Hi all,

Well that was a week, wasn’t it? The Spending Review confirmed what was feared for the ODA budget, and then on the same day Diego Maradona (see the last link) and James Wolfensohn (link 2) died. Just when 2020 was looking like it was going to try and rescue itself from the massive suck-fest it seemed so happy being, gaslighting humanity by giving us the news the Dolly Parton might have saved humanity (again – the first time was when she released the album Jolene) and that DeAndre Hopkins catch, it turned the tables again to reveal it’s true evil nature. If 2020 was a TV character it would be Tony Soprano – violent, abusive, but occasionally just likable enough to make you let your guard down again. When 2020 says ‘we had coffee’, this is what they mean.

1. So… shall we start with the obvious? I’ve always disliked the idea that the amount of good we do on development can be reduced to the amount of aid we spend in a given year, but cutting the aid budget in the middle of a global pandemic that is likely to cause the first increase in global extreme poverty in decades is… not so great. Not when the IMF’s head is penning op-eds desperately arguing to maintain a focus on the poor, if we want this crisis to ever truly end. And certainly not when you consider the quality of some of the other spending this year. That said, I’m going to break a rule and repeat a link. If we’re going to cut, cut the worst of it. I also liked this take by Mark Miller, and in particular his twitter thread. But more than anything else, I’d point out that there is everything still to fight for. Cuts can protect what UK aid does best, but require real defence, real fight. If you care about getting this right, cut your losses on the fights that have already been lost and fight the ones that remain. Until they’re lost, they’re worth fighting, and require people who believe in it, and have the knowledge to make the case for keeping the best of our work.
2. James Wolfensohn, whom Justin Sandefur described as the only good President the World Bank has had, passed away. Via Dan Honig, here is a truly amazing interview he gave as part of an oral history of the World Bank. As Dan said: you can learn more here about how the Bank works than from any other source available.
3. Do you find ‘left’ and ‘right’ restrictive intellectual categories? That there is a complexity to your thought that reducing it to a single region on a single axis won’t capture? Pranab Bardhan (whose work on sharecropping in India had such an impact on me when I was a student) has a lovely piece setting the ideological diversity of the academe on a more complex scale than left/right, and in the process gives you a starter for ten on so many intellectual debates that you can wormhole down at your leisure.  
4. Two super pieces on VoxDev this week – first Suresh de Mel and co-authors on an experiment that finds that rolling out free digital savings accounts to a cohort of poor people in Sri Lanka achieved… not much at all. Digital solutions are nice, but only once we’ve worked out the fundamental behavioural constraints to the problems we face. And another piece that finds that outsourcing of work from a parent firm leads to an increasing concentration of economic rents in the contracting firm – a finding that chimes very much with one of my favourite papers, Nick Bloom’s Firming Up Inequality.
5. Two more pieces on the recent US election. First, a really sad look at the shockingly high number of Americans who report being close to no other person, and how strongly these marginalised people broke for Trump – one possibility for why polls underestimate his support so consistently. And a piece which looks at the ethnic breakdown of Trump’s support, attributing his increased popularity with some ethnic minorities in part to reversion to the mean, to the rural/urban split even within ethnic groups, and Trump’s ability to tap into the specific concerns of some minority groups.
6. Because of course, Branko has written something about The Makioka Sisters, once again proving that he is a walking venn diagram, connecting unrelated topics in the mind of a single polymath again and again.
7. So I didn’t say much about Diego in the intro, because I was saving the best for the last. I don’t really watch football anymore, but I idolised Maradona. In fact, my son’s first name was very close to being Diego, before it was nixed by my (half-Argentine, no less!) wife. I am just old enough to remember watching him play at his absolute apex – for Napoli and for Argentina. It was the clearest expression of genius I’ve ever seen: he was simply that much better than everyone else I have ever seen play the same sport. And it wasn’t despite his imperfections, they were very much part of him; his genius is inseparable from the mindset that led him to do so many crazy things. We could have thousands of links here, but I’ll try and be restrained: the FT on how Maradona is the perfect metaphor for monetary policy; but he wasn’t a metaphor for life – he was far more important than that, as L’Equipe understood. It comes across on the commentary of that goal, particularly the howl of “Siempre Maradona! Genio, genio, genio!”; and in his legendary Live is Life warm-up. I’m so sad he’s gone, but happy to spend hours watching this to celebrate him.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R