the african problem
Sub-Saharan Africa is in dire straights. It is the most sick, hungry, poor and ignorant region of the world. It is a region infested with despots and illiberal democrats who for decades have led their...
View Articlezimbabwe is more than just afloat these days
As this piece in the Economist reports, Zimbabwe is slowly emerging from the hole that Mugabe and his men run it into. The pragmatic Tsvangirai and his MDC supporters appear to have decided that...
View ArticleIs Uganda experiencing its 1991 moment?
UPDATE II: Angelo over at TIA offers an analysis of the ongoing situation in the development of Uganda’s oil sector. After months of under-the-table maneuvers by the executive it appears that the...
View ArticleOn technology, governance and development
By now many of you have perhaps seen the takedowns of TED talks (see here, highly recommended), which some think have become rather pedestrian (I still find most TED talks insightful, just for the...
View Articlequick hits
1. Our Man in Africa: A great article on former president of Chad Hissene Habre. Also, is current Chadian president Idris Deby a clandestine state-builder in the Sahel or is all this just empty waste...
View ArticleWorking With the Grain in Development
I finally got to reading Brian Levy’s Working With the Grain. It is easily the most underestimated development book of 2014, and should be read alongside William Easterly’s Tyranny of Experts (which it...
View ArticleQuick Hits
1. Lunch with the FT: Mikhail Khodorkovsky 2. Blattman on Russian politics, and other stuff. 3. Tyler Cowen asks a rather odd question…. “Are anthropologists better than you think?” My simple answer...
View ArticleThe Continuing Deterioration of Uganda Under Museveni: The Case of HIV & AIDS
In the 1990s Uganda was typically considered to be one of the success stories in the management of the AIDS epidemic in SSA. However, as is shown below, since the early 2000s Uganda has significantly...
View ArticleBarack Obama on Uhuru Kenyatta
This is from Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic: Obama’s relationship with Kenyatta is complicated. A careful reading of Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father, suggests that he holds Kenyatta’s father,...
View ArticleCan fascists take over America?
Tyler Cowen thinks they can’t: American fascism cannot happen anymore because the American government is so large and unwieldy. It is simply too hard for the fascists, or for that matter other radical...
View ArticleClaims About “Good” Institutions
This is from Yuen Yuen Ang’s excellent book on How China Escaped the Poverty Trap: When foreign experts enter developing contexts and insist that there is one standard of good institutions — namely,...
View ArticleOn the Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators Database
Pamela Jakiela over at CGD has a great post on the quality and composition of bureaucracies across the world. Like Jakiela, I was struck by this finding: Across all countries in the WWBI data set,...
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