Andrew Gelman links to Casey Mulligan’s take on whether survey respondents should be compensated for their time. Mulligan suggests that from the researcher’s perspective, paying people might lead to better results. But he seems to miss the most important reason for paid surveys leading to better data quality: running an unpaid survey means that your refusal rate will be an increasing function of how much respondents value their time (and their impatience, and a few other thing). Your wonderful random sample is now no longer representative of the whole population. This is maybe okay, but you don’t actually know the selection process. Also, the value people put on their time is, in rough approximation, equal to their wages. Wages are a common outcome variable in analyses, and as I taught my undergraduate econometrics students last term, selecting your sample on the outcome variable means your estimates will be biased – in layman’s terms, you’ll get the wrong answer.

Mulligan’s piece reminds me of Chris Blattman’s post on this same topic last year. He discusses two possible problems with paying, raised by Aine McCarthy. The first is that people might pay less attention or participate for the wrong reasons; Blattman points out that it’s possible to run an experiment to study that stuff. They both seem unlikely to me, though.

But the second issue Blattman discusses is just bizarre to me – the idea that we might establish a social norm of paying people for their time (okay, plausible) and that that somehow is a bad thing (wait, really?). I’ve seen this suggestion from a number of corners, and I don’t get it. You’re taking something of value from someone (a chunk of their time, sometimes more than a whole day); a norm that says they should be compensated for that is a great idea. These aren’t stray cats that we’re thinking about feeding – they’re people, who have other stuff going on, and, as I’ll discuss, may feel obliged to participate.

One concern often raised by non-economists and mentioned in the comments on Blattman’s post is that paying people, especially if you pay them too much relative to their income, is coercive. Maybe it’s indicative of my training as an economist that I find that argument confusing. Are jobs “coercion”? Those mostly involve being paid enough to do something you dislike.

But that’s beside the point here in Malawi, and probably in lots of other places as well. Despite researchers’ best efforts to ensure respondents that our surveys are voluntary through the informed consent process, virtually no one refuses. I’ve heard that this is because some government surveys are legally mandatory. I would feel terrible imposing on someone who thinks they are required to participate and not at least try to make it worth their while. It seems very much like stealing to me, and an abuse of my status and power in the places where I do research.

It has been a dry year here in Zomba District. I’ve heard that in some areas the price of maize is spiking to record levels and the harvest was very bad. Experts are forecasting that Lake Chilwa, source of one fifth of the country’s fish catch, will dry up this year. I don’t have the experience to say much about either of those facts, but I’ve observed one striking contrast to last year: the countryside is ablaze. On a nightly basis, you can spot walls of flame spreading in irregular circles on the sides of local hills . A few weeks ago a huge wildfire covered much of Chikowi Hill. Since then brush fires have been a regular feature of the night sky. Tonight, when I came home, I could see one burning its way across Chinamwali Hill. Light pollution from the neighbor’s house made getting a picture tough, but you can still make it out – the chain of three orange-red dots:

Here’s another one above Mulunguzi from about a month ago:

A recent AllAfrica.com piece wonders why African leaders keep dying. It does seem to happen a lot – Bingu here in Malawi, Mills just recently in Ghana, and Yar’Adua in Nigeria in 2010 come to mind immediately, and there are many other examples as well. The piece speculates that this is due to their more advanced age – playing to the stereotype of the President-for-life African strongman. dadakim counters with the surprising fact that African leaders aren’t in fact much older than executives from elsewhere, given the famous examples of extremely long tenure here. This is a really encouraging sign of improving governance.

Given that age is a non-starter, the next place to look is population-average mortality in Africa. I know that it’s high, although I didn’t know offhand exactly how much higher it is than in other places. Fortunately it’s easy to look up: according to Anderson and Ray (2010) , the age-specific mortality for men age 60-64 is 37.2 per 1000 people in Africa and 14 in developed countries.* In percentage terms, those are 3.72% and and 1.4% respectively.  The AllAfrica piece argues that the mortality of African presidents is 15% since 2008 (8 deaths since 2008 for 54 countries). I’m dubious about this kind of analysis since you can cherry-pick start and end dates to get any kind  of impressive number you want. For example, if we start and end this analysis on last week Tuesday, the mortality rate of African leaders was 2% per day, or 675% per year. If we pick Wednesday instead, the mortality rate is a much more reassuring 0% per year.

But let’s roll with it. 4.5 years have passed since January 2008. Sticking with a linear approximation, we get an approximate annual mortality for African leaders of 3.28% over that period. So the answer is that African leaders are about half a percentage point less likely to die in any given year than their non-executive countrymen of the same age range.

So a better question to ask is why Africa’s leaders don’t die more often? The obvious answer is that they have better access to healthcare than their countrymen. But that doesn’t always work out too well for them – Bingu’s desperate attempt to get to a South African hospital was a failure – which highlights the risks, even to elites, of having a low-quality health care system.

You might have noticed above that the average person in a developed country, aged 60-64, faces a mortality risk of just 1.4% per year. In a very real sense, it is better to be a random American or European than even an elite in a low-income country. High mortality is a part of life here, showing up both in the news and in the huge numbers of coffin shops you pass on the side of the road. From a vast burden of disease to poor early-childhood nutrition to shoddy, under-staffed, and under-stocked hospitals to even the low quality of roads, the reasons for this are legion.

*kim estimates the average age to be 62, and if I understand the history correctly, which I probably don’t, there are only 2 female leaders in African history, Sirleaf since 2006 and Banda starting this year.

I get this question all the time. The answer is no.

It’s very common to assume that places with severe HIV epidemics are only that way because people there don’t know what it is or how it works. That’s not true at all. I’m going to limit my discussion here to Malawi, the country with the 9th-highest national HIV prevalence in the world. Although I’d assume the patterns are similar elsewhere in the high-prevalence southern cone of Africa, it doesn’t really matter if they are. The folk theory I’m addressing assumes that HIV education, meaning basic knowledge of transmission and prevention, is sufficient for stopping an epidemic. Malawi is a case where this kind of knowledge is high, but the epidemic is still going fairly strong. Therefore there is no way that HIV education alone is the answer, at least not the way it is typically done.

How do we know that Malawians are aware of HIV and how to prevent it? The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) have been running population-based surveys on probability samples of many developing countries for a long time now, and they have included questions on HIV prevention for quite a while. In Malawi’s case, these questions go back to 1992. These surveys allow us to estimate the share of people age 15-49 (the key age range for the virus) who understand a range of basic facts about HIV prevention. You can look them up yourself at hivdata.measuredhs.org, but to save time (and because I want to show people this stuff all the time) I did this and made a PDF of all the HIV prevention questions for Malawi across four rounds of the DHS survey. Click here to take a look.

The statistics are fairly impressive. 99.4% of Malawians have heard of HIV. Based on the survey’s measure, nearly 60% have no incorrect beliefs about its transmission. What about prevention? We usually emphasize the ABCs (Abstinence, Be Faithful to One Uninfected Partner, and Condoms), and 79%, 87%, and 72% of . Even more striking, nearly three quarters of Malawians knew whether or not mosquitos can transmit HIV. Do you know whether they can? Anecdotally, most Americans get this wrong. The answer is in the PDF – guess before you take a look.

This quantitative data is  consistent with other data I’ve collected, and might understate people’s knowledge. In a survey of over 400 people I helped run last summer, 98% of respondents stated that condoms provide at least some risk reduction over unprotected sex, and most people thought the risk benefits were massive. The average person in the area thinks that condoms reduce the risk of contracting HIV by 81 percentage points per sex act.

It’s also consistent with informal conversations and other non-quantitative evidence I’ve collected here. Lately I’ve been testing materials for my imminent project, and at one point in my information treatment (about HIV) I ask people if they have any questions. I have fielded a number of highly sophisticated questions – for example, one woman, who was still in high school, asked if taking ARVs meant that your sex partners might contract a resistant strain of the virus. The answer is yes, but the fact that she knew to ask that question is indicative of the extremely rich information environment here with respect to HIV. Not all of that information is 100% accurate – hence my project – but awareness and knowledge of the disease are extremely high.

So awareness alone is not the answer. What is the answer? We don’t know. If we knew for sure why HIV is a catastrophe  here in Southern Africa and never much more than a moderate problem anywhere else in the world, we could probably do something about it.

Karissa Gall at moni malawi has a recent post about how more and more drivers in Malawi are women. This is cool stuff, and part of an overall rising tide of women’s rights that seems to be going on here, and advanced considerably by the nascent presidency of Joyce Banda. There is a long way to go – Gall cites statistics that place Malawi at the bottom of a number of league tables of women’s rights. But the theme of the article implies that the increase in the number of women learning to drive is being impelled by a range of economic factors, and those are trends that I expect to continue. It’s a pattern consistent with my Amartya Sen-esque view on the importance of economic development: it’s not incomes and jobs that matter per se but the freedom they give people to live better lives, according to their own standard of “better”.*

Some evidence for the continued process of economic development here comes from my own observations of drivers on Malawi’s roads. There are a disproportionate share of vehicles emblazoned with driving school logos here, and they uniformly drive almost absurdly slow. The huge numbers of student drivers are partly a good sign and partly a signal of some of the issues of corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency that I have heard plague driver’s licensing here. If you want a license, I’ve been told, you either need to take a long sequence of lessons, or you just pay the right person an extra fee and get one right away.

*I’m not particularly pro-consumerism, but I’m also deeply skeptical of a view of development as an insidious process of American cultural imperialism. It is very hard to find American brands here (other than Coke). More on this later.

Amazon has a new program for their employees, The Amazon Career Choice Program, that covers the cost of technical and associates degrees in in-demand fields. This is great news, and not just for the generic corporate social responsibility/”giving back” type of reason. If that’s all this was, then they could have put the same money toward regular college degrees.

No, this is great because it challenges the current received wisdom about higher education: that everyone should go to college (meaning they should go straight from high school to a four-year institution in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree) and that people should just study whatever interests them in college, without consideration of whether it’s going to be worthwhile later. The financial benefits of a four-year degree are fairly well-established, but most economists think at least some of that is due to “signaling” – indicating how talented you are – rather than due to actual benefits from going to school. This means that people who start college but don’t finish may get little benefit, or even pay a penalty since they’d be sending a negative signal about their ability. Breaking out of this system would be great for everyone, as would developing educational pathways for people who don’t want a bachelor’s degree. Imagine a world where someone who just wants to go into a specific field could get training to do it, without indicating to potential employers that they’re not smart enough for college.

One of the complaints I’ve seen about the program is that Amazon is being cheap, or that it should really cover college degrees. I strongly disagree. First, college isn’t automatically for everyone. Second, this program covers associate’s degrees, which in some states (California, for example) are a great way to get started toward a four year degree while a) not committing to it from the beginning, b) still getting something useful if you stop after two years, and c) spending far less money. Promoting associate’s degrees would be a great option for letting people opt out of the ideational hegemony of “college for all” while still letting folks try it out to see whether it’s a good idea. Amazon is staking out a position on the nearly-nonexistent other side of the higher education debate, and I’m optimistic that this program could do a lot to promote the acceptability of alternative educational paths.

Hat tip: Andrew Hamada on facebook

I occasionally daydream about all the things I would do if I had more money to run my project, like having a car to get around instead of hoping that a minibus will be going where I want to get to sometime soon. When I’m actually lucky enough to get another grant, of course, I immediately budget it toward a bigger sample size. Having enough respondents to measure effects precisely is just much more important than, say, covering the cost of my housing instead of paying for that out of my pocket.

My suspicion is that this is a pretty common position to be in, at least for graduate students. Hence when I first learned about Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) – basically programming a tablet computer to automate your survey – my reaction was “who the hell can afford that?” It’s a really neat technology: you can build in data validity checks, so people don’t put impossible values in a field, and also skip rules so that your enumerators don’t go to the wrong place on a survey. Even better, you don’t need to enter the data. The Development Impact Blog has a pair of posts up about CAPI, covering its advantages and potential drawbacks. They cite a paper that showed the quality of data is higher using CAPI than traditional paper surveys.

Even though the paper is quite long, it doesn’t seem to contain the key details you’d need in order to know whether it showed anything useful: the extent of idiot-proofing in the paper survey forms and the entry templates. When I design surveys, for example, I almost never have my enumerators hand-write in codes for a given response. Imagine a question on ethnic group, where 1 is Chewa, 2 is Nyanja, 3 is Lomwe, etc. Many surveys I’ve seen have a blank space where the enumerator has to write the code value. Following my advisor’s scheme, I have check boxes for each value. This makes it much harder to screw up, and checking the surveys is way easier – you can just eyeball it, and not look to see if the code is valid. I’d like to run a John Henry vs. the Machine-type contest where I design a survey that’s totally idiot-proof and an entry template full of validity checks, and compete with a CAPI. I might be able to win based on perfecting the question phrasing and translations – people say that changing a CAPI is pretty hard, and I edit my surveys many times because translations and phrasing matter a lot.

The main downside people emphasize about CAPI is that there’s a lot of programming involved. Aine McCarthy makes this point in a post describing the survey design process. That seems like a red herring to me: properly entering and cleaning data from paper surveys should involve very similar code, since you’ll want the same validity checks and verification of skip rules. In sharp contrast, the costs are extremely different and in fairly inflexible ways. To run a CAPI I’d need to buy the devices and the software needed to program them; I’d need a secure office to store them where they can’t be stolen; I’d need insurance and/or a scheme for making sure my enumerators don’t lose, break, or make off with them; and I’d need reliable power to charge the things out in the field or I’d need to make regular trips back to a place with power. Storage is a major issue – it would probably mean commuting from an office to the field sites every day. That would add tons of time to the surveys, either ballooning costs or cutting my sample size. So CAPI isn’t going to work for me, at least this time around. Maybe someday, when I win the lottery.

According to wronging rights, Pol Pot’s nephew is refusing to testify before the tribunal due to commands from “The Iron God”, which sounds like a deity that the Greyjoys would worship. And the official oath witnesses take is even better. An excerpt:

If I answer falsely on any issue, may all the guardian angels, forest guardians and powerful sacred spirits destroy me, may my material possessions be destroyed, and may I die a miserable and violent death.

Yesterday, during a day trip to Blantyre, I went on a quest for an album by Alan Namoko, a (presumably) late musician who was prominent in Malawi during the 1970s and 1980s. Wikipedia describes him as playing blues and jazz, but his music doesn’t really sound like either to me – it reminds me more of American folk music.

Trying to get songs by this guy plunged me into the quasi-criminal depths of the market for recorded music here. It’s a place I’ve been to before – 95% of the Malawian songs I have were obtained through burned CDs and USB drives full of songs with such illuminating names as “Track 1” by “Unknown Artist”, off their hit album “Nthawi” (“time”). This would ordinarily cause me to feel at least a twinge of guilt, except that as far as I can tell there is no legitimate way to purchase any of this stuff. There are definitely plenty of dudes at markets selling music, but all of it has the feel of being made at an internet cafe down the road. I’ve seen a few more legitimate-looking CDs on sale in shops aimed at tourists (whence my Lucius Banda collection, for example), but that’s about it.

This has some interesting consequences. The first is that people don’t always know the names of even fairly popular songs. Last year it took me about a month to learn the name of that summer’s top hit, “Koka Kola” (by the Zambian group Organized Family [the “r” may be optional, or even deprecated]). I even met one person who had the song as her ringtone but didn’t know what it was called. There are a number of albums that I’d like to buy just because I like the artists and want a) more of their music and b) the actual names of these songs, and the artists themselves. But lacking the names, that’s fairly hard, and what’s on sale would probably be pirated and disorganized anyway.

Second, Malawi’s music industry has already transitioned to the place where America’s is going. All the money is in live shows. As a result, the top acts tour constantly. Last summer I missed big shows by Ma Blacks and Soldier due to fuel shortages, but due to the non-stop touring they both came back to town before I left. This is good for fans, and at least in the US it’s good for artists because they keep a bigger cut of the revenue.

Third, because touring is where all the money and action is, there is the risk of music by artists who have retired disappearing entirely. As I trotted through the wonderful madness of Blantyre’s open market asking about Namoko’s music, I got a disappointing number of blank stares. The guys (I’ve never seen a woman working at one of these semi-legal music stands) who did know who he was commonly said that no one would have his music “anywhere”. One actually did – on an old, pirated cassette tape, which he admitted was useless to pretty much everyone. I finally did get a copy of a few of Namoko’s songs, from one gentleman’s well-organized mp3 collection. When I asked what he wanted in exchange, he asked for “softwares”. I was unsure what to offer – I’m a bit out of touch with the software piracy scene – but it turned out he wanted Skype and Microsoft Security Essentials; both are freeware, available to anyone with an internet connection.

So Namoko lives on, in digital form, but I wonder for how long. I’ve only found one place, a website, that even attempts to offer his music for legitimate sale, and I think they’re stocked out. It’d be a damned shame if this country’s musical history faded into oblivion because there’s no money in it.

Reports on high-risk groups for HIV in Malawi often give the prevalence of the virus for various subgroups considered high-risk. Some of these are obvious (sex workers, for example, have an infection rate above two thirds) while others require more introspection to understand (police officers and school teachers travel frequently and have a lot of bargaining power to demand sex in certain situations). But the story for the high prevalence among police officers is implicitly a male one: we think that cops can use their position of authority to pursue more risky sex, and stereotypically it’s a male cop who does that.

The data from Malawi tell the opposite story – it is the women on the police force, not the men, who have the higher infection rate. Part of this can be ascribed to the higher per-act transmission rate for women (for unprotected sex with an infected partner) but that is compensated slightly by the lower overall prevalence for women’s potential partners (i.e. men). So I really am at a loss to explain why 32.1% of female police officers tested positive for HIV, versus 24.5% for men. Another entry in the seemingly boundless list of mysteries related to sexual behavior and HIV here.