If only Martin Luther King Jr. had been an aid agency official, he would have been able to use Powerpoint and aid terminology to get his main points across more effectively.
Using advanced econometric methods, we were able to project the Powerpoint slides that would have resulted (open or save here).
12 Comments
This is great. It’s why I almost never use PowerPoint.
this is both hilarious and thought-provoking
This is amazing. Exactly the kind of satire we need (not just aid workers, but all Westerners that suffer from an over bureaucratized, over institutionalized, and over matrixing of common sense world). So now, imagine how people all over the world feel when “we” come in and try to force UN-speak down their throats? How can “human rights” presentations compete with fascinating age-old myths and tales? We have clearly become robots!
this is brilliant. i’m going to need hundreds of copies for distribution.
I’m not always a big fan of the satire here, but I like this a lot. I was once asked to write a research paper on race equality and community cohesion in the UK for the Government … in POWEREFFINGPOINT.
I made what I thought was the reasonable argument was that it was a *research paper* and on an incredibly complex and tricky pair of subjects, but they covered their ears and shouted ‘powerpoint’ until I backed down (I was very young at the time).
I turned in a 200 slide behemoth. Lots of graphs, a lot of bullet points, and then tons of caveats and explanations.
When they asked a colleague to do the same thing for a regression analysis he ran on crime, he put headers and footers on every page listing the reasons why they could only be preliminary results and not taken as gospel.
They still quoted his coefficients in terms like ‘It has been proven that reducing X by 1% causes a 0.3% corresponding reduction in violent crime’.
We wept.
I should point out that the Ministers involved and the civil servants who misinterpreted those results are long gone.
Hilarious & Brilliant. A good reminder of why we need to scrap the jargon (and go light on the PowerPoint).
Did you already know about this one?
http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
Hahahaha!
Love this.
ahh that was funny – as was the gettysburg address one in a link above.
A lot of powerpoint presentations could be renamed powerpointless.
scarily enough i find myself reading that presentation and thinking “yeah – that makes sense”.
Right on! I hate PowerPoint – not just the bad uses of it; the actual tool. It is designed to make bad presentations.
Avam: “powerpointless” is now part of my vocabulary.
4 Trackbacks
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by bill_easterly: If Martin Luther King had been an aid offical: the Powerpoint version of “I Have a Dream” http://bit.ly/6U14g5...
[...] more from the original source: If Martin Luther King had been an aid official — the Powerpoint … Tags: across-more, advanced-econometric, been-able, get-his, had-been, king, main, main-points, [...]
[...] I came across a Powerpoint version of Martin Luther King, Junior’s legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. Here’s a [...]
[...] Bill Easterly tries his hand at PPTParody and hits a winner. The Gettysburg Address version remains the standard, of course. See also our PowerPoint archive. [...]