January 2012
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The African music on my ipod
Roving bandit recently made a few music recommendations, and Michael Clemens asked for more. I’ve been traveling in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi the better part of the last year and I’ve managed to collect a fair amount of African music from gospel to rap. Much of this will not be new to seasoned listeners, and I’m ignoring a lot of classics, but this is what I’ve been...
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New Design and Public Data
I’ve decided to usher in 2012 with a blog redesign. I won’t be regularly writing on the blog until I am back in Washington around September, but I’m still really happy with the new design. Aside from looking pretty, I now have the space to post some of the data that I’ve been collecting over the last nine months.
The new data section of the webpage contains election...
June 2011
1 post
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Power to the People: Village Electrification in...
I’ve been in Ghana for about 5 weeks researching electrification projects, and I thought it was about time that I talk about it. In the late 1980s and 1990s, electrification projects became a priority for the Ghanaian government and a large amount of donor funding went towards village electrification. My starting point is a study and government wide plan in 1989. To simplify slightly, there...
April 2011
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Travel Plans
I will be doing dissertation research outside of the US for about a year starting May, 2011. I will be in Ghana for the summer, then Kenya for part of August and September. After that I will be in Zambia and Malawi. The best place to find out about me is my twitter account, which is updated far more frequently than the blog.
January 2011
2 posts
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Institutions rule?
Roving Bandit has two good posts on institutions, but they aren’t doing much to ease my skepticism about the concept. Rather than rehashing an old argument, I am going to take the lazy efficient way out and direct interested readers to a working paper that I wrote and presented last year at the International Studies Association on foreign aid and institutions.
I am now less confident in my...
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Wikileaks – China, the US and Africa
Deborah Brautigam and I wrote a short article for African Arguments on what the leaked US embassy cables reveal about relationships between the US, China, and various African countries. Check it out.
December 2010
1 post
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November 2010
2 posts
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10 Articles on Aid
The Browser has collected ten interesting and well written articles on foreign aid (apologies in advance for the Browser’s photo of the African kids). I especially recommend Owen Barder’s article on the three narratives that came out of the MDG summit.
October 2010
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Development Without Freedom
Human Rights Watch recently published a report on aid in Ethiopia entitled Development Without Freedom. They had researchers visit Ethiopia in 2009 and conduct about 200 interviews to examine how the ruling party was distributing foreign aid.
Their central finding is that “donor-funded services, resources, and training opportunities were being used as threats or rewards for citizens to join...
September 2010
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August 2010
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What Social Science Does—and Doesn’t—Know
Jim Manzi wrote an excellent article on public policy experimentation and the difficulties in learning anything about the social world. He explains the limits of randomized trials much more eloquently than I did.
Additional remarks from Manzi and links to more commentary on his article can be found here.
May 2010
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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...
March 2010
2 posts
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African Growth Rates, 1996-2005
From Roving Bandit, who found it on Global Dashboard, who got it from the World Bank (.pdf).
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February 2010
2 posts
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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...
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January 2010
1 post
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December 2009
8 posts
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Happy Holidays
I’m heading home for the holidays, and because my home is in a tiny town in rural Ontario (and therefore doesn’t have access to high speed internet) I probably won’t be blogging much until January.
I hope everyone enjoys a much needed break and a peaceful and happy new year. I’ll see you in 2010.
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Jessica Cohen and Bill Easterly have a new edited book coming out called What Works in Development? Thinking Big and Thinking Small. The volume examines the role of randomized evaluations in development research and the contributors are a who’s who of top development economists. You can find Bill’s summary of the book here. Apparently there are some problems getting the book out the...
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November 2009
5 posts
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The most recent episode of the pop science podcast...
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“The key to success in academia is coming up with a big idea—a paradigm shift—and...”
– Anne-Marie Slaughter, answering a question on what her work in government has taught her about the differences between government and academia.
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World Bank data in Google
Today Google started including 17 World Bank world development indicators in its standard search results. Relevant search queries, like one above, not only present the World Bank data, but also present graphs of the data.
This seems to simply be the result of the World Bank making their data available through a public API, and Google being smart enough to take advantage of it.
You can read a...
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The Zedillo Report
Two days ago I attended the Washington, DC launch of the World Bank’s report on internal governance, headed by former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo. You can download the report here.
The executive summary does a good job overviewing the report and is quite readable, so I’ll only briefly mention a few of the key recommendations:
The World Bank Group’s Board should shrink...
October 2009
1 post
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Best Flag Ever
That’s the flag of the Benin Empire, a pre-colonial African state situated in modern Nigeria that lasted from 1440 until 1897. (via kottke & andre)
September 2009
5 posts
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DC Dev
DC Dev was calendar that Maya Berinzon and I made to aggregate development-related events in DC. This required far too much upkeep and has been discontinued.
You can still access my list of places and organizations that regularly host development-related events in DC.
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Listening to Development
Fall classes have started again so my time on the DC metro has increased greatly. The commuting has meant that I’ve been blowing through podcasts at an alarming rate, and I’ve come across a few that are worth sharing. These links are to the webpages of the podcasts, but all of them can be found in iTunes as well.
Podcasts that are consistently good:
Development Drums, a podcast by...
August 2009
2 posts
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Theory Talks
If you are interested in the theoretical or methodological side of international relations then you should check out the interviews at Theory Talks. Run by Peer Schouten, the site currently hosts 32 interviews with top scholars in IR (broadly defined), including Alexander Wendt, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and Robert Bates.
Thanks to Matto to pointing this site out to me.
July 2009
3 posts
RSS feeds for International Development Journals
Today Chris Albon posted a list top IR journals on his website War and Health. The list can be easily imported into a RSS feed reader. I can’t believe this didn’t occur to me before. Thank you again Chris.
I subscribed to his list, and then went about compiling a list of journals that would be of interest to most development academics. My list does not overlap with Chris’ list....
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Randomized Controlled Trials
Bill Easterly has a good post questioning the utility and ethics behind using randomized controlled testing to evaluate foreign aid interventions. His whole post is worth reading, but I want to elaborate on his second question, “Can you really generalize from one small experiment to conclude that something ‘works’?”
When it comes to aid the answer is pretty easy: no. There...
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“Yet a man who uses an imaginary map, thinking that it is a true one, is likely...”
– E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful.
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The internet is like a big phone, right?
About a week and a half ago the new Conservative party introduced a bill to modernize police power and internet interception rules in Canada (see more here). The bill is based on the assumption that the internet is analogous the phone system. On the program Search Engine Minister of Public Safety Peter Van Loan said, “What we did is we […] tried to find a way of modernizing and...
June 2009
4 posts
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The NY Times Code
Today I am releasing the Processing code that I used for this map and these graphs, and the code that I used to get the data from the NY Times. To run the programs, (download Processing, then) unzip the programs and place them in your sketchbook folder.
The code used to gather data from the Times’ API can be found here. Jer has a great introduction to working with the Times’ API in...
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The (delayed) NY Times Code
A few people have asked me where they can find the processing code that I used in my recent visualizations. Right now it is messy and incomplete and sitting on my desktop. It will stay there until I can clean it up. I’m aiming to have the code ready for public consumption before I travel to Chicago on June 18th.
Also, I am flattered by the positive response that the visualizations received....
Archive of Accepted Proposals
I am thinking about writing up and publishing some short pieces that I have kicking around in my head, but most of my ideas are not rigorous (or long) enough for academic articles. I might be able to pitch these ideas to quality newspapers or magazines, but I have never pitched an article before and I don’t know where to start.
Anyone else in this situation should really check out Dan...
May 2009
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