ideas about development
Tim Harford’s new book Adapt is essential reading for anyone interested in how to improve development aid. In this TEDTalk, Tim worries about the prevalence of the ‘God complex’ among politicians, doctors and economists in a world where problems and their solutions are multifaceted and complex. Tim is a big fan of adaptation through variation and selection, trial and error, to find solutions to complex problems. His thesis is that in order to get closer [...] Read more »
Andrew Mitchell’s announcement of a full UK aid transparency guarantee and a new independent watchdog is welcome news. (Audio of speech here.) In this blog, we have argued that recipients need to be able to give better feedback to aid agencies on whether goods and services actually reach the end of the track. Andrew Mitchell’s announcement today addresses another of the information failures – the opacity of aid spending decisions. We often discuss aid in [...] Read more »
Bill Easterly and Jessica Cohen discuss whether we can know what works and why, and have a great discussion on randomised control trials. On January 21, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings hosted a discussion on these fundamental global development questions with the book’s editors. Their discussion focused on the benefits and challenges of both a smaller grassroots development approach and a traditional big-picture development approach, with the goal of achieving a consensus [...] Read more »
TED2010 at Long Beach – innovative ideas from the World’s best minds. A highlight of Day One was Esther Duflo bringing the lessons from Poverty Action Lab and its rigorous impact evaluations to a larger audience – great stuff! The message is powerful. With technology we spend so much time in experimenting to find the best solution, but we don’t do the same in social policy. Why not? Read more »
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