In addition to the technical challenges with creating a global poverty count as outlined in my post below, there are also conceptual issues with poverty counts that I would be remiss to not include.  

First is the simple idea of a head count, as defined by those above or below a defined consumption level.  People's lives are not significantly different just below or just above that line, and yet those above are excluded from our numbers.  Small changes to the line can lead to big changes in t...

Measuring global poverty levels is hard, so hard the actual numbers might be of limited use. According to Angus Deaton, the godfather of poverty measurement, "it seems impossible to make statements about changes in world poverty when the ground underneath one's feet is changing in this way."  I thought it would be helpful to illuminate why.  

I'm taking Ricardo Hausmann's Development Policy Strategy course this semester, and every lecture seems more amusing than the last.  This Wednesday's lecture on productive transformation and the evolution of comparative advantage was so entertaining, I felt inclined to share.

Professor Hausmann talks a lot about monkeys and trees.  The trees represents the product space, a mapping of the capabilities required to produce certain products in an economy.  Monkeys then, are the entrepreneurs.  The...

We covered a lot macroeconomics this semester: growth theory, consumption, investment, real business cycle, Keynesian theory of the business cycle, unemployment, fiscal policy, and monetary policy. The assumptions behind so many of the models were just so unrealistic; it seemed absurd to be solving problems to see the conclusions ourselves.  I thought I’d outline a couple of the more counterintuitive things we learned and the implausible conclusions that they implied.

Neo-classical Growth Th...