Our Sally Field moment: (Most of) you (mostly) like us!
83 percent of you gave us a 5 (26 percent) or 4 (57 percent) out of 5 overall. About 15 percent of you gave us an “eh, you’re all right,” 2 percent of you gave us a 2 out of 5, and one person gave us a 1 (you really hate us!) Also on the plus side, three-quarters describe the blog as both “informative,” and “constructively skeptical,” 58 percent as “encouraging of constructive dialogue and debate” and 53 percent as “entertaining.” Only 1 percent of you think that we are “harming global efforts to help the poor.” In the improvements-to-be-made category, 33 percent of you find us “too predictably negative,” and 17 percent said we are “too confrontational.”
You want more of everything.
All topics had an excess of those who want more on that topic over those who want less. The largest margins were for 1) analysis of aid policies and approaches, 2) analysis of how to achieve economic development, and 3) critical evaluation of specific aid programs or agencies.
You want more positive stories on “what works.”
Another big theme to what you want more of, and what you would change about Aid Watch is—as one of you put it—more “analysis of aid programs that are actually working (there are some, right??)” Well, we hear you, and our response to that is two-fold:
First, the pushback. We wish it weren’t true, but good people in the aid industry do some dumb (ineffective, non-transparent, wasteful, arrogant) things! To identify dumb things to STOP doing is still positive change. When we run positive stories, you correctly sense that we are perhaps a little too arbitrary in our choices of “what works.” We’re trying hard, but the problem here is one of the central points of this blog—there is not enough transparency, evaluation, and accountability to know what’s working.
Second, the concession. We will seek out the positive stories in aid even harder, and we will profile more specific programs (or components of large programs) that have the demonstrated potential to improve the lives of the poor.
Sometimes we’re a little too snarky.
As we have said on this blog before, satire is the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. We deploy it often because the aid establishment is so impervious to change and so resistant to a course correction, no matter how reasonable the case for change is. Satire and sharp words are also a reaction to the bureaucratic buzzwords and evasive language that sometimes passes for real debate on this subject.
Having said this, it is a challenge to find the right balance—to calibrate our tone—and we take your point to be respectful of those we criticize. Although we are dissidents from a mainstream aid establishment, that’s NOT equivalent to thinking that we alone have the exactly correct view – another of our central points is that NONE of us know as much as we think we do. But we do pledge a better effort finding the positive (see above), being humble, even-handed, and giving the targets of our criticism a fair chance to explain themselves.
We could use a makeover.
Some of you commented on our less-than-bleeding-edge design and web functionality. Help is on the way: stay tuned for a redesign of the blog (and our parent page, NYU’s Development Research Institute) coming in early fall.
You don’t like being put in boxes.
Apologies to those of you who bristled at the narrow categories we provided for the ‘describe yourself’ question. We are pleased to discover our readership is even more diverse than we had guessed. In addition to a healthy percentage of students, economists, NGO workers, aid practitioners and consultants, your fellow readers also include entrepreneurs, aid recipients, congressional staffers, journalists, attorneys, technology consultants, bankers, missionaries and “interested bystanders.” Some categories we did not foresee: “Easterly groupie,” “Mets fan,” “hack bureaucrat,” and “Canadian.”
In closing, a sincere thanks to all of you who participated for your feedback and many helpful suggestions.
17 Comments
When I saw the questions on the poll, I was worried that guys were going to be a bit too receptive to our opinions. Glad to see from this post that I was wrong.
It’s great that you care what your readers have to say, but no blog could be worse than one that only caters to its audience. If you’ve got something to say, you should say it, and the inverse of that holds as well. We’re hear to see what *you* have to say, not what we think you should be saying. If some readers had their way, maybe Dumbledore wouldn’t have died, or Frodo wouldn’t have put on the ring. But we’re not the authors, and thank goodness, because those books would have been a lot worse if we were.
You guys just keep doing your thing. We readers won’t always like what we see, but challenging people is what Aid Watch is all about, right? You do that, and I’ll keep reading.
What was the N? One would expect that you share with us how many of us responded and perhaps even how this compares to your readership statistics. Transparency, huh.
The Easterly groupie was from LSE I am sure.
Can I make one other recommendation? When you are planning to criticise an organisation or an individual please offer them the right of reply before you post your story. It’s one of the first rules of journalism, but is strangely lacking in the blogosphere.
The ding-dong over poverty tourism, for example, would have been much more cordial – and accurate – if you had spoken to those behind the project first.
Dear Bill and Laura,
I forgot to include this on my survey but could you consider covering career development advice? I think I’m not alone in this demographic – recent graduate, some unsatisfying work experience under my belt, desperately afraid of becoming a lackey in the morally-corrupt web of bureaucracy… How can we make useful contributions?!
Thanks!
Another Easterly Groupie
I’d agree with Omair — your “snark” is one of your key competitive differentiators.
While a right of reply before posting sounds nice in the abstract, this is a blog, not a magazine. You already provide extensive opportunities to respond. I find the subsequent interplay when you post a criticism to be more useful to me than if everything got sorted out off stage.
Echoing Brum, the failure to report the size of the sample is a little shocking.
I would like to second Hannah’s request for more information about jobs for the future. I am a first year PHD student and I was wondering what is out there beyond the pearly gates. What sort of jobs in the aide world would you suggest for graduate students or undergraduate economists?
Also I would love to know the N in your survey.
I love the “Easterly groupie” category
Totally agree with Omair (even in the Dumbledore’s part)and back Hanna’s petition…I have been looking to have a chat with you about that.
Best wishes for the work of Aid Watch!
For those interested in useful discussions of jobs in development, I encourage you to check out the blog entries written by Alanna Shaikh on the topic at this blog:
http://globalhealth.change.org/blog/category/global_health_jobs
She blogs a lot on the topic, including interviews with people who are well-established in their careers. She covers both the content of their jobs, and how they ended up there. It is global health focused, but much of the discussion is relevant also for people interested in development jobs more broadly.
What about the stories about the Poverty Action Lab using field experiments to try to find out “what works” so large scale aid projects from donors can focus on these type of activities.
About the request for more positive, “what works” type info, I think the idea is that when you only criticize poor performance without suggestions on how to do it better, it’s less intellectually satisfying. I was one of those who asked for that, but on second thought, I don’t think it’s as important.
And definitely keep up the wit.
I would like to hear the sense of humor from the poor who are the recipients of both good and bad aid delivery. They are the customers to be satisfied. Not the rest of us.
EXCELLENT RESPONSE BY AID WATCH
It appears that you’ve listened, understood the criticism and the praise. One only hopes that you will live up to your engagements retaining but improving what reader’s found positive about the site.
One regret (this was not clear) I hope that people from developing countries follow the site and participated in the survey and will have a chance to blog in the future.
SS
‘missionary’ here. I would definitely add myself to ‘Easterly Groupie’.
From the South we would say ‘git ‘r dun!’.
Your comparative advantage is in identifying “dumb things to STOP doing”. Having said that, I put “more positive stuff” on the survey. I would be happy with more references to people you think are doing a good job in the field. One of the dismal parts of economics is realizing that all costs are opportunity costs and you can’t have more of everything. Keep up the satire!
Of course you got high positives, who would spend time reading a blog (and especially filling out a survey for a blog) that they didn’t like?