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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
@Noahpinion
Oct 16, 2018 • 9 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
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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. bloomberg.com/view/articles/…
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.

openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/hand…
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.)

thenationonlineng.net/nigerias-disap…
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)

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
May 6
1/This post didn't get a lot of attention, but I really enjoyed writing it (which is what really matters). So I figured I'd turn it into a thread!
2/Most of the discourse around China in Western media these days is about U.S.-China competition (e.g. this podcast by @DKThomp and @RushDoshi). But I thought I'd write about something a little more positive -- the idea that China is building The Future.

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3/Why are some people in the West looking to China for their visions of the future right now?

I see four basic reasons. Image
Read 29 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
Apr 27
1/I haven't written a thread of one of my posts for a long time, so I thought I'd do one today.

Today's post is about how MAGA isn't going to rebuild America.

noahpinion.blog/p/maga-doesnt-…
2/After Covid, there was a general sense that America needed to be REBUILT -- not just from the pandemic, but from the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Rust Belt, and decades of institutional decay.

noahpinion.blog/p/a-new-indust…
3/People argued about HOW to rebuild America. Naturally, progressives thought it would be more government-directed, while conservatives thought it would come from the private sector and from defense spending.

a16z.com/its-time-to-bu…
Read 20 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
Nov 25, 2024
This is a very subtle and interesting question. It seems clear that right-wing interest in personal health is a response to the terrible health of non-college Americans. And the rightists are trying to invent an alternative approach that resists the hegemony of academia.
The fact is, college-educated Americans tend to be hypocritical about health. They watch what they eat, get lots of exercise, and try to eat "organic", but they preach fat acceptance and a disability-based approach to poor health. Rightists don't know how to deal with that.
In fact, this is representative of a broader pattern. College-educated progressives get married and stay marriage, but denigrate the idea of marriage. They work hard but denigrate the idea of hard work. Their personal success is based on rampant, galloping hypocrisy.
Read 8 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
Oct 20, 2024
1/Here's something a lot of people I talk to don't understand about Japanese urbanism, and why Japanese cities are so special. Image
2/Japanese cities feel different than big, dense cities elsewhere -- NYC, London, and Paris, but also other Asian cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore.

There are many reasons for this, but today I'll focus on one: Zakkyo buildings. Image
3/When many people think of "mixed-use development", they think of stores on the first floor, apartments on the higher floors. This is sometimes called "shop-top housing" or "over-store apartments".

This is how most cities in the world do mixed-use development. Image
Read 33 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
Sep 1, 2024
This will be a running thread of observations from my trip to Poland!
Most European apartment buildings don't look any better than an American 5-over-1. But people like them more, because:

1. "Thing, Europe! 😃"

2. They have shops on the first floor and you can walk in and out on the street -- i.e. the neighborhood is walkable. Image
One thing you see a lot of here are Polish flags. There's so much red and white around here it feels like I'm back at Stanford!
Read 38 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
Jul 28, 2024
1/Here's something I've been wondering about recently: How did the U.S. miss the battery revolution?

With every other technological revolution, we anticipated it well in advance, and as a result we were the first -- or one of the first -- to take advantage of it.
2/The U.S. invented the computer, the internet, and modern AI. On all three of those, we were (or are) the leading nation. We talked ad infinitum about the benefits of those digital technologies long before they became a reality, allowing us to shape their eventual use.
3/We did the Human Genome Project. We invented mRNA vaccines. We did most of the research that drove down the costs of solar power. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House more than 30 years before it became economical.
Read 24 tweets

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