Nicholas Kristof is catching a lot of flak these days for a recent column on what he calls an "ugly secret of global poverty."  Citing conversations with people in Congo, as well as research by IPA Research Affiliates Abhijit  Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Kristof explains that it is not necessarily true that the poor

SaveTogether.org continues their chapter by chapter review of Portfolios of the Poor. This recent post breaks down how Portfolios tacked the thorny issue of the price of microfinance.

Never in history have the world’s rich been positioned to do so much for the world’s poor. The wealthiest 20 percent of the population has 72 percent of the world’s purchasing power, while the bottom 40 percent has a mere 4 percent. So why don’t we do more?

Of the many excellent notions Dean Karlan brought up during his USAID lecture last week, one had particular resonance.  Prof. Karlan expressed his wish that practitioners, who likely made up the majority of his audience at the USAID seminar, view impact evaluations (& RCTs) as investments rather than just accountability measures. 

A while back, a study estimated the number of people who will ever read any given published academic paper.  The number was pretty low; it was somewhere just barely above the total number of editors plus their parents.  The finding seemed to confirm that the inescapable Ivory Tower stereotype was not too far off.  Appropriately, I didn't ever read the meta paper itself... anyone remember this gem?

The chapter by chapter review of Portfolios fo the Poor continues over at the SaveTogether blog. This week: Chapter 4 "Building Blocks: Creating Usefully Large Sums."