Today's @bopinion post is about Nigeria. I expect its conclusions will not come as a surprise to most Nigerians, but it's good for Americans to be thinking about Nigeria and its problems.

Nigeria is very dependent on oil, for its government revenues and for its foreign exchange earnings.

When oil prices fall, Nigeria's people suffer.
And like many oil-rich countries, the government tries to cushion the blow by subsidizing fuel (this is more expensive than you might think, since Nigeria can't refine all of its own oil).

When oil prices rise again, this puts a strain on govt. budgets.
Meanwhile, fewer and fewer Nigerians have jobs, which could portend a rise in social instability.
To escape the doom spiral of the Resource Curse, Nigeria should look to a country that seems to have beaten the curse: Botswana.

https://t.co/oHrWaCO1Iq
Botswana's approach is basically:
1. Pour resource revenues into a Sovereign Wealth Fund
2. Depreciate the currency
3. Use SWF to stabilize the budget
4. Invest a bunch in education, health and infrastructure
Nigeria is already taking some of these steps, which is great.
But Nigeria is missing one big piece: Investment in education.

(It could also stand to invest more in health.)

https://t.co/3m1mSbRbE6
Instead of subsidizing fuel, Nigeria needs to subsidize education (which doubles as child care) and health. This will provide jobs, relieve poverty, and - most importantly - build human capital.

(end)

More from Noah Smith

Bloomberg Ideas conference now starting! I will be live-tweeting it. You can watch on our Facebook or Twitter pages (links below)!


Our first panel is about cryptocurrency! We have @matt_levine, @tylercowen, @eiaine, @nirkaissar, and Camilla

Ou: Crypto will be useful for the unbanked.

Cowen: Crypto has to compete against a bunch of other emerging payments technologies. Bitcoin is too inflexible.

Cowen: I'll bet on the payments companies over crypto.
Today's @bopinion post is about how poor countries started catching up to rich ones.

It looks like decolonization just took a few decades to start

Basic econ theory says poor countries should grow faster than rich ones.

But for much of the Industrial Revolution, the opposite happened.
https://t.co/JjjVtWzz5c

Why? Probably because the first countries to discover industrial technologies used them to conquer the others!

But then colonial empires went away. And yet still, for the next 30 years or so, poor countries fell further behind rich ones.
https://t.co/hilDvv0IQV

Why??

Possible reasons:
1. Bad institutions (dictators, communism, autarkic trade regimes)
2. Civil wars
3. Lack of education

But then, starting in the 80s (for China) and the 90s (for India and Indonesia), some of the biggest poor countries got their acts together and started to catch up!


Global inequality began to fall.
This thread demonstrates that a lot of academic writing that *looks* like utter nonsense is merely scholars dressing up a useful but mundane point with a ton of unnecessary jargon.


My theory is that the jargon creates an artificial barrier to entry. https://t.co/MqLyyppdHl

If one must spend years marinating one's brain in jargon to be perceived as an expert on a topic, it protects the status and earning power of people who study relatively easy topics.

In econ, a similar thing is accomplished by what recent Nobel prize winner Paul Romer calls "mathiness": https://t.co/DBCRRc8Mir

But mathiness and jargon are not quite the same...

Jargon usually doesn't force you to change the substance of your central point.

Mathiness often does. By forcing you to write your model in a way that's mathematically tractable (easy to work with), mathiness often impoverishes your understanding of how the world really works.

has written about this problem:
Time for panel #3: Big Tech and regulation!

I will be live-tweeting again, and you can also watch video at either the Twitter or Facebook links below!


Kaissar: Every industry gets regulated when it gets big. The question is what kind of regulation Big Tech will get,and whether the companies will be proactive in shaping it.

Kaissar: More profitable companies have higher returns. Why? Maybe it's a risk factor, because more profit = higher risk of getting regulated.

Bershidskyis showing a diagram of GDPR complaince pop-ups. What a massive ill-conceived bureaucratic mess.

Ritholtz: It's 2018 and we're still talking about Facebook privacy settings?! If you're still giving your personal data to Facebook, you just don't care about privacy!

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**Thread on Bravery of Sikhs**
(I am forced to do this due to continuous hounding of Sikh Extremists since yesterday)

Rani Jindan Kaur, wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh had illegitimate relations with Lal Singh (PM of Ranjit Singh). Along with Lal Singh, she attacked Jammu, burnt - https://t.co/EfjAq59AyI


Hindu villages of Jasrota, caused rebellion in Jammu, attacked Kishtwar.

Ancestors of Raja Ranjit Singh, The Sansi Tribe used to give daughters as concubines to Jahangir.


The Ludhiana Political Agency (Later NW Fronties Prov) was formed by less than 4000 British soldiers who advanced from Delhi and reached Ludhiana, receiving submissions of all sikh chiefs along the way. The submission of the troops of Raja of Lahore (Ranjit Singh) at Ambala.

Dabistan a contemporary book on Sikh History tells us that Guru Hargobind broke Naina devi Idol Same source describes Guru Hargobind serving a eunuch
YarKhan. (ref was proudly shared by a sikh on twitter)
Gobind Singh followed Bahadur Shah to Deccan to fight for him.


In Zafarnama, Guru Gobind Singh states that the reason he was in conflict with the Hill Rajas was that while they were worshiping idols, while he was an idol-breaker.

And idiot Hindus place him along Maharana, Prithviraj and Shivaji as saviours of Dharma.
Ivor Cummins has been wrong (or lying) almost entirely throughout this pandemic and got paid handsomly for it.

He has been wrong (or lying) so often that it will be nearly impossible for me to track every grift, lie, deceit, manipulation he has pulled. I will use...


... other sources who have been trying to shine on light on this grifter (as I have tried to do, time and again:


Example #1: "Still not seeing Sweden signal versus Denmark really"... There it was (Images attached).
19 to 80 is an over 300% difference.

Tweet: https://t.co/36FnYnsRT9


Example #2 - "Yes, I'm comparing the Noridcs / No, you cannot compare the Nordics."

I wonder why...

Tweets: https://t.co/XLfoX4rpck / https://t.co/vjE1ctLU5x


Example #3 - "I'm only looking at what makes the data fit in my favour" a.k.a moving the goalposts.

Tweets: https://t.co/vcDpTu3qyj / https://t.co/CA3N6hC2Lq
@franciscodeasis https://t.co/OuQaBRFPu7
Unfortunately the "This work includes the identification of viral sequences in bat samples, and has resulted in the isolation of three bat SARS-related coronaviruses that are now used as reagents to test therapeutics and vaccines." were BEFORE the


chimeric infectious clone grants were there.https://t.co/DAArwFkz6v is in 2017, Rs4231.
https://t.co/UgXygDjYbW is in 2016, RsSHC014 and RsWIV16.
https://t.co/krO69CsJ94 is in 2013, RsWIV1. notice that this is before the beginning of the project

starting in 2016. Also remember that they told about only 3 isolates/live viruses. RsSHC014 is a live infectious clone that is just as alive as those other "Isolates".

P.D. somehow is able to use funds that he have yet recieved yet, and send results and sequences from late 2019 back in time into 2015,2013 and 2016!

https://t.co/4wC7k1Lh54 Ref 3: Why ALL your pangolin samples were PCR negative? to avoid deep sequencing and accidentally reveal Paguma Larvata and Oryctolagus Cuniculus?