Last updated on February 8, 2014
Q: What inspired you to launch this?
A: Marc Bellemare’s brilliant piece on Development Bloat in Foreign Affairs from January 2014. It struck me that Marc was making the types of arguments lots of people I talk to make in private, but that you almost never read in print. … The piece – and the idea of Development Bloat as an analytical category – really spoke to me. But I thought that there was much more to it than anyone could hope to cover in one Opinion piece…hence, [the Campaign for Boring Development].
That’s from the mission statement of Francisco Toro’s new blog, which features examples of development bloat and SWEDOW, but also of things that work. An example of a thing that work is roads, which Francisco discusses in a post titled “Roads before Bros” (“How can you tell that real development is happening in this picture? Easy: just note the total absence of smiling children.”)
I never thought my Foreign Affairs article would move anyone to do anything about development bloat beyond the movement entailed by nodding in agreement or shaking one’s head in despair at what I was saying, so I am very happy to see Francisco pick up where I left off.
As far as I can tell, that article has already had more impact on the real world than any of the 14 articles I have published so far in academic journals. I doubt that even my most cited paper, the excitingly titled “An Ordered Tobit Model of Market Participation: Evidence from Kenya and Ethiopia” (Ladies, ladies, please! One at a time…) has had that kind of impact.
That is why I’m very happy to be in a department, in a college, and at a university that explicitly recognizes and appreciates that kind of public intellectual engagement along the more traditional research, teaching, and service–a whole section of our annual review is about outreach.
[…] Some assets were trendy, but now may be blasé to some, such as blogs and blogging. It was not too long ago that aid bloggers were a small, feisty, insightful, tight knit bunch, capable of swinging last minute happy hour gatherings of folks that have never worked together and live hundreds or even thousands of miles from each other yet somehow manage to have a surplus of inside jokes. Maybe the fact that aid blogging has begun to show some industry influence has indeed killed the former camaraderie of countervailing voices, but that is a relatively small price to pay for the benefit of counting that influence as part of one’s job performance. […]