Hi all,
Ah cricket. That magnificent sport that contains all the drama of Lear in a format just as underappreciated. The 20/20 world cup is going on, and while the short form of the game is to Test cricket what an Saturday Night Live skit is to The Tempest, it’s still pretty amazing when done right (rather like SNL). In particular I’d like to take this opportunity to warn any readers who require inputs from your South Asian or Antipodean collaborators to expect some delays and occasional curse-words. Already, we’ve had an India-Pakistan clash, which means that the most combustible fixture of the tournament has now passed (unless they meet again in the knockout stages, which might actually melt twitter down); but I’m tempted to post a live link to my heart rate as read by my running watch, so you can track Sri Lanka’s fortunes without needing to understand the intricacies of the scoring system. Spikes followed by a high plateau mean we’ve won a match, something you shouldn’t expect to see too often. Spikes followed by a prolonged depression means all is going to expectations. There’s been some economics, too. I should probably mention a little of it.
- Last week I trailed new work taking aim at the OECD-DAC’s aid effectiveness agenda, and you got two papers for your money (actually they’re free). In the first, Some Unpleasant ODA Arithmetic Atousa Tahmasebi and I tip our hats to Thomas Sargent’s famous paper and document that despite a decade and a half of the aid effectiveness agenda, not much has changed in how donors give ODA; one striking finding is that when scaled to the number of people living in extreme poverty in a country, the provision of ODA by DAC members is regressive. What’s more, in a second paper with Bernat Camps, we show that senior a mid-level bureaucrats working in these agencies are really quite badly misinformed about where ODA is going even from their own country. Their personal opinions tend to be very much more progressive than their agencies, which isn’t surprising. There’s a blog and thread for the short of time, too. And as a bonus, Sam Hughes and I get stuck into the Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that the UK would get back to giving 0.7 percent of GNI in aid in just a few year and find it’s got more holes in it than Bonnie and Clyde’s car. Scrooge McSunak has also been taking a pretty lax approach to value for money, allowing the budget to go up and down like the crowd at a System of a Down gig.
- I always love reading Branko Milanovic, because it’s abundantly clear that he thinks about grand questions all the time. It’s a quality I greatly admire in him, even if I disagree with his take on those questions (which isn’t all that often anyway). In this blog, he talks about how the very conception of economics you hold changes the questions you ask, how you see the world and the research that you do.
- And speaking of economists who ask big questions, this excellent appreciation of Janos Kornai, who recently passed away, by Gerald Roland is well worth reading. How many contemporary economists could have a career like this, working on so many different questions of central importance? What a life.
- Is Squid Game any good? I have a 14 month old who’s favourite game is sleep torture, so we tend to watch only *extremely easy* TV, like Bake Off and University Challenge (my wife is so annoyed at me that I haven’t tried out for this yet. I even slam my hand on an imaginary buzzer in front of me when I watch it). Anyway, Squid Game sounds horrific, and Planet Money have made it even worse by relating it to how pay is structured in modern economies, and the massive cognitive and mental health burden that debt puts on us (transcript). Recommended, but have chocolate on hand.
- I’m a big fan of Vijayendra Rao, and this piece with Marcus Holman about the circumstances under which Community-Driven Development is effective is excellent.
- Lastly—because the cricket is calling me (and so is my son, thus hastening the end of the links) I was stunned to discover that the most popular song in Asia at the moment is in Sinhala. It’s very catchy, but it feels a little to me like seeing song in Klingon on Top of the Pops (does that still exist?). Nikkei Asia cover this, and how it relates to the growing trend of songs in languages audiences don’t understand going global (even without a Gangnam Style-type dance). But if Sinhala rap isn’t your thing, here are some of Franz Kafka’s doodles, and they are every bit as magnificent as you’d expect.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
R
