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
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Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Jeffrey K. Silverman on Statement from CARE on Bruckner FOIA Request: I hope that OIG is reading some of these postings, especially about...
- Jeffrey K. Silverman on NGO Transparency: Counterpart International to release budget: That might be giving AEI too much credit, and it...
- AA on IAD on A-i-d: @ Tulip: Your comment about rich taxpayers driving aid policy may be true for Europeans, but I see some trouble with...
- Jim on Africans do not want or need Britain’s development aid: The statistics posted by Terence are fascinating. If Bill Easterly...
- Katrina on Be Careful What You Export: Brendon, I think the NHS is a good boiler plate model that can be tinkered. I’m in Uganda...
- edinburgh photograph on Statement from CARE on Bruckner FOIA Request: Great favorite is usually most definitely the idea is usually these...
Archives
Bill Easterly tweets
- Dear Aid Watchers, Laura and I are gone for a week, Adam Martin is Guest Editor, starting with today's great post http://bit.ly/ces1l3 02:12:45 PM August 30, 2010 from bitly
- Have a happy Last Week of the Summer 01:52:50 PM August 30, 2010 from web
- Beloved tweeps: I am going off line for a week in a last-ditch effort to regain my sanity, no more tweets from me till after Labor Day. 01:52:30 PM August 30, 2010 from web
- What to learn from those wacky animal-shaped Sudanese urban plans: rich country urban planners are just as wacky http://bit.ly/ces1l3 01:50:42 PM August 30, 2010 from bitly
Aid Watch tweets
- IAD on A-i-d http://bit.ly/9Yqk1H. Claudia Williamson discusses Elinor Ostrom's work on development. 12:29:51 PM September 03, 2010 from web
- Be Careful What you Export: http://bit.ly/cE3e1v 11:11:33 AM September 02, 2010 from web
- TransparencyBrawl 2010 continues: http://bit.ly/aG1ytu 08:18:35 PM September 01, 2010 from web
- Hayek vs. the Intellectuals, in technicolor! http://bit.ly/cSnS8m 11:25:39 AM September 01, 2010 from web
Category Archives: Meta/ about Aid Watch
Turning over Aid Watch management for a week
Dear Aid Watchers,
Both Laura and I are away for a week starting today.
I am cutting off the Internet entirely for a week in a bid to regain my sanity, so anything addressed to me in any Net medium (email, Twitter, Facebook, blog comments) I will not see for a week.
In the absence of Laura and I, DRI post-doc Adam Martin has generously agreed to take over as Guest Editor for a week, beginning with…
Aid Watch addresses an unexpected embarrassing problem
We’ve noticed a strange phenomenon on Aid Watch: our April 10, 2010 post Famine Africa stereotype porn shows no letup has also shown the least letup of any of our posts, showing up with traffic day after day. It is now the fourth most popular post of all time on Aid Watch. I was rather slow to figure out what was going on, which just shows what being raised as a Methodist in squeaky-clean…
Why the world needs independent aid critics: the video
Easterly talks with the John Templeton Foundation on the need for independent aid critics to challenge the mainstream development industry, and how successful development actually happens.
Aid Watch comes clean on unethical product placement in our blogs
The New York Times called my attention today to ethical problems with blogs that do product placement, such as shilling for a certain brand of vodka without disclosing gifts from Absolut:
a blogger must be clear about any “material connections” with a sponsor, especially if these would not be expected by the reader.
My reaction was “wow, I had no idea we could make money that way!” Given the pathetic results of my fund-raising efforts so…
When you might want a skeptic…
UPDATE 3:41pm June 7: see end of post.
I am a passenger in a car with my friend Owen driving…we’re chatting.
Me: did you see that sign? I think we better turn around.
Owen: why are you always so negative!?
Me: but the sign said…
Owen: if people listen to you skeptics, there’ll be no more funding for roads.
Me: I just think this time that…
Owen: why are you so negative when us drivers work
…
How the audience educates the lecturer: skepticism and freedom
On Wednesday night I gave a lecture at LSE called “We Don’t Know How to Solve Global Poverty and That’s a Good Thing.”
The abstract I wrote beforehand was:
This lecture argues that occasions when development economists were more certain about ‘the solution to global poverty’ have often led to harmful consequences for the world’s poor in the long-run. Sceptical criticism is a creative force that redirects attention and effort away from centrally-directed expert
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Inequality does cause underdevelopment: insights from a new instrument
Consistent with the provocative hypothesis of Engerman and Sokoloff (1997, 2000), this paper confirms with cross-country data that agricultural endowments predict inequality and inequality predicts development. The use of agricultural endowments –specifically the abundance of land suitable for growing wheat relative to that suitable for growing sugarcane — as an instrument for inequality is this paper’s approach to problems of measurement and endogeneity of inequality. The paper finds inequality also affects other development outcomes –
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Video of talks by Chris Blattman, others, and yours truly
Videos from Yale Law School Bernstein Symposium on Human Rights a couple weeks ago: Chris Blattman, Gregg Gonsalves (big attack on W. Easterly), Michael Kleinman
Keynote talk (something about double standards on human rights) by another somebody calling themself William Easterly.
Aid agencies announce they will be accountable to independent evaluators; This blog to permanently close
IRINA News, April 1, 2010
Geneva, Switzerland—A coalition of aid agencies meeting in Geneva today announced a historic agreement to reform the international aid system. In signing the agreement, heads of aid agencies formally committed to accept the verdicts of independent evaluators of the programs and projects in their portfolios.
The new measures require the 39 multilateral and bilateral aid agencies to scale up only those programs with a proven track record of success. Programs
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