Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 @KayTiKal

Haiti, economic history & development, technology, random stuff. Born and raised in Cap-Haïtien. Currently wandering in Africa. kaytikal.substack.com Brazzaville & Kinshasa Joined August 2009

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Philippe Lemoine @phl43

6 days ago

Politics is probably the occupation where someone of mediocre intelligence can hope to achieve the greatest level of influence, which creates incentives that are very unfortunate for the public good.

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Think that this tweet and the ones under it are (to me) the most fascinating aspects of China in Africa. Forget all the roads and trains from Chinese investment - this is the one where trade is likely to be a vehicle (or Trojan horse, depending on your taste) for cultural change. Wrote about it here (open.substack.com/pub/1914reader…)

PENTANE🎤💜💡 @Thepentane_

a week ago

If you're in Ibadan, Chinese have made life easier, just go to Sinomart at Palms Mall. It is owned by the Chinese. All the 25k jeans you people buy from vendors, they are being sold for as low as 4,500 to 5000 there. Their tops and shirts are very high quality, and they are

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Oliver Kim @oliverwkim

2 weeks ago

My latest with @oliverhanney in IN DEVELOPMENT, on the impact of AI-related job loss in developing countries—most of all, in India's IT services sector

In Development @indevmag

2 weeks ago

Discourse about AI and job loss is omnipresent right now. But what do we actually know about AI job loss in developing countries? @oliverwkim and @oliverhanney do (to our knowledge) the first analysis of AI's effects of IT in India in @indevmag: indevelopmentmag.substack.com/p/tomorrows-ai…

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Trung Phan @TrungTPhan

a month ago

Since the launch of ChatGPT, the Philippines offshore industry (8% of country’s GDP) has actually grown much bigger. Employment in IT and business outsourcing is up by +20% to 1.9m workers and industry revenue is up +30% to $42B. “AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models or supervising AI agents. Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools. Mr Gallimore says more “high-value” work, such as accountancy or engineering, is going offshore in part because “AI is a leveller. You can now teach someone complex stuff quickly” and still get it done more cheaply than in America or Europe.” *** More here: economist.com/asia/2026/08/0…

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Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota

2 months ago

WTF??

Susan Abel @susylicious2023

2 months ago

Reconnecting with my ex-fiancé’s child from the affair after 23 years

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Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 @KayTiKal

2 months ago

@okaythenfuture @Danielsrotaryo1 Here is your pilates place in Port-au-Prince: instagram.com/pilatherapie_h…

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Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 @KayTiKal

2 months ago

@DoubleEph That's why some of them were still done in Haiti until recently: manutech.us At the factory I was baffled to learn they were sometimes used in fighter jets: standexedge.com/blog/power-mag…

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Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 @KayTiKal

3 months ago

@Empty_America Guy looks like Captain Haddock

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Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026

3 months ago

The Americas comprise 55 states and territories with permanent populations, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. How many still have a total fertility rate above replacement? Four: Haiti, Guyana, French Guiana, and Saint Martin. These four hold about 13 million people. The Americas hold about 1.05 billion. So fewer than 1.3% of the hemisphere's population lives in areas where fertility is still above replacement. The data for Haiti, Guyana, French Guiana, and Saint Martin are not good. Still, most observers working from recent figures put their TFR between 2.4 and 2.6. My guess is that all four will fall below replacement before 2035. Among the region’s demographic giants, the U.S. now has the highest TFR, ahead of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. This is not a Hispanic effect, though Hispanic fertility is relatively high. The non-Hispanic white TFR in the U.S. exceeds the TFR of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. A few observations. First, none of the four holdouts speaks Spanish or Portuguese. Three of them, Haiti, French Guiana, and Saint Martin, are francophone, even if local creoles are more common than standard French. The fourth, Guyana, is anglophone. I stress this because many observers have not noticed that all of Central America, Guatemala and Honduras included, is already below replacement. A quick-and-dirty calculation puts the current TFR of the main language groups in the Americas at Portuguese: 1.5, Spanish: 1.55, English: 1.55, and French: 2.0. Second, at this rate, the Americas will begin recording more deaths than births around 2040, perhaps sooner. From that point, all population growth will depend on immigration from outside the continent. Finally, a few caveats. The data for many countries, especially in the Caribbean, are awful. I doubt better data would change any of these conclusions, but I want to be careful. And given how fast the TFR has fallen over the past decade, part of the drop may be a tempo effect. I lean toward those who think tempo will not matter much here, but I may be wrong. And, as always, whenever I can, I use data from each country’s National Institute of Statistics rather than the UN WPP (or databases like the World Bank’s, which rely on it). On a few occasions, to update time series, I built the TFR myself, using past TFR, CBR, and population data as input. While this creates some noise, none of it is particularly important to my arguments.

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Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 @KayTiKal

3 months ago

Why don't I have a clear mental image of Byzantine soldiers, while I have one (however inaccurate) for Roman legionaries, Greek hoplites, medieval knights, Zulu or Aztec warriors? Were Middle Ages Byzantine troops more like late Romans or Europeans knights?

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Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan

4 months ago

"That’s how the winning teams are created nowadays. Socially, ex nihilo."

Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan

4 months ago

My today's Substack: A different game On football’s extreme commercialization branko2f7.substack.com/p/a-different-…

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Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 @KayTiKal

4 months ago

I try to come up with an answer here: kaytikal.substack.com/p/why-does-the…

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Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 @KayTiKal

4 months ago

Why does the Dominican Republic buy iPhones like a rich country? h/t @LatamData

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Kurtis Lockhart @kurtislockhart

4 months ago

Economic growth is literally beautiful

Pascal Murasira @PascalMurasira

4 months ago

Rwanda at night, 2013 → 2025. Over the same period, electricity access grew from ~19% to 82%. I built this map using real NOAA VIIRS satellite data, retrieved via Google Earth Engine, and animated it in Python. i am fascinated by this kind of data visualization and what it

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Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 @KayTiKal

4 months ago

Full article here: open.substack.com/pub/kaytikal/p…

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Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 @KayTiKal

4 months ago

What Bangkok street food tells us about what to do in Haiti?

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Karthik Tadepalli @karthiktadepall

5 months ago

After a long break, I'm back to devposting! I argue that the development econ focus on "institutions" was a mistake – not (just) because the evidence was bad, but because the concept of "good institutions" is tautological and uninformative for policy.

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Oliver Kim @oliverwkim

4 months ago

It will take Malawi 21 years of Chinese-style 7% growth to reach Kenya's current GDP per capita. There's huge variation in incomes within Sub-Saharan Africa, which often goes ignored.

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Jonathan Said @JonathanSaid1

4 months ago

Many African countries have a lot to learn from what went wrong in Haiti, which this article summarizes. It’s by @KayTiKal

Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan

5 months ago

An excellent post by Carl-Henri Prophete (Haiti should be one of the most interesting countries to study: its decline from relative prosperity, early independence, and high land ownership to poverty and export of labor is a great study case in what went wrong.) My Totally

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Carl-Henri Prophète 🇭🇹 @KayTiKal

4 months ago

@whyvert @BrankoMilan Officially ~40 African countries with GDP per capita (ppp) higher than Haiti. Even after removing the likes of Seychelles and Oil exporters there are so many doing better. Understanding why and what can be done about it could improve the lives of millions. Thanks.