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In Memory of Paul Farmer
Paul Farmer is a personal hero of mine. NPR does a wonderful job at giving a little insight into the amazing work he did for so many.
“The racist double standards of international development” Al Jeezera
Year after year, the luminaries of international development, from Bill Gates to Jim Kim, Nick Kristof to Steven Pinker, line up to tell us about the wonderful progress that has been made against global poverty. According to the most recent estimates, published by the World Bank, there were “only” 734 million people living on less than $1.90 per day in 2015, down from 1.9 billion people in 1990.
It sounds like wonderful news. But there is a problem with this narrative. Oddly enough, there is no empirical basis for the $1.90 line. It is an arbitrary threshold that has no grounding in actual human needs. Empirical evidence shows that $1.90 per day is not even enough for people to secure decent nutrition, to say nothing of other basic requirements. In fact, at least 3.5 billion people live on more than this, and yet remain trapped in poverty.
“Advocating for Renewable Energy in the Land of Free Diesel” – Mohammad Pakravan
Without a doubt electricity is one of the most vital infrastructures for any development initiative. However, not any type of electricity source is appropriate or sustainable for development, especially in remote areas.
While many of the community members in the rain forests of Borneo have diesel generators that provide some electricity for TV or phone charging, the diesel generator comes with a big down side: it requires constant supply of diesel. Ironically, accessing a supply of diesel is not a considerable challenge for community members, because in the majority of cases diesel is provided for free by logging companies in exchange for easy access to their lands with no regulations, oversight, or whistleblowers. Communities are divided between those who support the logging companies and those who don’t. If you are against their logging activities on your land, you get nothing. If you support them, you get diesel, cash, food, etc.
So what does this mean for renewable energy development? That it is almost impossible to organize such a project within communities that support the logging companies, which perpetuates illegal and unsustainable logging activities in the region. The story of Bruno Manser, a Swiss environmental activist who spent years in Malaysian Borneo fighting against the logging companies only to mysteriously disappear in 2000, still haunts the elders in these communities.
People who second-guess themselves make worse decisions, study finds
By : Christopher Ingraham
Jan. 6, 2020 at 5:00 a.m. PST
“Trust your gut.” It’s something we’ve all heard (and probably even expressed at one time or another), an exhortation to not overthink decisions in realms as diverse as business, sports, dating and politics.
But is it actually good advice?
In a new paper published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, a trio of British economists applied some brainpower to the question of gut feelings and found that people who second-guess themselves make considerably worse decisions than those who stick with instinct. The researchers focused on prediction accuracy in sports betting but said their findings would apply in any realm where people have to make educated guesses about the future.
The economists gathered data on 150 users of a popular sports betting and prediction website. This was a representative sample of a subset of bettors vying to predict outcomes for all 380 soccer matches in the English Premiere League during the 2017-2018 season.
The final data set consisted of 57,000 individual predictions, each consisting of a user’s best guess of the final score of a given match. Users were called on to predict scores and could revise their forecasts up to the minute the match started.
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Revisions were infrequent: Only 6 percent changed their predictions, with the typical user revising 15 out of 380, and most of those occurred within minutes of the initial forecast. The authors speculate that in such cases, users typed in a prediction and looked up some relevant information on the match before quickly changing their mind. But there also were a number of instances involving large segments of time — days, even weeks — between prediction and revision; such bettors waited nearly two days, on average, to switch gears.
The researchers specifically wanted to know whether the revisions were more accurate than the originals.
In theory, there are a lot of reasons to believe this might be the case. A person would presumably revise a prediction after obtaining new information, such as an analyst’s match forecast or a team roster change.
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In practice, however, the opposite was true: Revised forecasts accurately predicted the final match score 7.7 percent of the time. But the unaltered forecasts were correct 9.3 percent of the time. In other words, revised forecasts were about 17 percent less accurate than those that had never changed. “Game players would have been better off sticking with their first judgments rather than ever revising,” the authors write.
So where did the second-guessers go wrong? For starters, the researchers controlled for match-to-match and player-to-player variation — it isn’t likely the case, in other words, that matches receiving more revisions were more difficult to predict, or that bad guessers were more likely to revise their forecasts.
The researchers found that revisions were more likely to go awry when forecasters dialed up the scores — by going, say, from predicting a 2-1 final score to 3-2. Indeed, across the data set, the bettors systematically underestimated the likelihood of a 0-0 draw: an outcome anticipated 1.5 percent of the time that actually occurs in 8.4 percent of matches.
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That suggests a general forecaster bias toward scoring as opposed to nonscoring — or, more broadly, toward things happening rather than not. Few people, after all, watch a soccer match and hope that nobody scores.
One final, tantalizing piece of evidence: Forecasts revised after a longer period of time were considerably less accurate than those changed within a few minutes. This suggests that overthinking it, or “over analysis” in economics parlance, was a key driver of the revised forecasts’ relative inaccuracy.
In the end, the authors write, their findings “could have relevance to other contexts where judgmental forecasting explicitly takes place and which have real economic importance, such as in company management and planning, financial markets and macroeconomic policy.”
For those of us not in the prediction business, the findings can be boiled down to a simple message: Trust your gut.
Can US cities help the world achieve the Sustainable Development Goals?
LOCAL ACTIONS, GLOBAL LESSONS
Despite a crisis of confidence at the national level, a significant majority of Americans still believe in the ability of their local governments to deliver. This is good news, because U.S. cities are increasingly responsible for taking on local challenges with global implications, such as pollution, violence, climate change, and economic opportunity and security.