The overarching theme of these episodes is the luck and privilege I’ve enjoyed—and my country has enjoyed—and the implications for my and my country’s responsibilities to the rest of the world. I was lucky to be born in America White and well-off; was lucky again as a baby boomer to enjoy the reprod...

In the fall of 1968, when I was 22 and starting the second year of a two-year master’s program at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies in Washington, DC, the man who would become my first husband told me about a college friend in New York needing $200 to help pay for an illegal but reas...

Before I get to the origin of CGD I want to say something about the concept of “mission.” I attended Catholic schools straight through college, and though before I left college I had left behind being a Catholic, I had apparently internalized the idea of having a mission in life—as in the missionari...

The story opens in the summer of 1990, when I became the head of a small technical division on environment in the Latin America region of the World Bank. The vice-president of the region told me (in so many words) he wanted an economist to take charge of what he saw as a “too-green” group. I resiste...

The first section of this note examines the causes and consequences of Afghanistan’s financial crisis and lays out policy options the international community can support to enable urgent financial flows and restore the basic functioning of the Afghan financial system. The next section examines prosp...

I was 26 years old and three months pregnant when I got a job in the summer of 1972 as an “analyst” at a USAID-funded program in Washington, DC, on think tank row (now home of the Brookings Institution, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and the Carnegie Endowment for International ...

Women apparently attribute success to luck; men to competence. I’m a successful woman—family and career and all that, and I don’t discount my own competence. But still the reality is that besides the luck of being born in America (see episode 1 in this series), which American men not just women tend...