Gregory Clark’s provocative new book, A Farewell To Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World was the subject of a lively CGD book chat with the author last week. Clark, a British academic who is the chair of the economics department at the University of California at Davis, was witty and charming as he proposed a theory of economic growth that implied that most of the development work going on in the world is wrong-headed and doomed to fail. He challenged health-focused interventions in Africa, saying that they merely raise the overall level of misery by keeping alive an ever larger number of people mired in abject poverty. Lawrence MacDonald, CGD director of communications and policy, reports.
