On Fake News, Narrative, Science, and Truth
Fake news and the demise of truth is one of the leading news stories of 2017. The front cover of Time magazine last month asked: Is Truth Dead? Recently the value…
Read more
How Does Hope Work?
Does hope need to be based in reality for it to help facilitate movements out of poverty? Recently my co-authors and I (Travis Lybbert and Irvin Rojas at UC Davis)…
Read more
Using Children’s Drawings in Program and Policy Evaluation
I want to devote this post to a new tool that I have begun to use with colleagues in program and policy evaluation, the digital coding of children’s drawings. An…
Read more
The Behavioral Economics of Why Hyperopic People Like Me Prefer Gift Cards over Cash
Consider the following scenario: The Christmas deadline is quickly expiring, and even by your own poor standards, you have displayed an impressive level of procrastination in Christmas shopping for your…
Read more
Trump’s Reckless Economics & Why His Presidency Could Cost You Your Job
(From the Huffington Post, October 27, 2016) In the barrage of issues surrounding the personal character of Donald J. Trump — his derision of ethnic and religious minorities, his public mocking…
Read more
Review of Kent Anann’s Slow Kingdom Coming and Three Classic Works on Poverty
(Published in Christianity Today Online October 25, 2016) The Parable of the Good Samaritan is so well-known to Christians that we often forget that it was given in response to…
Read more
Three New Papers on Psychology and Development Economics
I’ve had the pleasure of attending a couple of excellent conferences focused on poverty traps in the last few months–their causes, consequences, and possible cures. The first of these, The…
Read more
Review of Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
The notion that human beings behave “rationally” in pursuit of objectives such as utility and profit has formed the bedrock of economic theory for well over a century. For many…
Read more
Diagnosis and Development Impact
[Note for non-economist readers of Across Two Worlds, the following post may induce drowsiness and probably should not be ingested while driving a motor vehicle or operating heavy machinery.] In…
Read more
A Letter to My Evangelical Friends about Donald Trump
This article also published in the Huffington Post, March 31, 2016. Updated 10-31-16. You identify as an evangelical Christian, and you support Donald Trump to be our next president. A recent Pew…
Read more
Is My NGO Having a Positive Impact?
I enjoy helping NGOs with designing ways to carry out impact evaluations within the context of their normal operations. David Evans of the World Bank and I wrote a piece for…
Read more
Microfinance on the Margin
New blogs and articles in the public online press have brought increasing attention to the results of the six randomized trials on microfinance presented in the January 2015 issue of the…
Read more
Spank or Treat
How Game Theory Can Transform Your Kid’s Halloween Candy from Your Worst Enemy to Your New Best Friend As a parent, you will dread these days after Halloween. That stash…
Read more
What Bad Backs Can Teach Us About Development Work
As a development economist I naturally spend a lot of time thinking about issues related to economic development. I also have a chronic bad back, and unfortunately spend a lot…
Read more
Syria: Child Sponsorship in Reverse
A colleague of mine sent me an email recently, remarking that what is transpiring in countries like Syria, Iraq, Afganistan, Sudan, and Somalia was like child sponsorship in reverse. It is…
Read more
The Flaw In Fair Trade
The new July 2015 issue of the Review of Economics and Statistics contains the most rigorous academic study to date on the impact of fair trade coffee. Not only does the article…
Read more
Economists Discover Holistic Development
And 5 Reasons Why It’s Likely More Effective Although it has been a guiding principle of many development practitioners for some time, economists have begun to discover holistic development. While NGOs…
Read more
What a Beautiful Mind Left Behind
(San Francisco Chronicle Op-Ed, May 28, 2015) The death of John Nash and his wife Alicia from a tragic automobile accident in New Jersey last weekend stunned those of us…
Read more
The Economics of Hope
Why do so many development interventions fail to demonstrate positive impacts? Even one of the most hopeful ideas, such as microfinance, has…
Read more
Wheels of Fortune
Two years ago a man named Ron Rice called me on the phone and said his friend Ayuba Burki Gufwan was in San Francisco and wanted to meet me in…
Read more
Are Microfinance Impacts an Illusion?
Why is it that microfinance practitioners consistently argue that microfinance has large impacts on borrowers, while impact results from randomized controlled trials reveal only very small effects? In a paper…
Read more
Will the World Economy Ever Resemble the World Cup?
(Published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, June 22, 2014.) Like many World Cup aficionados, I will allocate far too much of my time to watching soccer games on ESPN…
Read more
Prophets Against Profits: What Occupy Wall Street Misses
(Christianity Today, October 10, 2011.) A sign flashed at the Occupy Wall Street protest reads “People Before Profit.” It is an effective sign. Who could support Profits Before People?…
Read more
What Trump Could Learn from the Golden State Warriors
Op-Ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, June 15, 2017 As the travails of President Trump have dominated the headlines, so has the jubilant season of the Golden State Warriors filled…
Read more