About Aid Watch
The Aid Watch blog is a project of New York University's Development Research Institute (DRI). This blog is principally written by William Easterly, author of "The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics" and "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good," and Professor of Economics at NYU. It is co-written by Laura Freschi and by occasional guest bloggers. Our work is based on the idea that more aid will reach the poor the more people are watching aid.
"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking." - H.L. Mencken
Recent Comments
- Rukmini on Aid Watch blog ends; New work on development begins : This has been a valuable resource for me and I’m sorry to see it...
- Jesse on From Hell to Prosperity: I would like to see this graph with a comparative one which shows the number of people in each religion...
- Ellie on Aid Watch blog ends; New work on development begins : Sad to see you go, but I certainly respect the decision. Hope it is...
- Vivek Nemana on From Hell to Prosperity: Jeff, Well, the billionaire effect might explain a disproportionately high mean income, but...
- M on Aid Watch blog ends; New work on development begins : I agree that Bill and Laura should think about how they can get their message...
- Mr. Econotarian on Are Lax US Gun Laws Spilling Violence into Mexico? : The paper says: “DHS data gives the number of illegal...
Archives
Bill Easterly tweets
- I had nothing to do with this flow chart of Sachs v. me, honest http://t.co/UyQkDrC9 HT Everyone in my Tw feed about 53 minutes ago from web
- That was very broadening. Now switching to Downton Abbey. about 14 hours ago from Echofon
- When does NY Philharmonic come on? about 14 hours ago from Echofon
- Nice tribute to Whitney. Btw who is Bruno Mars? about 15 hours ago from Echofon
Aid Watch tweets
- If you think leprosy is a rare ancient disease , then you won’t believe the prevalence rate in Cote D’Ivoire @irinnews http://t.co/MMwFcyId 06:53:13 PM February 09, 2012 from TweetDeck
- Didn’t I tell you not to say that? UK minister “misread” immigration report, creating an economic myth @CGDev http://t.co/iYGhCk9i 06:08:08 PM February 09, 2012 from TweetDeck
- Can women’s land rights improve the health of children, or are we mistaking correlation for cause? http://t.co/V7BNdITM via RachelStrohm 05:16:28 PM February 09, 2012 from TweetDeck
- There is no magic wand to break the resource curse, but an oil-to-cash program might just do the trick @CGDev http://t.co/6l4INTmL 04:50:01 PM February 09, 2012 from TweetDeck
Monthly Archives: June 2009
The Tipping Point: Fascinating but Mythological?
The “tipping point” is a popular concept covering a whole range of phenomena (and a best-selling book by Malcolm Gladwell) where individual behavior depends on the behavior of the herd.
Its original application was to racial segregation. Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling developed a beautifully simple model for this. Suppose that whites have different degrees of racism – some would “tolerate” higher shares of nonwhites than others. Schelling showed that the less racist whites would…
The US Army fights me back! — in a nice peaceful way
The following is the text of an email I received today after asking Lieutenant General William Caldwell IV for comment as one of the authors of the United States Army’s Manual with some economic development ideas that I criticized:
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: FOUO
Dear Dr. Easterly,
LTG Caldwell is currently on personal leave and not regularly receiving
email.
This is a very important topic to him — the manual to which you refer
represents…
Posted in Military aid 7 Comments
Response to MV tourism operator on “Should starving people be tourist attractions?”
Dear Michael (or Dr. Grosspietsch, whichever you prefer):
Thanks for taking the time to respond, which is very admirable in itself (I am still waiting a week later to hear from the US Army Lieutenant General William Caldwell IV on the Army’s approach to development.)
I have also read the comments on both my post and yours on Aid Watch, and I have read the post of Donald Ndahiro, the local…
Posted in Cognitive biases 24 Comments
Response from tourism operator to “Should starving people be tourist attractions”
Dear William,
While it is generally a pleasure to get to know you, the circumstances are rather sad. I thank you, nevertheless, for inviting me personally to respond to your blog. I’m the Director of the Eos Visions network that got under fire here and – and I’m happy to admit it – the author of the brochure that you and several of your commentators criticize to a point that verges on insult.
I…
Posted in Grand plans and aid targets, Poverty 22 Comments
Should starving people be tourist attractions?
Senegalese entrepreneur Magatte Wade on the Huffington Post touched a raw nerve about condescension towards Africans. She noted that a tourism operator was marketing one of Jeff Sachs’ Millennium Villages (MVs) as a vacation destination and quoted from the brochure “Please do not give anything to the villagers — no sweets.”
I decided to look more into the MV tourism project, not to pile on, but because I believe patronizing attitudes towards Africans…
J’accuse: the US Army’s Development Delusions
A wise economist that I met recently tipped me off that I would find the latest Army field manual interesting reading. He was more than right about that. The 2009 US ARMY STABILITY OPERATIONS FIELD MANUAL (available in a University of Michigan paperback as well as an earlier version online ) is remarkably full of utopian dreams of transforming other societies into oases of prosperity, peace, and democracy through the coordinated use…
Links to other blogs to make you taller, happier, smarter
Secret to development is to be taller! taller makes you happier, richer, smarter – thanks a lot from us short people, tall Anne Case and Angus Deaton!
False pessimism exposé: American children still doing better than their parents (Café Hayek) are they taller?
FT first newspaper to figure out that other countries’ banking crisis experience might be relevant (Brazil) and that it might help to consult experts on such experience (Ross…
Posted in In the news 1 Comment
Fund for Unsolvable Problems: is the IMF the new UN?
Scarcely another G-8 handshake goes by without piling another responsibility on the International Monetary Fund. The communiqué after the latest G8 Finance Ministers’ meeting last weekend asked the Fund to help devise “exit strategies” from stimulus at the exact right time in the exact right manner, which nobody knows and the G-8 cannot agree upon. Then they asked IMF should do more concessional lending to poor countries. So the IMF is only being put in…
A $3 million book with 8 readers? The impact of donor-driven research
One of aid donors’ less discussed activities is financing research. The Global Development Network (GDN) is probably the best known effort, a World Bank-sponsored effort to promote development research by researchers in the developing world, founded in December 1999, with an annual budget now of over $9 million (roughly the same as the entire annual budget for all National Science Foundation (NSF) funding of all economics research). In GDN’s own words, it exists to…
Posted in Data and statistics 7 Comments