Nightingales not neighbours

Oh and just to add additional insult, Simon Jenkins thinks we should be prioritising habitat for 180 nightingales over houses for around 15,000 people, valuing each nightingale at nearly 100 people. I've got nothing against nightingales, but do they each really get priority over a hundred people?

Why aren't young people in England angry about housing?

Apologies for being such a bore, but it drives me nuts that we aren't building enough houses in this country. Every year there are twice as many new households as there are new houses built. Every year. This is the first lesson of economics - prices are set by supply and demand - if demand continues to outstrip supply twofold every year then prices will continue to increase and houses will continue to be split into ever smaller fragments. I rented a beautiful apartment last month from a young married couple, both Oxford graduates, one of them a doctor. It was beautiful, except it was also quite symbolically the converted basement of a much more beautiful house above it. Even the most successful people of my generation are doomed to living in the basements of our parent's generation.

And yet simply building more houses, in the places that people want to live, and yes occasionally on some muddy field in a part of the greenbelt, would create jobs, reduce prices, reduce the housing benefit bill, and create all sorts of new positive dynamic externalities as places like Oxford are allowed to follow their natural economic geography and increase in density of smart people. But when the university does try to build more housing, on brownfield land next to the railway in the centre of town, campaigners complain about ruining the skyline. Not even building on "greenbelt," not destroying animal habitat or some beautiful piece of land itself, but obscuring the view of a church spire. Why aren't young people angry about the miserable hovels we are forced to live in? Most of us have been lucky enough to escape Britain at some point in our lives - we've seen the possibilities of better cheaper housing that exists in almost any other country in the world. Where is the angry youth pro-building lobby?

And now in addition to already having the smallest and most expensive houses in Europe to choose from, my  search in Oxford is thwarted by "Housing in Multiple Occupation" rules. Any rented house with more than one "household" in it needs to be registered, with increased legal obligations on the landlord, which means lots of landlords just don't want to bother registering, and so can't or won't rent to a group of young professionals instead of a family. So after being priced out of getting our own houses and basically forced to share because of government planning regulation, we're now thwarted in attempts to find a house which the government will allow us to share because of yet more well-meaning but utterly self-defeating regulation. Here's a better way to take power from landlords and give it to renters: Build. More. Houses.

Higher Education in Africa

Ugandan journalist Daniel Kalinaki posted this exam from the Kampala International University on his twitter feed a couple of weeks ago, and it has been a bit stuck in my head. Is this really real? Is this normal? Their wikipedia page says that KIU is ranked 58th out of African universities. It's deeply sad if true.

UK Public Spending

I don't think I've seen any proper discussion of the composition of UK public spending amongst the current debates on cuts and benefits, so here are a few charts from the IFS. 

From a 2009 survey of public spending you can see what the main categories are - social security, NHS, education, and defence. 

Then this observation compares mid-Labour pre-crisis spending in 2003 to estimated spending by the end of the current government in 2007. They aren't all that different, except for increases in health spending, pensions, and debt interest.

Finally this 2012 survey of the benefit system breaks down the largest category, social security, into recipients. Unemployment benefits make up just 2.6% (though people out of work will also claim some of the low-income benefits such as housing allowance, and there are no doubt some people on sick and disability who could manage some form of useful paid activity, even if the reforms to the testing regime have been poorly handled and very unfair on some people). Nevertheless, 60% of social security is for the elderly and for children.

More Disappointing Labour Market Policy Outcomes

This new from Jordan:

Wage subsidies and soft skills training are two popular types of policies that governments are turning to around the world as part of their efforts to deal with high youth unemployment. Our experimental analysis shows these policies do not appear to have had large impacts on generating sustained employment for young, relatively educated women in Jordan. Short-term wage subsidies generated large and significant increases in employment while the subsidies were in effect, but most of these jobs disappeared when the subsidies expired. High minimum wages may be one reason, with firms saying that graduates were not productive enough to be affordable without subsidies.

Groh, Krishnan, McKenzie, and Vishwanath, The impact of training and wage subsidy programs on female youth employment in Jordan

I don't see much cause for optimism in getting any solid positive results from labour market interventions. Am I missing something?

Bad Graphics

This is a guest post by Sean Fox at the LSE

This infographic, which came to my attention a few weeks ago on International Women’s day, has been on my mind because it is one of the WORST visual presentations of data I have seen in years: 

So what? Well, it contains information on an interesting and important topic (attitudes about domestic abuse) in a UN report. It should inform. Instead it confuses and distorts the facts. It violates almost every rule outlined in the bible of infographics, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte. Let me just name a few.

1. It looks like a quasi-pie chart. As such it implicitly suggests to the viewer that the slices represent portions of a whole. They do no such thing. They represent survey responses from a relatively small and arbitrary selection of countries around the world. 
2. The sizes of the ‘slices’ do not correspond to the numbers they purportedly represent. Just compare the Rwanda slice to the Vietnam slice. Huh?? 
3. It uses multiple colours. This is a great way to pack more data into a small space, but in this case the colours actually contain no information at all. They’re just randomly assigned. More visual confusion.
4. It uses a lot of ink to represent a small amount of data. Rule number 1 of good info graphics is to maximise the data/ink ratio. Less is more. 

So, how should it have been presented? There are many better ways, but a very simple one, which took me about 5 minutes in Excel is this:



While the first figure confuses the brain and obscures the significance of the data, this simplified version immediately throws up all kinds of interesting questions. Why do the women of the post-Soviet nations of Serbia, Georgia and Kazakhstan seem to have some of the lowest tolerance for domestic abuse in the world? How is it that the women of Jordan, which has a relatively liberal and modernising king and a female role model in the politically active and globetrotting Queen Rania, seem to largely accept domestic violence? What accounts for the wide gap in attitudes between women in the East African nations in Ethiopia and Rwanda? Is it due to “culture” or government policy and discourse?

These are interesting and important questions that are revealed by a simple improvement in the presentation of the data.

Come on, UNICEF. You can do better.

Aid and religion

I'm generally enough of an aid evangelist that I can put aside my rabid atheism when it comes to religious aid organisations. I suppose that makes me a bit of a consequentialist - when the need is so great, I don't really care about people's motivations as long as they are doing good.

But are they really doing good? A new paper by Niklas Bengtsson in Economic Development and Cultural Change looks at a village-level education project run by a church in Tanzania. They find substantial positive impacts on literacy and education attainment - but - only for the children of Protestants. The children of Catholics living in the same village were unaffected.

Now this wouldn't necessarily be a problem if these programs were all being funded with private donations, but close to a fifth of NGOs receiving support from USAID are Christian organisations, with apparently similar proportions from official donors in Europe. All of which is quite worrying.

Now maybe the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania is not typical of most religious aid organisations, and others are much better at providing assistance to people of different faiths, but it does raise some serious question marks. 

The solution to Britain's housing crisis

I just had a great idea inspired by David Goodhart. Clearly the reason that poor countries have monstrous governments is that all the smart liberal citizens who might have otherwise overthrown them have chosen to use their exit rather than their voice and left the country, so we should force them all to stay.

Similarly, the reason that Britain has absurd policies, such as the housing policy that leads to the smallest and most expensive houses in Europe, is that everyone who might otherwise have complained has left - about 1 in 10 Brits or 5-6 million people live abroad. So there's a simple solution, ban emigration from Britain, forcibly repatriate the 5 million, and all our political problems will naturally be solved. The "post-liberal" political solution. Sounds great huh?

Chasing Misery

My friend Kelsey is creating a book of essays by women who work in humanitarian aid, and the Kickstarter campaign has just gone live. She needs to raise $11,690 to cover the costs of design, editing, formatting, printing, and building a website. She's a really good writer, as her woefully neglected blog attests, with lots of stories to tell from South Sudan, Darfur, and elsewhere, so if that's your kind of thing (which it really should be if you're reading this kind of blog), you should make a contribution to the campaign, and share the link with your networks.

What are the barriers to work for women in developing countries?

Bob Rijkers and Rita Costa have a really interesting recent paper looking at gender differences in rural employment in developing countries, something I've been thinking about a lot in Rwanda over the last 3 months. In Rwanda the government has an ambitious goal to increase off-farm employment, and if this goal is to be reached there needs to be a big shift in female employment. Young women are currently much less likely to start their own businesses than men, and more likely to get "stuck" at home or running the family farm. 

Bob and Rita document that in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, women are also much less likely to establish a rural non-farm business, and that the businesses they do establish are less productive.

The reason that the businesses are less productive is not down to education or access to capital, but the sectors that these businesses are in. And this is where their quantitative story ends. They conclude that "Collecting panel data would help us better understand the causal mechanisms underlying the patterns documented in this paper and would permit a richer representation of the dynamics of rural labor markets"

But actually I think some qualitative work could get you a lot further a lot faster on those crucial policy questions of why women are less likely to start a business and why, when they go, it is in a less profitable sector.

An American who worked in Rwanda for several few years told me that teenage girls often aren't allowed out of the house as much as boys, for both security reasons and that they have more housework duties. Which means they get less exposure to the people and places around them, and less chance to think about what kind of market opportunities there are out there.

I also think that there is a strong cultural element around gender norms and what kind of work is acceptable for women. The New Times in Kigali tells the story of Nadine, one of only four female moto drivers in a city where there are hundreds. She quit tailoring because it didn't make enough money, and now driving a motorbike taxi she takes home enough to pay for rent, school fees, and childcare.

Naturally, challenges have come her way, the biggest being lack of support from some of her relatives who insist she is in a male field. 

“Nobody in my family approved of my choice to be a motorcyclist. In fact, they accused me of being a prostitute because I was joining a ‘male’ job. It was hurtful and discouraging but I decided to go with it anyway,” she narrates.

Presumably actually there is loads of sociological / anthropological research out there on this, anyone got any ideas? In England it took a world war for women to finally get access to "male" fields. What will it take to achieve such a cultural shift in developing countries?

Kigali to Oxford

This draft has been sitting here since I got back a week ago, because I wasn't sure how passionate and emotional and angry I was comfortable with being in public. The short story is, as I sat in the coffee shop at Kigali airport waiting for check-in to open, a man who I'd met a couple of days earlier asked me with total sincerity to take one of his children with me back to England so that they could get a better education and a chance of a better job, which for some reason really got to me. A man who totally seriously wanted a total stranger to take one of his children thousands of miles away because he knows that living standards are so much better in rich countries. And he couldn't move himself because of our totally self-absorbed immigration policies. So I'll skip the rant, but sometimes it just breaks my heart that we live in a world where such desperation is so mundane.

In other news, 3 months away is probably too short for any proper reverse culture shock, but I do admit to being mystified by the battery-powered electric salt and pepper grinders in the apartment I am renting, which make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Also a few people have commented that I've lost weight, which I hadn't noticed at all, but seems plausible following a typically overwhelming first-trip-to-the-supermarket-following-a-period-of-developing-country-living. Seriously, no wonder we have so much obesity when food is this cheap and easy.

How (and why) to do a corporate blog

Jason Fried and David Hansson of 37Signals argue in their book Rework (and the video above, HT: my favourite business writing blog) that companies should "emulate chefs." Why do you know some chefs better than others? Not because they spend money on advertising, but because they teach you their secrets - they explain recipes on TV and they publish their recipes in books. And all of this is free advertising for their restaurants. Why don't businesses do this? Because they are scared of competitors stealing their ideas. But the truth is it isn't about the ideas as about the execution and the mastery. Chefs aren't worried about someone stealing all of their recipes and opening a new identical restaurant next door and putting them out of business, it just doesn't work like that. Nobody is going to steal your idea and put you out of business. But when you share your ideas, you teach people something for free and you build an audience and a relationship based on trust and openness rather than marketing and selling. This is both more interesting for the reader, as well as being a strong signal of confidence, that you are good enough to let it all hang out. It's countersignalling, that you are so good you don't need to really bother with marketing, and that you are so confident in your expertise that you can teach others how to do it and not need to worry about whether people will keep paying for your services, because you are confident that you can do it better.

And you see this in the development blogosphere. The best blogs are written by experts in their field who are being open about their process and teaching you something with honesty. Look at Chris Blattman's advice posts or field stories, Development Impact's super-technical stats posts, or Duncan Green's internal Oxfam wrangling. All of these guys have built massive audiences who trust them and are interested in what they have to say because they are open and not just trying to sell you something. Most corporate blogs suck because they are all marketing and promotion, and readers smell that in a second and turn off. It is the opposite of countersignalling, it's trying too hard, like using complicated words in an attempt to sound clever when writing simply is actually harder and it shows. Smart writers write clearly and let their ideas do the talking, and let the words get out of the way. Smart business bloggers open up and say something of value that isn't directly selling and is playing the long game, building an audience and building trust. And once you have an audience, they will forgive you a bit of promotional guff.

All of this may or may not be written a prospective new OPM blog in mind. 

ChatBasket

Alex Andon just sent me the link to his new venture ChatBasket linking up developing country artisans with US consumers via an online chat room. It's a cool idea - maybe we can increase the value of trade if western consumers value and will pay for that personal connection and narrative behind a product (see also http://significantobjects.com, in which consumers paid around $45 for a $1.50 object that comes with a totally made-up background story). You can support the crowdfunding campaign and/or buy a handmade Guatemalan iPad case here.

British attitudes to immigration

Analysis of the electorate's view of immigration, by the anti-racism campaigners Searchlight, the thinktank British Future and others, shows there is a majority for sanity and solidarity out there, which could be coalesced. A quarter of the population are hardline anti-immigrant – some of them racist. But another quarter, essentially Guardian and Economist readers, support multiculturalism. The remaining 50% are up for grabs, but can be won over.

Neal Lawson in the Guardian