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Monthly Archives: October 2010

The Coffee Party Manifesto

By William Easterly | Published October 31, 2010

The Coffee Party is alarmed that our discourse has been hijacked by Partys named after other Beverages. The Coffee Party is for all the reasonable people, which happens to be correlated with drinking good coffee.

Here is our manifesto:

  1. The Coffee Party has had the privilege to meet people from many different creeds and races, and despises fear-mongering towards any one group.
  2. The Coffee Party also hates xenophobia towards immigrants. We don’t plan to vote

…

Posted in Uncategorized | 27 Comments

Eyes Wide Shut: Philanthropy Action on the “Rescheduled” Sachs vs. Clemens/Demombynes debate

By William Easterly | Published October 31, 2010

Tim Ogden at Philanthropy Action issues a petition for the “rescheduled” (quotes in original) Sachs vs. Clemens/Demombynes debate on evaluating Millennium Villages, which was supposed to happen last Wednesday, to be indeed, well, rescheduled.

He asks for all of us to be watching whether this indeed happens. Aid Watch is always in favor of more Watching, so we support Tim’s petition.

Posted in Aid debates, Aid policies and approaches, Grand plans and aid targets, In the news | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Physics Envy in Development (even worse than in Finance!)

By William Easterly | Published October 28, 2010

Andrew Lo and Mark Mueller at MIT have a paper called “WARNING: Physics Envy May Be Hazardous to Your Wealth,” also available as a video.  The takeaway, which is equally relevant to Development as to Finance (the actual topic of the talk),  is that inability to recognize radical UNCERTAINTY is what leads to excessive confidence in mathematical models of reality, and then on to bad policy and prediction.

Imagine how much harder physics would

…

Posted in Big ideas | 15 Comments

Millennium Villages: Moving the goalposts

By Laura Freschi | Published October 27, 2010

Here on the blog, we’ve been following the progress of the Millennium Villages Project, a joint effort from the UN and Columbia’s Earth Institute that has introduced a package of development interventions in health, education, agriculture and infrastructure into 14 “clusters” of villages throughout 10 African countries.

In response to a critical paper by Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes, the MVP architects published a statement last week that they said would “clarify” some “basic…

Posted in Grand plans and aid targets, Metrics and evaluation | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Between the Massive Middle and Ivy Elite

By William Easterly | Published October 26, 2010

UPDATE 9am, Oct. 27: commenter says too rosy a picture of Middle? see end of this post

There has been a lot of talk this political season about Ivy League Elitism. My own background—of belonging and yet not quite belonging to the elite— makes me very conflicted.

On Monday, I gave a seminar (not for the first time) at my undergraduate alma mater, Bowling Green State University, which is located in my hometown of Bowling…

Posted in Field notes | Tagged , , | 21 Comments

Is Papua New Guinea the New Niger Delta?

By Laura Freschi | Published October 26, 2010

The New York Times reports:

In 2014, ExxonMobil is scheduled to start shipping natural gas through a 450-mile pipeline, then on to Japan, China and other markets in East Asia. But the flood of revenue, which is expected to bring Papua New Guinea $30 billion over three decades and to more than double its gross domestic product, will force a country already beset by state corruption and bedeviled by

…

Posted in In the news | 12 Comments

The myth of Ethiopia’s “natural” disasters

By Laura Freschi | Published October 25, 2010

As Amartya Sen has shown, famines in our times are not true natural disasters, but more often the consequence of bad governments and their bad policies. Revisiting the era of Live Aid for a book review in The New Republic, David Rieff gives evidence of how the Ethiopian famine was framed as a natural disaster rather than a political one, so as not to “complicate” the picture for viewers:

… Michael Buerk’s first BBC

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Posted in Books and book reviews | 21 Comments

The Juan Williams Logic Test Edition

By William Easterly | Published October 24, 2010

UPDATE: some of my dear satirically-challenged readers did not quite pick up on the ironic tone of this post, so I have made a few changes. Others seemed to be missing the point that I am mocking fallacious logical arguments, so let me just clarify that I am mocking fallacious logical arguments.

UPDATE 2: some of you have helpfully explained that Juan Williams was just talking about feelings. OK. Just wondering whether we should deny equal…

Posted in Satire and parodies | Tagged | 26 Comments

Tribute to Center for Global Development (CGD)

By William Easterly | Published October 23, 2010

Dennis Whittle has a nice post praising CGD. I couldn’t agree more, even when not agreeing on every issue with Nancy Birdsall and the brilliant staff she has hired at CGD.

I will always be grateful to Nancy from an intensely personal perspective. She courageously took me in at CGD when I had become persona non grata to the rest of the development establishment, after my first book came out in 2001. She took a big risk in giving asylum to…

Posted in Aid debates | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Yes, critics also appreciate a little sympathy every now and then

By William Easterly | Published October 23, 2010

From Megan McArdle in a different debate:

The rest of her post puts me in mind of the phenomenon that William Easterly has described in development circles:  the recycling of ideas that have failed before, always unveiled with much fanfare, but no real explanation as to why this time is different.  Frankly, it makes me understand why Easterly sometimes gets a little testy.

Posted in Aid debates, Meta | 3 Comments