Re-design

So I’ve been playing with the new blog templates from Blogger. What do you think?

We’re number #34!

According to some sort of online 2010 ranking for best economics blogs. Mental. Obviously I can’t vouch for the rigour or quality of the selection process.

Blogging: A failed defence against impermanence?

Chronicling, like acquisition, is a failed defense against impermanence. We can’t take our stuff with us when we go, but we can’t even take our experiences with us into the next moment, except by recording them, by talking about them. Gossip can be understood through these texts as perhaps a function of longing rather than a malicious impulse; if we don’t tell someone about what happened or where we’ve been, that experience may just vanish. Telling people what happened is the acquisitive impulse applied to experience. Buying too much stuff is the same thing as telling secrets. Indiscretion is a kind of longing.

Helena Fitzgerald, via Marginal Revolution

LSE joins the blogosphere

A couple of potentially interesting new blogs from the LSE, Do No Harm written by students on the MSc Development Management and a course blog DV409: Economic Development Policy written by Instructor Diana Weinhold.
There is an even a post by an ex-Juba-ite on working in development:

A self-serving bureaucracy that never gets to the field, lives in meetings, writes endless reports and pays itself handsomely.  This isn’t why a lot of people join the cause.  They want to be working directly with people, seeing the impacts of their work in front of them, confronting poverty and injustice head on.  But how do you achieve large-scale impact from a local level, how do you fully engage with national politics, and how do you bring the large resources to bear?  Personally I’m in development to work on the big issues, which means in 3 years in Sudan I got out of the capital three times.  I could live with that.  Other people felt sorry for me, often quite angry.  You know that aid official who lives behind barbed wire in western comfort when there are poor people just the other side of the fence?  That was me.

In my 18 months I’ve left the capital twice.

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Links fixed - thanks Laura

10 Most Clicked (so far)

1. Blogging and Academia

2. Photo of the Day

3. Jigy-jigy

4. Elbadawi on the Game between Juba and Khartoum

5. Half of all Haitians wanted to permanently leave the country, even before the earthquake

6. Dear NGOs, Put some clothes on you scruffs!

7. Top 10 annoying things about people who complain about economists

8. All of political economy in one picture

9. Thursday Links

10. This rocks my world

I’m trying to look for patterns. Half of these are pictures/graphs/charts/tables. So you like pictures. Beyond that…

I have some competition…

For this week at least, possibly the best economics blog in Southern Sudan could be Whirled Citizen. He’s probably too busy doing some actual economics work to blog, but I’m looking forward to more reflections on Juba.

In case you missed it - this is also the best summary I’ve read of the new Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin “African Poverty is Falling” paper.

Happy Birthday Roving Bandit

I’m a few days late but I just realised that I started this thing just over a year ago. My first post was 3rd March 2009.

I’m afraid that I have no profundities (for that - try Andrew Sullivan - Why I Blog), except to say thanks for reading and for all your comments. I really couldn’t have imagined it going any better. So, if you keep reading, I’ll keep writing.

How to blog (tech-y edition)

First, write well (I’m still working on this one). Listen to David Roodman.

Then get some decent tools. I use:

Windows Live Writer - Let’s you draft rich-formatted posts (with photos!) offline, and preview you them as they will look on your site. I just discovered this and it is awesome.

FeedDemon - For offline feed-reading. Syncs with Google Reader

Fire Status - Post to Twitter in 2 clicks. It sorts out the links for you and everything

Page2RSS.com - For monitoring sites which don’t have feeds

Twitter

Yes, it is devil spawn, but I've kind of figured out how to use it (this helps), and so I am mostly posting interesting links there rather than saving them all up for a links blog post (which my housemate always complains about). There is a little box on the right of the webpage, or you can click here. I'll try and remember to keep up some lengthier stuff here and not descend entirely into stunted sentences.

How to blog

“Keep your posts organized. Cut words, but not necessarily ideas. Tell stories. My longest post is also by far the most read. Figure out why. Read other blogs and analyze what works for you and what doesn’t.”

David Roodman

RovingBandit.com

Because I love you all my dear readers, no longer shall you have to type in “.blogspot”. That is a 9 key-stroke (36%) reduction. Bada-bing.

10 Questions for 2010

I've been doing a bit of a spring-clean and found a few questions I've been musing over during the past year, half thinking about blogging, but googling in vain. Anyone know anything? Numbers are preferred, but I'd love to hear your thoughts either way.

1. Will increasing urbanisation in Africa improve growth? Is there a relationship between population density or city size and productivity in Africa?

2. What are the determinants of rich country citizen attitudes to aid? Do media debates such as Easterly vs Sachs vs Moyo have any impact?

3. What are the determinants of rich country citizen attitudes to immigration?

4. There are huge gains to "trade" from migration, however as with trade in goods there are winners and losers. Is it possible to compensate the losers and therefore allow for the capture of some of these gains?

5. What is the relationship between barriers to migration and the length of stay? What about internal migration?

6. What are the precise mechanics of aid fungibility? Is there a strategic interaction between government and donors? How do transparency efforts on each side affect this interaction?

7. Is there any evidence for Collier's assertion about a positive relationship between country population size and media quality? Is it even possible to measure media quality?

8. Are there any good cross-country measures of gay rights, and if so what are their correlates?

9. Are there any measures of the danger of countries for tourists? Tourist deaths per tourist? Would publicizing such data affect decisions? Is there an unfair bias against tourism to developing countries due to an incorrect perception of danger?

10. Will there ever be enough data?

Blogging and Academia

I've just been reading the latest draft of a paper by Miguel, Saiegh and Satyanath which measures the correlation between violence on the football (soccer) field in European leagues (yellow/red cards) and violence in a player's home country (civil war). Blattman blogged about an earlier draft a while ago.

Great paper, but what caught my eye were the acknowledgements:

"We are grateful to Dan Altman, Ray Fisman, Matias Iaryczower, Abdul Nouri, Dani Rodrik, seminar participants at Stanford, UCSD, UCLA, IPES, and at the 4th Annual HiCN Workshop at Yale, and a host of anonymous bloggers for useful comments, and Dan Hartley, Teferi Mergo, Melanie Wasserman and Tom Zeitzoff for excellent research assistance. All errors remain our own."

Proper academic acknowledgement of bloggers! Is this a first?