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If you have been paying any attention to development economics over the last 10 years, you know that education — to generalize quite a bit, how to increase school enrollment, and how to make sure children actually learn useful stuff — is one of the areas where development economists have learned the most, thanks to improved standards of causal identification.

In that spirit, two books were released just before Christmas on the topic of education in developing countries, both written by top scholars in that area. I have only browsed both books and have not yet read them carefully, but they are definitely in my to-read pile for the first half of 2014.

That’s actually quite a controversial question, one that is still debated in humanitarian circles. Some people will say that the musicians selflessly raised large amounts of money to help the world’s neediest. Others – myself included – would say that when projects like this don’t involve professional humanitarianism and the beneficiaries (i.e. the people who are supposedly being helped), the law of unintended consequences allows for the best of intentions to pave a road straight to H-E-double-hockeysticks.

There’s three broad ways that Celebrity Aid is often asserted as a success, or conversely, criticized as a failure. Namely they are (1) the amount of aid that actually hit the ground, (2) the stereotypes of Africans it created in the media, and (3) that they may have actually been complicity in ethnocide in the Sub-Saharan African context. I’ll address each separately.

From Reddit user wilbarp, in thread that popped up over the holidays asking “Did celebrity efforts like Band Aid’s ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ and USA for Africa’s ‘We Are The World’ actually help alleviate famine in the 1980s?” His answer — which should be required reading in any intro to Africa-type classes — deserves to be read in full.

It’s that time of the year again, when graduate students who are in their final year are getting ready to go on the job market. Because going on the job market is a harrowing experience for most people, I thought I should help job-market candidates by sharing my advice.

This post is the last in a series of three. Today, I’d like to discuss what it’s like to interview on campus (also known as a flyout), and how you should prepare for it.