Bad risk perception or rational decision making under resource constraints?

I took this picture the other day on my way up from Dhaka to Rangpur. This is what most of the buses here look like. So, not only do the bus drivers drive like lunatics with smack full buses but they also have, if possible, an even more crowded rooftop.

According to the Bangladesh police (through WHO), around 4000 people die every year in Bangladesh from road traffic accidents. That might not sound that much for a country of 150 million but considering that most people don’t travel much it actually amounts to 169 deaths per 10.000 vehicles according to that same WHO website. Given that in Iceland and probably many other developed countries there are almost as many cars as there are people this would amount to quite a high number (setting a side the issue of different types of vehicles, which is of course not correct).

The ticket from Rangpur to Dhaka if you plan to be inside the bus is somewhere around 250 to 300 Taka (3 – 4$, and one Taka is about 1 ISK). Settling for the rooftop slices about 150 Taka of that. Now I haven’t done the calculations (would need the accident rate per trip, I’ve only found that it’s estimated to be about 50 times higher than in the US and Western Europe) but, assuming that there is quite bit of difference in mortality risks going from inside the bus to the roof, I’m guessing this amounts to a pretty low value of a statistical life, and a lot lower than the at least 20.000$ dollars mentioned by Wikipedia to be used for automobile transportation policy.

If you knew how true this is…

Yunus in politics

Big developments over here. Professor Yunus, the recent Nobel laureate, is testing the ground for a new political party with an open letter to all.

World press photo

This one is pretty good, “taken 15 August 2006, shows a group of young Lebanese driving through a South Beirut neighbourhood devastated by Israeli bombings”. More here from the BBC.

Inequality

After the grad-school application session, the India trip and some crunch time at work it’s time to pick things up over here. For starters, here are two excellent posts on inequality from different sides, Cowen in NYT and Brad DeLong in the Miami Herald.

Vizualizing economic activity

From Yale via MR, here’s one of the coolest vizualizations of economic activity, a 3D flash file. Here’s more from the G-Econ project at Yale.

Democracy for sale

Will the Germans outdo the French?

Young, good-looking, and available for around 150 euros (£100), more than 300 would-be protesters are marketing themselves on a German rental website…

Book review mop-up

When I started this blog I had planned on posting reviews of all the books I was planning to read over the course of the year. I haven’t posted one for a while but that’s been more my laziness in writing reviews than in reading.

1. Interpreter of Maladies, by Jumpa Lahiri: A fun collection of short stories with an interesting insight into how it is to migrate from the Subcontinent to the US. Recommended for easy reading.

2. Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert: A bit over-hyped and doesn’t touch on happiness as much as I would have expected but a very interesting and stimulating discussion of the current scientific research into the psychology of how we make choices and remember or predict experiences, etc. Recommended.

3. Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman: A classic, of course, excellent and extremely stimulating book. Most of the ideas have been adapted into basic economic textbooks and/or mainstream libertarian/right-to-center political rhetoric but, it is mind-expanding to go back and read this ground breaking book on the political philosophy of individual freedom. Highly recommended.
4. In Defense of Globalization, by Jagdish Bhagwati: The Columbia economics professor reviews criticisms of globalization and concludes that most of them are misdirected or not grounded in evidence. He argues that globalization needs to be managed (such as to counter-act corporate lobbying for legislation) and that we should strive for a globalization of “optimal” speed in stead of maximal but that, on balance, it is a powerful force for both economic and social progress. Highly recommended and a must-read for anybody into international development.
   

Back to Dhaka, Politics

The week-and-a-half of Delhi’s energetic bazaars, Goa’s sunny beaches and an arctic-like train trip to the Taj Mahal is over so tomorrow I head back to Bangladesh.

Outlooks for a near-future political stability in Bangladesh were grim when I left but seem to have grown a lot worse in the few days that I´ve been away. Before I left the Awami league (the opposition alliance) had declared it would boycott the elections. Since then the UN and EU election observers have left the country because they felt elections scheduled for January 22nd could not be held properly. As a result, the president and head of the interim government declared a state of emergency, resigned from his post as interim-head and postponed the elections. So the electoral process seems to be back to square one. But the first step in a new process has been taken with a new head of the interim government being sworn in, Fakhruddin Ahmed, a Princeton economics PhD who has spent two decades at the world bank and then did a stint at the Bangladesh Central Bank. That’s a track record to my liking (of course), let’s hope he’ll manage to arrange for fair elections soon and before much more bloodshed on the streets.

The French and protests

When I lived in Paris there seemed to be a protest for something (or perhaps anything) almost every week. Coming from Iceland where protests are rare it felt like the French had taken the idea to almost the level of a national sport. So, I couldn’t help but smile:

BBC:

French marchers say ‘non’ to 2007

Hundreds of protesters in France have rung in the New Year by holding a light-hearted march against it.

Parodying the French readiness to say “non”, the demonstrators in the western city of Nantes waved banners reading: “No to 2007″ and “Now is better!”

The marchers called on governments and the UN to stop time’s “mad race” and declare a moratorium on the future.

The protest was held in the rain and organisers joked that even the weather was against the New Year.

The tension mounted as the minutes ticked away towards midnight – but the arrival of 2007 did nothing to dampen their enthusiasm.

The protesters began to chant: “No to 2008!”

They vowed to stage a similar protest on 31 December 2007 on the Champs-Elysees avenue in Paris.