The life and times of a Red Cross senior official in China

The NY Times reports:

Guo Meimei, 20, appeared to hold a senior position at the Red Cross Society of China, a government organization that is the country’s largest charity. Under the name “Guo Meimei Baby,” she had boasted on her microblog that her title was “commercial general manager” at the Red Cross.... At the same time, she posted photos and entries detailing her jet-set life, writing of the orange Lamborghini she drove in the south (her “little bull”) and the white Maserati she had in Beijing (her “little horse”)... During times of crisis, like the Sichuan and Yushu earthquakes ... officials always put the Red Cross on the front lines of charity drives.

 A Malaysian blogger posted more pics here. He asks:

"What if you found out that the money you gave in the name of charity to such non-profit organization contributes to people’s luxurious life?" 

For our Geneva readers, it should come as no surprise that non-profit organizations and corruption go hand in hand.

Military spending and danceability

Danceability is compiled by Echonest and defined as the ease with which a person could dance to a song, over the course of the whole song. It's built using a mix of beat strength, tempo stability, overall tempo, and more.

(Alleged) corruption, Aussie style

This video says it all.

Is the US really that rich?

As blogged on Carpe Diem, according to new BEA data on GDPs per capita at PPP exchange rates, US states are way richer than European countries. Of course PPP exchange rates are not perfect to capture standards of living as ham in the US is not the same as ham in Italy. But still...

If you lived in Canada rather than Switzerland

If you lived in Canada rather than Switzerland, you would:

• use 95.26% more electricity
• have 93.18% more chance of being unemployed
• consume 85.17% more oil
• have 21.12% more chance of dying in infancy
• make 7.91% less money
• have 7.53% more babies
• spend 12.11% less money on health care
• experience 4.75% less of a class divide
• be 33.33% less likely to have HIV/AIDS
• live 0.32 years longer

Compare any two countries on this website.

Do voters need to be educated for democracy to work?

Ugo and his coauthor claim in a new Vox column that:

In order to evaluate the actions of politicians, voters need to be able to process the available information and understand the impact of the actions of elected officials on their welfare... Democracy leads to the election of better politicians only if the level of education is above a certain threshold".

They go on to show that the correlation between democracy and the quality of government is statistically significant only in countries with high levels of education (see grinter below).

But do educated voters really vote more intelligently? The latest Economics Focus argues that education can reinforce authority and the power of ruling elites, rather than leading to better governments. It bases its arguments on a new paper by Ted Miguel and coauthors:

The authors compared a group of Kenyan girls in 69 primary schools whose students were randomly selected to receive a scholarship with similar students in schools which received no such financial aid... Overall, it significantly increased the amount of education obtained... [But] those with more education did not become more favourably inclined towards democracy. In fact, education deepened their sense of identification with their ethnic group and increased their tolerance for political violence. There was little evidence that having more education made them more engaged in civic life or political organisations.

The closing paragraph says it all.

Education may make people more interested in improving their own lives but they may not necessarily see democracy as the way to do it... In India, for example, poorer and less educated people vote in larger numbers than their more educated compatriots. Indeed, the latter often express disdain for, and impatience with, the messiness of democracy. Many yearn instead for the kind of government that would execute the corrupt and build highways, railway lines and bridges at the dizzying pace of authoritarian China.

So I wouldn't blame the troubles of democracies on the lack of education of their population. The problems are more likely to be due to the lack of civic engagement by educated people.

Book Review: Adapt by Tim Harford

I read Harford’s first book, The Undercover Economist, during my masters in economics. I found the book fascinating. It helped me understand my microeconomics class and convinced me that economists had the tools to design a better world. So when I saw that his new book, Adapt, was getting raving reviews, I got excited and ordered it right away.

I have to say I was a bit disappointed. It felt more like an aggregator of interesting facts, such as a collection of Tyler Cowen blog posts, than a book trying to convince me of anything. And anyway, who really needs to be convinced that, when confronted with failure, adapting is better than being pig headed?

His chapter on development, the one I was looking most forward to, is like a romanced literature review. If you read development blogs, you won’t find much new or exciting here. Also, there is no point in repeating arguments made in other books, such as Nudge, which is quoted excessively. For me, the climate change chapter is the best. His back-of-the-envelope calculations on how much carbon was emitted in the production of a cappuccino remind us how counterproductive good intentions can be. This is where Harford is the undercover economist, once again.

You’ll still end up enlightened after reading Adapt. There are so many inspiring anecdotes you may even feel like trying new things!

The barriers to trade and development, African style

Kinshasa (in the former Zaire, now DRC) and Brazzaville, in Congo, are twin cities separated by the Congo River (see Google map here). While they are twins, they are quite isolated from each other. I tried to get directions on Google maps from one city to the other but Google couldn’t do it. Here are key facts on the situation, courtesy of a new World Bank note:

 

• Kinshasa-Brazzaville is the third largest urban agglomeration in Africa. It is predicted to become Africa’s largest, and the world’s 11th largest, city by 2025 (see its previous growth from outer space above)
• Recorded Congo imports from the DRC are only 1.12% of total Congo imports in value terms.
• Passenger traffic between Brazzaville and Kinshasa is smaller in relative terms than traffic between East and West Berlin in the times of the Berlin Wall.
• Shipping local goods across the river is found to increase the retail price of these goods by one fifth.
• 20,000 CFA francs (~$40) is the standard all-inclusive price to cross the river back and forth. Relative to local income, that’s as if San Francisco residents would pay between $1,200 and $2,400 for a return trip to Oakland, which is about the same distance.
• Up to 17 agencies are reported to operate at the passenger port in Kinshasa.
• Passenger crossing costs include One-way fare, Travel document (“laissez-passer”) at origin, Search (“jeton fouille”) at origin, Port fee (“redevance portuaire”) at origin, Vaccination card at origin, Various fees and taxes at destination.

This is the result of a total absence of political will for development. When will things ever change?

How a number-crunching economist could soon find work at Real Madrid

You're finishing your PhD in economics and you're not sure what to do with your life? You don't wanna go into academia? You wanna use your skills for something productive? How about using regressions to help soccer teams win and make fans happy?

The data revolution is now invading European football according to a recent FT article. In the US statisticians have been involved in sports teams for some years now, partly inspired by Moneyball, the story of a poor baseball team that became good thanks to an analytical use of numbers (the movie with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill is coming out soon). Baseball, football, hockey, and basketball teams all started hiring stats guys to help them make crucial strategic decisions. One of Steve Levitt's students is now crunching numbers for the Boston Celtics, a basketball team.

So what could an economist do for Real Madrid? Well, it's all about not taking things at face value and looking deeper to identify which player attributes really matter. It's about facts not impressions. What matters more for goals, is it number of completed passes or number of completed good passes? How do you define a good pass? Is it total number of km ran, or top speed in sprints? How do you identify weaknesness in opponents? Do the number of defensive tackles matter? How do you compute the "goal-probability added" of a player? You'll find some answers to these questions in the FT article, but for the rest you'll have to get the job and do it right!