Pre-AEA/ASSA Edition
1. In Memoriam: The new year began with news of the deaths of two important thinkers on development, economist Tony Atkinson and philosopher Derek Parfit. Here's Tony Atkinson's view of his most important work. Here's a celebratory post from the World Bank's Let's Talk Development blog, here's Beatrice Cherrier's overview of his work as the "founder of modern public economics," and here's a Foreign Affairs piece of Tony's from late 2015, as always focused on inequality and what can practically be done about it. I'll save links for Parfit until next week.
2. Microcredit: I have a new post at Next Billion on what I consider to be one of the most important new research papers on microcredit, an examination of the size and prevalence of subsidy by Cull, Demirguc-Kunt and Morduch. It documents that subsidy is widespread but small--in other words, that delivering pro-poor financial services isn't free, but that it is cheap. Over at CGAP, Greta Bull offers her thoughts on the four drivers of change for financial inclusion in 2017. And here are the most influential posts of 2016 at Next Billion.
3. Cash Aid and Basic Income: I'm trying not to turn the faiV into a cash and basic income newsletter, but it is a topic that is drawing a lot of attention lately. In the UK, one of the tabloids attacked aid for giving cash to poor people (as opposed to giving cash to rich people?). The Atlantic ran a piece about the history of cash aid in philanthropy and how it is changing current practice. Here's a short history of the idea of basic cash income and here's a round up of both history and current things going on. If you're at #ASSA2017, there's a reception Saturday night to learn more about the Y Combinator basic income experiment in Oakland.
4. Kahneman and Tversky and Lewis: You've probably seen that Michael Lewis has a new book about Kahneman and Tversky. In case you haven't, here's Sunstein and Thaler's review of the book. Here's a piece by Walter Isaacson about Michael Lewis. And here's a piece from Slate about the irony of Kahneman, our teacher about how easy it is to be wrong, and his faith in results that depended on small samples and have ultimately not held up to replication.
5. Savings: On a more prosaic level, how and why people save remains an important question. Here's Guerin, Kumar and Venkatasubramanian on the use of ceremonial expenditures as a means of informal saving at the IMTFI blog. In related news, Bill Maurer of IMTFI has a book coming out this year on the artifacts of money and transactions (via Diane Coyle's round up of the spring catalogs from econ publishers)
Bonus Ad: Today is the official release date of my book Experimental Conversations: Perspectives on Randomized Trials in Development Economics. Check it out at the MIT Press booth at #ASSA2017 or order one from Amazon (though it now says temporarily out of stock. Is that good news or bad news?)
The second post in David Roodman's epic review of the evidence for deworming is now up at GiveWell. The first post looked specifically at some of the worms papers; this post looks at whether results from those papers can be reasonably applied to other contexts. It's a long read but thoroughly worth it. Source: David Roodman/GiveWell
