RCT spot
Angus Deaton and Nancy Cartwright with a new paper on the pros and cons of RCTs.Check out the abstract if you need convincing.
More sweatshops for Africa? Chris Blattman reports on a 6 year randomized control trial (RCT) to look at the impact of low wage manufacturing on poor Ethiopians, and (as they say in clickbait college) his answers may surprise you
Is a rising middle class really the best guarantee of good governance in emerging economies? The always readable Sina Odugbemi disagrees with Nancy Birdsall
DfID in the spotlight
DfID ‘should have done more’ to give poor countries a voice on fixing tax evasion. ICAI, the official UK aid watchdog is getting interesting
On the other hand, after 400 investigations, which found 69 positive cases the , cost of detected fraud in DFID’s spend was £1.04m in 2015-16. That’s just 0.01% of the total, (and presumably conducting 400 investigations to arrive at that number cost a lot more than £1m). Which raises the intriguing (for wonks anyway) question, how would you measure the value for money of anti-corruption investigations?
Oxfam GB’s new policy & campaigns director, Matthew Spencer, has just arrived from Green Alliance. Here’s his parting thoughts on 6 years of environmental campaigning in the UK
Hard to escape the US presidential campaign, but let’s at least avoid raking over last week’s debate:
Tired of Trump? Cool on Clinton? For a deeply weird/face slap candidate, time to follow Gary Johnson
Unable to name a single foreign leader (only in America? Don’t be so sure)
And here he manages to make Trump look positively normal [h/t Gawain Kripke]
Smart video trying to get US millennials to vote (why didn’t we have one of these on Brexit?!). Manages to combine lots of famous peeps being knowing/ironic, while still the message across
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW9PHNpGH18
And the satirists are stepping up to their admittedly not very difficult task. Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump is mesmerizing – on a par with Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin. 10m of sheer joy.