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Efforts by wealthy countries to help their poorer counterparts began in earnest after World War II with the Marshall Plan. By the early 1960s, Western powers were busy helping former colonies develop their agricultural and industrial sectors. These plans appeared to work; in the decades that followed, global poverty plummeted. But along the way, economic development morphed into something else: a multi-billion-dollar industry characterized by mission creep. Today, development has come to mean too many things — so many things, in fact, that development has become all things to all people so that by all possible means it might save some, to paraphrase the apostle Paul. The resulting scattershot approach, which dilutes resources, is harming the world’s poor.

That’s from my article (possibly gated; if so, please email me for a copy) in Foreign Affairs earlier this week about how mission creep in international development ultimately does more harm than good. It builds up on and expands a post I published in the fall also titled “Development Bloat.” That post caught the eye of the Foreign Affairs editors, who subsequently asked whether I’d be interested in writing a longer piece.

If I judge by the number of tweets and retweets this has generated, it looks as though there was definitely a certain demand for the thoughts I express in my article.

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.