The selection of Paul Ryan as the Republic vice presidential candidate has stirred up eternal arguments over America’s entitlement programs. This has in turn prompted the standard back-and-forth over whether Social Security constitutes a retirement account system, or is just another federal expenditure. Liberals (and I do consider myself one) tend to vehemently affirm the former and deny the latter. Here’s a recent-ish example from Noah Smith.

I’ve always found this strange – why are we even talking about the government’s unfundeded commitment to Social Security if it’s not a government expenditure? If it’s a system of retirement accounts, then once the federal government pays back what it has borrowed from those accounts, any obligation to pay for Social Security would be over with. At that point, if Social Security revenues (from payroll taxes) were less than its expenditures, it would go bankrupt. A bad outcome for people expecting benefits, but definitely not a fiscal catastrophe for the US. This is consistent with the law on Social Security – in Flemming v. Nestor, the Supreme Court ruled that you have no property rights over expected Social Security payments. Social Security is not savings – you do not own the funds in any legal sense. Congress can decide to stop paying you, or indeed all Social Security beneficiaries.

Now, I do understand what liberals are trying to do here. They think that they need to defend Social Security, and that people won’t like it as much if they think it’s a government program.* But it’s a really popular program – there’s no need for these rhetorical hijinks. I have my reservations about how the Social Security works, but it’s undeniably a vote-winner. Why trip over yourself about how it’s being framed?

And this isn’t a costless strategy. Framing Social Security as an retirement account system allows Republicans to carry on with one of the craziest lies in politics: the claim that over 50% of Americans pay no federal income taxes. That’s true if and only if we pretend that the payroll taxes that nominally fund Social Security and Medicare aren’t income taxes. But what are they, exactly? Are they your money? Yes. That gets taken away from you? Yeah. By the federal government? Yep. And are they mandatory? Totally non-optional. Does the money get spent on whatever the government wants, without regard to the name of the tax? Absolutely. They are taxes, but arguing that Social Security is a savings scheme lets Republicans pretend they aren’t and gain the advantage in the overall fight over entitlements. “See?” they say, “we’re in a death spiral of increasing numbers of listless, no-tax-paying leeches!” This is complete nonsense but since Democrats don’t want to talk about payroll taxes as taxes, no one ever heads it off.

It gets worse: payroll taxes are wildly regressive, too: they are 7.65%** of your income up to around $110,100, then that’s it, you don’t pay any additional payroll tax no matter how much you make. The savings account rhetoric leaves them out of the conversation when we discuss the equity of our tax code. It also means we can’t discuss unlinking benefits from income or removing the cap on payroll taxes, each of which could do a lot to make the Social Security system sustainable. To win a single, unimportant fight about what Social Security “really” is, Democrats have conceded almost the entire war over the size of government.

*Do they really believe the retirement account claim? I’m doubtful – most understand the reasoning above. And smart people all realize this is just quibbling over terminology. As a matter of practical policy, it doesn’t matter what Social Security “really” is.
**In reality they are 15.3% of your income. Half are nominally paid by the employer, but a basic analysis of tax incidence shows that who is supposedly charged the tax doesn’t matter – all that’s important is the relative elasticities of the labor supply and demand curves, and the total amount of the tax.

The shadow of an impending famine hangs over TA Mwambo. According to employees at AGORA and ADMARC, maize prices are reaching record heights on the back of a failed crop last year, and at present it is extremely dry. We’ve been teased by raindrops a couple of times, but they’ve never materialized into actual rain. Conversations about crops always take a detour through grumbling about a lack of action to do something about the impending situation.

Some of the obvious – and misleading – signs of famine in the popular are already here. In some villages half of the children have kwashiorkor; in others they all do. When I saw it, I looked up the causes to see if there’s anything I can do. It’s caused by protein deficiency, so simple multivitamins won’t do the trick. What’s more, although these kids are malnourished, none are wasting away. There’s food to be had, and it’s wrong to even say there isn’t protein. Every village we pass through has tons of livestock running around, and a large proportion of the men in Mwambo work as fishermen. I concede the possibility that the protein-deprived kids all belong to destitute families with no protein source, but a less savory explanation seems more likely: I suspect that many parents are making a choice – maybe a totally reasonable choice – not to give their kids enough protein to prevent kwashiorkor. That might be a way to pay for enough maize to feed the whole family, or it might be a way

What if famine really comes? First, to fix terms, I’m using “famine” in the colloquial sense (which is also the one used by Amartya Sen in his pathbreaking “Poverty and Famines”). It means mass death through starvation. Not a shortage of food, not a really bad shortage of food, not high food prices, not long queues for food. All of those are bad, but none are necessarily equivalent to famine. In the Malawian popular thought, there were famines in 2002 and 2005. From what I’ve heard, these were in fact food shortages – fairly terrifying ones – but I’ve found no evidence of widespread death in those years. In a paper I’m still working on, I have found evidence that the number of surviving children from those years is lower, but haven’t sorted out how much of that is infant mortality versus miscarriage versus delayed fertility. I don’t want to make like of what were no doubt horrible experiences, but as best I can tell there is a big gap between what happened here and for example last year’s famine in Somalia.

The central contribution of Sen’s book is to demonstrate that famines almost never involve a decline in the availability of food. In most cases, famine-struck regions actually export food to other areas. Instead, famines involve people being unable to afford the food they need to survive. Crop failures deprive them of the endowment of food/money they would normally use to survive, while also causing price shifts that make affording food impossible. This isn’t equivalent to the common idea that we have enough food but not the means to transport it to the needy. Mwambo sells tons of rice and maize and other crops which get bought by other Malawians. In a famine, that pattern would continue, using the high-quality tarmac road between Jali and Zomba town.

Many people have trouble believing that claim (that famines have nothing to do with food shortages), and it’s tough to get folks to read Sen’s book just to have their preconceived notions disproven. It’s a great book, which I do recommend highly (it’s pretty readabfle too), but I’ve often thought about how to convince people of its claims in a straightforward way. So here’s a thought experiment: if famine struck TA Mwambo while I was still here, do you think I would starve? Of course not. I would just buy food. Duh.

So if famine does arrive in Mwambo, god forbid, people will starve even while their neighbors sell food to people who live elsewhere in Malawi. If anything that is more horrific than the idea of there being no food around at all. But it also means there’s a simple solution: give people money. Not food, and certainly not surplus food from the US, which we’ve done in the past, but cash.

In the US, plumbing practicalities and limited space mean that we use our “bathroom” principally for eliminating waste; bathing is just a secondary use. Smarter folks than me have observed that, constraints aside, this is a pretty terrible arrangement: we intentionally go to the dirtiest room in the house the clean ourselves. God help you if you need to use the toilet before showering, the smell can be devastating.

A very different system obtains in rural Malawi. The toilet and the bath are generally different structures, separated by a fairly decent distance. Part of this is driven by necessity – pit toilets are disgusting – but part probably comes from the opportunity to rearrange two spaces that are outside the house anyway. The more urban the site, the less true this is – in places with running the water the two are often close together, or even combined in the standard Western style. Even in cities, though, at least having separate rooms is reasonably common.

Although I confess some benefits to the US arrangement – having one sink for both bathroom and toilet is nice, as is the shared storage – if I ever have the ability to design a house I’ll shoot for a toilet room that is separate from the bathing one.

I was forwarded a copy of John Mauldin’s latest “Thoughts from the Frontline” email column by a friend. It’s basically a finance/investing newsletter that centers on economic issues. I get this kind of thing sent to me fairly regularly, since people know I study economics. Sometimes (although not in this case) it’s also because folks expect someone with a masters in economics to know about investing, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. At best I can explain to you why you’re unlikely to beat a “diversify-and-hold” strategy, but I’m basically ignorant on that stuff. I’m going to go through this one in some detail, and then talk about this kind of “economic newsletter” more generally.

Mauldin makes bunch of claims, of various merits.

1) “How Are You Going to Keep Them Down on the Farm?” An economic history anecdote about the beginning of the shift from farming to the modern economy. This is interesting but I don’t see how it’s related to his other points. He alludes to something about graduate school, but what exactly is the grand shift he sees on the horizon? I may have missed that somehow.

2) “A College Degree Is Not Enough” It’s definitely true that a college degree doesn’t guarantee a job. It’s not clear whether it ever did, though – he doesn’t provide evidence on that point, and I can’t recall seeing this data in John Bound’s portion of second-semester graduate labor economics, which focused on human capital. (When I get back to Michigan I’ll ask him, I’m sure he knows). My thinking is you’d need to look at maybe the 1981 recession to see what happened “back in the day”. It’s also true that bachelors holders have a huge leg up over less-educated peers. Most of the talk about poor returns to education doesn’t pay enough attention to how badly-off high school graduates are.

3) “Boomers Are Breaking the Deal” The idea that boomers “breaking the deal” by working longer is a problem is a fallacy and directly contradicts his final point, about a shortage of workers to support retirees. There is not a finite supply of jobs in the economy. If there were, hundreds of millions of Americans would be out of work since we used to have far fewer total jobs than we currently have people. This idea (the “lump of labor fallacy”) is commonly cited but there’s no evidence that a larger workforce increases unemployment, except maybe over the very short term. Lots of evidence points out the opposite – developing countries (including the US in the past) uniformly undergo a “demographic dividend” where they have tons of workers and this drastically boosts their economies.

4) “Two Workers for Every Social Security Recipient” We definitely need more workers to sustain SS. One great solution is Mauldin’s third “problem” from above, which is that Boomers are working longer. This is great. It raises the size of the workforce while decreasing the number of retirees (People who are still working can collect some SS benefits, but not 100%, between age 62 and 67 (or so, the “full retirement age” depends on when you were born)).

After re-reading the newsletter, I’m not sure the points are supposed to be connected. But the ironic juxtaposition of his last two points.

With these emails, it’s important to consider the source, the audience, and the goal of the newsletter. Mauldin is a financial expert. While the newsletter disavows the idea that it’s selling anything, he is in the business of getting people to listen to him and (probably*) helping them invest. So there are three somewhat nefarious potential payoffs to doing this. One is attention – getting lots of people to read his newsletters is likely profitable, so it pays to be a bit sensationalistic and tell his audience what they want to hear. The second is the asymmetric returns to crazy predictions. In other such newsletters, it’s common to see forecasts of impending doom; circa January 2011 I was forwarded lots of assertions that we were about to experience hyper-inflation. No one is likely to remember your crazy predictions if they don’t pay off, but if they do, you get to be famous. The third is that you can make forecasts or conduct analyses that directly lead your readers to consume goods or services you’re selling. With the hyper-inflation talk, there was a lot of selling of gold and so forth.

I commend Mauldin for staying away from the second payoff, which can be tempting, but he’s definitely doing a bit of sensationalism and playing-to-his-audience bit. Investors lean Republican, so they like to hear stuff like the fact that one in eight American families are on food stamps or that one in two families get checks from the government. Neither are false, as far as I can tell, but both are overplayed – the second figure will rise mechanically as the population ages, for example.

As for directly profiting off the newsletter, I don’t see much of that either. He does market his talks at the bottom, so you could argue that his mild doomsaying is a way of encouraging attendance; if things are bad then you need to hear from the expert. I suspect this is more of a long game, though – he’s setting himself up as a reliable analyst for his target audience of rich, fiscally-conservative readers, so they will want to come to him for services in the future. This is the finance equivalent of a snack company sponsoring the paralympics.

Could this all be entirely ingenuous, just intended as thoughtful analysis on the economy? I’m doubtful, and my doubts return to the vast disconnect between his last two points. People trying to do thoughtful analysis for the public good usually impose a bit more consistency on their essays.

Hat Tip: Robert Bruhl, via email

*I wouldn’t know – as alluded to above, my investment plans at present are to diversify and hold, so I’m not in the market for financial expertise.

People everywhere believe in crazy bullshit. I’m not talking about religious beliefs – any spiritual belief can be defended on the grounds that it’s not a statement about the physical world, and hence not testable. I mean provably false nonsense, like thinking that horoscopes predict the future (they don’t) or that vaccines cause autism (absolutely not) or that cell phones give you cancer (some people are committed enough to this one to keep running studies until they think they’ve found a risk, when really they’ve just finally hit on a false positive). Reading about pseudoscience and urban legends has always been a hobby of mine – I am fascinated the absurd stuff people believe, the reasons they believe it, and the way they react to contradictory evidence. It’s increasingly become relevant to my research as well – a lot of what I work on has to do with what people believe about the world, which often differs from the truth.

Conventional wisdom holds that the poor, and people from undeveloped countries, are ignorant: that they are more likely than people in other places to hold incorrect beliefs or not know about stuff. As I’ve noted here before, my experience is that this isn’t true. I have a previous post that points out the high levels of knowledge about HIV here in Malawi. I wrote it to explain a point that I had seen proven before but couldn’t source, which is that Malawians know more about HIV than Americans. I’ve since learned that the evidence for that is in one of kim dionne’s papers that is currently in the pipeline. Here’s her post on the topic.

In addition to knowing the basics of HIV fairly well, Malawians also don’t seem to believe the crazy shit that foreigners* think they believe. It’s quite common for discussions about HIV in Africa to turn to the “virgin cure” myth. The idea is that people think having sex with a virgin can cure HIV. As best I can tell this is a kind of meta-urban legend, a myth about the existence of a myth. I have seen survey data from Zomba District that asked about this, and about 5% of respondents said that it was true. This is fairly low for something that’s supposed to be a widespread belief and a major causal factor in the HIV epidemic; it’s almost at the point where I’d just say it’s just measurement error, for example respondents misunderstanding the question.** Moreover, at one point I read through all the citations about virgin cures on Wikipedia. There were plenty of cases of whites or African elites asserting that villagers believe in virgin cures, or blaming some horrific rape on such a belief. I came across no evidence of people actually believing in this stuff. I’ve also never seen any quotes from self-professed believers in this idea. I can find you people who will openly espouse almost any belief, on the record: that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, that we never landed on the moon, that the uterus automatically prevents pregnancy in cases of rape. But I’ve never seen someone say on record that sex with a virgin cures HIV. These people probably exist, but if so they’re rare.

On the other hand, one belief I have no trouble finding open support for is the “blood suckers” rumor. This belief, prevalent in Southern Malawi, holds that when you see white folks in a car (or maybe anyone hanging out in your village in a car) they are planning to come back at night and take people’s blood. The story I’ve heard is that the blood suckers have special pipes or tubes that can go through windows while they remain outside. This rumor first became a big deal around 2004, probably related to the Demographic and Health Surveys, which did take respondents’ blood (in small amounts, in the daytime) to test them for HIV. According to my staff, though, it goes back at least a couple of decades and is also associated with the Red Cross logo and vehicles. Many of my employees assert that blood suckers are in fact real but aren’t associated with white people, and are maybe just evil individuals. The rumor is so commonly accepted that I’ve been openly asked if I was an “opopa magazi” (“blood sucker”, in Chichewa) and had people shout it at us in our project car. It’s also often whispered in my presence, especially by kids. While most kids here are kind of scared of me (hey, I’m weird-looking, who can blame them?), some proportion simply flee in terror the moment they see me.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about writing this post. Wild rumors spread faster than the nightly brushfires here, so in the field I try to avoid even saying the words “blood sucker” (in English or Chichewa), for fear that my words would be misinterpreted. My hope is that posting this here is okay, on the assumption that anyone who believes in that bullcrap isn’t sophisticated enough to use the internet. (Maybe that’s not a safe bet. Plenty of Americans believe even crazier shit and discuss it online – the 9/11 “truth” movement comes to mind.) What I find most interesting about the blood suckers legend is its similarity to other prominent urban myths. Although the name is reminiscent of Latin America’s “goat sucker” (chupacabras) legend, the similarity there is just superficial. Instead, it strikes me as having the same essence as most myths from the US. Fear of strangers, typically characterized by senseless and often anonymous violence, is common to a huge share of American urban legends. The best example of this may be the allegation that people are sticking HIV-infected needles in the coin returns of pay phones or in movie theater seats. Another common theme is a skepticism of authority figures and a belief in conspiracies by the government to do evil things for basically no reason: think of stories about black helicopters or men in black or that weird myth about cows being dissected. Both of these fit right into the blood suckers story.

It also has an attribute in common with lots of conspiracy theories and urban legends about the US government: it adapts to contradictory facts (we’re just doing surveys, and people can see that that’s what we’re doing) by asserting that although there is a legitimate reason for what’s going on, there’s also secretly another very similar thing happening that is nefarious (the same people come back at night and suck your blood). There’s a whole insane literature about “chemtrails” espoused by Americans that asserts that the contrails that come out of jet engines in some weather conditions are really chemicals being sprayed by the government to poison people or do experiments or something. The people who adhere to this legend have had to confront the fact that contrails are real things that naturally occur sometimes. Their response, logically, is that okay, that’s true, but sometimes the government makes things that look exactly like contrails but are instead chemicals being sprayed to kill us. People actually believe this. Fervently. So it’s hard to say that the nonsense Malawian villagers believe is that much worse than what people espouse in the US.

The crazy stories here are no surprise, since they’re not that much crazier than crap that Americans believe – remember, a significant share of Americans don’t think our President was born in the United States. What I find surprising is how similar the underlying themes in the blood suckers rumor are to what I know from American myths. The underlying fears and concerns behind US urban legends might in fact be fairly universal.

*Let’s be honest, we’re basically just talking about white folks here.
**On my current survey I have a question that states “I get pleasure from sex, True/False”. According to my enumerators, some proportion (they think 10%) of respondents think the question is about whether they think the *enumerator* enjoys sex. That question was on another survey and performed really well – measurement errors can be big even with really well-tested survey questions.

One question I get fairly frequently is what an economist is doing studying people’s sexual behavior, and other topics related to public health. There are lots of reasons, but a significant one is that the public health topics I work on (HIV, mostly) are interesting and important, and, moreover, that a lot of quantitative research that comes out of public health schools on these topics is bad. Like, really terribly bad. There’s definitely plenty of very good researchers in that field, but poor-quality empirical work in public health is common enough to be standard water-cooler fodder for certain groups of statistics nerds. The most common offense is for researchers to ignore the title of this blog, and to take two groups that differ in some specific way and attribute any differences in an outcome of interest to that difference. Want to conclude that alcohol makes you smart? Just compare drinkers and non-drinkers in terms of IQ. The former are, on average, smarter. But that’s a ridiculous conclusion; if anything, alcohol kills brain cells and makes you stupid. The problem is that, in the words of my advisor, a lot of other stuff might be going on. The predominant reason for becoming a teetotaler is religion, and higher levels of education tend to decrease religiosity as well as boosting measured IQ. If you don’t account for this, you will get the wrong answer. Unfortunately, this is a great way to make the front page of your university’s news wire/PR wing (every school has one, seriously) and hence the headlines of internet news sites. Chocolate prevents cancer? Fiber recuces your risk of bowel cancer? No, your study is terrible.

The latest offender of this kind comes to me via facebook, and alleges that exposure to semen improves women’s mood and health. The study’s methodology, according to this story from *The Sun*, was to use self-reported unprotected sex as “an indirect measure” of women’s exposure to semen, and look at health and scores on the Beck Depression Inventory. But condom use is related to all sorts of other things – the quality of one’s relationship, trust in one’s partner, STI and HIV status, and hormonal contraception use, to name just a few of the many potential omitted variables here.

Now, maybe that summary is just a poor description of the study, right? No; other than the titillating picture the *Sun* article is basically a paraphrase of the abstract. (Interestingly, this story was picked up just recently but the research is 10 years old). That link is gated, but I managed to dig up this copy of the PDF.* To the authors’ credit, they actually do control for some of the factors named above and find that condom use still correlates positively with depression in women. But that should go in the abstract! In any case they don’t adjust for trust or relationship quality. Here I can’t blame them – those are very hard things to measure on a survey. And they don’t consider the single most important factor: unprotected sex is more fun, feels better, and is more satisfying than sex with condoms. That is going to irrevocably confound any study that uses unprotected sex as a proxy for semen exposure to look at effects on depression – at least as long as it looks at women alone. If the hypothesis is just about semen, and we don’t think that vaginal lubricant has similar effects, you could just look for differences in these results across men and women. I submit that a study of men would find nearly-identical results.

Is it possible that semen improves women’s moods? Absolutely – given the relevant biology, it even seems likely that there’s some effect. But this study teaches us very little about whether there is an effect and how large it is likely to be.

*I did this, and wrote and posted this article, while sitting in my project’s minibus at Mpyupyu trading center, way out in rural Zomba district. Technology is awesome.

Picking aspects of Malawian culture that are superior to the American equivalent has been surprisingly hard. This isn’t because I’m afraid to judge one culture versus another – I’m more than happy to do that, in a serious and thoughtful way. If there’s an opposite for “cultural relativist”, that’s me. If comparing cultures with an eye toward improvement isn’t the definition of development, it’s definitely integral to the concept. As Dr. Robert Siegel pointed out when I was first training to be an HIV educator, “we [HIV prevention campaigners] are here to change culture.” If it didn’t need changing, we wouldn’t be around.

It’s also not that Malawi has no advantages over America. But I wanted to stay away from the bullshit platitudes that usually plague any description of a foreign culture. The worst offender is “hospitality”, which I’ve heard applied to virtually every country. I recently read a piece on foreign tourists’ perceptions of the US which focused on their surprise at our hospitable and welcoming nature. Hospitality is a big thing in all cultures, but it’s shown in different ways so I suppose people always find it striking to see those variations. It’s also usually a bigger deal to welcome a foreigner into your home, versus some guy from down the street.

I’ve also been thinking about stuff the US could actually learn from – I find Malawi’s popular music catchier than America’s, but that’s not particularly actionable. A big one that I think Americans could get on board with is the level of freedom and self-monitoring afforded to the kids here. When school is not in session (which is right now, incidentally) kids in the villages are allowed to just run around and amuse themselves, without a parent constantly hovering over them, not confined to one of those weird playgrounds with the signs that ban childless adults since apparently I am likely to be a child molester. I did a good bit of running unmonitored around my block/neighborhood as a kid, getting dirty, catching bugs, finding cats, and generally having a blast, but that experience is increasingly unheard of in the US; parents there now feel obligated to constantly hover over their children.

Now, mortality is pretty high here, and that is even more true for kids, but the reasons for those excess deaths are largely unrelated to kids running around unsupervised. For reasons that I am very interested in, but cannot explain satisfactorily (yet), people here are pretty unconcerned about what might happen if their kid goes and plays on his or her own. As best I can tell the main risks are snakebites and getting hit by cars driven along crappy roads by stressed-out American grad students – both are rare, but the risk is probably bigger than it would be in the US. Yet Malawian parents are less concerned than American ones, and their kids are probably better-adjusted for it.

My self-interest, by the way, actually runs in the other direction – I kind of wish the parents were doing more hovering here. Since the schools are currently on summer break or something, anytime I park my project’s minibus I attract a small crowd of local kids, who stare at me in terror and usually don’t say anything. I’ve had limited success getting them to play with me, since a) I don’t yet know any games that I can explain in Chichewa and b) more important, they’re often too scared to respond to me. To make matters worse, I often need to do paperwork to get the next batch of surveys ready, in which case I really need them to stay out of the way (and not get bored and start getting in trouble, which is what tends to happen). Today, though, I was just waiting for stuff to wrap up and got a bunch of kids to start imitating my movements, which was a blast. Imagine that happening in America: parents letting their kids go play with some stranger who is driving around the neighborhood in a van? It’s like a textbook kidnapping urban legend.

Back in college, a common response to my stated goal of going into development economics was for people to ask whether economic development wasn’t really about US cultural imperialism, or promoting consumerism, or some similar issue that college students care passionately about for a couple of years before taking a job at BCG or at an I-bank. I can’t really speak to the second issue, although I’d imagine that a lot of the folks around TA Mwambo would leap at the opportunity to worry about keeping up with the Joneses (the Phiris?) instead of worrying about surviving the current drought. It’s more of a relevant question for countries further along the economic development curve.

But the first issue, the imperial spread of US culture, I can say a bit more. US culture is in pretty strikingly short supply in Malawi. The most significant inroad that we seem to have made is in terms of music, but a) the music scene is still overwhelmingly African and mostly local within that, b) American artists that gain popularity here tend to have some link to Africa (e.g. Akon, who is Senegalese), and c) even when they don’t, we’re usually in some sense exporting back musical traditions that came from Africa in the first place. The dearth of US brands is particularly striking. I often look around big stores and shops to see if I see anything I recognize. There is no shortage of foreign-branded goods: the dominant beer is Danish, Shoprite carries loads of South African brands, the minibuses that serve as public transit are usually bought used from Japan, and for a while last year the dominant brand of lollipop was from Peru or something for confusing reasons. Rather than a sense of an imperial invasion by one country’s culture, though, this strikes me as a competitive market for imported goods, and one into which America has made few inroads. Even infamously common brands don’t exist here – you can’t calculate the Big Mac Index for Malawi because there is not a single McDonalds in the country.

The one exception to this pattern is Coca-Cola, which is the only US brand I am aware of in Malawi.* It is absolutely everywhere – in the remotest villages I’ve been to, places where you can’t buy water that’s safe to drink without boiling it first, you can find folks selling reusable glass bottles of it for around 30 cents. Coca-Cola’s role here is pretty informative, too – it’s much more prevalent, and culturally significant, than it is in the US, where it’s already a pretty big deal. Beyond its being nigh-universally available in Malawi, the #1 song here last year was about and named after Coca-Cola. In this way it is similar to maize, which arrived just 150 years ago from the new world but is a legitimate and vital part of Malawian culture. Even America’s biggest commercial success here seems to me to have meant basically nil in terms of forcing people to adopt our culture. To test that theory, I’ve started asking people I meet where Coke comes from. No one seems to have any clue, and I had one guy argue with me that it couldn’t be American in origin.

*Chibuku Shake-Shake is now owned by Miller SAB and I’m not sure how to categorize the Mars bars I’ve seen here, which I think are the UK version and are produced by a transnational conglomerate with a confusing origin story. Fanta, a German brand now marketed by Coca-Cola, is sold here as well. You can also find Sprite, another Coca-Cola brand. I’m ignoring all the second-hand clothes here and other things people bring in personally rather than shipping in for sagle, and I’m probably overlooking a number of brands I just haven’t noticed.

Writing about Jina Moore’s view on negative stories about Africa got me thinking about what I say here about Malawi, or about other parts of Africa. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced she’s wrong to call out Africa coverage in particular: all news coverage is overwhelmingly focused on bad stuff, because good stuff is uninteresting. “Everything is fine in Iowa” isn’t an article I’d read any more than “everything is fine in Botswana.” One of her commenters made the trenchant point that her idea of writing an article about an oboist from Kinshasa is only interesting as a contrast to all the bad news out of there. There are oboists in major US cities, too, probably great ones, but most people generally don’t care. This is probably even more true of international coverage – maybe you’re interested in hearing about olympians in obscure sports from your hometown, or the local fair, or the Costco opening, but the further away such stuff gets the less you want to hear about it. Here’s an example I picked arbitrarily: I can’t figure out how to perma-link to it, but as of when I checked The Economist’s Europe page currently lists 6 main stories, 5 of them entirely negative. The 6th is about how Italy’s judiciary is such a disaster that the country’s government has finally been forced to overhaul it. While there’s no violence for them to focus on, they’re certainly ignoring all the positive things going on in that region of 740 million people.

I’m nonetheless now thinking more about what I say here, and how I present Malawi, with an eye toward highlighting some of the interesting positives here. The first one is really cool, and I’ve never seen it anywhere else: at least in the region where I’m doing my research, and probably throughout most of the country, societies are matrilocal, and, at least historically, matrilineal as well. Matrilocality means that when a couple gets married, the husband moves to the wife’s village rather than vice versa. Interestingly, I don’t see any of Malawi’s ethnic groups where I’m aware of the practice on Wikipedia’s list of matrilocal and matrilineal societies. (I’m not enough of an expert to fix this myself, and the hardliners at Wikipedia are unlikely to accept “I saw it while driving my enumerators around in a minibus” as a valid source.) Many things are also matrilineal here as well – in cases of intermarriage, people tend to describe themselves using their mother’s ethnic group, for example, and the order of succession for village headmen and traditional authorities often flows down female bloodines, albeit commonly to males. In the past, I’ve learned, family names also went down the mother’s lines.

This hasn’t produced the beautiful equality of the sexes (let alone female dominance) that I’d been led to expect; Malawi is still fairly patriarchical. However, in my view, shared by everyone I’ve talked to about this so far, matrilocality probably still enhances the status and empowerment of Malawian women relative to the alternative. This is for ideational reasons – a greater value placed on females due to their social and political importance – as well as practical ones – women are allowed to stay at home and benefit from their existing local knowledge and support networks. I’m not hesitant to judge cultures, piece by piece, good and bad, and this is a case where I think Malawi’s system (or at least the system in the places I’ve visited here) works better than what we do in the US, especial the matrilineal aspects of their marriage system.

The Free Exchange column in last week’s Economist (I’m a bit behind since I listen to the podcast version) cites a working paper by David Bloom and coauthors that shows that inequality increases as countries undergo the demographic transition. First, a quibble with Free Exchange’s summary. It states that “DHS [Demographic and Health Surveys] data from 60 developing countries enable them to divide households into five income groups and to show that in every continent.” The DHS allow them to do nothing of the kind. For reasons that are still confusing to me, it does not collect any information on income at all. If you’re curious about the reasons for this, allow me to direct you to a 77-page document describing and justifying their alternative, the DHS Wealth Index, which is constructed from observations about household assets. The dataset contains that wealth index plus the underlying assets used to create it.

What Bloom et al. actually do is to estimate each household’s permanent income by assuming that the probability of owning each asset the DHS measures is a linear function of local prices for all assets and also of permanent income. (Permanent income is roughly equivalent to an individual’s lifetime income divided by the number of years he or she will be alive. I guess you can do something similar for households.) The working paper says they use logistic regressions to back out the permanent income factor from observed asset holdings. I’m assuming that this is a multinomial logit, but this early version of the paper doesn’t go into much detail. It also doesn’t appear to say where they got the asset prices they used, which seem important and somewhat annoying to collect.*

Lack of detail (and oversimplification by journalists) aside, this seems like a decent approach given the available data, since censuses also often don’t ask about income. Which makes it a great example for why I don’t care about inequality per se. Focusing on countries with small fertility declines – those early in the demographic transition – the authors write

The point estimates reported in column (6) of Table 5 suggest that the number of dependent children increased on average by 0.04 children among households in the poorest quintiles, while the number of dependent children decreases by 0.19 and 0.14 children in households of the fourth and fifth wealth quintiles respectively.

The increase of 0.04 they mention is statistically insignificant, and is roughly the size of the estimated standard error. That’s about as precise an estimated zero as you can get. In other words, for countries just starting the demographic transition, the rich have benefited from the demographic transition and the poor have not.** Many times, when people talk about inequality, they really mean poverty – the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, something like that. Bloom et al. find a pure rise in inequality: the poor aren’t any worse off at all! But inequality went up, so shouldn’t we oppose the demographic transition on equity grounds? As it turns out, no: as the demographic transition proceeds, the benefits accrue to everyone, even the poor.

Now, if this process involved the poor becoming initially worse off, then I’d be a bit more concerned. “Suck it up, future generations will do well if you suffer now” doesn’t rub me the right way. It doesn’t, though, it just sees them falling further behind the rich. That’s a little unpleasant, and seems unfair, but strikes me as a third- or fourth-order concern relative to the main issue of absolute levels of poverty and well-being.

EDIT: Actually, since their error term follows the normal rather than the type II extreme value distribution, they are certainly not running multinomial logits, but they probably should be doing something in that vein since my purchase of e.g. a cow depends on the prices of other stuff I could buy with the same money.

*It’s a nifty approach, but I wonder if they would have gotten very different results by just doing something simple like counting the total number of assets. That depends on how good their price data is, probably.

**This assumes that having fewer kids makes you better off, which seems a bit dubious, but that’s a standard assumption in a lot of policy circles so let’s run with it.