Links I liked: celebrity cheese, aid sceptics and antidotes for cynicism

Celebrities, hope, cheese c/o Chris Blattman

A clever video to help you rewind apathy here

A happy day for all the aid sceptics out there – William Easterly is taking no prisoners on his new ‘Aid Watch’ blog

James Meek in the Guardian on what it feels like to be living and thinking your way through a global meltdown and ponders what it all means for the sum of human happiness

And finally, this is why youtube is great – a young Obama supporter destroys stereotypes during the Obama/Clinton debates, talks serious policy detail and gets a million hits. Life is good.

A Promising new debate on the financial crisis

Take a look at Development and the Crisis, a new online debate moderated by Dani Rodrik, which has kicked off with contributions from Nancy Birdsall, Jose Antonio Ocampo, Arvind Subramanian, and Yung Chul Park. Here are some excerpted highlights from Dani’s opening pitch ‘Let developing nations rule’: Read More …

Greed, Fear, Deregulation and previous crashes: the origins of the meltdown

Rich pickings in this week’s Economist with a special report on the future of finance, and a nice briefing on ‘global economic imbalances’ that ties together the East Asian crisis of the late 90s with the current mess. The story runs like this, (allowing for my non-Economist spin)

The East Asian financial crisis of the late 90s was caused by a toxic mix of domestic financial deregulation and capital account liberalization that allowed Asian banks and other firms to go on a mid-90s foreign borrowing spree. Result? Asset bubbles, (e.g. Thai real estate), and then a crash as foreign (and domestic) capital launched speculative attacks on the region’s currencies or simply fled. Read More …

What would a global food security policy look like?

Sticking to yesterday’s theme of food, check out ‘The Feeding of the Nine Billion‘, an excellent new paper by Alex Evans. Alex combines the skills of academic and consultant with his insider experience as a former special adviser to Hilary Benn, then UK Secretary of State for International Development. He specialises in what George Lakoff calls ‘reframing‘ – here he pulls together a number of trends into what he calls an ‘age of scarcity’ (of carbon, energy, water, land). These will together produce a ‘food crunch’ as the population rises to 9 billion over the next 40 years, unless we come up with a ‘global food security policy’. Read More …

A Billion Hungry People – remember the food price crisis?

Read this paragraph: ‘Despite the recent creation of a United Nations High Level Task Force, there is still little coordination or collaboration among UN organisations, the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other donors. There is no functioning global mechanism to ensure coordination and policy coherence of the various actors, thus adding complexity to the response effort and reducing efficiency, particularly at country level. Reform of this ‘global architecture’ is pressing.’

Global financial crisis, right? Wrong – it’s about food, from a new Oxfam paper, ‘A Billion Hungry People’, published today to coincide with the latest meeting of that UN Task Force (on the food crisis), in Madrid. Read More …

Links I liked: mobiles v coke; Obama’s Mandela moment etc

Are mobiles the new Coca Cola? Mobile phones are held up as the most promising aspect of new technology in terms of helping poor people improve their lives, but some new research suggests people are cutting back on food and other essentials to pay for the all important status symbol. See here for a summary of the research and discussion.

A promising new website called African Arguments Online, hosted by the Royal African Society and the Social Science Research Council, promises to provide ‘the most vigorous debates on Africa available on the web’.

Why is the Hudson airplane rescue a metaphor for the financial bailout? See here

Hyperactive Yale blogger Chris Blattman tries to ‘dream like an engineer’ on African infrastructure here

Top Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee brilliantly captures the historical significance of the Mandela moment of Obama’s inauguration here. I thought Obama’s speech showed a real recognition that campaigning may be conducted in poetry, but governing is done in prose (a line originally coined by Mario Cuomo, I believe).

And just because I like the title, how about ‘markets punish UK for saving markets‘. The UK government bails out the banks at huge cost to the taxpayer. Financial analysts say ‘ooh look, a big deficit’ and start dumping sterling and shares. In the immortal words of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, ‘if you want a friend, get a dog.’

Pregnancy and childbirth still killing 500,000 women a year, nearly all in Africa and South Asia

Gender injustice is toxic to development, nowhere more clearly than in the stark fact that having a child remains one of the biggest health risks for women worldwide. Fifteen hundred women die every day from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. That’s half a million women every year, and the number has hardly budged in two decades, according to UNICEF’s flagship publication, The State of the World’s Children 2009, just published. Read More …

Brazil is top of the world on an environmental issue – recycling

I’m mugging up on green jobs as part of the research for a forthcoming paper on the need for a ‘global green new deal’ and came across this great and (to me) unexpected example from Brazil. It’s drawn from UNEP’s ‘Green Jobs’ paper.

Brazil is the global leader in aluminium can recycling — some 10.3 billion cans were collected in Brazil in 2006. This saves the country enough electricity to supply a city of over 1 million inhabitants for one year. Aluminium can recycling also provides jjobs for close to 170,000 people in Brazil. Read More …

Promises v Reality: The Widening Credibility Gap on Aid

The backsliding began almost as soon as the ink was dry on the promises of increased aid made at the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles. Have a look at the graphic, based on the latest figures.

It comes from a recent analysis of the latest aid numbers by ace crunchers, Development Initiatives, by way of Owen Barder’s blog. Here are some key points:

Read More …

Dreams From My Father – what does his book tell us about Obama’s presidency?

Imagine someone a bit like dozens of social movement and NGO activists who you’ve worked with over the years. Raised across three continents; a spell of community activism that tempers romanticism with hard knocks; all this interspersed with wrestling with the sense of identity to make sense of being of mixed race, the absent father, and all that moving around. What sort of president would that person make? We’re about to find out.

I’ve just finished Dreams from my Father and like everyone else, was blown away by its intelligence and openness. Amazing to have the early years and inner world of a US president so exposed from day one. What pointers does it give for Obama’s likely predispositions on foreign policy and development? Read More …