Despite the fact that Ranil and I are often banging on about donor coordination, we both ended up taking a break from AidThoughts at the same time (oh no!). We’ll both return soon – in the meantime I’ll leave you with some random thoughts:
On Alanna Shaikh’s twitter feed she writes:
Duncan Green and @owenbarder disagree on Tobin tax. Time for a development rumble? http://www.oxfamblogs.org/f…
I’m surprised and a bit disappointed that there hasn’t been many “development rumbles” in the blogosphere aside from the Easterly v Sachs v Moyo slugfest a few months ago in the Huffington Post (actually, how many development rumbles have there been that didn’t involve Aid Watch?). It might be that we’re all too polite or busy (or perhaps some of us are lowly grad students who aren’t ready to be suplexed by a development heavy).
Perhaps we should have a debate-styled variant of Development Drums called Development Deathmatch?
Speaking of Aid Watch, has anyone else noticed Bill Easterly’s recent tendency to link development concepts to good-looking female celebrities?
Also, see Chris Blattman’s hilarious “The Joy of UN Sex”
#1 by Ranil Dissanayake on September 6th, 2009
yes, bad timing! I’ll post something shortly!
#2 by Owen Barder on September 6th, 2009
I’d be happy to host a rumbustious debate on Development Drums.
I’m planning an edition on corruption which will bring together Mushtaq Khan and Daniel Kaufmann, who come from quite different perspectives, which I hope will be interesting.
But I’d welcome suggestions for other interesting topics and guests on Development Drums.
Oh, and keep up the good work.
Owen
#3 by Ranil Dissanayake on September 7th, 2009
please do get that corruption edition! and advertise widely. The more people that are exposed to Mushtaq Khan’s ideas the better. (transparency notice: he taught me during my master’s degree).