Best LEED for developing countries

Word goes that Portugal is likely to soon join the category of developing countries (as you might have heard). However, before you start sobbing, consider this: not all is doom. In fact, this could well be heaven for economists working with the famous Quadros de Pessoal longitudinal "linked employer-employee data" (LEED), and, eventually-- as I will try to convince you-- it would materialize in tremendous success in improving the state of the whole world. Bear with me.

Firstly, these researchers working with Portuguese LEED would then be able to sell their papers also as research in development economics (I am already working on convincing my co-author Miguel to place "economic development" as keyword in our couple of projects using that data). And you tell me if any other developing country can come up with data that beats Quadros de Pessoal! More importantly, just imagine not having to worry any longer about sample sizes, representative samples, non-response, measurement errors-- issues that typically plague development economics research; imagine how much more could be uncovered about the economies of developing countries, imagine the giant leap in the research progress on development, imagine finding solutions to all developing world problems, imagine all the virtuous circle! Isn't Portugal's sacrifice then just a very kind gesture to humankind?

-Inspired by Tiago, the most enterprising  Econ PhD student at Northwestern-

Sunday night econlinks

• Good, Gelman is even more pissed off with Greenspun's to-a-large-extent-nonsense than I was: 9th bullet point.

• The culture of Old Europe (aka, new European Union...), via Gabi Istrate; I've also promised him I would carefully look at/comment on this: the promise is still there, the time-- not yet... :-).

• I am very curious how big this can/will get. After all, a whole Nobel might be at stake (I confess: I never really liked Gore, on any dimension; I still think he is submediocre or worse; however, I thought/still think that some of the climate guys/gals who won within the IPCC were more than decent...). This is not so much about scepticism (of any kind/degree), but first and foremost about scientific honesty. Seemingly a very rare quality today.

• The current world chess champ was in Romania some days ago, but nobody within the national mass media seems to have noticed. Of course not, they are all busy with one of the most pathetic presidential elections ever; they always manage to keep themselves busy with the least important things.

• The battle of the IT giants takes every possible form. In case you're wondering whom I am putting my money on, here's something to help you; these guys seem to know what's important for tomorrow: a small step in that direction with a (preliminary version of) automatic captioning for YouTube .

• I guess I am not in such of an intimate relationship with Tokyo after all (despite this...), since I didn't manage to meet any of the city's "groundbreakers" (though ok, fine, between me and you only: the truth is that I've been playing hard to get with Tao Okamoto)

• Only reinforces one point Easterly (and a minority of others) has been stressing all the time; this is how development should be done: help them to help themselves.

• The underrated Economist: A.C. Pigou.

• The research agenda of some of my LMDG colleagues: enter Rasmus Lentz and co-authors.

• "[s]urely the biggest police action we have ever had in Danish history" or one of the rare occasions when I am glad that I am not closer to Copenhagen...

Easterly on Randomized Evaluation

By far the best read of the current week (as yet, but looks incredibly difficult to surpass this):

Here’s an imagined dialogue between the two sides on Randomized Evaluation (RE) based on this book:

FOR: Amazing RE power lets us identify causal effect of project treatment on the treated.
AGAINST: Congrats on finding the effect on a few hundred people under particular circumstances, too bad it doesn’t apply anywhere else.
FOR: No problem, we can replicate RE to make sure effect applies elsewhere.
AGAINST: Like that’s going to happen. Since when is there any academic incentive to replicate already published results? And how do you ever know when you have enough replications of the right kind? You can’t EVER make a generic “X works” statement for any development intervention X. Why don’t you try some theory about why things work?
FOR: We are now moving in the direction of using RE to test theory about why people behave the way they do.
AGAINST: I think we might be converging on that one. But your advertising has not yet got the message, like the JPAL ad on “best buys on the Millennium Development Goals.”
FOR: Well, at least it’s better than your crappy macro regressions that never resolve what causes what, and where even the correlations are suspect because of data mining.
AGAINST: OK, you drew some blood with that one. But you are not so holy on data mining either, because you can pick and choose after the research is finished whatever sub-samples give you results, and there is also publication bias that shows positive results but not zero results.
FOR: OK we admit we shouldn’t do that, and we should enter all REs into a registry including those with no results.
AGAINST: Good luck with that. By the way, even if do you show something “works,” is that enough to get it adopted by politicians and implemented by bureaucrats?
FOR: But voters will want to support politicians who do things that work based on rigorous evidence.
AGAINST: Now you seem naïve about voters as well as politicians. Please be clear: do RE-guided economists know something the local people do not know, or do they have different values on what is good for them? What about tacit knowledge that cannot be tested by RE? Why has RE hardly ever been used for policymaking in developed countries?
FOR: You can take as many potshots as you want, at the end we are producing solid evidence that convinces many people involved in aid.
AGAINST: Well, at least we agree on the on the much larger question of what is not respectable evidence, namely, most of what is currently relied on in development policy discussions. Compared to the evidence-free majority, what unites us is larger than what divides us.

Looks like Easterly's has very high chances to become the top blog among my econblogs (at least according to how often I dedicate entire blogposts just to cite his posts, e.g. here or here, or a WSJ article here). Not bad, not bad at all: I do have pretty high standards, as all of you should have noticed! :-).

PS. See also an earlier entry on the topic (featuring again some of the heavyweights in this realm): 4th bullet point.

On U2's poverty of music trap

“We will be lending African musicians to U2 to try to refurbish their sound to satisfy the urgent and growing needs for diversionary entertainment at a time of crisis in the global music and financial sectors.”

Easterly rocks (given Bono is too busy fighting poverty)

Weekend econlinks

• Acemoglu on how nations can get rich: "Fix incentives and you will fix poverty. And if you wish to fix institutions, you have to fix governments"

• Blogossary. With some definitions completely redundant.

• Carlsen is finally right where he should be. For now in Blitz.

• Diploma mills and degree mills. Romania has plenty, Denmark at least one very famous case (though Wikipedia is too slow for that).

• Caballero on sudden financial arrest. I don't agree with everything: the moral hazard is not merely fuzzy reasoning in the context.

• What's up with all the vampire hype: Tyler Cowen's answers. If you want the perspective of a vampire on why vampires are popular, you can meet me in private.

• "If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot." And many other smart thoughts from Umberto Eco (Part 1, Part 2).

• The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research: it exists (and seemingly functions well). Reminds me that I still have to read Edward Castronova's "Synthetic Worlds"...

• Undercover Michelin inspector. Clearly not such a flashy job as Anton Ego's, but if they were to consider hiring part-time, amateur (willing to heavily train on-the-job, though) food inspectors, I would be very interested... :-)

• Very little time left for you to trade Romanian Potential President stock. You have to act NOW! :-)

Econlinks

• Endless Summers (via Mankiw). Supercilious he might well be, but some of us still find him absolutely fascinating-- I think I am (in the process of) understanding why :-). Earlier (first bullet point).

• On the poetic prehistory of development economics: a very interesting post by Adam Martin on Easterly's Aid Watchers blog.

• They cannot be blamed for defending/arguing what's in their best interest (click on the British flag in the upper right corner to get to the article in English, if you do not see it immediately through the link above); however, in my opinion, their general case is overstated: most of the translation services as hitherto understood are redundant. There is still a case (and a premium) for translation services from/to Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese & the like, but certainly not for European to European languages, and certainly not in countries from Scandinavia or Benelux...

• Top 100 best films of the decade (?). To be honest, I have seen to date only one film from their top 10. But I did see quite a few from the range 10-20 and, if this hierarchy makes any sense, I ought to definitely see anything that beats the movies at positions 16, 20 or 21, which are all in my very own all-time top 26. Quite impressive is also that Romanian director Cristi Mungiu's film "4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile" is number 14 in this ranking (this movie is in my priority to-see list). See also my earlier entry on The December Children.

• Market-design presentations at a conference in honour of Paul Milgrom, by some of the world's best researchers in this field (via Al Roth on Market Design)



• Did you forget about the Romanian '09 Presidential Election Prediction Markets?! Participate: it's fun!

Mating, development aid, and the econometrics of it all

I recently helped one of my single male graduate students in his search for a spouse.

First, I suggested he conduct a randomized controlled trial of potential mates to identify the one with the best benefit/cost ratio. Unfortunately, all the women randomly selected for the study refused assignment to either the treatment or control groups, using language that does not usually enter academic discourse.

With the “gold standard” methods unavailable, I next recommended an econometric regression approach. He looked for data on a large sample of married women on various inputs (intelligence, beauty, education, family background, did they take a bath every day), as well as on output: marital happiness. Then he ran an econometric regression of output on inputs. Finally, he gathered data on available single women on all the characteristics in the econometric study. He made an out-of-sample prediction of predicted marital happiness. He visited the lucky woman who had the best predicted value in the entire singles sample, explained to her how he calculated her nuptial fitness, and suggested they get married. She called the police.

Continue reading this brief masterpiece by Bill Easterly.

(Many) Econlinks for the Weekend

• A nice, brief VoxEU note of Willem Buiter on negative nominal interest rates (and their potential desirability). Greg Mankiw also tackled the topic earlier.

• If you're at all into arithmetics (and not only) you might like this concise exposé on very big numbers (think Ackerman series, Busy Beavers and the like if you are dubious about what "very big" stands for in this context...). Inter alia, this reminds me that many many years ago :-), when I was starting highschool, one of my life goals was to prove the Goldbach conjecture. I guess meanwhile I started looking for easier life targets :-).

• We absolutely love Blonde Parades -- though I wouldn't necessarily ask a financial crisis as prerequisite :-).

• Harvard in BIG trouble?...

• Pacepa and the former Romanian car industry (that he does get at all WSJ editorial space I find rather amazing in the first place, that he uses it to give advice to the USA gov on the failed car companies is, well... just fantastic :-)...). Hmm, at least he's got an interesting "style", shifting the entire blame on his former superior(s)... There isn't much Economics in there of course, as he after all admits himself..., but I would have liked at least some more precision in the numbers (and no, "billions" in "The Oltcit project lost billions" is not what I would call a good approximation)

• This is the only bullet point connected to the "pathetic" label of this blogpost. Levitt oddly calls it "reasonably interesting" on Freakonomics (I also do not agree with all Levitt's further opinions on the apparent "macro problem", but well, I guess he is well versed in Macroeconomics to know it better :-)), but I find this Guardian editorial "interesting" only inasmuch it shows the difference in Economics education between the "Economics editor" (sic!) of The Guardian and other Economics editors at, say, WSJ, NYTimes, The Economist, or FT... Inter alia, I wouldn't pretend that everybody understands the work of Bonhomme and Robin forthcoming at the ReStud (or for that matter, any other work in a top 5 research journal within Economics, which perhaps is not aimed to really everybody?), but indeed from an "Economics editor" we would perhaps expect a little bit more that the appraisal "divorced from reality" (merely from reading the abstract and nothing further in the text, since else our author would have found plenty of "reality"...). But Economics à la The Guardian it is, now you know what to read :-).

• Who's a bigger villain for Development: Mugabe or Anopheles/ Sachs or Easterly...? I guess you ought to know by now what I think in this mater, but that should not stop you from making your own opinion :-).

• In a rather vague Reuters article Romania comes 3rd in a top of "new wine regions". A pity they do not mention any Romanian wine de facto in that top, since the variance in the quality of all wines produced in the above mentioned regions is... well, infinite.

• Interesting facts & thoughts by Dan Hamermesh on (incentive...) bonuses for papers with multiple co-authors. Should they be designed as function of 1/N or 1/SquareRoot(N), where N the number of co-authors etc.? Perhaps we should also know what other disciplines do, if anything, in this regard, in Economics indeed there seems to be a (very surprising) heterogeneity of such practices among various Departments/Institutes.

• It might be the first time ever..., but yes, the Historian won against the Economist (my good old friend Daniel, Harvard trained Historian of Science too, will surely be very pleased to hear this:-) ). I would never allow Paul Krugman in such competitions again, this is bad for the whole Econ field :-). The good thing though is that the Historian won with (the true) Economics arguments :-).

• Average citation rates by field (through Ad Astra). One trend not emphasized in the article's discussion following the table is that in some fields the citation impact is very low on the short run (1-3 years), but increases much faster over the the longer run (8-10 years). This is why for instance Economics gets a higher average citation impact than Mathematics or Computer Science overall, though in the short run (eg, the two years span that the Thomson ISI citation ranks are typically constructed on) is equally "de-cited". Consider switching to Molecular Biology if you're after citations :-).

Sunday night econlinks

• Reviewing the reviewers, with cross-disciplinary insights. Who would have thought that Economics is somewhat like History? :-). Thanks to Daniel for the link!

• The Prisoner's Dilemma in practice or 'Who's got the Golden Balls'? :-). Greg Mankiw already decided to use it for his econ classes :-).

• The Economic Journal announces two interesting changes in terms of its submission/refereeing process, aiming at speeding up and raising the bar in the peer review process: i) Referees will not be individually paid anylonger, but the 10 best referees every year will each get a 500 pound prize. ii) In terms of submission process, submission of editorial letters and previous referee reports at other journals is encouraged. Read the whole letter. I think that whether i) works in speeding and improving the refereeing process is really an empirical quest, but ii) should be clearly adopted formally also by other journals.

• Definitely a necessary debate within the structural vs. reduced-model economics context. I think/hope that this was just the warming up stage :-). Some extremely interesting contributions so far, all from top names in the Econ field: i) Marschak's Maxim nowadays; ii) Instruments of Development; iii) Better LATE than nothing. Not entirely on the same frequence, but somewhat of a prelude--third bullet point and earlier links therein.

• Bill Easterly's secret to succesful aid.

• We know quite a bit about the bad ones by now, e.g. from everyday's news... So time to hear more about the good pirates. (There should be of course no question about the best pirates ).

Sunday morning econlinks

• Incentives and globalization, a brief but very interesting interview with Luis Garicano. Topics tackled here are CEOs, football, and...everything else.

• Geography of the recession in the USA. Thanks to Fred for the link!

• 'Wall Street on the Tundra': Iceland anno 2009 or... high time for the rise of the Icelandic women leaders... More. This has a higher likelihood than the 'Lehman Sisters', though I would strongly support the US (and a global, why not) version too (10th bullet point).

• The benefits of (financial) inactivity? Call it patience, though: nothing but the eternal "con calma", I'd say. BTW, I would have never thought Roubini to be that high on equity :-).

• Andrew Gelman & Hal Stern with a nice short paper on differences between statistically significant and statistically non-significant results that are themselves not significant... You can find zillions of examples in published Economics papers, as well. And I do plead guilty to not having paid enough attention to this, myself...

• God will listen to you for the next 6 months... at least here in Holland. The offer does not include answering, though :-).

• The African branding problem, very well explained by June Arunga, linked video on Bill Easterly's blog. And, connected, somebody else who should clearly feature on the same blog...

• Finally, for those of us who have non-convex desires, you might also consider the girl's marginal benefits (the lyrics) :-). The latter is also my proposed song of the day. All together now, accompanying Mike Toomey and Julia Zhang (excellent stuff, ad majora!): "Cause girl your marginal benefits far outweigh your marginal costs/ Without our equilibrium baby well you know I'd be lost/ Trapped inside this market I need you to buy my love/ Girl without your complementing goods well I'm just not enough"

Sunday evening econlinks

• A WSJ article by Reinhart and Rogoff, on what past crises around the world might teach us for the current crisis. It really ain't lookin' that good... I have obviously attended Ken Rogoff's presentation of this research at the recent ASSA in San Francisco.

• Excellent point of Bill Easterly on the use of 'trump cards' instead of logic, common sense and evidence; it does apply way beyond the context here.

• Super interesting Science overview on the origins of art and symbolism (individual or institution subscription to Science required)

• Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog. Bacon explosion!

• Great US city match-maker. When one for European cities?

• "Whatever you do, somebody in psychometrics already did it long before", the longstanding principle in statistics. We love it!

• Don't know what's going on with Posner, but this really is something I can only imagine someone trained in Economics write while drunk... I am referring obviously to his suggestion of regulating charitable giving abroad; this is not Economics anylonger... Caveat lector: Becker's post on the same theme, on the other hand, is very sound; I really doubt Becker would support Posner's suggestion above.

(Many) Econlinks

• Brief but pertinent thoughts of Ricardo Caballero on the (real) causes and solutions to the current financial crisis.

• Language politicization in Central and Eastern Europe (via Andrew Gelman)

• Bill Easterly (and colleagues) have just started a very promising blog, Aid Watch. And talking about Development Economics, check out a very flattering portrait of one of its (if not the) young stars.

• Mr. Inflation goes public again (he featured on this blog before). Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, on MR.

• Dan Hamermesh ask the $64000 question: who changes the kissing rules? NB: having lived for quite a while in The Netherlands (and there again for two months, in a week!), I count myself one of the non-Dutch experts in three-cheek kissing :-).

• Not sure I immediately agree with Alex Tabarrok; some people believe the Nobel in Economics should be given only every 4 years... The John Bates Clark medal was fine somewhere in between, every two years. Will the Yrjö Jahnsson- EEA award also change to annual rather than biennial frequency?...

• I've only found out about this recently, via Tyler Cowen on MR. It should answer many of Jim Heckman's detractors. Obviously, as a student of Jim Heckman in that Oxford summer course of 2005 that he mentions (organized by David Hendry and Bent Nielsen, at Nuffield College), I could be biased (inter alia, that course was one of the best short courses I ever took; moreover, I guess I also publicly declared that I am a Heckman fan-- in Romanian). But in any case I think the material Heckman posted on his site for everybody's perusal ought to be clarifying enough, for everybody...

• Ranking The Beatles' songs (again via the cool guys at MR, who else?). This looks (at least goal-wise) a similar endeavour to the project (also very controversial... and heavily criticized...) of David Galenson, mentioned a while ago on this blog. Would just add that I definitely agree with number 1 being Number 1 in this Beatles song top, ie. the beyond-brilliant "A Day in the Life", but I would also clearly place "Strawberry Fields Forever" second... and I would further interchange quite a few positions in top 30... and quite a lot of positions further down... So much for the "consensus of taste" :-).

Econlinks

• "First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go": a historical perspective on the market, starting with the Great Crash

• What would Milton Friedman say about the current financial crisis? And he wouldn't be wrong.

• Here's an excellent answer if you ever wondered why people are interested in finding prime numbers with tens of millions of digits. And a nice exposition of the Lucas-Lehmer test for Mersenne primes by Terry Tao, to whom I owe also the previous link.

• "If Krugman were not too valuable to the profession for his own work, we should appoint him to a permanent position as the translator of economics journals into English." This is from Avinash Dixit's appraisal of Paul Krugman's work many years ago, when Krugman won the John Bates Clark medal. Very actual also as motivation for Krugman's winning the Nobel this year. And here's somebody who has actually bet on Krugman winning in 2008.

• Bill Easterly excellent on the dangers of developping countries learning the wrong lessons from this crisis.

Econlinks today

• Esther Duflo on a topic that deserves much more attention among policy makers: the need to insure the very poor against food price variability

• Here's the most ridiculous thing I've heard so far, within the academic publishing business: deliberately slowing things down by sitting a whole month on each submission before doing anything with it. Via Andrew Gelman. Something like this might well be practiced by more journals and in many fields ( and surely I am thinking mostly about my own field here...) than currently known: could explain a substantial part of (complementing the fact that referees are not easy to find and they might be slow themselves, see also here) the often exaggerated times before one gets back referee reports etc. I think it just shows the incapacity of those editors to function as editors, if that is the case. And obviously excessive crowding/queueing can be solved in this context, similar to many other contexts involving congestion, by raising submission fees (despite the apparent objection of some people, which Gelman also mentions, that people don't have the money for it-- give me a break, I'd say: if you are indeed such an underpaid academic, probably you can't produce the quality required for that top journal anyway; and for universities in places that really run low on budgets and remuneration in general, like Africa, Eastern Europe etc., some reduction or waiver could be in place).

• "Econometrics: qu'est-ce que c'est?" or econometrics as taught at University of Michigan (where also other Econ professors seem to be very talented inasmuch as music is concerned) :-). I think many economics/ econometrics professors elsewhere could learn something from this-- it isn't for nothing that most students consider econometrics courses the most boring courses they (have to) take... Here's the academic website of the excellent performer above, in case anyone wants to contact him for advice in teaching.

• Discussion on the merits of (further/ re-) regulating financial markets: Becker and respectively, Posner. I believe Posner is for some reason becoming too skeptical of the powers of the free market, so I'll strongly recommend only Becker's analysis this time :-).

• Collected advice for young economists (via Tyler Cowen on MR), from senior economists. I have read all of these pieces before (though, unfortunately, haven't always followed the advice in there...), but it is excellent to have them in one place.

Governance and Growth

...in 4 short essays that sum up the knowns and the unknows. Among other top researchers in the field, these essays contain the opinions of Daron Acemoglu, Francis Fukuyama and Douglas North.

Econlinks for 28-02-'08

• A very nice article about GMU's Econ department. I love for instance the following bit, despite its capitalizing on stereotypes (but we love those sometimes :-)); so here's Arnold Kling: My simple way of describing it is that at Chicago they say, ‘Markets work; let’s use markets.’ At Harvard and MIT they say, ‘Markets fail; let’s use government.’ And at George Mason, we say, ‘Markets fail; let’s use markets.’”

• Barack Obama might be very good at writing books (see here my assessment of his most popular book); however, he fares pretty poorly so far, in his economics policies. Here's one of his worst ideas, for instance, rightly and well criticized on VoxEU. It is rather amazing that with some top economists as his advisors, Obama can actually support an economic proposal that is "reactionary, populist, xenophobic and just plain silly". One can only hope that Obama does all this nonsense economic campaigning for popular votes and he'd eventually get back to his senses if elected President... But could he deliver as President, as The Economist and probably most of us would like to know...?

• An excellent interview with Kip Viscusi, the specialist on individuals' assessment of risk, compensation policies for safety and health hazards, and so forth.

• Since I've been reading The Bottom Billion, by Paul Collier, here's Easterly's review of it, published October last year in the Lancet. Haven't yet finished the book, but so far I tend to agree with Bill Easterly (hmm, seems I often agree with Easterly, here's another recent instance). I saw of course Easterly, Collier, Acemoglu and Duflo (and George Soros, by videophone) debating in the panel discussion on development in Budapest, at the EEA 2007; also there Easterly's speech came forth as clearer (and better!) than Collier's (with Acemoglu and Duflo diplomatically not taking clear sides :-)). Soros was eventually better than I had expected, but promoting Collier's book somewhat too much :-).

Econlinks for 07-11-'07

• "Cheap talk" incentives for better grades. You never know, it might actually work; let's see if Bloomberg actually implements this.

• Ed Glaeser with a very interesting piece on gender differences in aggresiveness and policy ideas. And yes, as things currently stand, Greg Mankiw might be very right that Glaeser just said goodbye forever to the Harvard Presidential chair :-).

• Surprinsingly, by the slimmest of margins, I am not a quant... (thanks to Greg Mankiw for the pointer)

• Colbert dropped his bid for the White House (though he only announced it some days ago): "Although I lost by the slimmest margin in presidential election history — only 10 votes — I have chosen not to put the country through another agonizing Supreme Court battle[...] It is time for this nation to heal" ; nevertheless, he claims it is not over :-)

• Heel goed, Wendy (interview on YouTube, in Dutch)! My friend and former Tinbergen Institute colleague Wendy Janssens is very briefly describing the research undertaken in her PhD thesis (with focus here on the importance of social capital in a development program from India). The latest prize her thesis won is the "Societal Impact Award" for 2007 (this after she won already the Amsterdam Institute for International Development/World Bank dissertation award) . Gefeliceteerd en ad majora!

10 out of 10 for Easterly's "Africa's Poverty Trap"

This is the best short econ article I've read in the last couple of days: "Africa's Poverty Trap", by William Easterly, published in the WSJ on March 23rd (yeah, I'm reading things with a time lag...). Since you need a subscription to read the article directly on the WSJ site, here's a PDF version on Easterly's site. Some representative excerpts:

"There is a sad law I have noticed in my economics career: the poorer the country, the poorer the economic analysis applied to it. "

"There has been progress in many areas over the last 50 years -- ... yet the same poor economics on sale to Ghana in 1957 are still there today. Economists involved in Africa then and now undervalued free markets, instead coming up with one of the worst ideas ever: state direction by the states least able to direct. "

"Despite these reality checks, blockbuster reports over the last two years by the U.N. Millennium Project (led by Jeffrey Sachs), Mr. Sachs again in his book "The End of Poverty," the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), the Tony Blair Commission for Africa, and the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) have all reached what the UNDP called "a consensus on development": Today Africa needs another Big Push. Do they really think nobody is paying attention? "

"Africa's poverty trap is well covered in the media, since it features such economists as Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Bono and Brad Pitt. But even Bill Gates ... expressed indifference to Africa's stagnant GDP, since "you can't eat GDP." Mr. Gates apparently missed the economics class that listed the components of GDP, such as food. "

with a great 'grand finale':

"The free market is no overnight panacea; it is just the gradual engine that ends poverty. African entrepreneurs have shown what they are capable of. They have, for example, launched the world's fastest growing cell phone industry to replace the moribund state landlines. What a tragedy, therefore, that aid agencies have foisted the poorest economics in the world on the poorest people in the world for 50 years. The hopeful sign is that many independent Africans themselves are increasingly learning the economics of how to get rich, rather than of how to stay poor." [my emphasis in bold]

PS1. I wrote a bit about my excellent impression of Easterly's recent book a while ago. I had also read his earlier book and thought it was simply great! If you want to read competent development economics forget about anything else and read Easterly's books and articles.

PS2. I have a deep appreciation (for some of them, superlative!) for artists like Jolie, Pitt, Madonna, Bonno, or for business (and not only) guru's like Gates. I just don't think their competitive advantage is in economic reasoning or rather (not to speculate too much :-)), not always (certainly not when, in a trully amazing 'irrational exuberance', they all believe they can save the world with one- more- big push and thus rally around Jeff Sachs, an economist who's been rather busy lately with increasing his 'popularity' among non-economists, rather than making sure he gets credit among his fellow economists first, they being the only ones who have the expertise to verify his economics advices...).