I know that it isn’t nice to laugh at the misfortune of others, but you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at this.

First the religious right were asked to pray for rain during the Denver Democratic National Convention:

Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family, one of America’s leading evangelical groups, was shown in a video filmed at Denver’s Invesco Field, where 75,000 are expected to cheer Mr Obama on Aug 28, asking Christians to pray for “torrential” rain.

“I’m talking ‘umbrella-ain’t-going-to-help-you rain,” the former pastor and television meteorologist said. He explained on the video: “I’m still pro life, and I’m still in favour of marriage as being between one man and one woman. And I would like the next president who will select justices for the next Supreme Court to agree.”

Did it rain on Mr Obama’s parade? Did it heck.

But what’s this? Hurricane Gustav has prompted a rethink over the Republican convention. John McCain said:

“But you know it just wouldn’t be appropriate to have a festive occasion while a near-tragedy or a terrible challenge is presented in the form of a natural disaster. So we’re monitoring it from day to day and I’m saying a few prayers too.”

If the Big Guy is sending rain according to which side he’s on, then He seems to be a Democrat.

Reich on Palin:

while Ms. Palin is perfectly entitled to believe that evolution is a myth, that women should be barred from choosing to have abortions, and that global warming has yet to be proven, these views all run counter to the views of mainstream America.

Incentives for Global Health have published a new report:”The Health Impact Fund: Making New Medicines Accessible for All”

The Health Impact Fund, our flagship proposal, is a new way of stimulating research and development of life-saving pharmaceuticals. To provide wide access, medicines need to be affordable-but low prices don’t create strong incentives for innovators to invest in research and development. The Health Impact Fund is an optional mechanism that offers pharmaceutical innovators a supplementary reward based on the health impact of their products, if they agree to sell those products at cost. The proposed Fund is to be financed mainly by governments.

I personally find this idea attractive. It shares a lot of characteristics and thinking with the Advance Market Commitment idea that I have worked on in the past. The main difference is that the AMC leaves patents in place; under the IGH they are signed away. If the pharmaceutical industry is willing to participate, this would be very attractive; my guess is that many firms will find this too challenging to their existing business model.

Via Chris, from Scarlett Lion.

This is scarily accurate.

CNN’s “Inside Africa” show this week covers three stories: the migration of wildebeest in the Masai Mara, gorillas in northern Congo, and a white man kayaking around Madagascar.

The ever-excellent Chris Dillow asks:

2. The National Gallery of Scotland wants the tax-payer to buy some paintings from the Duke of Sutherland. Why don’t we apply Nice-style cost-benefit analysis here? Would £100m spent on art really produce £100m worth of increases in quality-adjusted life years (by improving the quality of life, not length of course)? And if we don’t apply such reasoning, why not? Why is the restrictive CBA of Nice only applied to drugs, rather than to all public spending?

Exactly right. And, in particular, why don’t we apply this form of cost-benefit analysis to international development spending?

A friend in a donor agency (thanks CK!) passes on the following:

The wisdom of Buzkashi riders, passed on from generation to generation in Afghanistan, says that ‘when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount’. However, in the UN and NGO community a range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

• Changing riders;
• Appointing a committee to study the horse;
• Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses;
• Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included;
• Reclassifying the dead horse as ‘living impaired’;
• Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse;
• Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed;
• Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance;
• Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance;
• Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the mission of the organization than do some other horses;
• Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses;
• Preparing a workshop with paid attendants on the subject of Experience gaining in riding dead horses in post war setting;
• Preparing a second workshop on environmental hazards caused by horse shit, and the advantage on using dead horses since they do not shit therefore are of no hazard to the environment.

The World Bank published new estimates of the number of people in poverty yesterday. They are very important and they’ve been universally misreported.

The estimates show:

• the developing world is poorer than we thought; there are 1.4 billion people living in poverty (about one quarter of the developing world), not 985 million as we previously thought
• nonetheless, progress in reducing poverty has been about as fast as previously believed - poverty has been declining at the rate of about one percentage point a year, from 52 percent of the developing world’s population in 1981 to 26 percent in 2005. This is a reduction in the number of poor of about 500 million people.

As the full paper explains, the new poverty line is $1.25 a day in 2005 prices, compared to the old poverty line of $1.08 a day in 1993 prices.   This is actually a downward revision of the poverty line in real terms: if it had been kept the same in real terms (ie adjusted only for inflation) it would be $1.45 a day in 2005 prices.  (There are currently 1.7 billion people living on less than $1.45 a day in 2005 prices, the equivalent today of the old poverty line - which is nearly twice as many as we previously thought lived in poverty.)

The meaning of the poverty line is often misunderstood.  Some people assume that the poverty line measures the number of people who have an income of $1.25 a day; and they reassure themselves by thinking “a dollar will go a long way in some countries”.   But the poverty line is measured as $1.25 a day at purchasing power parity - that is, people below this line are able to buy each day what $1.25 would buy them in the United States.  This really is an absolute measure of poverty.

Of course, the newspapers got this all wrong:

James Politi in the FT reported

The new figure was estimated after researchers at the bank raised the threshold for extreme poverty from earnings of $1 a day to $1.25.

(Not true; the threshold has been reduced in real terms). The BBC reported

The new estimates suggest that poverty is both more persistent, and has fallen less sharply, than previously thought.

(Not true: it has fallen at the same rate as previously thought; just at a much higher level.)

Finally - a big untold part of this story is the big changes in the purchasing power parity estimates that underpin these poverty figures.  These show massive changes in the estimates of GDP at PPP. For example, here in Ethiopia, GDP per capita is now estimated to be $591 per year, compared to $1084 under the previous estimate.  India is down 40%, now below Pakistan in income-per-head; and China’s income per head is also 40% lower than the previously estimated.

Scott Adams on Economists:

If you think it is okay to ignore economists because they are so often wrong, you’re looking at the wrong questions. Economists are generally wrong with complicated models but right about concepts. For example, they know that additional domestic drilling won’t make much of a dent in the energy problem. And they know that free trade is generally good for all economies. (You can argue with my examples, but the point is that some things are generally known by economists while not being understood by the general public.)

By analogy, a mechanic knows that changing your oil is good for your engine, but he can’t tell you what problems you will have with your car next year. You shouldn’t ignore the mechanic’s advice on changing oil just because he doesn’t know when your battery will die, or because he didn’t personally perform any scientific studies on oil changes.

This is the entrance to a tiny 13th Century Rock Church in Tigray, called Abuna Yemata Guh. And yes, that’s a narrow ledge you have to walk along, with a 200 metre vertical drop to your left, at the end of a terrifying ascent up the side of a cliff to get there.

The dangerous climb is rewarded with an extraordinary church, carved into the rock, with glorious paintings.

More photos here or as a slideshow.

Paul Collier savages Prince Charles for advocating medieval peasant farming, and points out that it is not a solution for hunger in Africa.

The GM ban has three adverse effects. It has retarded productivity in European agriculture; grain production could be increased by about 15% were the ban lifted. More subtly, because Europe is out of the market for GM technology, the pace of research has slowed. GM research takes a long time to come to fruition, and its core benefit - the permanent reduction of global food prices - cannot fully be captured through patents. European governments should be funding this research, but it is entirely reliant on the private sector. Private money for research depends on the prospect of sales, so the ban has not only blocked public research - it has reduced private research. …

…. It is conventional to say that Africa needs a green revolution. The reality is that the green revolution was based on chemical fertilisers, and even when fertiliser was cheap, Africa did not adopt it. With the rise in fertiliser costs as a byproduct of high energy prices, any green revolution will perforce not be chemical. What African agriculture needs is a biological revolution. This is what GM offers, if only sufficient money is put into research. There has as yet been no work on the crops specific to the region, such as cassava and yams.

Mainstream scientists have responded to Priince Charles that GM offers the opportunity to redistribute wealth to feed the poor. With the right investments in technology, Africa could not only feed itself, it could be a major food producer for the rest of the world. GM corn in Africa produces four times as much corn per acre (and the corn can be protected from witchweed, unlike the previous varieties).