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
Recent Comments
- Rukmini on Aid Watch blog ends; New work on development begins : This has been a valuable resource for me and I’m sorry to see it...
- Jesse on From Hell to Prosperity: I would like to see this graph with a comparative one which shows the number of people in each religion...
- Ellie on Aid Watch blog ends; New work on development begins : Sad to see you go, but I certainly respect the decision. Hope it is...
- Vivek Nemana on From Hell to Prosperity: Jeff, Well, the billionaire effect might explain a disproportionately high mean income, but...
- M on Aid Watch blog ends; New work on development begins : I agree that Bill and Laura should think about how they can get their message...
- Mr. Econotarian on Are Lax US Gun Laws Spilling Violence into Mexico? : The paper says: “DHS data gives the number of illegal...
Archives
Bill Easterly tweets
- Why are they singing pro-Confederacy song "Maryland, my Maryland" at Preakness horse race? about 3 hours ago from Twitter for iPad ReplyRetweetFavorite
- RT @hangingnoodles: "a self-satirizing plan…pouring in money to a fictional government” http://t.co/K9yCiLgs06 @bill_easterly NYT on Mali … 09:29:12 PM May 17, 2013 from Twitter for iPad ReplyRetweetFavorite
- Good article on aid to Mali, even though I'm quoted http://t.co/1aWi9mjWAo 02:03:59 PM May 17, 2013 from bitly ReplyRetweetFavorite
- RT @dandrezner: Um... http://t.co/R8U5P6jbid MT @bill_easterly Thoughtful, well-written critique of Krugman anti-austerity crusade http://t… 06:43:31 PM May 16, 2013 from Twitter for iPad ReplyRetweetFavorite
Aid Watch tweets
- Where is the line between marketing social impact and exploitation? | http://t.co/YTc7AoLRMc via @Thehumanosphere 06:25:08 PM May 17, 2013 from Buffer ReplyRetweetFavorite
- Why the rise in global trade may have less to do with policy and more to do with metal boxes. http://t.co/QN6uw0wLys via @TheEconomist 05:57:06 PM May 17, 2013 from Buffer ReplyRetweetFavorite
- “I thought you were here to help.” http://t.co/z7hbKP8RtX via @NYTimes 05:29:12 PM May 17, 2013 from Buffer ReplyRetweetFavorite
- African traders flocked to Guangzhou for the cheap goods but are staying to run manufacturing operations http://t.co/gK7jmSS3qW via @qz 05:03:40 PM May 17, 2013 from Buffer ReplyRetweetFavorite
Category Archives: Satire and parodies
Nation not part of “Democratic Revolt” international media story presumptuously holds election
A nation that does not fit into the media narrative on the Worldwide or Arab-wide Democratic Revolution went ahead and held an election today.
Leading media representatives complained that there was no room for media attention to the historic, pivotal election in the nation of 74 million registered voters. “I mean there are no Arabs in Niger, are there?” said leading journalist Woodscott Tarleton. “We can barely keep up remembering the capitals of all those Arab countries like Iran.”
Voters…
Also posted in In the news 16 Comments
UN Revealed to be Gigantic 66-year-old Hoax
“I can’t believe it lasted this long,” said “US Ambassador to the UN” Susan Rice, laughing, “Who would really believe that there is this magical agency that would, like, be responsible for solving all the problems in the whole world? That nobody else can solve? Or even wants to?”
“I really thought it would come out when that prankster Ban Ki Moon put Libya on the “reformed” Human Rights Council in 2010,” said Rice, “after…
Tagged April Fools, United Nations 16 Comments
What if NCAA Basketball Tournament Teams were coached by Development Economists?
Tomorrow night is the next round of March Madness, the annual NCAA tournament that started off with 64 college basketball teams, now reduced to the “Sweet Sixteen” .
It is not widely known that some lower seeded teams in the tournament, who had to play much better teams, desperately sought advice from leading Development Economists.
A Columbia Professor said we already know the successful ingredients for a championship, just get lots of funding for the…
Also posted in Aid debates Tagged Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, Esther Duflo, Hernando de Soto, Jeffrey Sachs, Mohammed Yunus, Paul Collier, Peter Boettke 17 Comments
Congressional Muslim Terrorism Hearings: the Mathematical Witness Transcript
UPDATE 11am response to commentator: is there an association between inability to understand Bayes’ theorem with ethnic prejudice?
UPDATE 3:30PM explaining risk of false positives to congressmen and commentators
Congressman Chairman: Muslims! Terrorists! Muslims! Terrorists!
Witness: Let A be the event of terrorism, and B be the event of Muslimism. Then P(A|B)≠P(B|A)
Congressman: What are you talking about?
Witness: You seem to be confusing the probability that a Muslim person will be a terrorist with…
Also posted in Human rights, Metrics and evaluation Tagged Bayes' theorem, Bayesian statistics, False positives, racism 35 Comments
Twitter Klout of Development Folk
We were pleased at Aid Watch to discover Klout, an online Twitter “influence” scorecard. Could this help us settle some scores left over from the Twitter War we just had? We plan to use this as a rigorous new metric with which we will evaluate our efficacy in aid criticism and progress towards achieving our Meme Development Goals (MDGs), which were arbitrarily and haphazardly made up designed at the 2011…
Does bad taste indicate dictators’ vulnerability to overthrow?
UPDATE: an enterprising reader offered another intriguing datapoint
Bill noticed it on ubiquitous billboards during a trip to Libya. Laura found more examples. So we think we have found an intriguing phenomenon: autocrats and outré pop stars look alike. Photographic evidence:
And one last uncanny visual correlation:
There are many directions we could go with this, but we choose for now the point that many dictators look ridiculous, and ridiculously unaware of how ridiculous.
A…
Aid Watch Rerun: African leaders advise Bono on reform of U2
NOTE FROM THE EDITORS: Over the holidays, we’ll be publishing reruns of some of our posts from the first 2 years of Aid Watch. This post originally ran on November 23, 2009.
An expert commission of African leaders today announced their plan for comprehensive reform of music band U2. Saying that U2’s rock had lost touch with its African roots, the commission called for urgent measures to halt U2’s slide towards impending crisis.
“Our youth today…
Tagged Aid With or Without U2 8 Comments
Once upon a Professor: the Christmas Debate Story
Once upon a time, four Professors met to agree upon a Christmas Gift Policy. ‘Twas fortunate for the world that they met thus, for they were the world’s foremost Gift Experts.
Professor A said he already knew what everybody wanted, and wanted to massively increase financing for the International Fund for Christmas and Development, which will come up with a comprehensive plan for all the complementary technical inputs to deliver the correct gifts to all…
Tagged Aid Parables 11 Comments
US Government asks all governments to respect World Press & Internet Freedom except for US Government
From wonkette (HT David Zetland), the State Department has announced with impeccable timing (what is that Wikileaks thing?) and deafness to irony:
The theme for next year’s commemoration {of World Press Freedom Day} will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events,
…
Also posted in Democracy and freedom, Technology 12 Comments
Generalized Automatic Email Response
UPDATE: Thank you all so much for the wonderful responses to this post on Twitter, which I will appreciate so much after never reading them.
I have been having a lot of trouble managing my email. This causes some people who email me to get very upset. I was thinking I would try to automate the response so as to leave people who email me smiling, happy, satisfied, and in love with me. Here goes:
Thank…