 Good day, May 40 here, December 15th, lovely Thursday afternoon in Brisbane, Australia. And you may have heard of supply-side economics and demand-side economics. So supply-side economics is embodied by Reagan. You create incentives for people to produce economic goods by reducing their taxation burden. Then demand-side economics, you put money in the hands of people who are most likely to spend it, that's Keynesian economics. Then there's a whole other category, it's called faith-based economics. So this is New Yorker article on the leader of Ethiopia, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. A year later, his army was committing genocide. Known as the King of Kings, conquering Lion of the tribe of Judah, elect of God, Salasi was hailed as the culmination of a dynasty that, according to legend, had begun with the Union of Kings Song. Okay, let's fast forward. But he says, this is for the future generations. His attitude is, why only concentrate on the problems? We need to show that we are more than the conflict. Right, this is faith-based economics. He finds funding for his ventures wherever he can. He has held fundraisers on the sites of Addis's new parks, where he can lean on his country's billionaires, many of whom built their fortunes under the old regime in 2012. I didn't know Ethiopia had billionaires. God, that must be some kind of racist. His wife's office announced that it had solicited donations to construct 20 schools in the countryside. Abiy gave some $2 million in profits from his book to build more. He's also printed new currency, announcing that it was necessary both to deter financial crimes and to salvage the country's fractured economy. Yeah, so this is a guy who really likes flashy gestures and beautiful words. So he's got a best-selling book in Ethiopia. He's like the Tony Robbins and Jordan Peterson of Ethiopia. He's got a best-selling book on synergy. So he's all about the beautiful gestures, the beautiful shiny objects, the grand-sounding rhetoric. It has had little effect. During his term, the rate of inflation has been more than 30% a year. Abiy likes to present himself as this charismatic leader who puts himself above it all, Stephen Durkin, who teaches economics at Oxford and who has advised Ethiopian governments for decades, said, but his vision is vague as leaders' visions often are. Well, as African leaders' visions often are in particular. I mean, doesn't Africa suffer from a plethora of big men who talk big, who present grand-sweeping visions that are not so good on the follow-through? Durkin described a kind of faith-based economics. He has this belief in free enterprise and prosperity through hard work. It's the prosperity gospel. He's directly coming out of that. I think he just likes the shiny projects. Many of the impressive results that Abiy touts, huge wheat farms, irrigation programs, industrial facilities, are the continuation of programs started under the TPLF-led government, which focused its development efforts on the countryside. Abiy's own initiatives tend to cluster in cities where they can benefit young constituents and, he hopes, impress foreign visitors. Without enough access to domestic investment capital, he needs money from outside. There is much in Ethiopia to attract investors. The country has an educated population, decent infrastructure, and enormous supplies of minerals, water, and arable land. So, yeah, Ethiopia could be the most powerful country in Africa. So it's not some, you know, famine-ridden hellhole. But development, according to a recent IMF report, has faced a long list of impediments. COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, a ferocious drought worsened by climate change. Okay, I think there are bigger impediments to development than any of those. I would say demographics, the proclivities of the people, habits, trends, culture, ways of relating to one another, organizing that are kind of inimicable to development. Most significantly, the conflict in Tigray has frozen international aid. Is there any tradition of the rule of law in Ethiopia? Without a tradition of the rule of law, it's really hard to develop much. As a result of the fighting and the evidence of war crimes, the Biden administration has cut off Ethiopia's access to credits and loans. But it be his other funders who are less concerned with human rights violations. On a helicopter trip to Awash National Park, a swampy wilderness east of Addis, he traveled with a group of Emirates, and he introduced Vaglia's friends. It be it built a lakeside tourist resort in the park. The water was disconcertingly infested with crocodiles, but the landscape was ruggedly beautiful, and the developers had erected kid-friendly animal statues around the grounds. The resort was one of... Just waiting for these poor kids to get eaten by crocodiles. But doesn't that a bee was having constructed in Ethiopia? The idea was to seek international partners that would run them as concessions and to use them as hubs to develop the countryside. Over dinner, at a long table by a swimming pool, we listened as a bee spoke about how Ethiopia could be useful to its allies. For one thing he suggested, Ethiopia could fight their wars for them. He had noticed that Westerners no longer seemed eager to send their sons into combat. That's nice. We could use Ethiopians to fight our wars. That sounds handy. We could send a few thousand of them to defend Taiwan. But Ethiopians were good fighters, he said, and did not have the same qualms. The Emirates mostly kept to themselves, but an amiable man named Fahad Abdul Rahman bin Sultan introduced himself as the head of the UAE Red Crescent Society. Bin Sultan told me that Ethiopia could become a tourist hub if it was developed properly. It has abundant water, and it is convenient to the Arabian Peninsula. Yeah, maybe a little less genocide, a little less rape, a little less crime. That might help. Really hot at this time of the year. A bee, he said, was a visionary. If he can have ten years in power, Ethiopia will be transformed like Egypt was with Sisi. He didn't seem bothered by Sisi's fierce repression of his political opponents. In Ethiopia, the Emirates are a less significant presence than the Chinese were been in the country for more than a decade. In the United States, Chinese laborers in overalls are ubiquitous, expanding the internet. So in Australia and in California, they essentially forbade the Chinese immigrating to California, to Australia, because they worked harder than the natives. They were willing to work longer, they were willing to take less money, unlike the average bloke didn't like what Chinese immigrant labor did to his wages. So the amount of immigration you allow into your country, that essentially decides your wage rates. If you want to create a good living for average blokes, you can't allow in much immigration. The Chinese and bridges are being constructed throughout Ethiopia. And the Chinese play a key role in almost all of them. Isn't that nice of the Chinese? Always so helpful. So very eager to be of assistance.