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
- J. on Ghana. 1970.: Uh… which one is you?
- lukas on Ghana. 1970.: young bill easterly?
- 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...
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
- Excellent guess! RT @dutchatharvard was it you? about 13 hours ago from web
- I assume you guys figured out who the white boy was in Ghana 1970 picture?http://bit.ly/dtGz96 about 14 hours ago from bit.ly
- Ghana. 1970. Old Picture. http://bit.ly/dtGz96 (T from last night) about 16 hours 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 19 hours ago from web
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: Uncategorized
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.
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…
Undercover Economist Goes Public for Randomized Controlled Trials
Tim Harford column in today’s FT (VERY strong endorsement of RCTs)
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…
Best in Aid: The Grand Prize
As long as there are disasters, there will always be people who want to help by whatever means first strikes their fancy. There will be those who insist on giving shoes (including such high profile experts as Jessica Simpson and Kim Kardashian). Still others offer used yoga mats, or baby formula. Ports and roads clogged up with shoes and yoga mats cannot deliver essential medicines, food and…
Tagged best and worst, good giving
20 Comments
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…
Tagged Hayek, ideology
44 Comments
Worst in Aid: the Grand Prize
Hillary Clinton recently declared: “We are working to elevate development and integrate it more closely with defense and diplomacy in the field…The three Ds must be mutually reinforcing.”
Clinton says that the 3D approach will elevate development to the level of diplomacy and defense. Unfortunately, it could instead lower development further to an instrument employed to achieve military or political priorities. Clinton foresaw these objections: “There is a concern that integrating development means diluting it or…
Tagged 3Ds, best and worst, military aid
33 Comments
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…
Tagged climate change, sachs
5 Comments
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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