Random Thoughts from Cape Town

I have about two days left here in Cape Town and decided that this would be an appropriate time to reflect on what has been a great experience. I came here with the intention of finishing off one paper, and starting the second. As was the case with my last trip here, I leave the region with some great experiences and some new puzzles to ponder. Here are a collection of random thoughts I have (too tired to string these together in the usual thematic piece). Enjoy.

****

On the plane ride over, I saw this great movie called The Visitor. It's about a tenured widower academic (a development economist!) who is going through the motions in life, until he meets an illegal immigrant who he eventually shares his apartment with and starts learning the African drums from. The immigrant chap is eventually arrested and detained, and the academic works hard to get him out, forming life changing relationships with the drummer and the drummer's wife and mother in the process. It is an uplifting, sad and thoughtful movie, all at once, and perhaps one of the best movies I've seen in the last few months. Furthermore, Richard Jenkins, who plays the academic, gives an incredible performance and should win awards for this.

Highly recommended.

****

I absolutely love the University of Cape Town. Aside being located on the side of Table Mountain (and thus offering incredible views of both the mountain side and the city below), UCT is one of the best academic institutions on the continent, and the research that is going on here is really interesting. You often get a good grip on the quality of the research in an institution from the comments you get during a seminar. At my seminar, the feedback was ridiculously sharp and useful - definitely one of the best academic experiences of my young research career.

****

Speaking of UCT, I got a chance to revisit the owner of the Chinese food stall here, who made an appearance in one of my earlier posts on incentives to induce environmentally friendly behavior. The gentleman is still offering his R0.50 discount to those who bring their own plates or containers for food, though, he noted sadly, few people take him up on that these days. He seemed quite distraught to keep having to dole out styrofoam containers. I told him that it might be time to up the incentive, to which he laughed in response.

I don't think he is going to take me up on this.

****

One of the best ways to spend a day in Cape Town is to hike up Table Mountain and/or Lion's Head. Both offer stunning vistas of the city and surrounding suburbs. My body continues to revolt after the two hikes I've done here, but spending a day out in the sun, walking and climbing on paths surrounded by spring colors and geckos was pretty mind blowing.

Also mind blowing are Chandini restaurant in Woodstock (amazing Indian food), the Royale Eatery (at least 15 options for vegetarian burgers) and the High Life (Hare Krishna) food stall at UCT.

****

Of course, the trip wasn't all fun and games - at least in the recreational sense. My colleague and I spent most of our time working (fun and games, though of a different sort, in my book), and are onto some new research questions. In particular, we are going to look at links between economic vulnerability and shocks and risky sexual behaviors. More on that in a later post...

All in all, this has been a great trip: productive, fun, and thought-provoking. And it's been great also to create partnerships that could spur projects and travel opportunities in the future.

Incentives for Environmentalism

One thing I immediately noticed about Cape Town is the strong commitment many townspeople have to recycling and undertaking other actions that benefit the environment. (Thought: does this come from being surrounded by so much natural beauty? Or does causality run the other way? Also, poorer areas in Cape Town are less vigilant about recycling: is environmentalism a luxury good?). I think that this has rubbed off on me in an interesting way. Back home in the US, I often don’t recycle an aluminum can if I have to spend time walking around searching for the appropriate bin or if the said bin is rather far away (i.e., ~20 feet or so…just kidding).

I realized that my behavior here is completely different: I make sure seek out the recycling bin because I don’t want to be looked upon as the jerk who doesn’t care about the Earth. The one time I didn’t manage to recycle (because I was already late for a meeting) I wrapped my soda can in a plastic bag and carefully stuffed it near the back of a trash can, away from the possibly judgmental eyes of others.

As a friend of mine noted, this suggests that shame might be an effective to induce people to be nice to the environment. I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of using shame for public policy. In America, we’ve indirectly (or otherwise) shamed smokers and are starting to shame obese people, and I don’t think it has worked that well in either case. However, somehow shaming people into recycling seems less pernicious, though every intellectual reason I come up with why this is any different fails to clear my own internal robustness checks.

Less squirmy, to me at least, are financial incentives. A popular idea is creating a market for pollution permits. Companies buy and sell the right to emit pollutants at certain rates. The idea is that, by introducing a cost for pollution, companies internalize the cost of environmental damage and therefore pollute less. Here’s another one: as a colleague of mine pointed out, supermarkets in Ireland introduced a 15 cent charge for plastic bags. The use of these items dropped considerably.

The Chinese fast food stall here at the University of Cape Town also provides financial incentives, with these being geared towards reducing the use of Styrofoam containers. Patrons who bring their own plates and utensils receive a 0.5 R discount (off a typical meal of 13-15 Rand). It’s not a bad deal, but very few people have taken the proprietor up on this. I wonder if the incentive would be more effective if it was changed to a R 0.50 charge rather than savings. I tried to get the stall owner to do a randomized experiment on this, but he was not too keen.

A Day in the Life: Cape Town Edition

I’ve been so into the research here that I sometimes forget how unique and action-packed my typical Cape Town day is. Last Thursday is a pretty good example for what an average day has been like.

7:30 AM: Get out of bed and take an outdoor shower (though in an enclosed, private space) while catching a view of the top of Table Mountain. Taking a hot outdoor shower under rainy conditions in 40 degree weather is actually pretty awesome.

8:00 AM: Head to the University of Cape Town. On the way, I pass wildebeest and the occasional zebra in their natural habitat.

8:30 AM – noon: Dig into the data set and do some serious programming. I have a desk in UCT’s Leslie Commerce Hall. I spend some time chatting up UCT grad students and professors and talk travel with an interesting and very sharp American anthropology student. (Has anyone else realized that anthropologists use the word “context” a lot? Political scientists like to talk about “salience.” I still use words like “dude” and “cool.”)

Noon – 1 PM: Grab some lunch with UCT undergrads.

1 PM – 2:30 PM: Head out to one of Cape Town’s poorer townships and help my colleague/co-author Brendan Maughan-Brown deliver blankets to kids as part of his blanket drive. These areas are characterized by lots of small shacks, paved, but crumbling roads, and high unemployment. However, the spirits are warm, the people friendly, and the kids are really cute.

3:00 – 6:00 PM: Do some more work. Get in some serious “ground-truthing” action by asking those in the know about some sociological and economics hunches we have.

6:00 – 7:30 PM: Watch Sonia Gandhi, the most powerful woman – or, depending on your point of view, person - in India, deliver a lecture at UCT on Gandhianism in the 21^st century.

8:00 PM – sleepy time: Enjoy a goose-egg omelet for dinner, spend a couple hours doing programming, read some Harry Potter, and practice singing “Sleepy Fish.”

Finally, here are some pictures I took this weekend on a trip to the Cape Wine Country. Enjoy!

Some Pics

Top to bottom: Ships at False Bay; View from the Cape of Good Hope; Penguins in the wild; Standing beside the Taj Mahal ship in False Bay

Copenhagen III - The City

Ok, so I am in India now, but am behind in blogging. Hence you'll hear about Copenhagen today and more about the conference in the next post before any India stuff.

Unfortunately, because the conference was so time consuming (in a good, fun kind of way) I really didn't get to soak in Copenhagen as much as I would have liked. Even so, here are some quick thoughts:

-It seems like everyone in Copenhagen is friendly. Usually, with most cities you run into a real jerk within an hour of getting in to town. Not so here! Right from the airline to the taxi to the store owners, everyone seemed genuinely happy to see and help you. Rock on.

-Walking and biking is highly institutionalized. Seriously, there are separate bike and pedestrian lanes with their own respective signals. And its super easy to bike around since:

-You can rent a city bike for 20 DKK (about $3.50), ride it around, and recover your money when you are done. Let's just say I took full advantage of this and went on a Hudspethian adventure the day the conference ended.

-The prevalence of obesity is low. This is probably because of the first three points. After all low stress, easy and cheap to walk and bike make a person health, wealthy and wise....or something like that.

-Harbor cities with canals are beautiful. I'll put up the canonical Copenhagen picture in the next post. Monarchies help, too, as the palaces are often striking.

-Copenhagen is expensive! Finally, a negative! One survey ranks Copenhagen 8th among all world cities in cost of living. With the plummeting dollar (or the strengthening Euro or DKK) you get flummoxed if you are an American

-If you haven't eaten at the Addis Mesob Etiopisk Restaurant on the corner of Ryesgade and Fredensgade, you haven't eat Ethiopian food. No joke. Its cheap, all you can eat and the owner, Abdullah, is a nice bloke with a keen business sense.

-Almost all taxis in Copenhagen are Mercedes. There are several cab companies. The taxi drivers buy their own cars at a subsidized price (I think they pay significantly less VAT) and are able to sell their cars back two years later at the market price (which is often more than what they payed initially). I don't know why I put that in there, but it was interesting to me.