Aid sceptics like to say that the west has spent trillions of more than a trillion dollars on aid to Africa since independence. See for example Dambisa Moyo in the Wall Street Journal or The Catholic Herald. Bill Easterly makes the same claim on page 4 of The White Man’s Read more…
Hadley Freeman in the Guardian has rumbled my black jeans delusion: Black button-down shirts are basically the upper-body equivalent of black jeans, which were discussed on this page a few weeks ago. Just as some misguided men think the black gives the jeans a smack of formality while the denim Read more…
… is here. Simon’s stuff is always well worth reading – he has an enviable ability to synthesize ideas from across disciplines, and explain them with a coherent narrative.
Will Ross has a nice piece on BBC Radio 4 Today this morning in which he goes to Lalibela, a small, quite remote, mountain-top town in Northern Ethiopia, and interviews the kids there about the World Cup. They know all about the players and are so excited about the World Read more…
Today’s Guardian newspaper has an article about Robert Owen, after whom I was named: the Scottish parliament spent part of yesterday debating whether Robert Owen’s face should appear on Scottish banknotes. The explanation, as those who know the history of the school reform and co-operative movements will realise, is that Read more…
Welcome to my world: Fortunately my partner has reality-based beliefs.
Two interesting new articles start with the premise that the aid system needs to be overhauled, and then reach radically different conclusions about what this means in practice. First up, Roger Riddell says we need a radical rethink of foreign aid: The gap between what it does and what it could Read more…
This is a non-technical introduction to how you can “subscribe” to blogs and webpages so that you can read lots of blogs quickly and easily. It explains the benefits of Google Reader and the other ways you can read many blogs without having to go from one webpage to another.
People sometimes ask me to write more about political situation in Ethiopia (eg in a comment yesterday on my website). This has caused me to consider why I don’t write much about Ethiopian politics. I decided that there are two reasons, which shed a little light on my attitude to Read more…
A new Oxfam paper, written by the excellent Jasmine Burnley, looks at 21st Century aid. Here is a good summary paragraph: “We are now at a crossroads. On the one side, is politically motivated or ineffective aid – much of which still exists today. On the other, and looking to Read more…