Africa – Page 6 – artdiamondblog.com

“You Can Recognize the People Who Live for Others by the Haunted Look on the Faces of the Others”

(p. C21) In her first book, “Strangers Drowning,” Larissa MacFarquhar, a staff writer for The New Yorker, reports . . . about extreme do-gooders, people whose self-sacrifice and ethical commitment are far outside what we think of as the normal range.
. . .
A line from Clive James’s memoir “North Face of Soho” comes to mind. He quotes the journalist Katherine Whitehorn: “You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others.”
. . .
(p. C26) It was Kant who observed that, as the author writes, “it was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage.”
. . .
Charity begins at home, most of us would agree. Not for many of the people in “Strangers Drowning.” In their moral calculus, the goal is to help the most people, even if that means neglecting those close by, even spouses or children.
One of the interesting threads Ms. MacFarquhar picks up is the notion that, for extreme altruists, the best way to help relieve suffering may not be to travel to Africa, let’s say, to open a clinic or help build a dam. It is far more noble and effective — though less morally swashbuckling — simply to find the highest-paying job you can and give away most of your salary. She finds people who live this way.

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “Books of The Times; Samaritans and Other Troublemakers.” The New York Times (Fri., SEPT. 25, 2015): C21 & C26.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date SEPT. 24, 2015, and has the title “Review: ‘Strangers Drowning’ Examines Extreme Do-Gooders.”)

The book under review, is:
MacFarquhar, Larissa. Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.

“Fight the Decay Called Silence”

Chenjerai Hove speaking in 2001. Source of photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. B7) Chenjerai Hove, one of Zimbabwe’s leading writers, whose poems and novels powerfully evoked the struggles of ordinary village folk before and after independence, died on July 12 [2015] in Stavanger, in southwestern Norway.
. . .
Writing primarily in English, but also in his native Shona, Mr. Hove vividly depicted the lives of the humblest of his countrymen caught up in the guerrilla war waged against British colonial rule and, after independence in 1980, dealing with the hopes and disappointments of living under Robert Mugabe’s rule.
. . .
In newspaper columns and essays, Mr. Hove painted a bleak picture of post-independence Zimbabwe and sharply criticized the Mugabe regime. The government retaliated with a campaign of intimidation that drove him into exile in 2001 — first to France, then to the United States and finally to Norway, where the International Cities of Refuge Network, an organization that helps persecuted writers, placed him as a guest writer in Stavanger.
“Chenjerai was a national treasure,” Wilf Mbanga, the editor of the British-based weekly The Zimbabwean, told The Independent of London. “It is such a tragedy that one of Zimbabwe’s best-known writers was hounded out of his country and forced to live — and die — in exile. He was never afraid to speak the truth, no matter however painful that might be.”
. . .
“I try to write in order to fight the decay called silence, to communicate with myself so as to search for the ‘other’ in me,” he wrote in 2007 in an essay for the collection “Writers Under Siege: Voices of Freedom From Around the World.”
He continued: “What keeps me going is that every new word and metaphor I create is a little muscle in the act of pushing the dictatorship away from our real and imaginative existence.”

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “Chenjerai Hove, Zimbabwean Author, Is Dead at 59.” The New York Times (Sat., JULY 25, 2015): B7.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JULY 23, 2015, and has the title “Chenjerai Hove, Chronicler of Zimbabwean Struggles, Dies at 59.”)

Hominins Used Stone Tools at Least 3.3 Million Years Ago

(p. A4) One morning in July 2011, while exploring arid badlands near the western shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya, a team of archaeologists took a wrong turn and made a big discovery about early human technology: Our hominin ancestors were making stone tools 3.3 million years ago, some 700,000 years earlier than previously thought.
The findings promise to extend knowledge of the first toolmakers even deeper in time, probably before the emergence of the genus Homo, once considered the first to gain an evolutionary edge through stone technology.
. . .
The stones showed that at least some ancient hominins — the group that includes humans and their extinct ancestors — had started intentionally knapping stones, breaking off pieces with quick, hard strikes from another stone to make sharp tools sooner than other findings suggested.
After further field research and laboratory analysis, the findings at the site known as Lomekwi 3 were described Wednesday in the journal Nature.
. . .
In a commentary in the journal, Erella Hovers, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote that some form of toolmaking may have extended back to the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and hominins, as much as seven million years ago.
Dr. Hovers and other scientists not involved in the new research said that the dating of the material appeared solid and that the objects were deliberately produced tools, not scraps of rock broken by accident or natural causes.
“Because the sediments in these layers are fine-grained, and a flake found by the authors could be fitted back onto the core from which it had been detached,” Dr. Hovers said, “it is unlikely that the tools accumulated through stream activity or that substantial disturbance of the sediments occurred after the tools had been discarded.”

For the full story, see:
JOHN NOBLE WILFORD. “Stone Tools From Kenya Are Oldest Yet Discovered.” The New York Times (Thurs., May 21, 2015): A4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the date of the online version of the story is MAY 20, 2015.)

The academic article summarized above, is:
Harmand, Sonia, Jason E. Lewis, Craig S. Feibel, Christopher J. Lepre, Sandrine Prat, Arnaud Lenoble, Xavier Boës, Rhonda L. Quinn, Michel Brenet, Adrian Arroyo, Nicholas Taylor, Sophie Clément, Guillaume Daver, Jean-Philip Brugal, Louise Leakey, Richard A. Mortlock, James D. Wright, Sammy Lokorodi, Christopher Kirwa, and Dennis V. Kent. “3.3-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya.” Nature 521, no. 7552 (May 21, 2015): 310-15.

Fishing with Mosquito Nets, Where Food Is the Binding Constraint

(p. 1) BANGWEULU WETLANDS, Zambia — Out here on the endless swamps, a harsh truth has been passed down from generation to generation: There is no fear but the fear of hunger.
With that always weighing on his mind, Mwewa Ndefi gets up at dawn, just as the first orange rays of sun are beginning to spear through the papyrus reeds, and starts to unclump a mosquito net.
Nets like his are widely considered a magic bullet against malaria — one of the cheapest and most effective ways to stop a disease that kills at least half a million Africans each year. But Mr. Ndefi and countless others are not using their mosquito nets as global health experts have intended.
Nobody in his hut, including his seven children, sleeps under a net at night. Instead, Mr. Ndefi has taken his family’s supply of anti-malaria nets and sewn them together into a gigantic sieve that he uses to drag the bottom of the swamp ponds, sweeping up all sorts of life: baby catfish, banded tilapia, tiny mouthbrooders, orange fish eggs, water bugs and the occasional green frog.
“I know it’s not right,” Mr. Ndefi said, “but without these nets, we wouldn’t eat.”
Across Africa, from the mud flats of Nigeria to the coral reefs off Mozambique, mosquito-net fishing is a growing problem, an unintended consequence of one of the biggest and most celebrated public health campaigns in recent years.
The nets have helped save millions of lives, but scientists worry about the collateral damage: Africa’s fish.
. . .
“The nets go straight out of the bag into the sea,” said Isabel Marques da Silva, a marine biologist at Universidade Lúrio in Mozambique. “That’s why the inci-(p. 10)dence for malaria here is so high. The people don’t use the mosquito nets for mosquitoes. They use them to fish.”
But the unsparing mesh, with holes smaller than mosquitoes, traps much more life than traditional fishing nets do. Scientists say that could imperil already stressed fish populations, a critical food source for millions of the world’s poorest people.
. . .
In many places, fish are dried for hours in direct sunlight on treated mosquito nets. Direct sunlight can break down the insecticide coating. Anthony Hay, an associate professor of environmental toxicology at Cornell University, said fish could absorb some of the toxins, leaving people to ingest them when they eat the fish.
“It’s just another one of these ‘white man’s burdens,’ ” Mr. Hay said, referring to William Easterly’s well-known book critical of foreign aid by the West. “We think we have a solution to everybody’s problems, and here’s an example of where we’re creating a new problem.”
. . .
For Mr. Ndefi, it is a simple, if painful, matter of choice. He knows all too well the dangers of malaria. His own toddler son, Junior, died of the disease four years ago. Junior used to always be there, standing outside his hut, when Mr. Ndefi came home from fishing.
Mr. Ndefi hopes his family can survive future bouts of the disease. But he knows his loved ones will not last long without food.

For the full story, see:
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. “Meant to Keep Mosquitos Out, Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., JAN. 25, 2015): 1 & 10.
(Note: ellipses are added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 24, 2015, and has the title “Meant to Keep Malaria Out, Mosquito Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In.”)

The book referenced by Professor Hay, is:
Easterly, William. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.

Reigning Intellectual Orthodoxy on Race Is Wrong

Source of book image: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41BYpEQumNL._.jpg

(p. C5) The reigning intellectual orthodoxy is that race is a “social construct,” a cultural artifact without biological merit.

The orthodoxy’s equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific tenets. The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” (1972), is that the races are so close to genetically identical that “racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” The second, popularized by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that “human equality is a contingent fact of history,” as he put it in an essay of that title in 1984.
Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, what is known by geneticists has increasingly diverged from this orthodoxy, even as social scientists and the mainstream press have steadfastly ignored the new research. Nicholas Wade, for more than 20 years a highly regarded science writer at the New York Times, has written a book that pulls back the curtain.
It is hard to convey how rich this book is. It could be the textbook for a semester’s college course on human evolution, systematically surveying as it does the basics of genetics, evolutionary psychology, Homo sapiens’s diaspora and the recent discoveries about the evolutionary adaptations that have occurred since then. The book is a delight to read–conversational and lucid. And it will trigger an intellectual explosion the likes of which we haven’t seen for a few decades.
The title gives fair warning: “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.” At the heart of the book, stated quietly but with command of the technical literature, is a bombshell. It is now known with a high level of scientific confidence that both tenets of the orthodoxy are wrong.

For the full review, see:
CHARLES MURRAY. “The Diversity of Life; A scientific revolution is under way–upending one of our reigning orthodoxies.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 3, 2014): C5 & C7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 2, 2014, and has the title “Book Review: ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ by Nicholas Wade; A scientific revolution is under way–upending one of our reigning orthodoxies.”)

The book under review is:
Wade, Nicholas. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. New York: The Penguin Press, 2014.

Global Warming Tipping Point Models Are “Overblown”

(p. C3) Climate models for north Africa often come to contradictory conclusions. Nonetheless, mainstream science holds that global warming will typically make wet places wetter and dry places drier–and at a rapid clip. That is because increased greenhouse gases trigger feedback mechanisms that push the climate system beyond various “tipping points.” In north Africa, this view suggests an expanding Sahara, the potential displacement of millions of people on the great desert’s borders and increased conflict over scarce resources.
One scientist, however, is challenging this dire view, with evidence chiefly drawn from the Sahara’s prehistoric past. Stefan Kröpelin, a geologist at the University of Cologne, has collected samples of ancient pollen and other material that suggest that the earlier episode of natural climate change, which created the Sahara, happened gradually over millennia–not over a mere century or two, as the prevailing view holds. That is why, he says, the various “tipping point” scenarios for the future of the Sahara are overblown.
The 62-year-old Dr. Kröpelin, one of the pre-eminent explorers of the Sahara, has traveled into its forbidding interior for more than four decades. Along the way he has endured weeklong dust storms, a car chase by armed troops and a parasitic disease, bilharzia, that nearly killed him.
. . .
. . . Dr. Kröpelin’s analysis of the Lake Yoa samples suggests that there was no tipping point and that the change was gradual. He says that his argument is also supported by archaeological evidence. Digs in the Sahara, conducted by various archaeologists over the years, indicate that the people of the region migrated south over millennia, not just in a few desperate decades. “Humans are very sensitive climate indicators because we can’t live without water,” he says. If the Sahara had turned to desert quickly, the human migration pattern “would have been completely different.”

For the full commentary, see:
Naik, Gautam. “Climate Clues in the Sahara’s Past; A Geologist’s Findings in Africa Challenge the Way Scientists Think about the Threat of Desertification.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., May 31, 2014): C3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 30, 2014, and has the title “How Will Climate Change Affect the Sahara?; A geologist’s findings in Africa challenge the way scientists think about the threat of desertification.”)

One of the more recent Kröpelin papers arguing against the tipping point account is:
Francus, Pierre, Hans von Suchodoletz, Michael Dietze, Reik V. Donner, Frédéric Bouchard, Ann-Julie Roy, Maureen Fagot, Dirk Verschuren, Stefan Kröpelin, and Daniel Ariztegui. “Varved Sediments of Lake Yoa (Ounianga Kebir, Chad) Reveal Progressive Drying of the Sahara During the Last 6100 Years.” Sedimentology 60, no. 4 (June 2013): 911-34.

“A Libertarian Celebration of Hustling, Hacking and Free-Form Development”

Source of book image: http://www.hmhco.com/shop/books/the-bright-continent/9780547678313#

(p. 21) Africa’s gains have come not because of Western largess or painful structural adjustment programs set out by the likes of the International Monetary Fund, Olopade argues, nor are they the work of governments. They are largely the fruit of Africans’ efforts to help themselves, through creative means that sometimes involve breaking the rules.
. . .
She excavates a hopeful narrative about a continent on the rise, “a libertarian celebration of hustling, hacking and free-form development.”
The best solutions, according to Olopade, are local, developed by people closest to the problem, not bureaucrats in Washington or Brussels: the South African gynecologist who operates out of two shipping containers stacked together, the Kenyan family who take over an abandoned plot of land to grow vegetables to eat and sell.
Central to Olopade’s thesis is the concept of kanju, a term that describes “the specific creativity born from African difficulty.” It is the rule-bending ethos that makes it possible to get things done in the face of headaches like crumbling infrastructure, corrupt bureaucracy and tightfisted banks unwilling to make loans to people without political connections.
Many countries have these kinds of hacks and workarounds. In India, the term is jugaad, and it has had its moment in the sun as a business school concept. India runs on this informal hacking of the system that makes life and business possible.

For the full review, see:
LYDIA POLGREEN. “Home Improvement.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., APRIL 13, 2014): 21.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date APRIL 11, 2014, and has the title “Home Improvement; ‘The Bright Continent,’ by Dayo Olopade.”)

The book under review is:
Olopade, Dayo. The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2014.

Ignorance of Economics Makes U.S. Agency Complicit in Elephant Deaths

“Crushed ivory falls out of the crusher as the U.S. crushed its six-ton stock of confiscated ivory at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge . . . .” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

The higher the price of ivory, the greater the incentive for ivory poachers to kill elephants. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could have put their cache of ivory on the market, thereby increasing the supply, and reducing the price. If they had done so, they would have reduced the incentive of the poachers to poach. (This is basic price theory that I teach in each of my micro-economic principles classes.) Instead they crushed the ivory and thereby doomed some elephants to death, who otherwise could have been saved.

(p. A3) COMMERCE CITY, Colo.–The U.S. government spent the past 25 years amassing contraband ivory in a warehouse here, with pieces ranging from tiny statuettes to full elephant tusks tattooed by intricate carvings. Ultimately, the pile grew to six tons–equivalent to ivory from at least 2,000 elephants.

On Thursday, the stash collected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was pulverized by an industrial rock crusher as government officials, conservationists from around the world and celebrities gathered to watch the destruction.
The move, which follows similar events in the Philippines and Gabon in recent years, is part of a global effort to combat elephant poaching, on the rise because of growing demand for ivory trinkets in Asia. Proponents argue that crushing the ivory conveys to illegal traffickers and collectors that it has no value unless it is attached to an elephant.
. . .
But critics of the practice said they worry that destroying the coveted commodity, sometimes referred to as “white gold,” could instead create the perception that the world’s remaining ivory is more valuable–and drive poachers to kill more elephants for their tusks. “This could be self-defeating,” said Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes, an independent conservation economist.
. . .
While praising efforts to preserve elephants, some in conservation circles consider crushing contraband ivory to be an ineffective strategy.
Kirsten Conrad, a wildlife conservation consultant who has studied the Chinese ivory market, said elephants could be better served if sustainably harvested ivory–from elephants that died from natural causes, for example–were regularly offered for sale.
The proceeds would give communities in Africa an incentive to better protect wildlife, and the steady supply would dissuade speculators in China from stockpiling, as she says they are doing now. A kilo of raw ivory can sell for up to $3,000. “We’re losing an elephant every 16 minutes,” she said. “We should look really hard at legal trade.”

For the full story, see:
ANA CAMPOY. “Crushing Illegal Ivory Trade; In Move to Combat Elephant Poaching, U.S. Destroys Six Tons of ‘White Gold’.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 15, 2013): A3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 14, 2013, and has the title “Crushing Illegal Ivory Trade; In Move to Combat Elephant Poaching, Government Agency Destroys Six Tons of ‘White Gold’.”)

“Ivory on display before the U.S. crushed it in Commerce City, Colo., Thursday. On Thursday the government destroyed nearly six tons of seized contraband ivory tusks and trinkets.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

“Government Takes What It Wants”

“Mike Campbell, 76, challenged Zimbabwe’s land redistribution law. He and his son-in-law, Ben Freeth, 38, were beaten by a gang.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) CHEGUTU, Zimbabwe — Edna Madzongwe, president of the Senate and a powerful member of Zimbabwe’s ruling party, began showing up uninvited at the Etheredges’ farm here last year, at times still dressed up after a day in Parliament.

And she made her intentions clear, the Etheredges say: she wanted their farm and intended to get it through the government’s land redistribution program.
The farm is a beautiful spread, with three roomy farm houses and a lush, 55,000-tree orange orchard that generates $4 million a year in exports. The Etheredges, outraged by what they saw as her attempt to steal the farm, secretly taped their exchanges with her.
“Are you really serious to tell me that I cannot take up residence because of what it does to you?” she asked Richard Etheredge, 72, whose father bought the farm in 1947. “Government takes what it wants.”
He dryly replied, “That we don’t deny,” according to a transcript of the tapes.

For the full story, see:
CELIA W. DUGGER. “White Farmers Confront Mugabe in a Legal Battle.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., December 28, 2008): 1 & 10.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date December 27, 2008 and has the title “White Farmers Confront Mugabe in a Legal Battle.”)

“Mr. Freeth circulated photographs of his injuries online after the invasion of his farm.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Former Botswana President Won Prize for Ceding Power

“Festus G. Mogae, trained as an economist, was Botswana’s president for two terms.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A10) JOHANNESBURG — A foundation dedicated to celebrating and encouraging good government in Africa awarded its annual prize on Monday to Botswana’s former president, Festus G. Mogae. He was honored for consolidating his nation’s democracy, ensuring that its diamond wealth enriched its people and providing bold leadership during the AIDS pandemic.

Mr. Mogae, 69, a man with a modest style, will receive $5 million over the next 10 years and $200,000 per year thereafter for the rest of his life. Over the coming decade, the foundation may also grant another $200,000 a year to causes of Mr. Mogae’s choice.
The award, the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, is bestowed by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, named after its founder, a Sudanese billionaire.

For the full story, see:
CELIA W. DUGGER. “Botswana’s Ex-President Wins Leadership Prize.” The New York Times (Tues., October 21, 2008): A10.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date October 20, 2008.)

Sound Economic Policies Benefit Africa More than Sachs’ Profligate Interventions

Source of book image: http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2013-09-02-TheIdealist.jpg

(p. A19) Nina Munk’s new book, “The Idealist,” is about the well-known economist Jeffrey Sachs and his “quest to end poverty,” as the subtitle puts it.
. . .
The quest began in 2005, when Sachs, who directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University, started an ambitious program called the Millennium Villages Project. He and his team chose a handful of sub-Saharan African villages, where they imposed a series of “interventions” in such areas as agriculture, health and education.
. . .
With almost every intervention, she documents the chasm that exists between the villagers and those running the project. At one point, the Millennium Villages Project persuades the farmers in Ruhiira to grow maize instead of their traditional crop, called matoke. “The results were fantastic,” she reports, a bumper crop. Except there were no buyers for the maize, so some of it wound up being eaten by rats. In Dertu, Sachs’s staff decided it should set up a livestock market. It flopped. Efforts to convince villagers to start small businesses largely failed. The critical problem of getting clean water to the villages was enormously expensive.
Ultimately, reports Munk, Dertu was scaled back by the Millennium Villages Project while Ruhiira is today lauded as one of the project’s most successful villages. “There is no question the lives of people in Ruhiira have been improved,” Munk told me. “I’ve seen it.” But she is dubious about what that means — other than the fact that if you pump millions of dollars into an isolated African village, the villagers’ lives will be better.
. . .
That things in Africa are getting better is undeniable. Child mortality is down, as is the number of people living in extreme poverty. In his book, “Emerging Africa,” Steve Radelet, the former chief economist for the United States Agency for International Development, gives credit to such factors as more democratic governments, a new class of civil servants and businesspeople, and sounder economic policies. Sachs wants us to believe that the Millennium Villages Project has also helped show the way.
“The Idealist” makes it tough to believe it’s the latter.

For the full review, see:
JOE NOCERA. “Fighting Poverty, and Critics.” The New York Times (Tues., September 3, 2013): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 2, 2013.)

The book under review is:
Munk, Nina. The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

The Radelet book mentioned is:
Radelet, Steven. Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries Are Leading the Way. pb ed. Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development, 2010.

UNECE · Innovation Matters: Innovative Dynamism

Innovation history and policies continue to be the themes of this second part of my conversation with Lars Anders Joensson on the United Nations’s Innovation Matters podcast. The discussion of “Innovation Matters: Innovative Dynamism” is mostly related to the process of innovative dynamism as discussed in my book Openness to Creative Destruction. Anders was especially energized in this second part of the conversation. (Recorded Weds., Aug. 3, 2022; posted Thurs., Sept. 19, 2024.) [To play this podcast, you click on the white-arrow-in-the-red-circle, in the upper left hand corner.]

UNECE · Innovation Matters: Openness to creative destruction (part 1) - lessons from history

I discuss innovation history and policies on the United Nations's Innovation Matters podcast in this first part of a conversation with Lars Anders Joensson that was recorded on Weds., Aug. 3, 2022 and was posted on Fri., Feb. 24, 2023. The discussion was mostly based on my book Openness to Creative Destruction. [To play this podcast, you click on the white-arrow-in-the-red-circle, in the upper left hand corner.]

I discuss "Policy Hurdles in the Fight against Aging" on Caleb O. Brown's Cato Daily Podcast that was recorded on Sun., April 3, 2022 and was posted on Fri., May 27, 2022. The discussion is based on research that I am conducting for a chapter of my next book which will be on Less Costs, More Cures: Unbinding Medical Entrepreneurs. [To play this podcast, you click on the white-arrow-in-the-light-blue-circle, in the lower left hand corner.]

On Nov. 3, 2021, I presented "Galilean Science: The Impediment to Progress When Science as Doctrine Wins Over Science as Process" at an Organisation [sic] for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) workshop on "AI and the Future of Science." I am grateful to Alistair Nolan for inviting me to participate.

Dr. Derek Yonai of the Koch Center for Leadership and Ethics posted on Tues., March 9, 2021 my half-hour "Innovation Unbound" lecture on how regulations bind innovators.

Petition Seeks to Increase Nebraska Minimum wage

The above story, by reporter Brent Weber, ran on WOWT’s 10 PM news on Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021. It includes a couple of brief comments by me near the end.

Kate Wand slightly edited my AIER article "When I Knew More Than Hayek," and transformed it into a video she titled "Hayek, Covid & The Use of Knowledge in Society." This is the YouTube version of the video that "premiered" on Jan. 4, 2021. If you click above, the video should play right within my blog.

The YouTube version of the full hour and 15 minute EconTalk podcast on Openness to Creative Destruction, that was posted on August 12, 2019. The host and interviewer was Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. If you click above, the podcast should play right within my blog.

Arthur Diamond: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism

The URL for the 29 minute "Arthur Diamond: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism" episode of Jim Pethokoukis's Political Economy podcast at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) web site. Jim interviewed me on my book Openness to Creative Destruction. The episode was posted on July 29, 2020.

The YouTube version of the full hour and 8 minute Econonomics for Entrepreneurs podcast on Openness to Creative Destruction, that was posted on Oct. 22, 2019. The host and interviewer was Hunter Hastings of the Mises Institute. If you click above, the podcast should play right within my blog.

Innovation and Creative Destruction

The URL for the 55 minute "Innovation and Creative Destruction" episode of the Cato Institute's Free Thoughts podcast hosted by Aaron Ross Powell and Trevor Burrus. They interviewed me on my book Openness to Creative Destruction in an episode that was posted on February 29, 2020.

"Wilbur Wright Circles Manhattan": brief musings on Wilbur Wright, flight, and my Openness to Creative Destruction book.

Free to Try a Cure for Covid-19

The URL for the 35 minute "Free to Try a Cure for Covid-19" episode of David Forsyth's Freedom Adventure podcast. In an episode that was posted on Aug. 5, 2020, David interviewed me on how to speed therapies, or a vaccine, for Covid-19, and on my book Openness to Creative Destruction.

Arthur Diamond Interviews on Jim Blassingame's The Small Business Advocate

The URL leads to links to a series of interviews on topics including my book Openness to Creative Destruction, entrepreneurship, regulations, labor markets, and policies to speed vaccines and cures for Covid-19.

Art Diamond's personal website artdiamond.com

Art Diamond's academic website at UNO

"Cafe Hayek" (Don Boudreaux's excellent blog)

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