mémoires de ceux qui y assistaient.

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 monetary systems,” Bernanke said. “There’s an awful big waste of resources.”  Plus, he said, they don’t fix things.  There wouldn’t be enough gold in the world to meet global demand, the U.S. would need to mine in South Africa and ship what it could get to a vault in New York City — and most importantly, the Fed would be left unable to respond to rising levels of unemployment.  Pegging the value of dollar to gold led to financial panics and sharp swings in the economy during the 19th Century, he continued, the kinds of problems the Fed was established in 1913 to stop.  “The gold standard would not be feasible for both practical reasons and policy reasons,” Bernanke said. “I understand the impulse, but I think if you look at actual history the gold standard didn’t work well.”

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 only 6!” The video is so well done, it’s very impressive.

Trying to pinpoint why it makes me ambivalent is hard, but I think I know what is going on. And these remarks have to be prefaced by saying that making Kony a household name I think is a good thing. In other words, there may be unintended consequences, but overall I think they are small, and I think the success of the campaign makes it more likely rather than less likely that Kony will be arrested and tried and found guilty.  There is a clear consensus that Kony is responsible for horrible crimes, and a fair and partial judicial process (the ICC) has issued an arrest warrant. So there is no moral ambiguity (except quibbling) about a campaign to splash his poster everywhere in the world and make his name and face well-known everywhere. All persons who commit crimes against humanity should fear that.

So where is the moral ambivalence?
1. Should someone with the power to mobilize tens of millions of people advocate that they deluge “celebrities” with a message, making it difficult for those “celebrities” to disagree or simply be indifferent? Maybe the celebrities have other, laudable or reprehensible, goals in life. What does Rhianna (whoever she is) have to do with Joesph Kony and justice?
2. Should someone use their child, knowingly, in a campaign intended to reach millions of persons, so that their child becomes a “celebrity”. This is an obvious troubling moral issue in the era of “viral” video: How do we retain privacy if we are always one click away from intended or unintended 15 minutes of fame? The key word there is that Gavin is being “used” as an instrumentality. Of course children have always been used in that sense (Shirley Temple), but shouldn’t part of “development as freedom” imply the freedom of children to not be used that way? It’s a tough moral tradeoff, to constrain one child’s life with the intent to improve opportunities for thousands of other children.
3. Does the very high production quality of the video not have a “medium is the message” effect? I worry a little that by taking an attitude that only a Hollywood style production can generate the intended outcome, means that at some complex level one is accomplishing the same thing as the very Hollywood/Corporate manipulation criticized in the last third of the video. Shouldn’t we be careful about holding on to a deliberate anti-slickness as a mechanism to signal credibility?
4. Related to this, the video appears to celebrate Facebook in a somewhat strange way, as if Facebook were a global commons, rather than a private corporation.

Those are my thoughts, but of course as I noted earlier, contextualized in the very earnest desire to see the campaign indeed achieve the intended goal of redoubling effective efforts to have Kony captured.

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 legal infrastructure that lowers transactions costs.  it turns out that the Papal Schism of 1378 of Avignon/Rome meant that many German students and teachers returned to Germany and set up three universities starting in 1386.  Yuchtman argues that their establishment was a natural experiment, and that cities closer to the universities subsequently received more “royal” charters to hold markets (he takes as index of economic activity) in subsequent 20 years (i.e. a break in trend towards more rapid growth).

I wasn’t sure how he distinguished the supply side from the demand side (if they had been large amusement parks with no production of knowledge, might the agglomeration have been enough to produce the effect?) but I had to leave early due to office hours, and I haven’t had time to look at the paper.  But he was a great presenter with infectious enthusiasm, and made great links to general questions of historical underpinnings of economic growth of Europe.  It does make me wonder though about how the research agenda gets driven, in the sense that you never see this current crop of economic historians looking for natural experiments that explain the decline of Europe from 400-1000.  It’s taken for granted that growth was complex and decline simple (Goths!).  But maybe decline happened in part because of the rise of the Catholic Church, the same way growth happened in part because of the rise of universities.  Gotta go read my Goody.

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 use hyperinflation examples from Latin America, and by the mid-1990s, I could use examples from eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But for the next few years, I suspect, the canonical example of hyperinflation will be what has happened in Zimbabwe from 2007-2009, which has the dubious distinction of being the only hyperinflation of the still-young 21st century. Janet Koech of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas offers a nice overview of “Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe,” which appears in the Annual Report of the Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute.

Read his full post here.

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 if people are lying”that  had as central story a beautiful model “exposed” as spokesperson for an anti-Kony campaign.  The practical ethics issues are wonderful for debate.  Most academics (including Blattman) have a serious distaste for agitprop, especially of the very distant Mrs. Jellyby kind.

So the panic attack was by two students at Santa Clara University, who had invited Invisible Children to come to campus and present the video, and this week as it went viral, they started reading all the nuance, and more and more decided they didn’t want to host the Invisible Children group… so they rushed in for advice… can you guess what I said?  Lots of sympathy, and “teachable moment/debate is good” stuff.  So I am looking forward in April to see what happens.  And of course to seeing Kony handed over to ICC.

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 in his slide show). He and co-author are trying to measure and correlate (causality is hard here) what gets lost in schooling. There is a literature, for example, on decline in what is often called “indigenous technical knowledge” (i.e. plants and craft stuff) that one might expect. But less clear is “social responsibility” and “respect for parents.” The correlations Jukes presented (based on a neat method of asking adults to rate the relative respectfulness of groups of three kids) suggest that schooling is pretty strongly negatively associated with these values. And parents think these values are very important and should be learned and deepened in school. (i.e. parents apparently did not highly rank “getting smarter” as the thing that should be happening in school!).  Lots of food for thought!

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 the primaries, even in an incredibly weak Republican field.  Guess we won’t see a big surge of “Ayn” babies in 2012….

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 has been carpet bombing the journals with articles in this vein.)

Pretend you’re a three-year-old, exploring an exciting new room full of toys. You and another child come up to a large machine that has some marbles inside, which you can see. There’s a rope running through the machine and the two ends of the rope hang out of the front, five feet apart. If you or your partner pulls on the rope alone, you just get more rope. But if you both pull at the same time, the rope dislodges some marbles, which you each get to keep. The marbles roll down a chute, and then they divide: one rolls into the cup in front of you, three roll into the cup in front of your partner…In this situation, where both kids have to pull for anyone to get marbles, the children equalize the wealth about 75% of the time, with hardly any conflict. Either the “rich” kid hands over one marble spontaneously or else the “poor” kid asks for one and his request is immediately granted. (Chimpanzees doing tasks similar to this one do not share the spoils, in any of the conditions. They just grab what they can, regardless of who did what.)

A slight variation ..reveals a deep truth. 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 obvious ones in the book are: (i) confusing causation with correlation, (ii) attempting to lead the reader into such confusion, and (iii) “post hoc, propter hoc” (if Y comes after X, Y must have been caused by X).

(i): At page 178, the authors discuss “direct discovery technologies” that mine data and would “let managers go directly to the cause of variances in results or performance. This would be a form of predictive analytics, since it would employ a model of how the business is supposed to perform, and would pinpoint factors that are out of range in the causal model of business performance.”

First we need to deal with a textual ambiguity: the meaning of “supposed” in this context. If “supposed to” is normative — i.e. meaning “is desired to” — then to call technology “predictive” when it uses such a model is quite a stretch. So does “supposed to” have a more neutral meaning, like “is anticipated to”? I’ll assume that this fits the context better.

Now let’s get to the real problem: The model is looking at results and performance — i.e., the past. As statistical programs are wont to do, the model can identify correlations; and let’s assume that it will make predictions based on the observed correlations (there are some commercial software packages that promise this). That is quite different from divining causes, which nonetheless is what the authors have twice asserted in this passage. I leave aside the question of predictive value based on past results; read Taleb or your mutual fund prospectus (“Past results are no guarantee of future performance”).

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 Africa as transhipment point, dislocation due to rapid swings in incentives (one estimate that I heard was that 1 out of every 5 young men in Burkina Faso had left their village to try their hand at artisanal gold mining, a horrific way to make a living and pursue l’aventure if there ever was one), the list goes on and on.  These same price and profit changes mean that inequality is growing rapidly, abetted by trade and financial liberalization, and growing emigration, legal and illegal.  Primary schooling is soaring, so there is a whole new generation of youth who have good reason to not “respect” their illiterate elders.  Add to this rapid telcom change as Internet and mobile phones penetrate ever deeper into urban and village societies, and you have a recipe for lots of social instability.  Yikes!

The upside of course is that most African economies are the worst performers in the world, and some of them really in recent human history, so while many will worsen in the coming years, eventually they will be better poised for rapid catch-up.  And also, African societies may be more resilient, because of their informal organization and self-sufficiency, to large-scale global threats that may challenge wealthy economies that rely on massive specialization.

So much for Tuesday philosophizing.