First Week of June 2018

1. Microfinance: There are things that make you feel old. Like discovering that KGFS, the Indian "wealth management for the poor" not-a-start-up-anymore is 10 years old. Here's Bindu Ananth's, one of the co-founders, reflections on what they've learned over those 10 years. There's apparently a Field and Pande impact evaluation on its way shortly, which will be must reading. I'm struck by a couple of points in Bindu's post: a) that their take-up rates are so high that they are seeing general equilibrium effects (further cementing for me that GE effects and household risk are the two most important things to be thinking about in microfinance, and financial inclusion more broadly, right now), and b) the attention paid to the behavior and bandwidth of front-line staff (OK, three most important things).
But there are other things to think about too--here's MicroSave's latest Low Income Living newsletter focused on microfinance and WASH.

2. Global Development: For as long as I've been paying attention to Global Development there have been big think pieces and agendas for transforming aid. Right behind me are some of the first books I was handed way back then: Inside Foreign Aid, A Bed for the Night, Lords of Poverty. Here's Jeremy Konyndyk of CGD's review of the reform agenda of the past decades, why they haven't worked, and the pros and cons of what's happening now. Since he's focused on incentives, of course I liked it. Here's Paul Currion's paper on Network Humanitarianism for ODI, which he calls the "other half" of Jeremy's paper.
But that's macro stuff. Micro matters too and any discussion of the macro has to make sense in light of micro-realities. Here's Helen Epstein's review of a new book about Rwanda, titled In Praise of Blood. Marc Gunther recently paid a visit to Rwanda--here's his initial reflections including a discussion with Josh Ruxin, the founder of the Kigali restaurant/hotel Heaven and author of a very different book about Rwanda, from 2013. Realizing that was only 5 years ago makes me feel almost as old as learning KGFS is 10. Marc promises a good bit of reporting on his visit in the weeks to come.
And here's a Nature story on the many trials of unconditional cash transfers that are one of the macro-trends that Konyndyk writes about.

3. Household Finance (and Data Redux): Or perhaps I should have called this item financial inclusion or even financial health. Hot on the heels of Findex, Gallup has a 10 country survey of households, sponsored by MetLife Foundation, called the Global Financial Health Study. It's a really interesting set of data on how households feel about their finances. You can get to the reports and the data via this page in a multi-step process which I'm sure Ideas42 had nothing to do with designing.
Here are Sonja Kelly of CFI and Evelyn Stark of MetLife's take on the results. I'm not a huge fan of the "financial health" terminology--though that's a story for another time--but I am a huge fan of the way Sonja and Evelyn take on the difficulties of all the different phrases we use--financial health, financial inclusion, financial access, etc. All of our terminology fails at some level to capture what we are really after, and so we need a combination of metrics and methodologies to make sure we don't lose our way (such as how the focus on measuring financial inclusion led to paying too much attention to account openings).
I also promised to pass along things that I found around Findex, and here are two that both focus on the problem that Sonja and Evelyn write about: access does not necessarily lead to usage which does not necessarily lead to positive outcomes.

4. Effective Altruism and Some Algorithmic Overlords: The Economist has a piece about effective altruism which is a reasonable introduction to the thinking and the thinkers, if you haven't been following that world. If you have, it's not distinguishable from any of the stories written over the last 5 years or so. If you are more familiar, here's something new: a long profile of the Open Philanthropy Project/Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz and their various entities. Full Disclosure: I'm a long-standing board member of GiveWell which appears in both pieces, along with Cari, and consider a number of the people who appear in the piece personal friends. The profile is by Marc Gunther--same one, also the person who broke the story about misbehavior at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation--and here's his post about the piece.
Marc discusses Open Philanthropy's work on existential threats to humanity, including "evil AI". Which makes for an easy pivot to Open Philanthropy's announcement of their 2018 AI Fellows, "promising machine learning researchers." And here is an NYRB piece on Automating Inequality and another new book, Algorithms of Oppression. I continue to worry that these pieces focus too much attention on the technology and not the non-digital algorithms that influence so much of life. Again, that's probably for another day, but if you want you can get a preview in my review of Automating Inequality.

5. Some Other Stuff: The lack of a thread is really showing through now huh? To hell with it, here's some other interesting stuff that I think you should click on. Planet Money's new episode about game theory and existential risks (see it does sort of tie back). Charles Kenny has a piece about the holes in America's safety net and the damage they do to children, which have a lot to do with non-digital algorithms (see!). Some "innovations" in home financing that seem likely to lead to people answering Gallup Financial Health surveys by saying they are not in control of their finances or future (see!!). And Felix Salmon has a piece about "Fictional Design" that may help you believe that Open Philanthropy's investment in AI scholars is high expected value (see!!!).