Someone needs to show Paul Collier how to use Dropbox

"At the end of the lecture, the exhausted Prof Collier carrying a heavy bag was mobbed by autograph-seeking youths who had some questions for him. As the English professor was leaving the hall, a rogue whom he mistook for one of the Ooni’s people asked to assist him with carrying the bag. He handed it to him trustingly and like magic, the thief vanished into the thin air in a twinkle of an eye, with everything gone—money, passport, air ticket and most painful of all, a laptop filled with the professor’s writings. “My soul is missing,” a distraught Prof. Collier told me, a day after."

 

Sun News Online (Nigeria), ‘Agony of an Oxford Prof in Lagos'

Safety nets and economic growth

Stefan Dercon wrote a paper a couple of years ago about how cash transfers might boost growth - by focusing on investments in ECD, smoothing geographical mobility, or smoothing the school-to-work transition.

To those possible avenues, Harold Alderman and Ruslan Yemtsov (ungated) now add:

• improving financial markets
• improving insurance markets
• improving infrastructure (through public works programmes), and
• relaxing political barriers to policy change

I find the last one particularly interesting. So for example, Ghana recently tried to offset the removal of fuel subsidies with a doubling of the coverage of the still-small national cash transfer programme to 150,000 households - helping to avoid Nigeria-style protests. Alderman and Yemtsov note that Indonesia pulled a similar trick on subsidy reform, and Mexico's safety nets helped usher NAFTA in.

But this political point goes beyond relaxing barriers to policy change, to relaxing barriers to technological change. Otis Reid pointed out to me this paper by economic historians Avner Greif and Murat Iyigun which argues that:

"England’s premodern social institutions-specifically, the Old Poor Law (1601-1834)-contributed to her transition to the modern economy. It reduced violent, innovation-inhibiting reactions from the economic agents threatened by economic change."

To be crude - it's worth paying off the Luddites so they don't get in the way of growth-enhancing technological change.

India fact of the day

In India, remittances are larger than the country’s earnings from IT exports.

From Dilip Ratha 

How many kids attended school in South Sudan today?

You'll soon be able to find out online from live SMS reports, currently being piloted in Lainya County near Juba (1,319 girls and 1,507 boys reported present so far today in case you were wondering, 84 girls absent and 136 boys absent), with plans to roll out to the whole country. Data is reported by state, county, and even by school. As CG says, "South Sudan may not be at the top on most things, but on SMS real time school attendance monitoring, we think we may actually be leading the world." Ana Fii Inni (I am here!) is a South Sudan Ministry of Education project being supported by the DFID Girl's Education Programme.

Unrelated, I'm also told that it is possible to procure schools through the church in South Sudan for half of the $30,400 figure reported here.

Measuring internal migration with mobiles

This is a cool idea by Joshua Blumenstock - measuring migration within Rwanda through mobile phone data. This video shows one person's movements over four years, proxied by the nearest mobile phone tower with each call made (the full paper is on his website). Are there any visualisations of M-Pesa transfers? I'd love to see a video along the lines of the Kiva one.


Mobility Inference from Call Data from Joshua Blumenstock on Vimeo.

There is no great stagnation

One of the points that Tyler makes in his great book is that though there has been a US innovation slowdown of late, the internet is a technology which, though not reaping immediate economy-wide benefits in terms of jobs and revenues, is something which might just pay off more in the long-run. Let's hope it can be analogous to steam power:

Steam power is an example of a general-purpose technology (GPT), that is a technology that can be applied to a variety of uses. Other GPTs include electricity and computers. It takes decades to develop the potential of GPTs, so their contribution to economic growth takes place long after their invention. That was certainly true for steam. As late as 1800, almost a century after Newcomen’s invention, steam power made only a minute contribution to the British economy. By the middle of the 19th century, however, the potential of steam was finally being realized as it was applied widely to transportation and industry. Half of the growth of labour productivity in Britain in the mid-19th Century was due to steam. 

And lets hope it doesn't take us a century. From Global Economy History: A Very Short Introduction (thanks Tom for making me read it. Very good. As is much of the rest of the series, including the Economics one)

ICT for Development and the Availability Bias

With apologies to all of the wonderful people who work in ICT4D, but is it possible that actually new technologies aren't all that important, but we focus on them because they are so important to our lives, because it gives us a sense of optimism and hope, and because we like new shiny things? If my amateur psychologising is correct, this is a version of the availability bias.

Essentially the availability heuristic operates on the notion that "if you can think of it, it must be important."

And because we spend all day on our macs and ipads, well surely these things must be able to revolutionise poor countries too right? And not only that, but the idea empowers us to think that we are able to make a difference.

I have a couple of hesitations.

1. One of the chief functions of modern technology is as labour-saving device. Wages are high, so cutting out a worker can really save money. That's why we have to scan our own shopping in the supermarket these days. Well guess what, in most developing countries, wages are not high. That is kinda the definition of developing country. So, the labour-saving device isn't quite so relevant. (I'm thinking of this JPAL project in India. Computer-assisted learning works, but person-assisted learning is more cost-effective).

2. There are already a TON of amazing technologies we already know about that just aren't being used. Fertilizer, vaccines, bednets, chlorine tablets for drinking water. The challenge is getting existing technologies to scale.

I know mobile phones are cool and important. But maybe the really important technologies are the hardest ones. Getting democracy and the rule of law to work. And those are technologies that we really don't know how to transplant to new places.

Anyway, just thinking out loud, let me know why I'm wrong. 

Three Free Books (and the economics of publishing)

All self-recommending; 

Lant Pritchett, The Rebirth of Education: From Universal Schooling to Universal Learning
Ernest Bazanye, The Ballad of Black Bosco
Julian Gough, Jude in London

What particularly caught my interest is Julian Gough's trust-based online publishing model. You get the book for free, and he asks for a tip once you've read it, if you enjoyed it. Now before you all say "that's what Radiohead did with In Rainbows," NO IT IS NOT. Radiohead asked for payment up front. Gough wants it after. That means all the risk is on him, not you. How on earth are you supposed to know how much you think the thing is worth before you've listened to it / read it?

Or in Gough's publisher's words:

we're aware of a bigger threat than piracy - oblivion. It is not easy, in this cash- and time-poor age, with free forms of entertainment abounding, to persuade people to spend money on an unknown book. Yes, a great book affords many hours of enjoyment and enrichment; indeed, adorns the shelves and the mind for a lifetime. Thus valued (i.e. using the crude calculus of 'hours of enjoyment and enrichment afforded'), a great book ought to cost far more than, say, a ticket to the cinema or the opera. But it doesn't, and among the reasons for this is the fact that a book - particularly a new, unproven book - comes with a grave risk: that, far from the hoped-for intellectual, moral, emotional and spiritual nourishment, it will bring nothing but asphyxiating boredom and hair-yanking irritation - with the pain only prolonged by that dreadful duty to finish felt by so many readers. And, of course, the worse a book is, the longer it takes to get through. What if you were unlucky enough to pick up an infinitely bad book? It would take all eternity to read it. Films and operas are different: the potential rewards may be less, but so are the risks. They're over in an hour or two, and even if they've bored or annoyed the pants off you, at least they've got you out of the house.

All of which is timely given a recent lecture by author Ewan Morrison lamenting that;

within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, ebooks and e-publishing will mean the end of "the writer" as a profession. Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers, by teams, by speciality subject enthusiasts and by those who were already established in the era of the paper book. The digital revolution will not emancipate writers or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist.

Now back to those three books. One of these authors is not like the others. He is an academic, with a salary from an institution for teaching, research and writing. His salary, and his ability to write books, does not rely directly upon those books making a profit.

Can we learn from academia and build new institutions to support artists in the new era of free online publishing?

I think that Morrison's diagnosis and analysis of the falling price of online content is correct, but I am far more optimistic that we can create new funding models to support music and literature. I hope I am right.

Capacity Building and Soccer

via Alan Hudson - Matt Andrews has a new blog.

Matt is the author of my favorite capacity-building as soccer metaphor, which crudely paraphrased goes something like this:

Much development capacity-building is a bit like sending Arsene Wenger to work with Accrington Stanley. A bottom league team with part-time players needs help with the basics - like making sure the players get to the game on time and maintain a basic level of fitness and organization. Bringing in the nutritionist, sports psychologist, and sophisticated data analysis used by the likes of Arsenal is kind of not really always appropriate.

Bashir committing mass Facerapes in Sudan

His first move came at the start of February when he called upon the citizens of Sudan to 'Like' his page so that it becomes clear that he definitely has more friends on his profile than the opposition. He even went so far as to encourage authorities to extend the electricity grid so that more people can join Facebook and be friends with him. 

However, Bashir did not feel that this was sufficient. Therefore, in true Bashir proxy militia style, he has unleashed his "Cyber-Jihadists" or Cyber-Janjaweed on those opposition supporters roaming the social networking sites with orders to "crush" all that try to topple the government. 

Soon, mass Facerapes will commence and a genocide of profile pages will ensue. Thousands will have to seek refuge in lesser sites such as Bebo, Myspace and even Friendster, where basic services such as chat and tagging are almost non-existent. Livelihoods will be destroyed as countless livestock and crops on Farmville are neglected.

From the essential Bored in Post Conflict (essential that is, if you like dick jokes with your Sudan coverage).

In Praise of Podcasts

I never really got into podcasts, mainly because just looking at iTunes makes me want to bludgeon my face with a rock.

Until I recently discovered the Stitcher app which automatically and quickly downloads audio to your phone. It is a joy.

I subscribe to:

• BBC World Service Africa Today
• Development Drums
• CGD’s wonkcast
• Freakonomics
• The Guardian Football Weekly
• BBC Radio 4 More or Less
• EconTalk
• NPR

The Center for Global Development’s “wonkcast” is especially good; it is weekly, it’s not too long, and Lawrence MacDonald is a great host.

The last two episodes with Lant Pritchett and Andy Sumner are fantastic.

The future of data collection

The Sudanese like to talk, so giving out mobile phones is always going to be a winner. Gabriel Demombynes at the World Bank is now starting to get the first data in from the Southern Sudan Experimental Phone Survey which I wrote about last year.

In November, in conjunction with the Southern Sudan Centre for Census, Statistics and Evaluation, we delivered mobile phones to 1000 households in the 10 state capitals of Southern Sudan. Each month starting last December, Sudanese interviewers from a call center in Nairobi have phoned respondents on those phones to collect information on their economic situation, security, outlook, and other topics.

What is so exciting about this project is the sheer quantity and frequency of data that is being collected at relatively low cost.

For more info see Gabriel’s blogpost and photo essay, and make sure to follow his new Twitter account@gdemom.

More Clarifications: On Academic Publishing

So my position on Elsevier also requires some clarification.

on the one hand you say it is in the nature of a private firm to maximise its profits, but at the same time you say that if they don't decide to make no profit at all they should be nationalised?

Ian Thorpe also discussed a number of different business/revenue models:

Journals are not “free” to produce of course. Producing them costs money, whether it’s to organize the peer review process, for editing, layout, printing, distribution, advertising, web design, subscription management and so on.

Well firstly I refuse to believe that the costs for online-only access are (or at least should be) that high. Look at this blog! It costs me nothing absolutely nothing to publish. With the exception of $10 for the domain name.

But let me start again - informati0n basically has most of the properties of a textbook public good, which kind of suggests that it should be publicly funded and made freely available to all. Public funding could co-exist with the existing publishing companies through some sort of contractual arrangement. I don’t buy the arguments for establishing new journals, reputations are too difficult to acquire. Rather, governments should tell publishers that they will now be publishing things online for free, and then maybe give them some compensation for it, but then as the costs are so low they could basically afford to just do that bit for free and cross-subsidize the slightly loss-making online versions by selling physical copies to libraries. And yeah sure, let them stick some advertising on it too, the basic point is that they should be compelled to allow free online access.

And finally whilst it is of course completely logically understandable when profit-maximising firms happen to behave utterly disgustingly in the valid pursuit of profits, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pour scorn on them.

Is that any better/clearer?

The World on Facebook

Via: The Guardian Datablog

Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy

O'Brien: Do you feel that we now take technology for granted?

Louis C.K.: Well yes, now we live an amazing world, and its wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots that don't care.

Word.

HT: Kelly Bidwell via Chris Blattman

More Awesome News from the (non-)nation of Somaliland

Monty Munford thinks that Somaliland, not content with democratic elections and biometric passports, is also likely to become the first nation to become a cashless society, due to expansion in mobile money transfers and retail payments.

He also throws in these tidbits:

“For every dollar there are almost 17,000 Somaliland Shillings”

“The state itself runs on a budget of only $40 million dollars”

“competition between the country’s carriers means calls from Somaliland are five to six times cheaper than other African countries.”

I really have to go visit.

Haddad on Cash Transfers

Lawrence Haddad at IDS notes that all of the recent big cash transfer successes have been led by governments rather than donors. 

There have been too many donor driven pilot schemes in sub-Saharan Africa that have not taken off due to lack of political support. The successes cited in the article have been home grown: Mexico, Brazil, South Africa. What donors can do best is to be nimble, nurturing and flexible enough to support home grown political energy for cash transfers when and where it exists. This is what donor support for cash transfers should prioritize and it is what aid more generally should seek to do.

I would disagree for 3 reasons.

1. His list (Mexico, Brazil, South Africa) are all middle-income countries. If we wait for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa to become middle-income… then isn’t half of the problem solved already? Won’t that take too long?
2. Donors should not necessarily blindly follow where governments lead. They can and perhaps should play a catalytic role in experimenting and encouraging the government to experiment with new policies (and robustly evaluating them!) to generate new knowledge.
3. Mobile technology. Soon there will be an M-Pesa which works globally. And then…

-----

On a side note - Haddad references a Sunday Times article - which he can’t link to because of the new paywall. Anyone want to bet against the Times paywall experiment failing?

Hyperlinked research

To betray my utter geekiness (as if I haven’t done that already), I just got very excited when I opened this CGD working paper by Michael Clemens and saw hyperlinks on all the references. Imagine that! To my disappointment the links in the text only lead to the full citation in the bibliography. But really, in this day and age, why on earth don’t all academic papers come with embedded links to online versions of their sources?

Kenya fact of the day

11% of Kenya's GDP is transferred annually over cell phones (HT: Watson).

Or is it?

Since its inception [2007], the cumulative value of the money transferred via M-Pesa was over US$3.7 billion -- almost 10 percent of Kenya’s annual GDP (Safaricom, 2009). Aker and Mbiti

So somewhere between 4% and 11% then. Still not to be sniffed at.

The Guardian to stop printing by 2015?

More on the economics of newspapers:

Peter Kirwan at  wired.co.uk has pieced together some numbers and estimates that the Guardian’s online ad revenues could be enough to entirely funding its reporting and editorial operations by 2015.

[£40m] is the number budgeted for overall digital revenues at GNM [Guardian News & Media] during the year to March 2011.

…

GNM expects to boost its digital revenues by around 30 percent in the space of a year.

…

I’ve used a range of more realistic growth rates to estimate how long it might take GNM’s digital operations to earn the £100m required to keep a decent-sized newsroom operating seven days a week.

At 10 percent annualised growth, the target date is 10 years away, in 2020.

At 15 percent, it’s seven years away, in 2017.

At 20 percent, it’s five years away, in 2015.

I need an iPad now.