The most recent episode of This American Life is about reconstruction in Haiti. It features excellent stories which touch on nearly all of the major problems with foreign aid and development work. Being This American Life, it does this with good humour and clear language. This should be required reading for undergrad development classes.

You can listen here. (click through the donation request page if it appears)

Also, sorry for not posting recently. I was finishing up the remainder of my coursework.

African Growth Rates, 1996-2005

From Roving Bandit, who found it on Global Dashboard, who got it from the World Bank (.pdf).

ISA Presentations

I’m giving two talks tomorrow at ISA. One is a paper evaluating the concept of institutions as it is used in the literature on foreign aid and development. The panel will be held at 1:45 in the Starboard room of the Hilton (Riverside Building).

The second paper is on using Processing to produce graphics for slides. The paper will be presented at 3:45 in the Norwich room of the Hilton.

The Processing paper draws on some of the graphics and code that I have been posting over the last few months:

• The Africa map of NY Times coverage (the code is here)
• The line graphs of news coverage of individual African countries, 1981-2008
• The Wordle clouds

I hope that people can stop by. If anyone is at ISA and on twitter, send me a message at @ryanbriggs and say hi.