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Arvind Subramanian's op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, A Farewell to Alms has reignited a long-running debate about whether foreign aid works—a debate that NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof tried to put to rest recently in an elegant defense (subscription required) of some aid for some purposes.
Bill Easterly, in a recent Foreign Policy article, The Ideology of Development (subscription required), writes ominously that "a dark ideological specter in haunting the world," one in which "unelected outsiders imposing rigid doctrines on the xenophobic unwilling" and "favors collective goals such as national poverty reduction, national economic growth, and the global Millennium Dev
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