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Jeffrey Sachs … holds to a model of economic development in which poverty cannot be broken piecemeal, but must be attacked on all fronts at once. Perhaps people cannot save for the future because they are too poor or too unhealthy, or both; perhaps they cannot improve their health or their productivity without the investments that depend on saving; or perhaps their productivity is low because they are not adequately nourished which, in turn, comes about because their productivity is so low. These vicious circles cause “poverty traps” from which people cannot escape except through a “big push” from outside. “In order to make lasting changes in any one sphere of development, we must improve them all”, argues the website of the Millennium Villages, where “all” comprises eight categories: education, mother and child health, business and entrepreneurship, gender equality, technology, the environment and intervention, water and energy, and food. (Note the “we”, which presumably means the western visitors to the website.)

Continue readingAngus Deaton on Development Bloat

Click here for an answer (whose language is slightly NSFW…)

Joking aside: I know blogging has been light these past few weeks, but with the start of classes and seeing six job-market candidates (all of whom I have to meet with, attend a seminar by, and have dinner with), there has been little time for anything else. Regular blogging should resume next week.

(ht: Mathieu Lalonde.)

From a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore on Fox News president Roger Ailes‘ biographers, admirers, and detractors:

It was easy to despise [William Randolph] Hearst. It was also lazy. Hating some crazy old loudmouth who is a vindictive bully and lives in a castle is far less of a strain than thinking about the vulgarity and the prejudices of his audience. In 1935, the distinguished war correspondent and radio broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing observed, “People who are not capable of disliking the lower middle class in toto, since it is a formidable tax on their emotions, can detest Hearst instead.” Ailes haters, take note.

This reminded me of what I wrote about a year and a half ago about the bashing of the New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof that was then (and still is) fashionable in the development blogosphere: