Taking the Cell Phone Challenge
What is the most precious personal possession of a college student today? Clearly for millennials, the thing they would hate to part with most is their cell phone. A recent…
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5 Poverty Busters You Should Know
Because Their Work is Making a Difference Article in Christianity Today, December 29, 2015 As a development economist, people sometimes ask me, “What can I do to really make an…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Can We Trust the Poor With Cash?
What do the poor do with cash handouts? There is mounting evidence from interesting new review papers that, at least in developing countries, cash grants do not increase purchases of…
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Why Shouldn’t We GiveDirectly?
(PRISM Magazine, April 2014–click to read full article at PrismMagazine.org.) One of the most exciting new ways for people to give to the poor in developing countries is through transferring cash…
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Why We Give (or Don’t)
(Christianity Today, February 2014.) This past July in Massachusetts, Eileen Taylor, a customer in a Heavenly Doughnuts drive-thru, paid not only for her own doughnuts, but for the order of…
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Should I Give a Cow or Cash for Christmas?
(Christianity Today, December 2013–click for full article at ChristianityToday.com.) What kind of Christmas present should you get for your rich uncle who has everything? Or perhaps even more importantly, what if…
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Want to Change the World? Sponsor a Child
(Christianity Today, June 2013.) “What can an ordinary person like me do for the poor in developing countries?” I have been asked this question casually at parties and social gatherings…
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The Best Ways to Help the Poor, Really
How can you say that you’re not responsible? What does it have to do with me? What is my reaction, what should it be? Confronted by this latest atrocity Driven…
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