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Author Archives: William Easterly

Ghana. 1970.

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Beware the fury of a patient man: Michael Clemens on Millennium Villages

Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development is a very calm,  judicious, sensible guy. But even he has finally lost patience with the lack of any serious evaluation of the Millennium Villages:

Why a Careful Evaluation of the Millennium Villages is Not Optional

UPDATE (3/20, 8:16am) Chris Blattman adds his take on this.

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The leader bias – for example, this blog

One of our many cognitive biases is to give too much credit for a group undertaking to the leader (or most visible member) of the group. I could illustrate that with how country leaders get too much credit for development success, how firm CEOs get too much credit, how soloists and conductors get too much credit relative to the orchestra … but I want to use the example of ME getting too much credit … for…

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Undercover Economist Goes Public for Randomized Controlled Trials

Tim Harford column in today’s FT (VERY strong endorsement of RCTs)

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Economics tells countries to specialize…including specializing in economics

One of the most venerable and I think most powerful wealth-creating ideas in economics is the package of comparative advantage, gains from specialization, and gains from trade. As we all know, different countries just do different things well: the Swiss give us chocolates, the Germans give us beer, the French give us wine, and the British give us…um…they give us … um…um…

Oh wait, the British were the ones who gave us the ideas of…

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Defending My Homeboy Hayek from Freakonomics

Justin Wolfers has an amusing Freakonomics piece describing how anti-government conservatives are trying to use state intervention to get the anti-statist Friedrich Hayek taught in high school economics classes. Wolfers is completely right that this episode exposes the hypocrisy of these intellectual censors.

(My favorite Mark Twain quote: “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.”)

But after that Wolfers goes astray, piling on Hayek…

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Climate Blowback: What I didn’t say was not what I didn’t mean not to say

My post criticizing Sachs on climate change got many negative responses yesterday. The main problem was that I was much too terse about an issue that people care a lot about (you should probably apply a “weekend discount” to things I post on weekends!). So some understandably jumped to conclusions about what I was saying, which were inaccurate.

Honestly, I know very little about climate change. But I do know…

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When Kenya saved Washington DC

In today’s NYT :

… everyone-as-informant mapping is shaking up the world, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to the work of humanitarians and soldiers who parachute into places with little good information. And an important force behind this upheaval is a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi, which has become a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes and which may have something larger to tell us about the future of

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Debating Sachs: the Next Generation

I am reluctant these days to post any criticisms of Jeff Sachs, since I know many people are tired of this never-ending back and forth. But I make an exception when my own daughter asks me to take him on.

I want to protect her privacy and not involve her directly in what is at times a nasty debate, so let me just says she is a college junior who has studied and thought a lot about the…

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Rodrik, Defining Libertarians, Afghan Tribes, Finding Coffee in New York

Links for Friday:

Dani Rodrik gets way too excited about changing IMF views on capital controls.

Will Wilkinson: libertarians are liberals who like markets.

The NYT again tries tribal analysis in Afghanistan: did they get it wrong again?

Bonus non-development link: where to find the best coffee in New York

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