Views from the Center

In a recent SNL sketch Bill Haider is a white celebrity filming a commercial in a village using black people as props to plead for “39 cents a day” which he claims is “all these people need to survive.”  

In an op-ed last week, “Reading Piketty in India,” I noted how poor the U.S. was in the mid-19^th century. As best I can determine from the data available, the proportion of America’s population living below India’s poverty line was roughly as high then as it is in India today. 

A set of more or less arbitrary lines continues to do very strange things to discussions about development. 

This Q&A was originally posted at Democracy in Africa.

1. Tell us a bit about your work with the Center for Global Development

CGD is a ‘think and do tank’ established in Washington, DC in 2001, doing rigorous research with the aim of producing policy proposals to improve the development impact of (or reduce the damage done by) rich countries. I work for CGD Europe, based in London, as a research fellow leading on illicit financial flows, and continuing to dabble in inequality.