Philanthropy

I have - on many occasions - commented on how philanthropy, or altruism can have negative consequences for the recipient. I'm not quite Ayn Randian on this, but I do think its important to understand that often the philanthropy is about making the philanthropist feel good, instead of making the recipients life better off. Here is a great example in a short TED talk on condoms in the Congo. Note the difference in marketing strategy between the for profit condom sellers and the NGOs. You know it can't be good for the Congolese when the NGOs are using the condoms to advertise to donors, rather than potential condom users.

Aid to Africa

It does more harm than good. But I've been saying that for awhile now.

Many Wives

Many wives apparently reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS.  

The story: Africans don’t have more sex than Americans; both have roughly the same number of partners in a lifetime. But Americans are more likely to be serial monogamists, while Africans are more likely to have concurrent partners (outside marriage). These networks allow HIV to spread more easily. Polygyny, it seems, is the exception.

A Simple Crush

How can you not love a woman like Emily Oster? Her work is featured in Esquire here. To think, I actually had her lined up to present in a session I organized for the AEA, but the powers that be decided against the session. How could they turn us down?

And how is this not hot?

I consider a world where individuals live a maximum of two periods. All individuals live for certain in period 1, and there is a chance, p, of surviving until period 2. Each individual receives utility from certain income, y, in each period, as well as their choices of number of sexual partners in each period: sigma1 and sigma2. Total utility in period i is u(y, sigmai), and we will assume that u(.) is concave in both y and sigmai. In a world without HIV, total lifetime
utility can be written:

Utot = u(y, sigma1) + pu(y, sigma2) (1)

Income is fixed in each period so the only choices individuals make are about sexual behavior. The first order condition defining the choice of sigmai is usigmai(y, sigmai) = 0. Note that optimal choice of sigmai can vary with y, even in the framework without HIV. The direction of this relationship will depend on the sign of usigmay. If the cross partial is positive, richer people will have more sexual
partners; if it is negative, they will have fewer. For example, if sexual partners cost money, this will deliver a positive cross partial, which would imply that richer people have more partners.

How is that not hot? I mean, sex, partial derivatives and utility maximization. I defintely have a crush.