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...
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Archives
Bill Easterly tweets
- Why are they singing pro-Confederacy song "Maryland, my Maryland" at Preakness horse race? about 1 hour 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
Tag Archives: Millennium Villages Project
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.
New York Times on Millennium Villages
Jeffrey Gettleman reports today from Sauri, Kenya on the debate on the Millennium Villages.
Posted in Metrics and evaluation Also tagged Millennium Development Goals, New York Times 19 Comments
Millennium Villages Comments, We Respond
We received the following comment this morning from the Director of Communications at the Earth Institute, regarding the Aid Watch blog published yesterday, Do Millennium Villages Work? We May Never Know. My response is below.
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It’s unfortunate that the author of this post chose to publish such an uninformed blog on the Millennium Village Project’s monitoring and evaluation activities. She and William Easterly at Aid Watch were invited to meet with our…
Posted in Aid policies and approaches, Metrics and evaluation Also tagged Millennium Development Goals Comments Off
Can We Push for Higher Expectations in Evaluation? The Millennium Villages Project, continued
There’s been some good discussion—here in the comments of yesterday’s post and on other blogs—on the Millennium Villages and what sort of evaluation standard they can (realistically) and should (ideally) be held to.
Yesterday on Aid Thoughts, Matt was distressed that over 70 percent of the student body at Carleton University voted in a tuition hike—$6 per student, per year, every year—to fund the Millennium Villages. The students apparently concluded that the MV…
Do Millennium Villages work? We may never know
Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages Project has to date unleashed an array of life-saving interventions in health, education, agriculture, and infrastructure in 80 villages throughout ten African countries.
The goal of this project is nothing less than to “show what success looks like.” With a five-year budget of $120 million, the MVP is billed as a development experiment on a grand scale, a giant pilot project that could revolutionize the way development aid is done.…
Five simple principles for scaling up in aid
There is a lot of discussion in aid on scaling up small-scale successes in aid to reach many more potential beneficiaries. But what things can be scaled up? Here are some principles so simple that they would be embarrassing except that they are routinely violated in aid.
(1) Scale up success not failure
The only reason for mentioning this is that the aid business has a strange habit of trying to scale up again…
Posted in Big ideas, Economics principles 11 Comments
Should starving people be tourist attractions?
Senegalese entrepreneur Magatte Wade on the Huffington Post touched a raw nerve about condescension towards Africans. She noted that a tourism operator was marketing one of Jeff Sachs’ Millennium Villages (MVs) as a vacation destination and quoted from the brochure “Please do not give anything to the villagers — no sweets.”
I decided to look more into the MV tourism project, not to pile on, but because I believe patronizing attitudes towards Africans…