World according to Blattman

Honoring Stealing from Chris Blattman's great blog, I am reproducing some of his recent posts because they have been unusually fun & good and because I'm just too lazy to write my own blog today. Favorite distorted maps of Africa:

Favorite wordle on which countries are mentioned in Journal of Development Economics shown below.

I'm fascinated by this. One idea that I am investigating in my own research is that success stories are over-sampled, a brilliant thesis for which there is a spectacular lack of confirmation in this wordle (3 out of the Gang of 4 are MIA, what's going on?) One paper already written shows a very strong association between per capita income and being studied by economists, which confirms another favorite personal hypothesis -- the poor get the worst of everything, including the worst economics.