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
- Ghana. 1970.
- Beware the fury of a patient man: Michael Clemens on Millennium Villages
- The leader bias – for example, this blog
- Undercover Economist Goes Public for Randomized Controlled Trials
- Economics tells countries to specialize…including specializing in economics
- Best in Aid: The Grand Prize
- Defending My Homeboy Hayek from Freakonomics
- Worst in Aid: the Grand Prize
Recent Comments
- geckonomist on Beware the fury of a patient man: Michael Clemens on Millennium Villages: nobody needs evaluations to see whether some...
- Joe on Ghana. 1970.: Nice photo. In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a wonderful documentary on Ghana from 1950s-1980s:...
- Robert Tulip on Beware the fury of a patient man: Michael Clemens on Millennium Villages: Opportunity cost of MDVs would be clarified by...
- ugo on Economics tells countries to specialize…including specializing in economics: I think that the Paris School of Economics and the...
- Mike on Undercover Economist Goes Public for Randomized Controlled Trials: Agree with Tim Harford
- avam on The leader bias – for example, this blog: I’d like to second everything Androgyne said. completely agree.
Archives
Popular Posts
- 100% African leaders advise Bono on reform of U2
- 84% Nobody wants your old shoes: How not to help in Haiti
- 34% Haiti earthquake: Help navigating complex terrain of disaster relief
- 18% The Civil War in Development Economics
- 16% How to write about poor people
- 15% If Martin Luther King had been an aid official -- the Powerpoint version of I Have a Dream
Bill Easterly Tweets
- Ghana. 1970. Old Picture. http://bit.ly/dtGz96 (T from last night) about 4 minutes ago from bit.ly
- PS location of equinox sunrise in the East this morning showed that Manhattan streets do not really run East-West, they are off by a lot. about 2 hours ago from web
- Only 5 hours to go until beginning of Spring. Expected high in New York today 74F. finally! about 2 hours ago from web
- Ghana. 1970. Old picture. http://bit.ly/dtGz96 about 17 hours ago from bit.ly
Aid Watch tweets
- WB: Graph showing Africa's devt pattern increasingly diverse, w/ more & more success stories via @ryanbriggs http://bit.ly/dsdqPy 11:07:43 AM March 18, 2010 from web
- Today's post: Economics worldwide is an Anglo-Saxon monopoly. Discuss.http://bit.ly/bka5vP 10:58:41 AM March 18, 2010 from web
- RT @nancymbirdsall A new way to deliver aid to Pakistan? @FP_Magazine (http://bit.ly/8Z7av5) cites #CODAid (http://bit.ly/24cpXR) 10:58:07 AM March 18, 2010 from web
- Modest manifesto on open philanthropy http://bit.ly/a8Prsg via @denniswhittle 11:44:41 AM March 17, 2010 from web
Category Archives: User Feedback, Announcements and Surveys
Invading Canada to debate aid
Bill Easterly is speaking in Toronto tomorrow.
When: Tuesday February 23, 2010, 4pm-6pm
Where: University of Toronto, Hoskin Avenue, Seeley Hall, Trinity College
(He will be largely offline for the next two days while taking part in this peaceful invasion.)
Even more apparently even more not a big fan…
Another post from @transitionland:
Bill Easterly’s cheap, ignorant Afghanistan snark…
Also posted in Aid Policies and Approaches, Grand Plans and Other Delusions
2 Comments
Apparently not a big fan…
Easterly’s pointless echo chamber
Maybe I’m being too harsh on professor Easterly. Wait, no I’m not. He becomes petulant when anyone from a fellow blogger to a large multilateral organization doesn’t immediately respond to his criticisms, yet he often ignores the most knowledgeable and thoughtful of his own critics….
Posted in Aid, Bloggers, Blogging, Development, Stupidity
February 21, 2010 at 5:06 pm
Written by transitionland
Also posted in Arguments, Logic and Use of Evidence, Human Rights and Wrongs
9 Comments
NYU’s Development Research Institute (including Aid Watch) receives 2009 BBVA Development Cooperation Award
Excerpts from the BBVA Foundation press release issued today:
January 29, 2010 – The awardof €400,000 goes to the Development Research Institute (DRI) for “its contribution to the analysis of foreign aid provision, and its challenge to the conventional wisdom in development assistance,” in the words of the jury’s citation.
The DRI has brought a fresh approach to aid and development research, helping ensure that the economic aid rich countries provide to the developing…
Also posted in Uncategorized
11 Comments
The best and worst in aid from the past year is…what our readers say it is
Dear Aid Watchers,
A year ago this month we launched this blog as one small contribution to the effort to make aid more accountable. Our ambition: to add to the growing chorus of voices demanding that our development assistance money be spent according to what we know about best practices in aid so that it might actually reach the poor. And to provide a forum for aid professionals, academics, students, and citizens to talk openly…
Bill Goes to Africa
Hello, aid watchers.
I am Africa-bound and will go off the Internet for the next 2 weeks (out of choice, not technological constraints). Laura will be running the blog in my absence. When I come back I will tell you about any experiences of interest.
Maybe when I come back I will also wearily comment on the latest aid-and-growth regression paper, the 1 millionth attempt to resolve the relationship in a cross-country growth…
Welcome to the new Aid Watch blog
As you can see, we’ve redesigned the blog and moved to a new location. The content is the same, but we hope the new format and design will make Aid Watch easier to find, nicer to look at, and more intuitive to navigate.
Please update your bookmarks and links with our new url: http://aidwatchers.com/. If you subscribe to the blog using an RSS feed, you’ll want to update the subscription as well: http://aidwatchers.com/feed/.
You might also want to take a look at the new Development Research Institute website, which has more information about who we are, our publications, details about occasional events and conferences, and a growing list of resources.
p.s. The images in our older posts aren’t loading right now. We’ll have this fixed in a day or two.
My own market experiment: where I am IN or OUT
Last week, some people wanted to meet up with me at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting in New York. I was a little embarrassed to tell them I was not invited to CGI, and in fact have never been invited to CGI. Actually, there is a long list of distinguished groups wise enough to have never invited me to anything.
I think each of us who makes some kind of public comment on anything…
How it helps NGOs to treat them as selfish
Let me respond to one major strand of comments on my recent post, Are we allowed to talk about the self-interest of NGO officials?
Is it just too cynical to talk about NGO self-interest? Among the kinder comments received were that I don’t “trust anything or anyone not explicitly out to make as much money as possible.” Or that yours truly “says that no one is straightforward about their motives, so I wonder…
Survey Results Are In: A Dialogue with Our Supporters and Critics
Our Sally Field moment: (Most of) you (mostly) like us!
83 percent of you gave us a 5 (26 percent) or 4 (57 percent) out of 5 overall. About 15 percent of you gave us an “eh, you’re all right,” 2 percent of you gave us a 2 out of 5, and one person gave us a 1 (you really hate us!) Also on the plus side, three-quarters describe the blog as both “informative,” and…



