I'm happy to post a link to any blog that extremely overestimates me

Lord Acton and ... moi?

Cool globalization video: who's reading the New York Times when and where

In the pre-Internet age, we used to joke that availability of the printed New York Times (just within the U.S.) was the best single indicator of civilization (Bowling Green, Ohio did not do that well on this indicator). Today we use the word "globalization" instead of civilization, but it's still fascinating to see where the hot spots of NYT readership are -- and large regions without hardly any hot spots  (Africa, Middle East, Russia are the most striking). Asia is much more NYT-intensive.

This video is for the whole world.

And this one is just for the U.S. Dallas and Atlanta do better than I expected!

(HT World Bank PSD Blog, orginal source is Nick Bilton, Lead Writer, The New York Times Bits Blog @nickbilton)

I REALLY hope this idea does NOT spread to global poverty awareness

Women posting their bra color on Facebook for Breast Cancer Awareness Also could you please NOT think of some analogous thing for men -- trust me, you don't want us to go there.

Teasing my friends at Center for Global Development: censoring for Hillary?

More updates on coverage of the big Clinton Development Speech, following up on the previous post: Chris Blattman has a negative take. Change.org some negatives, some positives, so a mixed review. The Center for Global Development (CGD) blog is positive, although mostly only about the idea of the Secretary of State even giving a whole speech devoted to development. Duncan Green at Oxfam liked some of the specific ideas in the speech. The Chronicle of Philanthropy gave an overview, citing "mixed reviews."

Mead Over disagreed with my "selectivity" complaint, saying Clinton was right to be LESS selective in health (don't just do AIDS treatment, strengthen health systems!) I confess that Mead is right on that one.

The speech host, CGD, aggregated now all the news coverage they could find, except, wait, they don't include any negative coverage...  They cited Foreign Policy — but they just gave the FP posting of the speech itself, not the review column (mine) at FP.

Oh, my dearest CGD friends, this couldn’t be some unconscious censorship of a negative view, could it?

The speech at least seems a focal point for a good discussion! Please continue to post your comments.

UPDATE: CGD has now put out a new press coverage aggregrate that includes negative coverage. I knew I could count on them, they're good people. (They certainly are a LOT more responsive than the USAID that Hillary wants to reform, who would either not answer or refuse to change or both.)

The power of searchers

The Defense Department just sponsored a contest in which they randomly placed 10 large red balloons across the United States and challenged teams to find them all. The one who found all 10 first would get $40,000.

The National Department of Supervisory Agencies for Universal Surveys for Many Different Types of Objects took on the challenge from its massive Washington DC headquarters. It dispatched instructions by secure mail pouch Circular #10-A643 to its 135 regional offices, notifying them to add large red balloons to the Watch List in their multiyear project for surveying the entire United States for Many Different Types of Objects. When last we heard, the regional offices were contacting Washington headquarters for clarification as to what diameter balloon should be considered “large.”

The winning team, at the MIT Media Lab, found all 10 balloons in 8 hours and 56 minutes. They used decentralized search through the Internet, spreading the message through web sites and social networks that there would be cash rewards to any chain of people that resulted in a balloon find. In the end, they drew on the efforts  of 4,665 people.

As Dr. Riley Crane, the leader of the MIT group, explained:

If you heard about our Web site and went to sign up directly, and you found a balloon, you would get $2,000…. If instead you signed up and then you told your friends, and one of your friends found a balloon, that person would still get $2,000 because they found the balloon. And you, because you signed someone up who found the balloon, would also be rewarded with $1,000...

Wow, the Defense Department has just simulated an entrepreneurial economy! Entrepreneurs search for things that will pay off, or search for other people who will find things that pay off.

Searchers also work in aid, finding techniques or projects that work where you least expect to find them. That’s how aid found microcredit, conditional cash transfers, mobile banking, water purification tablets, nutritional supplements, oral rehydration therapy, and on and on.

The first and only time I met Bill Gates, he complained about my book “what is all this nebulous crap about searchers?” The funny thing about very successful Entrepreneurs is that not even they realize that they are part of a decentralized search network. They think it was all their brilliance – the equivalent of the 10 -- out of the 4,665  --who actually spotted the balloons thinking “we are so brilliant at balloon finding.”

Hat tip to the great searcher Michael Clemens, for drawing our attention to the story.

Let's show some compassion for gifted individuals like Secretary Clinton, whom politics forces to babble

This is my blog that just went up on the Foreign Policy web site on Hillary Clinton's development speech today. There's a positive ending! Plus my wife likes it! MORNING UPDATE: News coverage of Hillary's speech was overwhelmingly dominated by her plans to visit New Zealand. This supports one of two theories: (1) there was indeed too much babble, eliminating any newsworthiness, (2) the media doesn't care about development.

UPDATE 2: Nick Kristof has a much more favorable take.

Audience check: am I too nasty? should we accept a certain amount of babble as unavoidable?

Democracy and development look different from inside a jail cell

One of my most inspirational experiences lately was to meet with an African democratic opposition leader whom I had long admired from afar. He earned his credentials the hard way -- he spent years in jail under the dictatorial government of his country.

While in jail, he read the foreword to one extremely popular book on The End of Poverty. The author thanked the dictator who had jailed the opposition leader for the dictator's "help and guidance" on the book, naming this same autocrat as one of "Africa's new generation of democratic leaders."

He also was not a big fan of statistical regressions that tell poor people when they are allowed to have democratic rights. He can't understand why there's a double standard: real democracy for rich countries, yet doubts about whether poor societies deserve to be free. Not to mention active support of aid organizations for authoritarian leaders. One aid organization gave their representative an award for creative financing of this same dictator while this opposition leader was in jail.

He knew that I am  in favor of democracy for poor nations, and he encouraged me to do better at making that case, partly on idealistic grounds and partly on pragmatic ones. I feel like I have let him down by not making more progress on this longstanding debate.

I am keeping the country and opposition leader unspecified, for fear of further harassment of this courageous activist by his country's "new generation of democratic leader."

Coincidentally, I read today a superb article by Carl Schramm on democracy and capitalism in the Fall 2009 Claremont Review of Books (alas the article itself is not available online). Among other things, Schramm takes down Thomas Friedman for his book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded."  Schramm says:

This is what happens in free market democracies, Friedman tells us -- an unacceptable mess ensues when there are no expert overseers to direct our affairs.

According to Schramm, Friedman's ideal system seems to be if

intellectual elites could rule us in a benign autocracy. And it likely would be benign, because intellectuals are ... so nice.

You can keep all your experts, I'll take one real democratic opposition leader anyday.

Levi's sees the light on human rights for Native Americans

A previous post suggested that American liberty was still a work in progress. One illustration was a Levi's ad that celebrates the seizing of Native American land for ourselves. To Levi's credit, they responded to an email invitation to respond to our blog.

Now that we have pointed out that the language in their ad seems to, well -- how should I put this diplomatically -- kind of lend support to nearly wiping out the Indians, they responded:

Thanks for checking in with us.

The Levi's(®) "Go Forth" campaign is intended to refresh and reinvent the idea of America's raw pioneering spirit, youthful optimism, and hard work to build a better tomorrow.  We apologize if our efforts did not resonate with you.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.  We'll definitely pass them along to our Marketing colleagues who pay close attention to consumer feedback.

"What works in development" is available again

After my whining in a previous post that the great publication "What works in development: Thinking Big and Thinking Small" was not easily available, it is once again available on Amazon. Let me repeat the previous sales pitch: although I am one of the editors, this is not about self-promotion.  The main contribution of the book is to feature a galaxy of academic superstars heatedly debating how or whether to apply randomized evaluation to development projects (see one of our most popular posts of all time:  "The Civil War in Development Economics"). This is the only book anywhere that summarizes the arguments on both sides.

Any interest? Can we bump up its current rating on Amazon from #81,373?

Are terrorists statistically significant?

Here’s another discussion relevant to the earlier post that DO SOMETHING is not a helpful government response to the current terrorismscare:

[T]he key point about identifying al-Qaeda operatives is that there are extremely few al-Qaeda operatives so (by Bayes’ theorem) any method you employ of identifying al-Qaeda operatives is going to mostly reveal false positives.

(From Matthew Yglesias via Tyler Cowen ONCE AGAIN, I think I’m now Tyler’s full-time RA).

How does this relate this to our usual statistical analysis? Proving someone is a terrorist is analogous to proving a nonzero effect that confirms an economic theory. We allow a rate of false positives of 5 percent (“statistical significance at the 5 percent level”) for showing that, say, good institutions have a positive effect on development. The false positives do not automatically swamp the true positives, because the true effects of  one thing on something else are not as rare as terrorists.

To have a low rate of false positives, we have to accept a high rate of false negatives. But we don’t care about false negatives. You failed to show an effect of your favorite magic ingredient X on development? Too bad, the burden of proof is on YOU if you want to add your ridiculous theory to the existing development knowledge.

Contrast airport security, where we DO care about false negatives (i.e. failing to detect a terrorist). To reduce false negatives even more (as everybody is demanding ), we would have to accept MORE false positives. This would swamp even more the rare genuine terrorists.

Yglesias used a hypothetical rate of false positives of 0.1 percent in his discussion of screening 15 million British Moslems. Of course, TSA makes it much worse by screening each and every of the 800 million airline passengers annually in the US -- including my 80 year old mother whose only suspicious behavior is hiding her handbag in fear of NYC purse snatchers. A false positive rate of 0.1 percent times 800 million means that false positives would be 800,000 people.

Have you seen 800,000 terrorist suspects milling around at airport security? No, I haven’t either. So the true TSA false positive rate must be even lower, which must mean the false negative rate must be a lot higher than the TSA would like to admit (as confirmed by audits). Intensified universal screening cannot possibly work: QED. (For useful alternatives, consult the people in the know.)

As Shakespeare once said about TSA:

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

OBLIGATORY AID PARALLEL TO TODAY’S APPARENTLY UNRELATED NEWSWORTHY TOPIC: the Do Something approach in aid has not been a great success either. Although it is still popular in aid and social activism, as illustrated by the nearly 300,000 followers on Twitter of @DoSomething, who wrote the following “Tweet”:

Its really easy to be a critic. Its really hard to be a do-er who actually makes stuff happen.

Stuff happen like click on a non-binding poll on their web site whether unnamed state legislators who don’t check web sites should pass laws against texting while driving. That may be easier than being a critic.

UPDATE: announcement today that TSA will piss off 14 mostly Muslim countries by subjecting fliers from those countries to the US to universal invasive screening. Thank goodness the terrorists are so dumb they would never think of flying from ANOTHER country besides these 14!

Having fixed Africa and AIDS, Bono tackles filesharing (from BoingBoing)

Bono, in a New York Times top-ten essay filled with of Brilliant Ideas That Will Fix The World If Only They'd Listen To Moi, says "Intellectual Property Developers" are doomed because of filesharing...

From a post on the great blog BoingBoing.

I know the NYT is desperate to survive, but having Bono as a regular columnist is...OK, I give up. How about Lady Gaga writing on counter-terrorism?

Latin America scores lousy on international standardized tests: is that part of why it grows slowly?

I am just reading the paper on this by Eric  Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann.

Forensic analyst busts Victoria’s Secret

Forensic analysts look for abnormal data patterns that allow them to catch bad guys doing bad things, with many economics applications. One of their recent non-economics triumphs has been to catch Victoria’s Secret’s blatant photo- shopping of their ads, notably the example below (HT to Tyler Cowen as usual). The most obvious giveaway  is that they snatched the young lady’s handbag out of her right hand, leaving her holding – nothing. This made the forensic photo expert suspicious and he also caught Victoria’s Secret in more subtle photo shopping. Most predictably, they increased the young lady’s bust size. (This is documented in way more expert detail than you really want.) Not only does Victoria’s Secret objectify women to be like their gorgeous models, but even the models have to be objectified to be their concept of a fantasy woman.

I’m not a marketing expert, but I'm not sure “wear our stuff and you might look good enough to be photo-shopped” is the best ad campaign.

To Victoria’s Secret’s credit, after they got caught, they undid some of the photo-shopping and reposted the picture on their web site. They gave the young lady back her handbag. However, they did not undo the fake bust.

I realize that this is all pretty tame compared with the expectations raised by the headline. But Aid Watch NEVER exploits supermodels! Even here, I refrained from giving a far more sexy, hyper-objectified female example of photo-shopping.

Forensic economics does similar things with patterns in data rather than photos. Ray Fisman at Columbia famously caught some Indonesian companies as corruptly linked to Suharto, because their stock prices would fall whenever Suharto got sick. Ray has made a specialty of this – he also caught some countries smuggling art and antiques, using discrepancies between their exports of these items to country X and the country X data on imports of these items from these same countries.

So here’s the challenge – can we use forensic economics to keep tabs on aid agencies? Oops, I forgot, there's a lot fewer people who care about aid than Victoria's Secret models. Can both of you please forward your suggestions on forensic aid evaluation?

Satire Wars! Owen Barder on "The universal cynics’ answer to why your aid project won’t work"

Happy 2010, Aid Watchers! New viewers on Jan 4: See Update 2 below. Since you don't really expect me to work on a holiday (do you?!), I will just start off the New Year with a link to Owen Barder's hilarious spoof. Are we in a satirical face-off?

Update 1: Yes we are! Aid Thoughts has responded to Owen's Universal Cynic with a very funny counter spoof on the Universal Project Advocate.

This update motivates me to correct the inexplicable omission of a link to my original satire "How to write about poor people," which may have motivated Owen's counter blast, which in turn motivate Aid Thoughts' counter-counter-blast. Plus for good measure, Aid Watch readers' additional 15 pointers (through my editorial filter) on writing on poor people.

Any other related blogs that want to launch their own missiles of maximum sarcasm? Yes, I mean you Chris Blattman! And of course, we have got to hear from you, Wronging Rights, you're a natural at this.

New Update 2 (Jan 4): Wronging Rights came through, they are as hilarious as I expected! And it's their blogiversary, so please go there. Blattman blew me off with some flimsy excuse that he's giving two presentations at the All-Galactic Social Science Association, currently meeting.

It doesn't get any better than this, aid watchers. Somehow satire brings deeper insights than yet another aid and growth regression.

Decade Ender Edition: We interrupt this blog for a brief self-promotional announcement

People from Ohio are not supposed to trumpet their own achievements. Ohioans have this belief that if you do the Unforgivable Sin of Self-Praise, a tornado will immediately strike and wipe out you and your entire family. "Pride goeth before a fall" is the state motto. Still, when you are labeled an "aid skeptic" and make enemies everywhere, if you don't praise yourself, who's going to? On top of that, I will appeal to a technicality of quoting others praising me, is that alright Ohio? If not, at least tornadoes are uncommon in downtown Manhattan in the middle of winter. So just to note that the World Bank included my book on the PSD blog's Top Ten Books of the Decade. No, not the White Man's Burden, but my lesser known earlier 2001 book (paperback 2002), The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. Some insiders, not necessarily including the author, actually like the first book better than the second. And there's nice poetic justice here, since the 2001 version of the World Bank forced me onto the exit ramp out of the Bank because of that 2001 book.

Then BOTH my books made the Top Ten Pro-Liberty Books of the Decade. Thank you liberty lovers, I love Liberty for All also, and thanks for giving me 20 percent of the whole decade liberty franchise. Good thing I didn't waste time on a 3rd pro-liberty book.

So for those who procrastinated on Christmas gifts, or maybe celebrate Orthodox Christmas instead, it's not too late to click on the above links and raise my Amazon rankings!

Avatar

I just saw Avatar. This movie is a metaphor for a lot of stuff we care about here at Aid Watch, such as... Sorry, not this time. It's a fabulous movie. I loved it. There's nothing more to say.

Underwear Bomber illustrates limit of “Do Something” approach to public policy, with aid application

One of the celebrities once said about global poverty, “just do something, even if it’s wrong.” This approach is deeply appealing to politicians. Politicians love to show off to the public they are addressing a tragic problem by “doing something,” without having to bother with all that crap about “whether it actually works.”

The latest terrorism scare provoked by the Underwear Bomber prompted these profound insights into political economy. The New York Times reported a forceful  response: the TSA is now doing full-body pat-downs of 5-year-old girls.

I have been waiting forever to vent about airport security as incompetent and useless, as well as killing off the airline industry. I might have been afraid the TSA would put me on a watch list for such a rant, but no worries: according to recent reports, they can’t check their own watch lists.

I failed to speak out for a more basic reason: I know nothing about the topic. I had limited myself to reading the occasional newspaper article on chainsaws getting through security. Fortunately, Chris Blattman came to my rescue by finding a real security expert, Bruce Schneier. A quick scan of his work shows his expertise on the limits of “do something.”

Before the underwear bomber, Schneier had already said airport security is “a show designed to make people feel better."  He has repeatedly said “Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers”. (The latter just worked on the Underwear Bomber.)

Being a sensible but ignored critic usually stimulates a snarky edge (don’t ask me how I know this). Schneier on his post-Underwear Bomber blog:

What sort of magical thinking is behind the rumored TSA rule about keeping passengers seated during the last hour of flight? Do we really think the terrorist won't think of blowing up their improvised explosive devices during the first hour of flight?

I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.

The prescribed response for useless or harmful "do something"  is democratic accountability (just like in aid!). It's a bit harder to enforce accountability when Homeland Security can use the partially justified cover of secrecy to hide their incompetence. (Is this why aid agencies also resist disclosing information?)

So thank goodness for Mr. Schneier! And let's have lots and lots of Schneiers on the "do somethings" in foreign aid and global poverty as well!

How to write about poor people, cont'd (the Interactive Edition)

This second post is the result of crowd-sourcing this satire. I turned to all of you in response to one commenter who really thought I needed to improve the satire quality of the previous post. Another commenter suggests reading the all-time-great classic "How to Write About Africa," which was of course an inspiration, and whose brilliant author, Binyavanga Wainaina,  I would no more dream of matching than Shakespeare.

An anonymous commenter  (an extremely talented, knowledgeable, and well known writer on global poverty, among other topics) got the ball rolling by suggesting these additions to the list:

11. Assume that all poor people everywhere have the same interests and views on all subjects. 12. You can take the views of Western-based NGOs as a proxy for the composite opinions noted in rule 11.

I then went to crowd-sourcing and many great suggestions have now come in. I have taken the liberty of liberally editing the suggestions to fit the format, the original authors are listed below:

Alanna Sheikh MPH:

13. Leave untouched the assumption that poor people are all non-white, but never openly admit it.

14. You may use the phrase "these people" as an alternative to the poor, as in "these people have nothing" or "these people still live as their ancestors have for centuries"

Ian:

15. Suggest specific answers that will end poverty in every possible situation, such as a package of microcredit, fertilizer subsidies, and a women's handicraft cooperative.

Saundra:

16. Simplify poor people's cultural, social, and political systems as easy to understand and easy to change. You will not have space to attempt to explain why THEIR societies are so different from OUR intractably complex societies.

@altmandaniel on Twitter:

17.  It is not necessary to talk to any real poor people, they do not understand how to solve their problems anyway.

Tyler and Sarah and booksquirm inspired the following:

18. Use liberally the pronoun "we," such as "we must act now to end poverty." You don't ever need to make clear who is "we," although it is obviously not the poor.

And John was the inspiration for this one:

19. When you give an anecdote about one poor individual, make sure it is as extreme and non-representative as possible, such an HIV-positive famine victim being chased by child soldiers

Transitionland inspired:

20. Do not mention any individuals in a poor community who have now escaped poverty, don't seek any lessons, it was probably either luck or evil behavior.

@keithkall:

21. Write about the interests of the poor as entirely consistent with other good things, such as preserving the natural environment and fighting global warming.

and inspired by Word_Bandit:

22. Appeal to the voyeurism of your rich audience reading about "the poor," but do so tastefully.

Carrie:

23. If anyone does finally object to the label "the poor," use "the vulnerable" instead. "Vulnerable"  has the added advantage that it is so vague that you can make up just about any story you want about this group.

Ben:

24. Be sure to include statements in the form "X children die every minute because of  diseease or problem Y. Y could be easily eliminated at a cost of $Z (a modest number)." X, Y, Z can be quoted from other people whose methods of estimating X, Y, and Z you do not need to scrutinize too carefully.

Indirectly inspired by many readers:

25. Suggest to the readers some demonstrative action that they can do to end poverty,such as wearing a white band on their wrist. How these actions affect global poverty does not have to be completely spelled out.

OK I think that's a wrap, thank you for all of your suggestions! The outpouring of responses suggests a lot of discontent with the cliches, stereotypes, and tolerance for nonsense in poverty writing. (I don't claim to speak for all of you, feel free to disagree.)  As I have said before, remember that satire is the weapon of the weak. None of us have much direct power to change the unaccountable establishment's "consensus." But we can tell poverty writers: "get serious,or beware of ridicule."

How to write about poor people

1. Use a precise definition of poverty: living on less than $1.25 a day, adjusted for purchasing power. Give the precise number who fit that definition.
2. Ignore the recent revision of  this number by 42%.
3. Do not excessively analyze geographic or ethnographic distinctions amongst poor people.
4. Discuss the following: poverty traps, vicious circles, aid financing gaps.
5. There probably won't be time left to discuss the following concepts: initiative, savings, inventiveness, resourcefulness, adaptation to local conditions, or local knowledge.
6. Discuss only income, health, access to clean water, and literacy. Leave it to anthropologists to cover areas like happiness, traditions, ceremonies, festivals, friendships, kinship, love between men and women, or love between parents and children.
7. Display pictures of poor children (alternatively women).
8. Don't show pictures of poor men, who make your audience think of drunkards, wife-beaters, or janjaweed.
9. These topics are only for Marxists: power, class, discrimination, oppression, or history.
10. Your knowledge about poor people should come from other writers who observe these rules.