Links I liked: November 26, 2014

Can African Countries Learn from North Korea’s Handling of the International Media? – An interesting perspective. He argues that African leaderships, rather than seizing crises as opportunities to draw attention and approval for their countries from Western donors, might actually benefit from clamping down on international media coverage, which often exploits and distorts the story. I’m thinking that the Ebola panic might have been averted if the media hadn’t picked up on the most freakish elements of the story, and focused rather on the mundane issues of poor public health care delivery.

Colonialism and development in Africa – “Most of Africa spent two generations under colonial rule. This column argues that, contrary to some recent commentaries highlighting the benefits of colonialism, it is this intense experience that has significantly retarded economic development across the continent. Relative to any plausible counterfactual, Africa is poorer today than it would have been had colonialism not occurred.” The authors, however, note the different contexts of colonialization and remark that results are mixed, but in general, the countries that have done the best (i.e. those which didn’t experience slavery) would be doing significantly better.

Stop Making Intellectually Disingenuous Market Arguments – “Shall we blame Twitter, trolls or bloggers? I am unsure of the underlying reason. But as we have seen far too, financial discussions seem to entail people arguing at cross-purposes. Bull-bear debates devolve into winning the argument at any cost. Previously, we had a true competition of ideas in the marketplace. Now, we have discussions that range between disingenuous and useless. The hunt for the truth has been replaced by the search for bragging rights.” Well, Barry, I don’t think you should limit your observations to only those talking about markets. It’s endemic now.

An autopsy review of sudden unexpected natural deaths in a suburban Nigerian population – “Sudden unexpected natural deaths accounted for 13.4% of all medico-legal autopsies. The male to female ratio was 2.1:1, and the mean age was 43.1 years ± 19.5 SD. Cardiovascular (28.3%), respiratory (18.2%), and central nervous system (12.6%) disorders were the major groups of causes. About 64.4% of cardiovascular deaths were due to hypertensive heart disease. Bacterial pneumonia, intracerebral haemorrhage, and breast carcinoma accounted for 34.4%, 60.0%, and 52.6% of respiratory, central nervous system, and cancer-related deaths respectively. Only 16.9% of cases occurred while the patient was admitted to the hospital.” Twice as many men are dying as women, they are dying of heart disease and the average age of death is 43, give or take 20 years. Time to move our focus over to chronic outcomes in developing countries. They are staring into a tidal wave of disease that’s going to break their health systems.

Economics Is a Dismal Science for Women – Wow. Just wow.