Jessica Jackely, co-founder of Kiva and the newly launched Profounder, gave an intensely personal talk at TEDGlobal last week.  It was met with a standing ovation and actually, it was the single talk that brought tears to my eyes.  In addition to conveying her deep passion for development, Jessica had some very insightful things to say about the psychology of philanthropy and the mechanisms with which those who give engage with those who receive.

According to Jackley, the exchange that cha...

Continue reading ...

Ethan Zuckerman is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.  Incredibly and embarrassingly, I never managed to link with the Berkman Center during my time in Cambridge, so I was thrilled to see Ethan would be speaking at TEDGlobal this past week.  His talk was another of the highlights of the conference, and one of particular relevance for those of us interested in how the access to information that the Internet affords impacts developm...

Continue reading ...

Tim Jackson, who among other things is the UK government’s advisor on sustainable development, raised an important issue at TEDGlobal this week in Oxford.  At least I thought so, because it struck at one of the central things on my mind these days (outlined in a recent blog posting here).

Jackson makes two points, one obvious and the other less so.  The first is that economic growth is fundamentally constrained by the resources of this planet.  Our way out to date has been a blind faith in ...

Continue reading ...

I spent last week in Oxford at my first TEDGlobal conference.  I was unexpectedly struck by the parallels between this prestigious gathering of global intelligentsia and an event ostensibly as far away at the other side of the spectrum as possible – Burning Man. 

Burning Man is near impossible to explain to the uninitiated, let alone succinctly.  It’s like dropping yourself on another planet with an entirely different species of human being.  You’re on a dusty dried lakebed that loo...

Continue reading ...

Imagine you are a bank.  What information would you need to determine the creditworthiness of an entrepreneur or a small business?  If the business is at an early stage, financial statements may not be very valuable.  If the business has little physical capital to be used as collateral, it might be too risky.  If the entrepreneur has no credit history, it might be game over.  Microfinance gets around this with the group-lending model, because while it is costly for a lender to assess the c...

Continue reading ...

A few things have been on my mind for awhile.  Topics I'm particularly fascinated by, and that I think are important for development.  They are the following:

How people access and process information, and what the deficiencies in that process mean for the challenges we face in international development.  I actually think this is very relevant for a long list of issues, especially aid and access to capital.

Prospect theory and the implications for development.  In sum, prospect theory arg...

Continue reading ...

I'm in the middle of biggest transition state of my life.  Not only am I just about to embark in a new direction with my career, but I'm also just about to transition from a girlfriend to a wife, and motherhood looms on the horizon.  As I move on to these significantly different phases of my professional and personal life, I'm doing a considerable amount of thinking about my priorities and how I want to live.  In doing so, I'm reminded of a real problem with the society I exist in. 

We're ...

Continue reading ...

One of the things I'm doing with my time off between graduation and working full time is taking a massive step back when it comes to my thinking about development.  I'm asking myself the following questions:

What do I believe should be the societal goals of "development"?  Is there some level of overall well being (or freedom as Sen would define it) that we consider a right of everyone that inhabits this planet?  If so, upon what basis are those rights determined?  Or is it that, given the ...

Continue reading ...