I thought that the change I voted for was going to prioritize a more rational and facts-based approach to addressing the major issues of our times. I thought that we actually were going to start to abandon our top-down, failed-from-the-start approaches to helping the poorest and to start “exploring” new approaches that might actually work.… Continue reading A Smarter Approach to Global Warming
RECOMMENDED READING Out of Poverty: What works when traditional approaches fail by Paul Polak Polak, a psychiatrist by training, shifted his full-time efforts to working on poverty over 25 years ago. He founded International Development Enterprise to focus on helping small, developing country farmers earn more income. IDE has already helped millions of very small… Continue reading Out of Poverty book review
The Economist published an article called, A partial marvel, last month which summarizes the results of various research which evaluates the value of microcredit in helping the poor. The Net: Not everything (as expected) is rosy. Here are a few highlights: Funds still subsidized. 53% of the $11.7B committed to microfinance industry came at rates… Continue reading Microcredit helps the entrepreneurial poor
In Defense of Globalization by Jagdish Bhagwati Jagdish Bhagwati, an economist specializing in international trade and a professor at Columbia University, has written a very indepth book arguing that economic globalization overall has (and is having) a tremendous positive impact on the poor. He looks closely at the many critiques and perceptions of globalization and… Continue reading In Defense of Globalization book review
Guns, for sale Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies By Jared Diamond This is not per se a book on poverty. The reason I list it here though is that if you want to get a non-Western, cialis Judeo/Christian perspective of how human history might have developed and why certain people groups prospered… Continue reading Guns, Germs and Steel book review
The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good by William Easterly Boy, has this book started a lot of controversy in the international aid community. You’ve even got Nicholas Kristoff writing an oped piece in the New York Times in response to… Continue reading The White Man’s Burden book review
Untouchables: My Family’s Triumphant Journey Out of the Caste System in Modern India by Narendra Jadhav If you want to understand India and how to be effective in accelerating impact on poverty there, you need to understand the caste (pronounced “cast”) system and how it affects how the vast majority of people think in India. … Continue reading Untouchables book review
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey Sachs This book seeks to lay out the facts — both historical and present — on the state of global poverty and with concrete recommendations about how to move forward. Here are a few facts: world population — about 6.1 billion extreme poor (<… Continue reading The End of Poverty book review
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Hernando Desoto I think it is pretty much unanimously agreed to by most economists that in order to unleash the full potential of the wealth creation process of capitalism that a nation needs to have a reasonable and predictable methodology… Continue reading The Mystery of Capital book review
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