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Category Archives: And the Secret to Development Is...

The Economist Debate on Finance for Good or Evil: Round 2 Turns Up Heat

By William Easterly | Published February 26, 2010

The debate now going on at the Economist is providing one of the most exciting and insightful looks at What We Learned about Finance from the Crash. The debate is very relevant for the role of finance in development (which Levine has devoted his career to studying). Debate is now on round 2 and you can vote for your favorite. Stiglitz has a small lead at this point; my vote still goes to Levine.…

Also posted in General Economic Principles | 5 Comments

Democracy and development look different from inside a jail cell

By William Easterly | Published January 6, 2010

One of my most inspirational experiences lately was to meet with an African democratic opposition leader whom I had long admired from afar.

He earned his credentials the hard way — he spent years in jail under the dictatorial government of his country.

While in jail, he read the foreword to one extremely popular book on The End of Poverty. The author thanked the dictator who had jailed the opposition leader for the…

10 Comments

Fundamental Lunch-Napkin Equation Valuing Development Expertise

By William Easterly | Published December 15, 2009

I had a lunch with my boss a long,long time ago at the World Bank Research Department to discuss my research. He listened impatiently to my description of my various research papers and finally burst out, “yes, but what would you tell the Finance Minister to do tomorrow?” I got asked this question what seemed like thousands of times while I was at the Bank. It’s still at the heart of the Bank’s approach to development today,…

13 Comments

The secret to success is failure

By Laura Freschi | Published December 2, 2009

Novogratz_blue_sweaterWhen Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund, was in her early twenties, she turned down a promotion on Wall Street and went to the Cote d’Ivoire to open a new branch of the African Development Bank focused on microfinance for women. But the West African women she was supposed to work with shunned her. They talked about her derisively in her presence, letting her know exactly what they thought of an untested, unmarried, American…

Also posted in Book and Article Reviews | 13 Comments

The Age of the Development Expert

By William Easterly | Published November 29, 2009

Foreign Policy magazine just released its top 100 Global Thinkers for 2009. Twelve out of the top 100 were what is loosely called “development experts:”

 Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart (20), Paul Collier (36), Jeffrey Sachs (39), William Easterly (39), Esther Duflo (41), Muhammad Yunus (46), Amartya Sen (58), George Ayittey (76), Paul Farmer (83), Jacqueline Novogratz (85), Andrew Mwenda (98).

 With the obligatory caveats about the more well-deserving who were omitted and questionable…

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The secret to aid is people

By William Easterly | Published November 25, 2009

Editors’ Note: This will be the last Aid Watch post until Monday after the holiday weekend. Happy Thanksgiving!

Which attribute of an aid project makes it more likely to succeed:

  1. It will have rigorous evaluation based on some output indicators to make sure it’s working, OR
  2. It is staffed by people who really, really want it to succeed?

This question came out of a tour of maternity and family planning clinics of 

Also posted in Aid Policies and Approaches | 12 Comments

Big Plans vs. Real Plans

By Guest Blogger | Published October 20, 2009

This guest post, by Jeffrey Barnes, Portfolio Manager at Abt Associates, is in response to yesterday’s What must we do to end world poverty? At last, an answer.

Aid Watch and other Easterly work, notably “The White Man’s Burden,” rail against the big plans of development. As this body of work rightly points out, there is a lot of paternalism involved in the Big Plans to “save” the poor. Easterly’s preferred alternative is “searching,” which…

Also posted in Aid Policies and Approaches, Grand Plans and Other Delusions | 15 Comments

What must we do to end world poverty? At last, an answer

By William Easterly | Published October 19, 2009

OK, that’s too good to be true. There has been a search for sixty years for the right answer. Now most economists confess ignorance how to raise the rate of economic growth — how to progress more rapidly towards development and the end of poverty.

To get out of this dead end, I would respond to this question with more questions.

First, who is “we”? It seems like whoever “we” are, “we” must have unconstrained…

19 Comments

Set a Big Goal. Give All to Meet It. This is Stupid.

By William Easterly | Published October 2, 2009

The first two sentences come out of thousands of commencement addresses, not to mention inspirational foreign aid addresses. But they’re bad advice.

Social entrepreneurs in foreign aid might learn from private sector entrepreneurs, who don’t stick to fixed goals.

A University of Illinois graduate moved to Silicon Valley with a great goal (perhaps inspired by the Illini commencement address) – develop security software for hot-selling handheld devices like the Palm Pilot. He assumed that enterprises…

Also posted in Aid Policies and Approaches | 8 Comments

The Anarchy of Success

By William Easterly | Published September 21, 2009

In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books I have a review (ungated here) of:

Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

The success of the East Asian Gang of Four—and now China—has exerted an irresistible lure to researchers of growth. Academic economists who were used to studying whether a politically…

21 Comments