Are you the general to stage a coup at Aid Watch?

The organization behind Aid Watch, NYU’s Development Research Institute, is looking for a dynamic, visionary Executive Director to guide DRI into its next phase. Our ideal candidate will bring capable leadership, an understanding of international economic development issues, and strong fundraising skills based on a proven track record. (Hey, we do need to keep funding our pathetically small budget…)

Please consider this a unique opportunity to work with leading scholars in an organization committed to changing the way the world thinks about aid, economic growth, and development.

Apply yourself, or tell your friends!

Read the complete (more boring-sounding) details here.

If interested, please contact william.easterly@nyu.edu (include in the subject line “Executive Director Job”) and tell us a little about yourself.

A rare glimpse at censorship in action in real time on the Net

I was really pleased recently to get a link to a blog, which from the link description strongly agreed with me on my controversial Lennon vs. Bono piece in the Washington Post, also featured on Aid Watch. I mean really pleased -- my roster of supporters just doubled! I dropped the neighbor’s baby that I was holding and rushed over to my computer to click on the link, waiting with growing excitement as the link slowly loaded, to give me...to give me...finally...and...finally...and...again...finally......

Well, at least, I got an unintended rare glimpse of the world of blog censorship LIVE and in REAL TIME, self-imposed and otherwise. As the to-remain-anonymous anonymous witness-protection-protectee told me in an anonymously wistful anonymous email:

“He's too strong.  He's just too strong.”

Following the money, from DC to Haiti and back again

Out of every $100 of U.S. contracts now paid out to rebuild Haiti, Haitian firms have successfully won $1.60, The Associated Press has found in a review of contracts since the earthquake on Jan. 12. And the largest initial U.S. contractors hired fewer Haitians than planned.

Discouraging news from an AP article out this week. The article tells the story of one 40-year old Haitian construction supply business. Despite playing by the rules and working to establish a reputable business, owner Patrick Brun says he hasn’t won any US government contracts:

“You can imagine that if we can't win the contracts ourselves, we become totally dependent on foreign companies and nonprofits, and there is not much hope in that," he said. "We may not have the extended capacity of a U.S. company, but we are respectable. We keep good books and records, we have foreign suppliers, we have good credit, we pay our taxes and our customs dues.

The piece also quotes Clare Lockhart, of the Institute for State Effectiveness, whom we’ve featured on this blog. Drawing on her experience of missteps in Afghanistan, she argues that contracting with local firms is a vital step in reconstruction:

"You can't just provide manual jobs. You need to contract with companies so that the middle tier managers and owners of companies have a stake in the legal system and rule of law, and ultimately a stake in the success of their political system and their economy," she says.

So why is so little US funding going into the local economy to help build the capacity of local, Haitian businesses, while the overwhelming majority ends up with foreign firms?  Dealing with known contractors theoretically lets USAID act quickly and avoid corruption, as the article points out. But also to blame are outdated procurement practices that fail to encourage USAID to engage local firms.

USAID’s plan for procurement reform, included as part of  its ongoing reform effort “USAID Forward” as well as the whole QDDR fanfare, does acknowledge that in order to “strengthen local civil society and private sector capacity,” it will need to actually contract with more than a handful of local NGOs and businesses. The specific targets USAID has set for itself are not cited in those publicly available documents, but an internal USAID document sent to Aid Watch shows how far the agency has to go:

By FY 2015, USAID will increase its direct grants to local nonprofit organizations from 2.46% to 6% of its program funds and will increase the number of partners from 424 to 1000. By FY 2015, USAID will increase its direct contracts to local private businesses from 0.83% of its program funds to 4% and will increase the number of partners from 322 to 600.

Now, hopefully USAID’s laborious procurement reform process will end up benefitting deserving businesses like Patrick Brun’s, waiting in the wings in Haiti.

Instead of the Iron Curtain, the Facebook Curtain

This map shows the pattern of Facebook friendship links across places around the world, with lots of white where there are very dense links across nearby places. The map was created by a Facebook intern, and I learned about it (where else?) on Facebook (HT Mari Kuraishi).

One interesting pattern is a kind of Facebook Curtain somewhat related to the old Iron Curtain. The whole area including the former Soviet Union and China, along with other adjacent autocracies like Burma and North Korea, is pretty much a Facebook void (see zoomed map below). This reflects some combination of language barriers, preference for other social networks in Russia and China, and some (rather unclear) role for Internet censorship by the authorities, which either prevents or lowers the payoff to participating in Facebook.

Substitutability: there is no substitute for learning this wonky concept if you want your project to succeed

The debate we had on the HDI brought up the seemingly drop-dead boring jargon “substitutability.” Surprise! This actually turns out to be a USEFUL concept. Consider two extremes in an everyday example.  For producing the output: “weird music that Bill listens to,” my iPod and my iPhone are perfect substitutes, so one is redundant for this purpose (forget about other purposes for now). For producing this same output, headphones and the iPod are NOT substitutes, they are BOTH required in the proportions: 1 set of headphones for every 1 iPod. So headphones and iPods have zero substitutability.

The exact opposite concept to substitutability is complementarity. Headphones and iPods are perfect complements (you can’t use one unit of either without one unit of the other). At the other extreme, iPods and iPhones have zero complementarity (you CAN use one without the other). This is just a description of technology as it is at the moment, that we might have to take as given (but maybe not, see below).

So why does this matter for, say, aid projects? Aid projects often run into trouble because one of the essential inputs (one of the “complements”) for the desired project output goes missing. So for example, the supply of clean water breaks down because one small part fails on the water pump at the well. None of the other components of the water supply are worth anything as long as the one part of the pump stays broken.

This is a common problem. Indeed, many disasters are caused by the failure of one (sometimes very small) complementary input, like the malfunctioning O-ring that caused the 1986 Challenger Shuttle explosion.{{1}}

Yet the idea of complementary inputs over-predicts the likelihood of disaster – there are so many different parts that could fail, any one of which would be fatal, you would expect MOST Shuttles to fail. Or you would expect a lot more airline disasters than actually happen, since airplanes are subject to the same problem.

So why are more airplanes not falling out of the sky? Airplane designers do not passively accept perfect complements, they add many backup (redundant) systems in case one part fails. In other words, they deal with a complementary (essential) input by creating a perfect substitute for it in case it fails. I follow the same principle when I carry around both my iPod and my iPhone, to avoid the catastrophe in which the battery runs out on one and I can’t listen to my eccentric music.

The lesson for aid projects is to also build in redundancy for the essential complementary inputs. Make sure you have a good backup system of repairmen and spare parts in case the water pump breaks down. This seemingly obvious advice is often not followed–for example in Malawi, between 30 and 40 percent of all waterpoints don’t work.

Oh, and a final word on the HDI debate. Under their old method, UNDP assumed that inputs into the index (like income and life expectancy) were perfect substitutes, so the amount you have of one doesn’t affect the usefulness of the other. This means that even if, say, Zimbabwe has almost no income, it still gets some credit if life expectancy rises.

The new HDI method instead treats these inputs as complements, meaning that a missing input (or an income level very close to zero) would produce the catastrophe of zero overall human development, just as an iPhone with no headphones nets us no music at all.

In our critiques of the HDI, Martin Ravallion, Laura Freschi, and I thought this was way too extreme. People are resourceful enough to “produce” human development even if their income is extremely low, when they will find back-up substitutes for “low material income.”

An important part of development in general is developing systems that provide back-up redundancies for any essential input into production. Development is also the growth of resourcefulness to work around bottlenecks of any one particular scarce input.

And so, class, today’s lesson is: Aid project managers should imitate this resourcefulness. Whenever you get stuck by complements, look for substitutes.

[[1]]In fact, Michael Kremer used this as an analogy for development failures in his classic paper “The O-ring Theory of Economic Development”[[1]]

Aid blog popularity contest; econ heavyweights defend microcredit; threats to aid workers; no to anti-Wikileaks hysteria

Millie, our new celebrity spokesdog

Like the Blattman, we want to remind you of the aid blog popularity contest, on which voting ends tomorrow. Millie (see left) wants you to know that we are announcing this purely as a public service announcement and we would never stoop to any cheap electioneering tricks like appointing a new celebrity spokesdog. In the FT, all the academic development econ (micro) heavyweights line up in a stern defense of microcredit, despite the India troubles.

The NYT joins many others (including us) in worrying that increasing militarization of aid is increasing threats to aid workers.

Two counter-attacks against anti-Wikileaks hyteria by Gideon Rachman in FT (sorry: gated link) and David Rieff in the New Republic.

African export success: finding the needle when you're not sure which haystack

Export success in Africa is a matter of finding a rare Big Hit, with the added complication that it won't stay a hit, and that in a few years you will need a new Big Hit.

This from a new NBER working paper by Ariell Reshef (U. Va.) and myself. We also tell some stories of the individual successes, some of which involve the local government.

The news is not that Africa is different from the rest of the world in this, but that it's the same.

This unstable uncertainty holds regardless of whether you include or exclude oil, minerals, and other export commodities. And so does the concentration of success -- the top-ranked non-commodity export is 23 times larger than the 10th ranked export.

The stereotype of African countries as unchanging mono-exporters based on some unchanging natural endowment just turns out to be...wrong.

Coping with such remarkably high and unstable uncertainty (the "unknown unknowns") as to what will be a hit seems like an a priori case for a lot of decentralized, highly motivated seekers and experimenters. We don't exclude ANY possible government involvement -- at the very least, governments need to be nimble to adjust regulations and infrastructure to support any new success that comes along from private entrepreneurs.

In sum, we think there is just as much a role for entrepreneurs in Africa, and just as little role for centralized and systematic government industrial policy, as in the rest of the world.

Human Development Index Debate Round 2: UNDP, you're still wrong

by Martin Ravallion, Director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank

Francisco Rodriguez has defended the HDI against recent criticisms by Bill Easterly and Laura Freschi, who drew in part on my new paper, “Troubling Tradeoffs in the Human Development Index.”

Francisco would make a good lawyer, since he defends his case vigorously on multiple fronts. But this leaves a puzzle about his true position. On the one hand he claims that tradeoffs—including the implied monetary valuations of extra longevity and schooling—are not relevant to the HDI, and that it is even “incorrect” to calculate them. But (on the other hand) he agrees that the old HDI was deficient because it assumed constant tradeoffs (perfect substitution). If he does not care about the HDI’s tradeoffs then why does he care about how much substitution is built into the index, which is all about its tradeoffs?

The tradeoff built into any composite index is just the ratio of the (marginal) weight on one of its underlying variables (such as longevity in the HDI) to another (such as income). There is nothing “incorrect” in wanting to know the HDI’s weights and implied tradeoffs. These are key properties for understanding and assessing any composite index.

And the implicit weights and tradeoffs in the new HDI are questionable. I find that the HDI’s valuations of longevity in the new HDI vary from an astonishingly low $0.51 for one extra year of life expectancy in Zimbabwe to $8,800 in Qatar. The valuations are lower than for the old HDI, especially in poor countries.

And this striking devaluation of longevity is not just due to the fact that the HDI puts declining marginal weight on income, as Francisco suggests. As my paper shows, the weight on longevity itself has declined due to the change in methodology, and substantially so in poor countries.

Francisco defends the new HDI on the grounds that it allows imperfect substitution between its components. This is a non sequitur. One can introduce imperfect substitution without the questionable features of the new index. Indeed, I showed in my paper that if the HDI had used instead the Chakravarty index—a simple generalization of the old HDI, with a number of appealing properties—it could have relaxed perfect substitution in a less objectionable and more transparent way.

I agree with Francisco that perfect substitutability was a dubious feature of the old HDI, and (as he points out) the index was criticized from the outset for this feature. It is a shame that it took 20 years for the Human Development Report to fix the problem. And it is an even bigger shame that the proposed solution brought with it new concerns.

One such concern is the substantial downward revision to the HDI for many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), which Easterly and Freschi pointed out. Francisco questions their claim, but the data are not on his side. The graph shows the pure effect of the change in the HDI’s aggregation method. (I have held everything else constant, at the same data used by the 2010 HDI.) Switching to the geometric mean involves a sizeable downward revision for countries with low HDIs, and these are disproportionately found in SSA.

This is not to deny that much of SSA is lagging in key dimensions of development, as Francisco notes. The point here is to separate the role played by the questionable new methodology used by the HDI.

Maybe it is time to go back to the drawing board with the HDI. Deeper consideration of what properties the index should have—especially its tradeoffs—would be a good way to start.

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Related posts: The First Law of Development Stats: Whatever our Bizarre Methodology, We make Africa look Worse What the New HDI tells us about Africa Human Development Index Debate Round 2: UNDP, you’re still wrong

Is it OK to do randomized experiments on people? NYC edition

It has long been the standard practice in medical testing: Give drug treatment to one group while another, the control group, goes without. Now, New York City is applying the same methodology to assess one of its programs to prevent homelessness. Half of the test subjects — people who are behind on rent and in danger of being evicted — are being denied assistance from the program for two years, with researchers tracking them to see if they end up homeless.

The city’s Department of Homeless Services said the study was necessary to determine whether the $23 million program, called Homebase, helped the people for whom it was intended. Homebase, begun in 2004, offers job training, counseling services and emergency money to help people stay in their homes.

From Wednesday's New York Times.

It’s interesting to watch the debate over the ethics of randomized control trials arrive at our own shores, and to see New Yorkers up in arms over homeless people being treated “lab rats" or “guinea pigs.”

I understand why these experiments make the public uncomfortable, but to me the important fact is that the organization profiled in this article does not have enough funds to give support to everyone who applies, and also faces future funding cuts (according to the reporter). If this experiment is just a different, more deliberate way of deciding who gets support and who doesn't, AND if we can learn something useful about the effectiveness of different methods for keeping people off the streets, then I don't see it as unethical.

Lennon vs. Bono, Round II (Washington Post version): the death of the celebrity activist

UPDATE III: Blood in the water, sharks circling! (see debate with Daniel Drezner at end of this post) UPDATE II: pasted some email comments below. Gained 1st supporter, victory in sight.

UPDATE: go to the Washington Post full version click below to read lots of comments. The vast majority of commentators disagree with this column. So my attempt to answer the critics who were not convinced by my previous answer to the critics of the previous post was still not convincing. And I will still not back down: give peace a chance.

For those 5 people not totally satiated with this topic, including those of you who want answers to some of the very valid questions and doubts posted as comments on the earlier blog post, I have an article coming out in the Washington Post Outlook section this coming Sunday.  Please read the full version that is already available online, here are some extracts:

Lennon was a rebel. Bono is not.

Lennon's protests against the war in Vietnam so threatened the U.S. government that he was hounded by the FBI, police and even immigration authorities. He was a moral crusader who challenged leaders whom he thought were doing wrong. Bono, by contrast, has become a sort of celebrity policy expert, supporting specific technical solutions to global poverty. He does not challenge power but rather embraces it; he is more likely to appear in photo ops with international political leaders - or to travel through Africa with a Treasury secretary - than he is to call them out in a meaningful way.

There is something inherently noble about the celebrity dissident, but there is something slightly ridiculous about the celebrity wonk.

...In this role, Lennon was continuing a venerable tradition: the celebrity as a crusader against the wrongs committed by those in power. In the 19th century, the celebrity activists had been not musicians but writers. Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and other authors loudly supported the abolitionist crusade against slavery. ...Mark Twain denounced American imperialism and atrocities in the 1898-1902 war against Spain and Filipino independence fighters.

...{Bono} runs with the crowd that believes ending poverty is a matter of technical expertise - doing things such as expanding food yields with nitrogen-fixing leguminous plants or solar-powered drip irrigation.

These are fine moves as far as they go, but why have Bono champion them? The technocratic approach puts him in the position of a wonk, not a dissident; an expert, not a crusader. (Little wonder that he hasn't cranked out a musical hit related to his activism. It's hard to imagine "Beautiful Day When We Meet the MDG Targets by 2015.") Can you imagine Lennon passing himself off as an authority on the intricacies of Vietnamese politics and history? His message was simpler: This war is wrong.

UPDATE III: The very smart Daniel Drezner at Foreign Policy does not get  it (he thinks I want "dumber celebrities").  There has an unexpected breakdown in either Drezner's previously impressive comprehension of logical argument or in my ability to explain a logical argument.  The problem with even the celebrity experts that are "smart"  is that "smarts" do not lead you to a unique answer: different smart and well-informed people disagree. The best answers usually emerge from logical and evidence-based debate, but celebrity experts short-circuit this process -- they will win the argument because they get so much attention as celebrities, not because of logic or evidence. And so having rock stars as experts, even those that are amazingly smart and well-informed "for a rock star" (that phrase says it all), will often to lead to bad answers (as indeed it has, see mine and everyone else's writings on this).  

The celebrity as moral crusader is doing so based on ...  a moral crusade that is already there. These crusaders take a situation that  is morally wrong, but is in the interests of those in power, and they say ... it's morally wrong. This has been a vital part of social change, and celebrities have played a useful role.

So no, I don't want dumber celebrities. The celebrities are too dumb already to deserve to have their ability to short-circuit debate and announce "the answer." And they always will be.

The secret to fighting poverty is New Zealand

In a new World Bank blog post (h/t @poverty_action), economist David McKenzie explains why he thinks facilitating international migration should be at the top of everyone’s list of effective development interventions. Compared to microfinance, conditional cash transfer programs and cash grants to microentrepreneurs, a seasonal migration program in New Zealand produced WAY larger gains in annual income for program beneficiaries.

The good news doesn’t stop there. The usual fears for or about migrants—that they would be vulnerable to poor treatment, or that they would take advantage of the program to over stay their visas—don’t seem have materialized:

In addition to estimating per-capita income gains of 30-40%, we find that participating in the RSE leads to greater subjective well-being, more durable asset purchases, housing improvements, and in Tonga, a large increase in secondary schooling. Moreover, as a recent evaluation by New Zealand’s labor department found, these gains came with minimal displacement of native workers, and overstay rates of less than 1%.

Previously on this blog, Michael Clemens wrote that the development program known as leaving Haiti has pulled far more Haitians out of poverty than anything else that has ever been tried.

US Government asks all governments to respect World Press & Internet Freedom except for US Government

From wonkette (HT David Zetland), the State Department has announced with impeccable timing (what is that Wikileaks thing?) and deafness to irony:

The theme for next year’s commemoration {of World Press Freedom Day} will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.

What the New HDI tells us about Africa

by Francisco Rodríguez, Head of Research at the Human Development Report Office In a post published last Thursday, Bill Easterly and Laura Freschi criticize the new formula for the Human Development Index (HDI) introduced in this year’s Human Development Report.  Borrowing on a recent paper by the World Bank’s Martin Ravallion, Easterly and Freschi argue that our decision to shift from an additive to a multiplicative mean makes Africa look much worse than it should.

The relevant question, of course, is not whether the index makes any particular region or country look better or worse but whether the methodological changes introduced in the new version of the HDI make sense.  If we reject the methodology, we should do it based on the soundness of its principles, not on whether or not we like its conclusions.

Why the HDI has a new functional form – and what it means

One of the key changes to the HDI functional form introduced in this year’s report was to shift from an arithmetic to a geometric mean, thus introducing imperfect substitutability into the index. Imperfect substitutability means that the less you have of something, the more you will benefit from improvements in that dimension. By contrast, perfect substitutability (which had characterized the index’s old formula) means that how much you care about one dimension has nothing to do with its initial value. The old perfect substitutability assumption had been extensively criticized, with good reason.{{1}}

Easterly and Freschi misinterpret the rates of substitution in the HDI as saying something about the “value” of a life.  But the HDI is not a utility function, nor is it a social welfare function.  It is an index of capabilities.{{2}}  What the huge differences in trade-offs between health and income in the index tell us is actually something quite simple: that income contributes very little to furthering capabilities in rich countries.  Societies may and do value other things than their capabilities, so it is incorrect to read these numbers as “values” of anything.

For more on why it is incorrect to read “values” into the HDI, read the longer version of this article.

Does the new HDI make Sub-Saharan Africa look worse?

What is the net effect of the new functional form on the relative position of Africa vis-à-vis the rest of the world?  In the 2010 Human Development Report, Africa’s average HDI stands at .389, or 62.3 percent of the world HDI.  If we had applied the old functional form, then Africa’s HDI would have been 64.1 percent of the world average.  So does the new HDI make Africa look worse?  Yes, exactly 1.8 percentage points worse.  While one can of course try to make a big deal about that, as Easterly and Freschi do picking up on the former’s earlier complaints about the MDGs, it seems that nothing in the general picture of Africa’s relative progress vis-à-vis the rest of the world really changes from the new functional form.

Easterly and Freschi also object to the HDR’s measure of progress, which they claim is biased against Africa.  First of all, it is not clear that it would be a good thing if a measure of progress ranked Africa highly for the past forty years, a period that includes the disastrous 1980s.  But if they were right and our measure was incapable of capturing African progress, then we shouldn’t see Africa do well in any period.  However this is not the case. Indeed using the same measure of progress, Africa does remarkably well since 2000.  As  shown in Table 1 below, Africa has six of the top 10 performers in the world, including all the top five (Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Mali, Mozambique and Burundi). Odd results indeed for an index which by design is claimed to be biased against Africa.

For more on Africa’s human development progress, read the longer version of this article.

References

Desai, Meghnad (1991), ‘Human Development: concepts and measurement’, European Economic Review 35, p. 350–357.

Lind, Niels (2004), 'Values Reflected in the Human Development Index', Social Indicators Research 66, p. 283-293.

Sagar, Ambuj and Adil Najam (1998), ‘The Human Development Index: A Critical Review’, Ecological Economics 25, no. 3, June, p. 249-264.

Sen, Amartya (1980), “Equality of what?”, in S.M. McMurrin (Ed.), Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Vol. I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

UNDP(2010) The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

[[1]]See, for example, Desai (1991), Sager and Najam (1998), Lind (2004).[[1]] [[2]]For the notion of capabilities and its relationship to the human development approach, see Sen (1980).[[2]] --

Related posts: The First Law of Development Stats: Whatever our Bizarre Methodology, We make Africa look Worse What the New HDI tells us about Africa Human Development Index Debate Round 2: UNDP, you’re still wrong

It really was better to be British than French

Or so say the authors of a study probing the effects of colonial rule in West Africa.

To identify the effects of colonial legacy, we focus on one case, the West African nation of Cameroon. Originally colonized by Germany, Cameroon was divided between Britain and France during World War I, and the two powers implemented widely divergent colonial policies in their separate zones. The two areas were only reunited at independence in 1960, and despite a strong policy of centralization, they retain separate legal and education systems and a strong attachment to the language and culture of their respective colonizers. A comparison of these regions this permits an excellent test of the colonizer influence hypothesis.

Comparing communities close to but on either side of the colonial border, Alexander Lee and Kenneth Schultz of Stanford discover that rural households on the British side are wealthier and have access to better water sources than those on the French side.

This blog frequently covers how long-ago events have surprising effects on today’s development outcomes: patterns of indigenous slavery in Peru and Bolivia show up in household consumption and stunted children's growth, while taxation regimes in colonial Nigeria influence the quality of public service provision. If that's not long run enough for you, how about 1000 BC?

This new study on Cameroon is among many that find British colonial institutions (as compared to those of their French, German, Belgian, Portuguese or Spanish colonial competitors) lead to better development outcomes today. Lee and Schultz note that the Anglo edge comes from a combination of characteristics generally common to British colonial regimes: “lack of forced labor, more autonomous local institutions…common law, English culture, Protestantism” but stop short of telling us which of these were most responsible for the differences observed in Cameroon.

For some relief from the oppressive conclusion that today’s development outcomes are all pre-determined, the researchers find that post-independence policies matter too.  The positive effects from British rule don’t hold for urban areas or for centrally-provided public goods, showing that post-independence policies, which have generally favored the former French side with greater infrastructure investment, can overtake colonial legacies.

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Thanks to reader Blair Reeves for the pointer to the study.

Development is Uneven, Get Over It

UPDATE: out of 188 recorded songs on all Beatles albums, how many are now hits on iTunes? See end of post. This a 20 minute extemporaneous talk at UNICEF headquarters in New York on the topic of "Inclusive Growth". After the talk, there is a question, comment, and response session with the audience.  The full video is an hour, if you are really a masochist. (Try this link if the video player above doesn't work.)

To summarize the talk: success is intrinsically uneven, so development and growth is intrinsically uneven, not "inclusive". (See the earlier post about the fractal stubborness of uneven geographic wealth.) In this talk, I also mention how remarkably uneven success shows up in just about every field of endeavor. One way this shows up is in a "power law": there is such a strong negative relationship between the frequency of success and the scale of success that we have to use a logarithmic scale (i.e. a scale where every unit increase means multiplying by 10)  for both to be able to fit the extremes onto the graph, like the one below:

There is no evidence that large-scale redistribution programs can succeed without killing off growth, but targeting things like health and education to the poor has worked and could work even more. Lastly, the best thing of all you can do for "inclusive growth" is asserting the individual human rights of all, including women, gays, and religious, racial, and ethnic minorities. For more detail to fill out these ideas, please watch the video.

UPDATE: Answer to how many Beatles  hits out of 188 recorded songs on their 14 albums are hits today: 15. Even the most successful band in rock history could only produce a lasting hit about 8% of the time (please draw your own profound insights into the intrinsic unevenness of success and non-inclusive growth).

(Sorry about my really excessive Beatle-mania, it's a Baby Boomer thing, you wouldn't understand.)

PS highly imperfect methodology for measuring hits today: the popularity metre on iTunes gets maxed out for hits, all others (most showing zero popularity) are non-hits.

Americans appalled at how much we spend on aid, want to spend 10 times more

This chart is courtesy of Ezra Klein (h/t @viewfromthecave and @laurenist), who summarizes the results from a new World Opinion Poll. The 848 Americans polled guessed, on average, that the US spends 25 percent of the budget on foreign aid, but opined that the figure should be about 10 percent. The actual number, as you Aid Watch readers probably know, is less than 1 percent. The chart will also be interpreted by many as showing that the US should spend more, since many citizens - who have just demonstrated they have no clue what we are currently doing - theoretically have a tolerance for more spending.

I suspect these polls just suggest that most people have a hard time comprehending very large numbers. In fact, public opinion figures on foreign aid correspond closely to another maligned area of federal spending: space exploration. In a 2007 poll, respondents apparently thought 24 percent of federal spending went to NASA, while the real number is also…less than 1 percent.

If this bit of innumeracy is just a natural human failing, perhaps it is related to what’s known in psychological research as the availability heuristic: when a rare event makes a vivid impression, we overestimate its likelihood. Maybe powerful images of earthquake survivors receiving aid in Haiti or a rocket launch remembered from childhood bias us to think these types of events are more frequent, more costly, or more significant in the context of overall spending, than they really are.

Africa Clichés, Part LXXVIII

The blog Africa is a Country reacts to the NYT Magazine's Coverage of John "Save Darfur" Prendergast. The best summary is from former NYT Reporter Howard French's Twitter feed: "Bwana Saves Africa, Part 3,276." The same blog had a post yesterday on cringe-inducing attempts to have a supermodel portray an "Africa" theme at a certain fashion show. It reminded me of crude Hollywood portrayals of Africa when I was a child.  And no, I'm not showing you the picture.

Recipe for success

1. Toil for years at a career that doesn't support you, mainly helping others redo their work 2. Produce a few deeply flawed products with occasional flashes of talent

3. Finally produce something that breaks all the rules for what your customers want.

4. Resist all suggestions for changes from your collaborators, who describe it as undoable. 

5. Unveil the work to shocked incomprehension from the hostile audience and critics.

6. You die in misery 3 months later.

Congratulations, you have just produced the most successful opera of all time.

The US Map of Prices of Pot

UPDATE: just got the question on Twitter: "what does this have to do with development?" Answer: nothing, except that you will never understand development if you are so quick to ask that question. When I first saw this map, I immediately thought legalize pot! what a great teaching tool for my Intro students! So students, please explain using the concepts of supply, demand, and transport costs (including in this case smuggling costs) the pattern of prices you see here.