Leading media representatives complained that there was no room for media attention to the historic, pivotal election in the nation of 74 million registered voters. “I mean there are no Arabs in Niger, are there?” said leading journalist Woodscott Tarleton. “We can barely keep up remembering the capitals of all those Arab countries like Iran.”

Voters in the largest nation in sub-Saharan Africa expressed keen interest in the fragile fortunes of the ruling party, but no international reporters were able to be present in the country. “We are already overstretched sending reporters to cover the Arab Revolt from Morocco to Azerbaijan,” said news executive Barnaby Cotswold, ” not to mention the Japan earthquake and  Tiger Woods’ play in the Masters. If  they really wanted the international press to judge whether the elections were free and fair,  couldn’t they have waited a little?”

“I really thought it would come out when that prankster Ban Ki Moon put Libya on the “reformed” Human Rights Council in 2010,” said Rice, “after there was a backlash against Libya CHAIRING the old Human Rights Commission. Who would fall for that?”

Ban, who in real life is a much-loved writer for 30 Rock, also bet “UNCTAD Secretary-General” Supachai Panitchpakdi three shots of Glenlivet that he would never get more than 15 crisscrossing arrows into one UN diagram. He lost the bet.

Click for larger image

A team of investigative reporters finally broke the story after receiving a tip from a group of concerned Azerbaijani citizens who recognized their “Ambassador” as a child soap opera star from the 1970s. As details began to emerge, Ban and Supachai locked themselves in the General Assembly Complex, which was discovered to be 30 floors of luxury condos, restaurants, and health spas.

Reporters found in the rest of the UN building the remains of old mainframe computers.  These computers, manned by a few technicians, were created to run programs like the UN Automatic Document Software, which produced for many decades 300-page documents with language like:

As part of the efforts to strengthen the United Nations Economic and Social Council, Member States, …mandated the Council to convene a high level biennial Development Cooperation Forum to review trends in international development cooperation, …. promote greater coherence among the development activities of different development partners; ….as a key venue for global dialogue and policy review of the effectiveness and coherence of international development cooperation. … Forum also reaffirmed the demand for an inclusive and universally recognized space for discussions on international development cooperation…

UN Computers also ran the revolutionary Promise ReMaker Software, which every 15 years reiterates and reaffirms in stirring language the International Goals made 15 years earlier. Other programs issued new batches of imaginary data every year on per capita income, employment, gender, income distribution, and nutrition.

Josette Sheeran, the “World Food Program Executive Director,” who is really a heavily tattooed computer hacker from Boulder, Colorado, said “It’s amazing all these programs can now fit onto a single MacBook.” She sighed, “we didn’t want to move the huge mainframes out of the building for fear we would get caught.”

“Now the hoax is over,” said Rice sadly, “it’s a bit of a shame.” Sir Mark Lyall Grant KCMG, Her Britannic Majesty’s Permanent Representative from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the United Nations, agreed: “Now where are we going to send those problems we are too cowardly to address ourselves?”

It is not widely known that some lower seeded teams in the tournament, who had to play much better teams, desperately sought advice from leading Development Economists.

A Columbia Professor said we already know the successful ingredients for a championship, just get lots of funding for the inputs to a victory. Each of his players was given a beautfiul new basketball but had no incentive to pass it or shoot it.

An Oxford Professor distributed “peacekeeping equipment” to his team, saying it was critical for his Good Team backed by the UN Security Council and the G-7 to win. The other team fled in panic, but was declared the winner by default by tournament officials.

An NYU Professor said a lower seed had never won the tournament and he saw no reason why it would be possible now. He and his team left for a vacation in Cancún.

Other Professors such as Duflo, Banerjee, and Karlan set up randomized trials for which plays work. Treatments included 3-point shots, driving layups, pick and roll, and passing to the open player, compared to a control group holding the ball still. The results were of considerable interest, but players got very confused trying to remember which study to cite and apply in each pressure-packed moment of the game. They did not make the Sweet Sixteen.

Hernando de Soto said the only thing that mattered was property rights. He called for secure titles to his team’s land. This team defended its own half-court successfully, but they were forced to recognize the other team’s rights also. There was not a lot of scoring.

Mohammed Yunus said it’s all about microcredit. He suggested empowering his team’s players with micro loans. This was a great success, as players all left the court to start small businesses selling beer and pretzels in the stands.

Finally,the team asking advice from George Mason Professor of Economics Peter Boettke made a Cinderella run into the Sweet Sixteen. What was his brilliant economics advice? Well, he chose not to give any, but he had actually played and coached basketball in high school and college.

Were the above characterizations inaccurate? Everybody can participate in the usual heavy betting on this tournament — fill out your own brackets below to determine who will advance to the semifinals and then the finals, and who the final winner will be.

UPDATE 3:30PM explaining risk of false positives to congressmen and commentators

Congressman Chairman: Muslims! Terrorists! Muslims! Terrorists!

Witness: Let A be the event of terrorism, and B be the event of Muslimism. Then P(A|B)≠P(B|A)

Congressman: What are you talking about?

Witness: You seem to be confusing the probability that a Muslim person will be a terrorist with the probability that a terrorist person will be a Muslim

Congressman: And you seem to be confusing everyone in this hearing, smartass.

Witness:

Congressman:  What did you just call me?

Witness: it’s simple, the probability that a Muslim will be a terrorist will be 13,000 times lower than the probability that a terrorist will be a Muslim. That is, the ratio of the probability of being a terrorist to the probability of being a Muslim is about 1 over 13,000 (P(A)/P(B)).

Congressman:  so even the math department has been taken over by politically correct academic radicals who hate America?

Witness: even if you think that the Probability of a Terrorist being a Muslim is 95.3%, the probability of a Muslim being a Terrorist is only 0.0007%. That is less than the probability of a left-handed octogenarian Olympic discus-thrower being struck by lightning.

Congressman: or maybe even less than the probability that anyone is listening to you?

Witness: maybe this picture will help.

Congressman: I’m calling your state legislature right now to fire your radical butt.

POSTCRIPT: response to commentator:

Mr. McKinney, perhaps your prejudices led you to mis-read the piece. 13,000 was how much larger one conditional probability was than another, which is helpful for understanding Bayes’ Theorem but not for policy. The policy-relevant probability is that of a Muslim being a terrorist, which based on a Rand report was calculated here as 0.007 percent.

If you still don’t get this, then why don’t you also start targeting white males, since 80% of serial killers fit that description, and these serial killers kill about 100 people a year.

Regards, Bill Easterly

POSTCRIPT 2 3:30PM

To the Congressman and Mr. McKinney (again):

One other probability you may want to consider is that Al-Qaeda’s recruiting will become more successful by a δ >= 0.0007 percent after you have persecuted the 99.9993 percent of Muslims who are innocent.

Klout employs such measures as followers, list memberships and retweets to present a comprehensive global metric of Twitter and social media effectiveness. Table 1 lists the Klout scores of various thought leaders in development:

We regret the low positioning of Aid Watch, with a Klout score of 53. This fact is partially – but not entirely – offset by Bill Easterly’s higher placement of 65. (Please don’t tell him that @viewfromthecave is way higher).

Nevertheless, Aid Watch will implement a 4-point comprehensive plan of reform to achieve 3 indicators on the way to the MDGs: 1) enhance our social media influence 2) improve our Klout metric and 3) elevate progress towards the MDGs:

• Intensive Social Mediafication: We will increase investment in our twitter account in order to promote intensive tweeting in an effort to “shock” the Klout metric into growth
• Retweet incentivizing: Drawing upon pledged support from imaginary donors, Aid Watch will offer a free multicolor wristband to anyone who retweets our tweets
• Aggressive List Creation: We will establish an independent commission to create and monitor Twitter lists in which Aid Watch may claim membership
• Randomized experiments on tweets: Tweets will be subjects to RCTs in which the popularity-potential of tweets is rigorously assessed

On a side note, Vivek Nemana’s disappointingly low Klout score of 10 has elicited reactions including “angst,” “shame,” and “humiliation.” We recommend an intensive “shock therapy” regiment of savvy Tweets and follower-count obsession in order for Vivek to escape the Klout trap.

Bill noticed it on ubiquitous billboards during a trip to Libya. Laura found more examples. So we think we have found an intriguing phenomenon: autocrats and outré pop stars look alike. Photographic evidence:

Bono shows his revolutionary stripes, er, camouflage headwear.

Bono, a man of many hats.

The King of Pop and the Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. In fashion as in politics, there a thin line between brilliance and...

OK not such bad taste, but we could not resist.

And one last uncanny visual correlation:

Where else could Kim Jong-Il have gotten his love of flashy shades and pompadours?

There are many directions we could go with this, but we choose for now the point that many dictators look ridiculous, and ridiculously unaware of how ridiculous.

A plausible explanation: when you rule by terror, you wind up surrounded by sycophants and yes-men,  so you lack even the most rudimentary check: don’t look like a bad parody of yourself.

Which makes dictators vulnerable to some day the population waking up and noticing the Emperor has No Taste. This is of course just a jokey symbol of a much broader disconnect between the dictator and their society’s real needs.

We wrote this post before the happy news of Tunisians overthrowing their dictator, and don’t intend the post to have any particular relevance to that event (the ex-dictator’s taste level is depicted below), but we do hope that more and more peoples can get rid of rulers who are a bad joke.

Bono thanks Commission chairman Nelson Mandela for the Report

NOTE FROM THE EDITORS: Over the holidays, we’ll be publishing reruns of some of our posts from the first 2 years of Aid Watch. This post originally ran on November 23, 2009.

An expert commission of African leaders today announced their plan for comprehensive reform of music band U2. Saying that U2’s rock had lost touch with its African roots, the commission called for urgent measures to halt U2’s slide towards impending crisis.

“Our youth today are imperiled by low quality music,” said Commission chairman Nelson Mandela. “We will be lending African musicians to U2 to try to refurbish their sound to satisfy the urgent and growing needs for diversionary entertainment at a time of crisis in the global music and financial sectors.”

Concerns about U2 have been growing in Africa for a while. One Western aid blogger testified to the Commission that his teenage kids found U2’s music “cheesy.” The Mandela Commission proposed that U2 follow a series of steps to recover its Edge:

1) Hire African consultants to analyze U2’s “poverty of music trap”

2) Prepare a Band-owned and Commission-approved Comprehensive U2 Reform Strategy Design (CURSD)

3) Undertake a rehabilitation tour of African capitals to field-test and ground-truth proposed reforms

4) Subject all songs to randomized experiments in which the effect on wellbeing of control and treatment groups is rigorously assessed.

Mandela expressed optimism that the Commission’s report and proposed reforms had come in time to stave off terminal crisis in U2, and restore its effectiveness in the 80s arena rock field.

Professor A said he already knew what everybody wanted, and wanted to massively increase financing for the International Fund for Christmas and Development, which will come up with a comprehensive plan for all the complementary technical inputs to deliver the correct gifts to all individuals.

Professor B was worried about the lack of child security inside homes, and wanted a G8 rapid response force to intervene and take custody of the children, after which their needs for Christmas gifts will be identified and met.

Professor C called for a randomized trial of the leading 3 types of Christmas gifts, relative to a control group who received no gifts. The results will not be available in time for December 25, so Christmas should be postponed until the results are published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Professor D said that Christmas gifts never gave people what they really wanted, money spent on Christmas gifts was always one hundred percent wasted, and each person should just buy their own Christmas gift for themselves.

The Professors’ fierce debate went on and on, deep into the wintry night, whilst the fire burned low.

Meanwhile, unaware of the debate, individuals around the world went ahead and bought gifts for their loved ones based on nothing other than emotions and guesswork.

And everyone was happy, except perhaps the four Professors.

Merry Christmas!

The theme for next year’s commemoration {of World Press Freedom Day} will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.

I have been having a lot of trouble managing my email. This causes some people who email me to get very upset. I was thinking I would try to automate the response so as to leave people who email me smiling, happy, satisfied, and in love with me. Here goes:

Thank you for your wonderful email – hearing from you is one of the best things to happen to me today.

Allow me to elaborate further:

1. If you are an automatic mass mailing to a huge number of people, THEN:

1. I will never read your email.
2. That’s OK, because you will never read this reply.
3. Almost everyone else on your list will respond likewise.

2. If I don’t know you, and you are asking me for help or advice on something, THEN:

1. I love what you’re doing! You are great!!
2. Please read the part of my  writings where I argue the aid of poorly informed strangers is often not very helpful.
3. This applies very much to the likelihood that I would be of any use to you whatsoever.

3. If I do know you, but somehow I have failed to answer your previous email, it is because:

1. I hate you.
2. I am an arrogant prima donna jerk who is ignoring you.
3. I am disorganized, absent-minded, forgetful, and indecisive, and so have already forgotten whether I answered you already, what the answer was, and what the answer should have been, and I’m really sorry and always will be.
4. The only correct answer in this case is (c)

4. If you invited me to something very noble and honorable, and I have failed to respond, it is because:

1. Consider possibilities (a) through (c) in 3 above.
2. The only correct answer in this case is (c)

Thanks again for your lovely email! Please write again soon!