Congratulations! You have discovered the hidden section in which I have decided to withhold any embarassingly impudent self-descriptions bar one exception; I lick feet.
Here's the questioning box.
Here's the questioning box.
Since Professor William Easterly is now actively posting to a new Tumblr blog, I thought it would be fun to link to a book review by Nick Kristof of Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (and several other aid-related books that came out around the same time, back in 2006).
Maybe my favorite quote from Easterly’s book:
It seems strange that bureaucrats and politicians would focus on the input—total aid dollars spent. The Hollywood producers of Catwoman, which won an award for being the worst movie of 2004, would not dare to argue with moviegoers that the movie wasn’t so bad because they had spent $100 million on making it. We can understand the emphasis on aid volume only as reflecting the pathology that in aid, the rich people who pay for the tickets are not the ones who see the movie.
If you haven’t read anything by Easterly and didn’t read his former blog, Aid Watch, I recommend picking up a book of his or perusing the archives of the blog. And, of course, you might follow his Tumblr blog. As Kristof rightly notes, “Easterly and a few other authors are shaking up the aid establishment and making us all think about what works and what does not. That’s painful, but also essential.” This isn’t an argument for doing away with aid; it’s an argument for aid that works.
