Adventures in Onionism

I read Nina Munk's recent book The Idealist to possibly add it to my Development course syllabus. It's about Jeff Sachs (he of The End of Poverty fame) and his Millennium Villages Project. Basically, Sachs is an idealist, he insults you if you disagree with him, and his program doesn't work and isn't being rigorously evaluated since there was no control group. I usually want to cut Sachs some slack, maybe because I think I'm already too cynical so I shouldn't bother wasting energy criticizing his (naive) optimism, and I tend to agree with his statement that the amount of money we're talking about for his desired big push of foreign aid is pennies compared to our military spending. But the book really portrays him as a bully. (And also possibly a washed up bully since his fame seems to have waned of late.) Anyway, I'm clearly not a fan of MVP. The book itself was alright, if not stunning: B, maybe a B-. Listen to this:

For my development course.

This is what I sometimes claim my development economics is all about. But trying to know the objective function I'm trying to (or should be) maximize is difficult. Shouldn't climate change be part of it, especially if life on planet Earth is at stake? Should my own happiness, which really wouldn't be maximized by working on Wall Street? Couldn't you be more effective in the long run by encouraging a bunch of others to do the "best" thing instead of actually doing that "best" thing yourself? Hard to say. h/t for the seriously thought-provoking and interesting article: Blattman .

On both counts. I have accepted a position with Innovations for Poverty Action as a postdoc working on a water, sanitation, and hygiene project in Kenya for two years. I leave July 13. Read this Nick Kristof article if you're curious about the type of work. Everything is also cleared up regarding my dissertation, which has cleared all paperwork hurdles. As soon as I get back to Berkeley I can go pick up my lollipop from Grad Division.

I'll be spending this week working closely with two of the workshop participants helping them answer their specific questions about Rwanda's community-based health insurance (Mutuelle). The project as a whole is about results-based financing (RBF) of health clinics, but there's pretty good panel data on all sorts of health-related topics. For more info on a bunch of RBF-related projects that the Bank is running, go here . The people I'm working with had to go back to their regular jobs, so we meet in the evenings and I have days to myself. I'm doing a little work on my own military recruiting research idea and doing a lot of running--the new hotel is on the nicer outskirts of town, complete with a public golf course and tons of tiny squatted farm plots, so I can find dirt roads to run on and the air is much better than it was downtown. site of the workshop Nicolas Sarkozy on US health care reform: "Welcome to the club of states who don't turn their back on ...