Adair Turner, Chair of the Financial Services Authority, says that the FSA should not be expected to curb city bonuses: Lord Turner, head of the Financial Services Authority, said it was “economic illiteracy” to expect his organisation to be able to dictate to banks what they paid their staff. He Read more…
Bizarrely, the BBC online magazine has an excellent article on “The problem with PowerPoint” with some tips for giving presentations that many people in the development business and in government would do well to heed. Here is the main point, as far as I am concerned: … all too often Read more…
About six years ago I threw together a website, www.runningforfitness.org, to make running-related calculations (for example: if I can run a 10km in one hour, how long might it take me to run a half marathon?). Today I’ve changed one of the calculations because I made a mistake when I Read more…
Tim Harford has an interesting article in this weekend’s Financial Times about private health and education in developing countries: Imagine that your daily earnings were less than the price of this newspaper. Would you consider buying private education and private healthcare? Before you make up your mind, here are a Read more…
Danny Finkelstein in The Times sticks up for Special Advisers. Alex Evans, who was a Special Adviser in DFID, tells a funny story about being put at the end of a corridor I returned from leave to discover that my office had halved in size: the wall had been moved Read more…
Scarlett Lion has this list. Her main advice is to keep it to a minimum. Here is our list, intended for visitors to Ethiopia. So apparently zip off safari shorts/trousers make you look stupid. I guess I don’t care – I think they are quite a good way to travel Read more…
Bob Sutton offers us fifteen tips on workplace management. Most resonate with me. Especially these two: 3. In organizational life, you can have influence over others or you can have freedom from others, but you can’t have both at the same time. … 13. Err on the side of optimism Read more…
The BBC reports Gordon Brown’s speech at the TED conference today: The power of technology – such as blogs – meant that the world could no longer be run by “elites”, Mr Brown said. Policies must instead be formed by listening to the opinions of people “who are blogging and Read more…
I was touched to receive the following message through my website yesterday: i am one of the proud person in the world when in heard that you are going to man utd but please i am applealing to you that gambia are in need of your support because we need Read more…
I’m inordinately proud of the latest two episodes of my development podcast, Development Drums. In Episode 17, Todd Moss (Center for Global Development) and Chris Blattman (Yale, and blogger) join me to talk about President Obama President Obama’s speech in Ghana about US policy towards Africa. In Episode 16, FT Read more…