Ryan Hahn's blog

Is economic growth more like accumulating masses of putty, or assembling many hundreds of different lego pieces?

F. Halsey Rogers, a World Bank economist in the Development Research Group, has put together a helpful summary of the impact of the crisis on development thinking. Clearly, financial markets in rich countries went haywire. What should this mean for the role of markets in developing countries?

Bill Easterly argues that development is about creating problem-solving systems, and not just individual solutions or interventions for specific problems (e.g. malaria, access to finance, etc.). The whole post is worth reading in full, but here is a snippet:

I just realized that what is called "Keynesian stimulus" works differently when the government is starting off a situation of deficit. The math would produce different results, which makes me wonder why economists cannot spot it (I inject more perturbations and see massive fragility). In one case, to make an analogy to an individual, you can invest money you have on the side(assuming you've had suspluses [sic] from the past). In the other, you fragilize yourself by borrowing, and transfer the liabilities cross-generations.

One common complaint lodged against aid organizations is that they are too distant from local contexts.