The white man's burden

What Hacker News says

1. dash2May 2022
   >Economics as a discipline describes an idealized fictional human-like colony on Mars, locked in a greenhouse. It doesn't even attempt to describe humans living on Earth, so be careful how you interpret it.

   I'm an economist, and this is not remotely true. It's not even true for economic theory (international trade, environmental economics).

   Here are some economic articles about humans on earth:

   Case and Deaton's Deaths of Despair paper: https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/15078.full_....

   Duflo and Banerjee, Poor Economics

   Easterly, The White Man's Burden

   Autor et al's China Syndrome on the effect of trade with China: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18054/w180... and their subsequent papers on its effect on social outcomes (marriage, divorce, drug overdoses) and political extremism.

   The idea that economists don't study real estate markets is also absolutely false. Google scholar "real estate economics" gives about 2.5 million results. There's the Journal of Urban Economics. There's Glaeser's book Triumph of the City. Et cetera.

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2. sienFeb 2014
   Don't just read Moyo.

   Read 'Poor Economics' by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Duflo is at MIT and is all about trials to figure out what works with aid.

   Read 'The Bottom Billion' by Paul Collier who is a development economist at Oxford.

   Read 'The Idealist' by Nina Munk which is about how we can say that Geoffrey Sach's millennium village project has failed.

   Read 'Africa Rising' by Vijay Mahajan about how many countries in Africa are actually been doing well economically for the first time in decades.

   Read 'The White Man's Burden' by Bill Easterly about how he thinks aid has all failed.

   The development of the poorest countries is incredibly important. These people all have thought heaps about it and are very serious about wanting to help.

   Nobody really knows what the answer is but at least get a picture of the different viewpoints.

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3. j4peJun 2014
   I wonder what the author thinks can be done to improve volunteerism?

   Here in the Philippines I met a troop of British deaf-assistance volunteers, visiting for three months, who don't know sign language and happily admit their own uselessness. Clearly this is suboptimal. But the only solution he presents in the piece - make money and give it to NGOs to hire professionals - sounds, well, not exactly surprising coming from a grant writing consultant. The authors of books like Dead Aid [1] and White Man's Burden [2] would have a few research-backed criticisms of what his suggested approach does to NGOs' effectiveness.

   I was hoping to find some in-trade NGO hacks for travel volunteerism, or Doctors Without Borders for Everything, but without any new approach presented, this piece is just complaining about a pretty obvious problem.

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   [1] Dead Aid https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6184317-dead-aid [2] White Man's Burden https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33513.The_White_Man_s_Bu...

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