Hello. My name is John Powers. I live in a somewhat rural area just north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA. I will be 52 on the December 21. I like being born on the winter solstice.

I like blogs and occasionally write on my own blogs; here are a couple: Bazungu Bucks and Hats for Health. I read many blogs and comment sometimes. Blogs have been a way to help me see that computers and Internet communications can alter the means of production.

A smart blogger, Dave Pollard seems to have fooled around and fell in love with a woman at Second Life. I'm not sure what to think of that, but he mentions a word new to me compersion. It's a term swingers use to express the idea of taking pleasure when a partner is taking pleasure in another.

From the romance point of view, compersion is a hard construct to wrap my mind around, but it seems much easier to take pleasure in the accomplishments of others. When people do well they do well not just for themselves, but for all. Or perhaps another way to look at it is that whenever people love there is more love in the world. I want love to increase.

Part of the accomplishment of classical economics is to alienate our ways of work from our ways of life. We've learned that some things are "just business."

I don't use the expression "accomplishment" sarcastically. From the Wikipedia article on Adam Smith:

One example he used was the making of pins. One worker could probably make only twenty pins per day. But if ten people divided up the eighteen steps required to make a pin, they could make a combined amount of 48,000 pins in one day.

That example shows how alienation--thinking about business as separate--can be very useful.

Smith came to economics as a moral philosopher. Some modern classical economists are loathe to acknowledge his flexibility regarding state intervention in the economy. But it does seem important to see that Adam Smith's ideas were in some ways tethered to the well-being of people.

It's the integration of production with good living that's the challenge for us today. Classical economics has so succeeded by alienation and analysis, that it's made integration and synthesis hard to imagine.

Linda has begun to take seriously the problem and challenge of integration in her studies. It gives me great enthusiasm for he work. I'm surprised to be invited to participate. I am ready to roll up my sleeves to work on this important challenge.

John just forwarded me some great resources which I have added to the resources page. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Now if I can find time (HAHAHHAHAHHAH) I can attend, all of the tops schools for free! Harvard here I come (looks like a good resource I need for the class I am teaching anyhow!)

Forgive me for using this space for discussion, but it's a bit tangential to your proposal, at least I haven't worked out how it's related but think it is, so putting this in between asterisks in the proposal didn't seem the right place.

I just read an interesting article in Orion If Nature Had Rights by Cormac Cullinan. There is also an excerpt from Cullinan's book Wild Law.

Part of the challenge of setting up the research is as you note:

Currently purported "development" indicators either significantly depend on a measurement of per capita GNP or they are based on subjective evaluations of happiness.

I know from other places you've written that "subjective evaluations" are highly problematic for you. Metrics imply things that can be counted and divided. Such quantifiable measures are useful and important. But to use a lyric of a Tracy Chapman song to sum up one of your critiques of Western society: 'mountains and mountains of things' don't add up to happiness.

Subjectivity is not only a problem in making qualitative distinctions, but can also be the bane of quantitative measures. Indeed, part of the reason for your research is that GNP seems too narrow an indicator, certainly not a good indicator for sustainability, so a reliance on GNP creates subjectivity by omission.

Being a bad boy, my temperament takes me in the direction of imagining community processes leading to qualitative measures. I acknowledge that your proposal includes the importance of qualitative measures, but I also know that in terms of getting the research done these seem such a pain, I'm afraid they'll be glossed over.

Cormac Cullinan's article suggested to me a different frame to imagine community health by imagining them in terms of legal rights. The question: Who speaks for the natural community? is made interesting by imagining law where natural communities have legal rights. Cullinan points out that corporations are relatively recent inventions and yet our legal thinking has proceeded apace in assuring the rights of corporations.

Paul Ryan has created a sort of "yoga" of relationships called threeing This concept might be applicable to your research at least in terms of providing a process for exploring cross cultural relationships. It might also be a method for dialog in communities about livability and sustainability.

Okay, I acknowledge this is another one of my off-the-wall and half-baked ideas ;-) I do find Ryan's work interesting and in particular recommend glancing over his Hall of Risk.

A couple of names associated with the Hall of Risk are Jean Gardner, here's an article by her, and Brian McGrath. McGrath has done research in Thailand. His Urban-Interface site provides some clues about how Peirce's three phenomenological categories--the basis of Ryan's threeing--are applied in his work and research. Clearly McGrath is concerned with a larger scale of urban design rather than the more local communities you're interested in, still there might be something to this approach for developing a community toolbox.

On a more down to Earth level Sustainable Measures is a dot com. But the site has lots of useful information on it, in particular they've got a very understandable section on measurable indicators. I know that I've go a hard time really getting this issue of measurable, but I don't think I'm the only one. So the site might be helpful in providing examples in communicating this important notion.

Good Lord, my brain is like Swiss cheese! I forgot I had written the previous post in this thread. But I'm back at this thread for pretty much the same reason: I came across a couple of links today that I wanted to share, but wasn't really sure they fit on the resources page.

The first is an article in Business Week, Rating Countries for the Happiness Factor which is a happy little BW article about Adrian White the author of "The World Map of Happiness."

The second is an article by Jack Kornfield The Buddhist path and social responsibility (1993) I found the article at a site that has lots of Buddhist resources BuddhaSasana certainly worth bookmarking.

Lately I've been reading feminist blogs. I'm ashamed to say that conversations with smart women online often scare me. I know that the chances are good I'll get called out about something. In any case I got kind of wrapped up in a conversation that involved white feminist and feminists of color. I'm not sure why but Kornfield's article came to mind as I was thinking about the distinctions being drawn in the feminist conversation.

I've been bringing up religion a lot recently. Partly that's because Christianity seems to me very much like my home language in how it shapes the way I think of things. It seems hard to try to understand how people with other home religions think without drawing out my own ways of thinking for examination.

Of course a bunch of smart women in heated debate is going to bring out a lot of smart writing and links to smart writing. One of the pieces linked to which really caught my attention was Bernice Johnston Reagon (1981) Coalition Politics: Turning the Century. I'm not sure what Reagon's speech has to do with your studies, but it moved me so and I wanted to point you to it.

Update: Ethan Zuckerman writes and amusing post about the BW article and happiness in general.

More links on my mind. Linda, please tell me if adding them is distracting. I'm operating under the premise that you read quickly and can pick out anything of interest to you. I don't want to waste your time or to discourage you in any way.

Recently with the GM thread and the intellectual property thread my thoughts have turned to agriculture. It's winter here so thinking about my garden too. David Frayne early in the month at the Ayittey thread brought up Daniel Quinn. LOL not that I imagine you can make any sense of it, but from those threads you might sort of have a feel for what I'm thinking about.

Chris Blattmann pointed to a New York Time article about the Ankole Cow so I was thinking about that cow. And I've been thinking about the Gate's Foundation AGRA initiative. When I say "I'm thinking" part of what I mean is I'm paying some attention to the discussions about topics online. Here's the Web site for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

Just as background, one idea that I think is important in thinking about food and people is that one of our biggest challenges today is finding ways to put less carbon into the air and more carbon into the soil.

AGRA prominently raises the importance of soil. Still, my general and initial perception about the initiative is that it misses something important about the matrix of African agriculture, but not really sure what it is that it's missing.

Last night I also looked up Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya in an Almanac. I wanted to see statistics flat on the page. The funny thing is that per capita GNP, life expectancy, infant mortality, arable land, etc. aren't a story in themselves, but are very important for any story we might tell.

Today when I went online an article by Jeff Vail caught my attention. Vail is a former military intelligence officer and writes about Peak Oil among other things. In the article Vail points to a debate about relocalization of agriculture in response to declining oil availability. I haven't read the debate yet. Vail also points to his book A Theory of Power which he's put up online for free (PDF). I haven't read that either, but I skimmed it and it does seem to have some relevance to your work.

I'm hardly getting to the point;-) Uganda of the three East African countries has the most available arable land by a long mile. Just looking at East Africa, what's obvious is that large percentages of people are engaged in food production on unfavorable agricultural land.

Something that gives me pause about AGRA is that it presumes a hierarchy which concentrates power in ways that don't seem to match the environment or culture of the region. Vail points out how agriculture imposes a hierarchy.

Obviously one of the important stories of Sub Saharan Africa is the Bantu expansion premised on Agriculture. Some of the ethnic disputes in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania are extensions of the long history of people trying to accommodate agriculture in the region. In light of this history, so explicitly putting "Revolution" into the promotion of "Green" makes me skittish.

I looked up Wes Jackson. I wonder if you're familiar with him and his Land Institute? Even in the history of the USA the challenge of agriculture as a guiding star make for genuine tensions. So far as I know Jackson hasn't written extensively about the Ogallala Aquifer, but he's very clear-eyed about the reality of the dryness of the Plains. He understood early on that the established hierarchies imposed by agriculture don't make sense in Kansas.

Since I'm not making much sense by just hanging topics together which I happened to access around the same time, I'll add Isabel Allende speaking at TED. Towards the end of her talk she said:

I want to make this world good... Why not? It's possible.

Revolutions scare the heck out of me, even green ones. One way or another while we're living we've got to act. Like Allende, I want to make this world good. Creating something good is always an experiment, because we can never be sure what new relationships will bring forth.

Ankole cows produce little milk. Milk is an important food even while for many humans lactose intolerance makes it not good for them. Holsteins as it turns out are great producers of milk, but not well suited to the African climate. I have no idea whether the crosses of African cattle with Holsteins is a good thing or not. But I'm quite sympathetic with African dairy producers who want the income from Holsteins. The problem with economics so often is how the short term decisions fail in the long run.

In one way or another my sense is that thinking in terms of sufficiency economics may provide better ways to account for the longer runs.

Agriculture may be as Daniel Quinn suggests our original sin, but in the short run none of us can run very far and long without food. And right now we're dependent upon agriculture for our food. Something that provides definition for a good world is a world where no child is hungry. I want agriculture which helps to create a good world. The economics of this are of crucial importance.

Dang it! I know I'm not using this group the right way. Today on Chris Blattman's blog he gave a link to Free Economics Textbooks Online

I don't care if it is the right way! Thanks for that resource! It's a very useful thing in a country where text books are expensive but we still would like to honor intellectual property rights.

Via Rootless Cosmopolitan Tony Karon let Helena Cobban write about her new book Re-Engage! America and the world after Bush.

One of the interesting parts of Cobban's post to me was here point that she was a foreign policy wonk before becoming a Quaker, but in writing this book some of the foreign policy advice corresponded with Quaker witness about war. Tangentially related to your work, as she note a correspondence between Buddhist and Quaker understandings about war.

Obviously it's human to hold two contradictory ideas at once. Here in the US there's a correspondence fundamentalist Christianity and pro-war sentiments--especially among the Air Force. Likewise Myanmar is surely not a Utopia of peace and plenty.

Here are Cobban's big arguments in the book:

1. That the revolution in global communications has irreversibly changed the nature of international relations;
2. That in the new era of transparency among nations, the only workable organizing principle for a international order going forward is one deeply rooted in the concept of the equality of all human persons;
3. That the new era of international transparency and cross-border communications has also made the waging of colonial-style wars of domination much harder than ever before, and has perhaps even, these days, made them impossible to win;
4. That the approaches of “human security” and “global inclusion” anyway provide Americans and the six billion of our fellow-humans who are not U.S. citizens a much surer path going forward than the continued pursuit of doomed attempts to impose our country’s will on other nations.

I like that. Sterling Newberry is another writer I like to read online, and today he wrote:

The consequence of this is that we are facing a century with a broad choice, either it will be an increasingly reactionary century, or it will have to be the Progressive Century, one where managing and promoting progress as a general, rather than personal, good, will be at the forefront of our politics and society.

And with all of that Cobban made a quip that made me smile and I wanted to share with you:

Perhaps if Quakers were not so self-effacing we’d have a new slogan along the lines of: “Quakers! We were right about slavery, so now listen to us on war!”

The Buddhist economics you are working on is an important part of creating a Progressive Century. One of the most exciting aspects of your work is how you are finding common ground across so many boundaries.

You work too hard. Remember to feed yourself so that other can benefit from your efforts. But your work is so very important.

Chris Blattman was asked for suggestions of RSS feeds to keep a finger on the pulse of what the academic community is thinking about poverty issues. Blattman made his suggestions and because of course it's a blog opened the topic for comment. I thought of the SSRC Blogs. I only follow Making Sense of Darfur with any regularity, so tonight surfed through Knowledge Rules and read Paideia 2.0`_ by Nicolas Guilhot. Here's a snippet:

What the precentors of the “knowledge economy” fail to see is that the emergence of this economy is built upon a paradox. It is allegedly characterized by the creative mobilization of all human faculties in the work process, and this is indeed a complete break with the Taylorist organization of labor...

And yet, this trend conceals another one: the core activities of knowledge production and transmission – research and teaching – are subjected to an inverse trend, as the pervasive use of ICTs allows for the rapid Taylorization of these activities. Where teaching and research were still, until recently, “crafts” indissolubly attached to the person performing them, scholars are now regarded as a “bundle” of functions that can and should be “unbundled,” desubjectivized, and broken down into as many discrete tasks that can be fulfilled more efficiently, and on demand, by interchangeable operators – a development made possible by the pervasive introduction of ICTs as instruments of coordination.

From Wikipedia:

Paideia was "the process of educating man into his true form, the real and genuine human nature."[1]

I keep talking round in circles about your work in Buddhist Economics. Guilhot's piece reminds me of the distinction made between "making money" and a "way of life." And while I don't know much about economics, I think it ought to be concerned not just with the former, but the latter as well. I'm no teacher either, but the concluding paragraph of Guilhot's piece resonated with me:

The puzzling thing is that, when they have a chance to have a say in these matters, students have very few good things to say about this. In fact, in most countries where a primarily public higher education system is being restructured according to these principles, students don’t want more loans that will be used to pay for expensive Masters selling mostly a brand name and to mortgage an already uncertain future income. They usually want more teachers who have more time to engage with them, and extended library hours rather than a more expensive version of Courseworks or WebCT. As for those of us who believe that teaching should remain primarily a meaningful and enriching form of socialization, we should ask ourselves what we can do to meet their demands and to avoid becoming the tamed simians of the Taylorized academic factory.

Geez every time I come to this thread my face turns red--talk about hijacking a thread! But having started to use it as a place to put links, I guess I'll continue.

Duncan Green, Head of Research for Oxfam GB and author of 'From Poverty to Power'. His blog may be of interest generally, and this post: Putting numbers on happiness - new efforts to measure well-being particularly so.

John Powers said:

Geez every time I come to this thread my face turns red--talk about hijacking a thread! But having started to use it as a place to put links, I guess I'll continue.

Duncan Green, Head of Research for Oxfam GB and author of 'From Poverty to Power'. His blog may be of interest generally, and this post: Putting numbers on happiness - new efforts to measure well-being particularly so.

oops....fixed the link

A couple of links probably not much relevant to Buddhist economics, but in re interdependence.

Through quirks of history and temperament my understanding of mathematics is very thin. That contributed to pointing me towards the social sciences in my academic career, but of course my innumeracy severely limited my advancement!

So here are the two links. First a post by Dani Rodrik and here's the meat of it:

There is an interesting paradox buried in the Krugman model. On the one hand, the more leveraged you are, the larger is the sell-off you need to engage in to restore your original leverage ratio following any initial reduction in asset prices. That makes high leverage the prime culprit of the present crisis, and rationalizes Krugman's (and many others') view that liquidity is of no help; only recapitalization will work. On the other hand, if the leverage constraint were not binding (as Krugman forces it to be in his model)--i.e, if you were able to ramp up debt--then you would not have had to dump any assets in the first place. In this second view, the problem is liquidity. Is this a possible justification of the Paulson plan?

The second link is to the PDF of Krugman's model. The only reason you'd go read it is if you're interested in the current meltdown as an economic problem. LOL and I suspect you're engaged in more immediate issues right now.

I mention my math problem simply to point out that I'm missing crucial tools to understand Krugman. But I was quite interested how he uses the Asian Financial Crisis 0f 1997-1998 for clues to the present situation.

As an aside I note the graph uses both color and symbols to represent variables. I'm not color blind, but know some people are, so that technique is good practice.

Back in the day I tried to understand the Asian Financial crisis as best I could. I was very pleased that Larry Summers spearheaded moves to increase transparency among the major international banks. Even before 9/11 the many areas in which the Bush administration was withdrawing from international covenants alarmed me. And I noted that the US reversed course on Summers' international banking initiatives. I saw then Treasury Secretary O'Neil on PBS Newshour later in the week of 9/11 saying that they weren't going to go after off-shore banking accounts--something to that effect. I remember because I ranted about O'Neil's performance at the time--my poor father enduring my rants.

I love that Krugman cites a mimeographed paper by Guillermo Calvo (mimeograph!) as the basis for his current modeling. Clearly I'm missing something, but from my ignorant point of view it seems the general premise that Calvo presented of balance sheet contagion was better understood at the time than Krugman lets on. It seems to me this was precisely the view that Summers took and acted to put policies and international agreements in place to correct.

The current popularity of Nassim Taleb's black swan events troubles me a little. On the one hand it's important to understand that there is much we cannot know, but the trouble is using that insight towards know nothing and helplessness.

Summers identified a problem with banks in Aruba, the Bahamas,Hong Kong and Singapore being used as conduits, as I understand it as a means to effect a large-scale check kiting scheme. Revisiting some of the approaches suggested then make sense. I do not believe that there's nothing positive that can be done about the current economic crisis. Indeed common sense solutions of transparency and good faith seem an obvious place to start.

Linky dink:

A Short Course in Behavioral Economics Edge Master Class 2008.

If you remember one thing from this session, let it be this one: There is no way of avoiding meddling. People sometimes have the confused idea that we are pro meddling. That is a ridiculous notion. It's impossible not to meddle. Given that we can't avoid meddling, let's meddle in a good way. —Richard Thaler

More linky dink:

Does the free market corrode moral character?

A discussion at the Templeton Foundation: Jagdish Bhagwati, John Gray, Garry Kasparov, Qinglian He, Michael Walzer, Michael Novak, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Kay S. Hymowitz, Tyler Cowen, Robert B. Reich, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, John C. Bogle, and Rick Santorum.

You are a saint, John. Where was all of this reading 2 months ago when I had no books? ;-)

I am inspired to work on a grant proposal to the John Templeton Foundation to enable my work and eliminate the necessity of teaching classes unrelated to my work. I am going to Bangkok tonight to be able to do some research at Thammasat and Chulalongkorn Universities. I wonder if I can complete the online funding inquiry this week? They promise an answer within 30 days as to whether they will honor a full request.

The implications of ethics in economics is enormous. The potential positive externality with regards to the Thai society as a whole is inspiring.

Thank you again and again.

The implications of ethics in economics is enormous.

I agree with you. It is interesting how this global financial crisis seems to have really rocked economists to their foundations. I'm an outsider so there is much I'm missing, still I perceive a shift in tone. Many economists seem to have been blindsided and are curious as to what they missed and why. I also think many economists see a shift in paradigms coming and are asking hard questions and dreaming large. In doing so more and more economists are realizing that ethics and moral judgments have great relevance to economics.

I think many people react to Stirling Newberry's economic pieces online as a Cassandra. I'm not exactly sure why, I like his writing. One of the points he's made is "the greening of the American spirit." What he means is we have to invent ways of living that make us happy which aren't so destructive to our environment. As someone put it to live on"the interest of natural capital, not on the principal."

In a recent piece Newberry wrote:

It must be this that will be the direct project, not "alternative energy," but a new happiness and new goal for economic activity itself. We must remember that money exists in the real world. Money means what we say it means, and it exists because of its utility, not it's God given certainty.

Stirling Newberry isn't an academic economist. Of course most academic economists have a narrow focus. This crisis however seems to have forced many to look at the larger assumptions and real questioning has broken out.

You seem a natural fit for the Templeton Foundation grants.

Hi Linda, of course I know you're busy. Still, I like to post links because it seems a way to find stuff later.

I haven't been following the Course in Behavioral Economics very well, but boy what I've read has been quite informative.

Duncan Green's blog is worthwhile and he recently posted about two new research papers you may find relevant. The first paper concerns an evolving understanding of poverty.

Shaffer identifies three main shifts in thinking about poverty. First, the concept of poverty has been broadened. This is reflected in the move from a physiological model of deprivation to a social one, and subsequently, in the increasing attention given to issues of vulnerability, inequality and human rights.

The second, Doing Growth Diagnostics in Practice: A Mindbook:

[T]he new paper from the Harvard team of Ricardo Hausmann, Bailey Klinger and Rodrigo Warner. This takes forward an important and influential stream of work that also involves Dani Rodrik, which is trying to make the economic equivalent of the shift from medical research to a doctor-patient relationship. Switching metaphorical horses in midstream, growth diagnostics tries to locate and strengthen the one or two weakest links in the chain and focus government efforts on tackling these, rather than the wishlist of dozens of desirable reforms that have often figured in structural adjustment programmes and other agreements. Instead of trying to establish general rules of dubious relevance to real life, the Growth Diagnostics approach is developing a ‘good enough’ approach to help decision makers determine and deal with the top priority ‘binding constraints’ on their economy.

I haven't read this paper yet, but there is something seemingly Buddhist about the approach--all is in flux.

By now you know I tend to put two things not alike together and remark on their similarities! LOL that's silly really. But it probably is silly to impute Buddhist economics to that Harvard Paper. And sillier still to connect it to a piece I read today about the election The Magic Ballot by Arjun Appaduri.

There are many reasons I found the essay interesting, not the least of which was grappling with the ideas in the book I read recently "The Secular City." The connection to Harvard paper is dealing reasonably with complexity--stuff too hard to figure out because it's too complex.

Buddhism like all religions has many traditions. And the ways some of the traditions deal with (in) magic are quite different from modern Christian traditions and the ways they do. I'm really a bit hostile to magic--my Protestant roots showing--but I was taken by this passage in Appaduri's piece:

Magic is a method for deploying modest technical means to address outsize ethical challenges. Human beings have always done this and always will. We might as well have a grown-up word for this set of practices.

There's something further to explore in this idea, and I'm not sure where it will lead. But just the notion of the word "magic" in this context interested me. I suspect there's a kernel of something quite essential that's very hard to translate across the sort of thinking that creates Buddhist economics and that which creates neo-classical economics. So regardless of what words are chosen, this issue--"deploying modest technical means to address outsize ethical challenges"--maybe a place to work "to take the Buddhist out of Buddhist economics."

I'm very interested in the direction that some security analysts are going these days. One of the key areas receiving attention is resiliency and resilient communities. John Robb linked today to a post by Shlok Vaidya who is working ot unpack some of Gandhi's ideas on the economy. Vaidya is an energy analyst. I'm struck by how much it seems like Sufficiency Economics.

Not directly related Dani Rodrik whose blog I consistently find worthwhile links to a FT post by Bob Geldof. Geldof among other things recommends the Tobin Tax. I was very pleased to see Rodrik report this as a sensible initiative.

There's a radio quiz show called "What d'ya Know" and one of the categories is "Things you would have learned in school had you been paying attention." I do wish that I'd taken some economics now, but I think accurately predicted at the time I wouldn't pay attention. Right now the Web has some great reading about economics going on. Duncan Green has fast become one of my favorite commentators.

Hi Linda, hope all's well with you.

The link I have today doesn't really really fit here, but something that interested me and haven't quite found a place to put it up. So I thought to put it here.

Beth Kanter did a blog post about a study of Twitter users by HP. Her blog can sometimes be slow loading so here is the photo that I'm intrigued by at flickr which also has the link to the report in PDF.

At Twitter people can follow other's tweets. So the picture on the left shows people who follow with black lines. Friends are defined as someone who has sent at least two responses to another's tweets. So the black lines are removed showing only the red lines designation friends.

Beth calls what is revealed by the graph a "trusted circle." What surprises me is the result is not what I expected. What I would have expected to see were a few people who were friends with several others. I guess you might say of my expectation "wagon wheels of trust."

Dunbar's number is the theoretical limit on the number of people we can maintain stable relationships with thought to be about 150. The HP paper basically observes that while thousands of people might follow someone, that someone is human too with limited attention.

LOL well putting this up now it occurs to me that of course one of the Network Weaving threads is where this should go.

Another somewhat tangential link is to an article by Virgina Postrel with a story from experimental economics showing that financial bubbles are inevitable.

You may have noticed that I'm on a bit of economic psychology kick of late. I never really loved psychology. And experimental psychology especially never captured my fancy. But right now when economic models are proving to be flawed, my attention to models is increased.

Geez, I really messed up this thread by posting link here. I do hope you don't mind.

Often times it's too easy to skim over blog posts and not discover the gems in the links. Emeka Okafor has a blog which explores idea around George Ayittey's book "Africa Unchained." He revisited a link to Chris Blattman's blog, a Yale economics professor. I very much enjoy Blattman's blog, but on my first reading of the post Okafor links to I didn't click on any of the links or read the comments. Going back to the post I did and am glad for it.

Essentially Blattman was working on the syllabus for a course he's teaching in the Spring: Why is Africa poor and what (if anything)can the West do about it? He saw that the authors he had in mind were all rich western white men and decided he'd need to change a few things. So he opened the comments for suggestions. Some great stuff in the comments, including one from economic woman blog who's collected course outlines of various heterodox economics courses.

I was also interested to see Blattman's draft syllabus (PDF). LOL I would never have survived Yale, but the course looks great. All in all there's some good resources there.