Easterly study questions

Questions to ponder for Easterly:

1. P.T. Bauer, the development economist, wrote in 1993: "[Aid] promotes an unquestioning attitude. It disarms criticism, obscures realities, and prejudges results. Who could be against aid to the less fortunate? The term has enabled aid supporters to claim a monopoly of compassion and to dismiss critics as lacking in understanding and sympathy." Discuss this in the context of Easterly’s book, and his criticism of Jeff Sachs’ The End of Poverty.
2. Does Easterly believe there’s a grand plan for development? Give at least two examples from his last chapter that would be Easterly-like development strategies.
3. Would Easterly be surprised by the story of Kenyans converting mosquito netting to dresses as shown in class (see post below)? Why or why not?
4. Are there any causes of poverty besides oppression? (You may want to define oppression before you answer this.)

Links of the day

• Mosquito nets becoming dresses. What would Easterly say about this? Here he is.
• Relatedly, who's helped by these microchips? Why are they a better investment than mosquito nets?
• Starbucks responds.
• Robert Kaplan (who is, by the way, one of the best reporters on conflict in the world) writes about how it sucks to have bad neighbors. What would Collier say?
• Are we more prone to catastrophe because of globalization? And what if we are? Would that mean not to globalize?
• An interview with Alex Tabarrok. Question: Does democracy hold back Indian development?
  
• A too-hard final exam question.

Suggestions for students seeking careers in development

If you are considering a job in the development area, there are some fine recommendations by Alanna Shaikh. Most of you are doing some of these already, but I think even the most dedicated are missing one or two on this list.

Red and Moyo

Here are some of the things we used today in class:

• Starbucks' Red Card, and its criticism by Easterly.
• The video of Dambisa Moyo.
  I also suggested in class this interview of Moyo from the NYT.
• Here's the question I started class with: Are "scarcity" and "poverty" two sides of the same coin? Click the link for some thoughts.

Not mentioned in class but found today: Working World, a source for overseas job and study opportunities?

Unstable equilibrium

I mentioned this in class today but it bothered me I could not remember the whole quote. From an interview in Reason magazine in Dec. 1974:

From "An Interview with Milton Friedman," Nobel laureate economist

"There's a strong argument to be made that a free society is a fundamentally unstable equilibrium, in the language of the natural sciences....There's a great deal of basis for believing that a free society is fundamentally unstable--we may regret this but we've got to face up to the facts....How often and for how long have we had free societies? For short periods of time. There was an essentially free society in 5th-century Greece. Was it able to survive? It disappeared. Every other time when there's been a free society, it has tended to disappear."

Reason: It's paradoxical but...you are attributing to the collectivist intellectual a better feeling for the market.

Milton Friedman: Of course. But while there's a bigger market for Fords than there is for American Motors products, there is a market for the American Motors products. In the same way, there's a bigger market for collectivist ideology than there is for individualist ideology. The thing that really baffles me is that the fraction of intellectuals who are collectivists is, I think, even larger than would be justified by the market.

An alumna blogging overseas

Not directly related to this blog, but one of our former students, Laura Morris, is overseas with her husband who provides medical care to diplomatic staff. You can follow her at DiplomatDoc.

Jacqueline Novogratz on patient capitalism in Africa