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ARTICLE: A firewall should be built between USAID the defence department

21 Nov

Professor Easterly writes for the Guardian Poverty Matters blog on November 21, 2011:

US foreign aid programmes should be for poverty relief and should not be taken over by national security interests, abetted by delusions of nation-building.

As the US government budget wars continue, everyone agrees that among the most vulnerable programmes is foreign aid. What is now forgotten is that foreign aid enjoyed strong bipartisan support until quite recently. On 16 March 2002, President George W Bush announced large funding increases for aid, which have indeed been realised across two administrations since. Even former opponents such as Jesse Helms became aid boosters. What happened to destroy that support?

The answer is that the US aid programme was taken over by national security interests, abetted by delusions of nation-building. The US Agency for International Development (USAid) wound up in the most self-destructive position – the unsuccessful cover-up. USAid arguably had little choice, but development intellectuals and celebrity aid advocates did have a choice – and most chose to stay inexcusably silent during the national security takeover of aid. The resultant failures overshadowed notable successes in more traditional aid programmes like health. These disasters and the neglect of more feasible poverty relief failed to sustain the compassionate constituency evident earlier in the decade. Aid can still be saved politically if it now forswears the undoable nation-building dictated by the defence department, and returns to its original mission of poverty relief – a mission both cheaper and more likely to succeed.

Read the full article on the Guardian website.

BOOK REVIEW: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

5 Nov


Professor Easterly reviews Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow for the Financial Times:

There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Kahneman, a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, distils a lifetime of research into an encyclopedic coverage of both the surprising miracles and the equally surprising mistakes of our conscious and unconscious thinking. He achieves an even greater miracle by weaving his insights into an engaging narrative that is compulsively readable from beginning to end. My main problem in doing this review was preventing family members and friends from stealing my copy of the book to read it for themselves.

Kahneman presents our thinking process as consisting of two systems. System 1 (Thinking Fast) is unconscious, intuitive and effort-free. System 2 (Thinking Slow) is conscious, uses deductive reasoning and is an awful lot of work. System 2 likes to think it is in charge but it’s really the irrepressible System 1 that runs the show. There is simply too much going on in our lives for System 2 to analyse everything. System 2 has to pick its moments with care; it is “lazy” out of necessity.

Read more on the Financial Times website.

PUBLICATIONS: Rhetoric vs. Reality: The Best and Worst of Aid Agency Practices

27 Oct

By William Easterly and Claudia Williamson
World Development, Vol. 39, No. 11, pp. 1930-1949
October 2011

Foreign aid critics, supporters, recipients, and donors have produced eloquent rhetoric on the need for better aid practices—has this translated into reality? This paper attempts to monitor the best and worst of aid practices among bilateral, multilateral, and UN agencies. We create aid practice measures based on aid transparency, specialization, selectivity, ineffective aid channels, and overhead costs. We rate donor agencies from best to worst on aid practices. We find that the UK does well among bilateral agencies, the US is below average, and Scandinavian donors do surprisingly poorly. The biggest difference is between the UN agencies, who mostly rank in the bottom half of donors, and everyone else. Average performance of all agencies on transparency, fragmentation, and selectivity is still very poor. The paper also assesses trends in best practices over time—we find modest improvement in transparency and more in moving away from ineffective channels. However, we find no evidence of improvements (and partial evidence of worsening) in specialization, fragmentation, and selectivity, despite escalating rhetoric to the contrary.

Download the paper

Download the accompanying dataset

UPDATE: The AidSpeak Dictionary

19 Sep

By William Easterly

This is a sampling of actual posts on Twitter that I requested (@bill_easterly) last weekend for “decodings of aid/development jargon” .  Inspiration was from 40 Publishing Buzzwords, Clichés and Euphemisms Decoded. I don’t necessarily endorse any implied viewpoint, if any.

“beneficiaries” : the people who make it possible for us to be paid by other people @monanicoara

“bottom-up” : don’t ask someone what might work, just make something up instead @thejoeturner

“baseline” : a point which is so low that positive results are the only possible outcome @ANLevine

“accountability for results”: we keep all our promises by  issuing new promises @bill_easterly

“bottoms-up development”: downing single-malt whiskey in one shot at Davos @Arvind11d123

“civil society involvement”: consulting the middle class employee of aUS or European NGO @dangay

 “community capacity building” : teach them what they already know @fauvevivre

“demand-driven approach”: you create the demand and then you respond to it

“empowerment” : what is left when all the quantifiable variables give non significant results @MarianaSarastiM

“entrepreneurial” : vaguely innovative and cool, but definitely nothing to do with the hated “market” @jselanikio

“experienced aid practitioner” : has large number of air miles in account @thejoeturner

“expert” : I read a book about the place on the plane @savo_heleta

“field experience” :  I can’t bear DC anymore @MarianaSarastiM

“gender” : counting how many women attend your meeting @liamswiss

“Global North” : White academics; “Global South” : Indian academics  @Isla_Misty

“innovation” : we’re sexy, you want to be associated with us @DarajaTz

“leverage” : we’re not paying for all of this @katelmax

“low overhead” : volunteers run headquarters @thejoeturner

“low-hanging fruit”:  we were already going to achieve this anyway @Global_ErinH

“mainstreaming” : forgetting @swampcottage

“microfinance” : not as good as sub-prime lending @lippytak

“meetings” : our grant said we had to host an event @Global_ErinH

“per diem”: what we have to pay local officials to attend our meetings @Afrophile

“participatory stakeholders” : people who should solve their own problems @UCGHR

“participation” : the right to agree with preconceived projects or programs @edwardrcarr

“partnering with other institutions” : we’re raising barriers to entry @JustinWolfers

“political will” :  I have no comprehension of the incentives faced by the people who I wish would do stuff I want @m_clem

“practical solutions” : photogenic solutions @thejoeturner

“pro-poor” : the rich know best @james_tooley

“RCT” : research method yielding same results as qualitative work at 10 times the cost –@texasinafrica

“rent-seaking behavior” : everything not nailed to the floor will be stolen- @charcoalproject

“outreach” : intrude @langtry_girl

“ownership” : we held a workshop @dangay

“raise awareness” :  no measurable outcome @jonathan_welle

“scale-up” :  It’s time for follow on grant @HunterHustus

“sensitize” : tell people what to do @zw1tscher

“sustainable” : will last at least as long as the funding @thejoeturner

“tackling root causes of poverty” : repackaging what we’ve already done in a slightly more sexy font @thejoeturner

“UN Goals”: making up targets for problems we don’t understand paid for with money we don’t have @jacobhorner

Notes: I have done some very minor editing for spelling and clarity. 

ARTICLE: Inception Statistics Revisited

3 Sep

Professor Easterly and Laura Freschi wrote a letter to the Lancet Medical Journal criticizing the methodology in a 193-country study on stillbirths, in which researchers could obtain actual data on stillbirths from only 33 countries and twice modeled the stillbirth estimates for the other countries:

Many will argue that modelled numbers (or in this case, twicemodelled numbers) are better than no numbers at all. To this we ask, better for what, and for whom? We question the wisdom of creating policy based on fi gures with such a tenuous basis in reality. Could the irresponsible lowering of standards on data possibly refl ect an advocacy agenda rather than a scientific agenda, or is it just a coincidence that Save the Children is featured among the authors of the new data?

The correspondence includes a response from the authors of the original study, who argue that “improving data quality and quantity is a high priority but in the meantime modelling is indispensable.”

They previously discussed the issue in an April 2011 post on the Aid Watch blog.

Read More:
>National, regional, and worldwide estimates of stillbirth rates in 2009 with trends since 1995: a systematic analysis (The Lancet, April 14, 2011)
>Inception Statistics (Aid Watch blog, April 18, 2011)
>Correspondence published in the Lancet, with the authors’ reply (September 3, 2011)

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