Adeline Delavande, Xavier Giné, and David McKenzie have a new paper in the Journal of Applied Econometrics on the elicitation of subjective expectations during fieldwork:
Published January 14, 2011
Category: Social Sciences
Published January 13, 2011
The Toaster Lesson
Milton Friedman once said that no one in the world knew how to make a pencil from scratch. He said that in order to illustrate the power of the market at decentralizing the hundreds if not thousands of tasks necessary to make something as simple as a pencil.
Designer Thomas Thwaites decided to build a toaster from scratch, learning the lesson of the pencil the hard way. Here is his TED talk on the topic:
(H/T: Chris Blattman via Twitter.)
Published January 10, 2011
Microfinance: “The Opposition Is Politically Driven”
Given the popularity of last week’s posts on microfinance (see here and here), I thought I should continue blogging about the topic.
This week and the next, however, I will blog about microfinance as seen from within the industry. As such, I will be blogging the five-point response a friend of my wife’s and mine — whom I will refer to by the pseudonym “Chad” — has made to my previous two posts.
Chad works for a microfinance private equity firm and used to work for a leading online microfinance website. He has studied in the best universities for both his undergraduate and subsequent professional degrees. More importantly, Chad has traveled extensively to the field to meet with stakeholders along the microfinance supply chain.
Chad’s first point was: