Energy use per person. African states MUST do better.

Extreme heat damages crops and increases the number of strongly undernourished households in terms of calories, iron, and other nutrients. While some households cope by buying food grown elsewhere, the poorest remain highly vulnerable. Read today's article to learn more:

While the adoption of improved fertiliser boosted agricultural productivity among rice farmers in Nigeria, the effects on tree canopy cover depended on the local landscape. Read today's article to learn more:

“The top 10% of U.S. households now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, a record high since data collection on this metric began in 1989.” @weisenthal.bsky.social @mikezaccardi.bsky.social

Willpower alone is unlikely to defeat distraction machines with algorithms that constantly adjust to steal attention. We explain why this should concern economists

F Campante, R Durante, F Hagemeister, & A Sen study the impact of GenAI on trust in news. When the threat of misinformation becomes salient, the value of credible news increases. Outlets should continually invest in helping readers distinguish fact from fabrication. cepr.org/voxeu/column... #EconSky

BREAKING UN investigators determine Israel has since October 2023 committed "genocide" in Gaza, with the "intent to destroy the Palestinians". "We came to the conclusion that genocide is occurring in Gaza and is continuing to occur, and the responsibility lies with the State of Israel"

Very useful discussion on the perils of using micro/cross-sectional parameter estimates in inferring the aggregate effects of policies/shocks. This is pervasive in Economics, yet the two effects can even have the opposite signs. (Example in next post.) voxdev.org/topic/method...

Extreme views are heavily over-represented on social media Social platforms’ tendency to reward hostile content creates incentives that systematically reward simplistic messages and extreme positions and this fuels populism www.ft.com/content/9251... via @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Jihadists allied to Al-Qaeda have launched a blitz of raids on industrial sites run by foreign firms, especially Chinese, as a tactic to undermine Mali’s ruling junta u.afp.com/SdQg

Earmarking revenue to fund government agencies is usually a bad idea because, regardless of the amounts involved, they will always find a way to spend it. Yet every naira spent by these pseudo‑agencies is a naira not spent on a child’s education or a mother’s health.

Our @ourworldindata.org we visualise weekly updates of wildfire data from the Global Wildfire Information System. Spain was having a pretty low/average year until the past few weeks when it went roaring past previous years. You can track this data here: ourworldindata.org/wildfires

"Favour is better than Labour - Philosopher Odionarius Ighalotus 2000 BC". Copied from a friend.

Fascinating piece by Oscar Lopez (a former colleague at a previous job!) about how previous Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador's welfare policies were largely responsible for a *26% poverty reduction* - that's 13.4 million people lifted out of poverty

With the world’s attention on Gaza, Israeli settlers in the West Bank are carrying out one of the most violent campaigns against Palestinian villages since the UN began keeping records. nyti.ms/4lt6F2u

A paper that studies how the Bank of England was transformed by the slave trade, “Preventing financial ruin: How the West India trade fostered creativity in crisis lending by the Bank of England” joint with Mina Ishizu came out in the Economic History Review this year. doi.org/10.1111/ehr.... 1/14

"Our research suggests that emergency aid serves as a critical buffer, shielding children from the long-lasting consequences of disasters."

With more people displaced than in Gaza and Ukraine combined & fading attention and money from the usual "peacekeeping" powers, @lynseyaddario.bsky.social & @anneapplebaum.bsky.social take us inside Sudan's "nihilistic" conflict and the "devastating" senseless violence being endured by civilians.

It is of course tantamount to a regressive tax.... which is the opposite of the kind of tax we should be trying to raise to finance public services or public entities.

Crucial new research from CBO showing that inflation from 1979-2020 hit poor households harder & rich households less hard. Graph shows cumulative growth in real income. When you account for differential inflation it cuts ~1/3 of the real income gains for the poorest. Only ~23% growth in 41 years.

Osun, among other things, is the #Yoruba orisha of fertility. This is why an important stop today in the Osogbo Sacred Grove on the way to the actual Osun shrine is this statue of Olomoyoyo, the one with many children. #Nigeria

UN rights chief Volker Turk says the violence resulted in ‘one of the largest documented death tolls’ despite a truce.

#BBCNews - Besieged #Sudan city residents face starvation, UN warns www.bbc.com/news/article... The WFP warning comes as local activists have already begun reporting deaths by starvation in el-Fasher, which is still home to about 300,000 people.

🤔

It's apparently "reunion week" for me on podcasts: Rejoining @planetmoney.bsky.social and @amandaaronczyk.bsky.social to talk about economists' credibility problems: www.npr.org/2025/08/01/1... (See also my story from Jan.: www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/b...)

Decision time for landmark global treaty as plastic pollution talks begin. Three years of negotiations hit the wall in South Korea in December when a group of oil-producing states blocked a consensus u.afp.com/SMNy

Last two reposts...climate change

BREAKING Hong Kong records highest daily rainfall in August since 1884, says Observatory

Japan sets record high temperatures, worries mount over rice crops reut.rs/4fiKM4o

@robgillezeau.bsky.social You may like this www.1914reader.com/p/diversity-...

VIDEO: A life devoted to caring for Sierra Leone's chimpanzees. Bala Amarasekaran has spent three decades building a sanctuary, and a life, around orphaned chimpanzees whom he calls family. What began with the rescue of a single malnourished chimp tied to a tree grew into a lifelong mission

Famine is "now unfolding" in Gaza, with thousands of children malnourished and hunger-related deaths on the rise among the youngest, a UN-backed monitor warned on Tuesday. u.afp.com/Sgbj

How much does it cost to provide a healthy diet? How does this vary across countries? www.worldbank.org/en/programs/... Will Masters shares an open-access resource that seeks to compare across countries at #ABCDE2025.

The food industry literally gaslighted people for decades talking just exercise more.....

@frontiercharlie.bsky.social Your theory proving to be important.....

"We faced hunger before, but never like this."

More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups, including Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders, warned on Wednesday that “mass starvation” was spreading across Gaza, adding to growing calls for Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian aid to the enclave.

Gita Gopinath set to step down from IMF https://on.ft.com/40RSWLl

Statement by the Director-General of @unesco.org, @aazoulay.bsky.social, following the decision of the United States to withdraw from the Organization. Read more: unes.co/ksovsg

🙃

Nigeria’s central bank kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged despite inflation cooling for a third consecutive month.

The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) were large, nationally representative surveys conducted in over 90 lower- and middle-income countries around the world. They provided core information such as birth and mortality rates, which are otherwise poorly recorded in many countries.

"Stellenbosch scholars have published the highest number of papers on Africa in economic history journals over the last 25 years". Well done @johanfourieza.bsky.social

An Italian reform that prohibited directors of Italian banks from sitting on multiple boards simultaneously resulted in a significant reduction in loan rates, consistent with pre-reform collusive behaviour. @guglielmobarone.bsky.social‬, F Schivardi, E Sette cepr.org/voxeu/column... #EconSky

My latest Data Insight is about extreme poverty in South East Africa. In Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia, extreme poverty is not declining.

No, it's not the case that only China is responsible for the large decline in extreme poverty over the past decades. We wrote about it recently: ourworldindata.org/data-insights/was-the-global-decline-of-extreme-poverty-only-due-to-china