In the summer of 1990 I taught English at a technical college in the then-Czechoslovakia, newly liberated from Communism. The design of the course was intensive–30 hours of conversational English with the same...
Read More →If there is a next big thing at the moment in the field of economics, it is the application of techniques from medical research—specifically, “randomized controlled trials,” or RCTs—to assess the effectiveness of...
Read More →In the beginning, there was usury. In the deflationary, no-growth world of the early Middle Ages, lending was frequently predatory. More often than not, the predators were priests. The poor were not the...
Read More →On Wednesday the New York Times published a lengthy piece by Clifford Krauss on the topic of U.S. energy independence titled ”Can We Do Without the Middle East?” Here’s how it starts: Imagine a foreign...
Read More →Over the weekend, @bill_easterly very generously posted to this to the @AidWatch blog, with the title “Development in 3 Sentences”: I liked this formulation from the blog The Coming Prosperity, posted today as...
Read More →1941-1945: To oppose the Nazis, the United States allied with the Soviets. (ref. … the Cold War) 1979-1989: To oppose the Soviets, the United States supported and funded the Mujahideen. (ref. … emergence...
Read More →For the last few days the passion and the dignity that has been demonstrate by the people of Egypt has been an inspiration to people around the world, including here in the United...
Read More →There’s a certain mythology built about around conflict, as if the laws of physics or economics somehow don’t apply. Our image Afghanistan is of a soldier standing in front of a mud hut....
Read More →Mosharraf Zaidi (@mosharrafzaidi) has a great op-ed in The International News (Pakistan) that quite incisively corrects for the overstatements in my previous post: Zaidi starts with the following observation: Casual observers could easily...
Read More →[See follow-up post here.] I recently found this excellent video clip of the talk that Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s gave at the Brookings Institution last month: Oh, wait… Wrong video! Sorry...
Read More →Paul Polak isn’t just one of America’s most remarkable “ascending market”* entrepreneurs–having founded and built International Development Enterprises (IDE), the treadle pump design and marketing organization that has brought improved livelihoods to more...
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