Readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of behavioral economics.  I’m constantly applying its lessons to a host of development issues, from consumer finance to aid effectiveness to health care to (my personal favorite) venture capital.  The list goes on and on.  I find the intersection of psychology and economics so central to my thinking that I when I first encountered it at the Kennedy School I was surprised to realize it wasn’t part of the core MPAID curriculum. So surprise...

I generally resist summarizing an interesting post or article, but occasionally one comes along that is just too good to risk losing in a Twitter stream.  I read a fantastic blog post about conditional cash transfers (CCTs) the other day by Lant Pritchett, one of my former professors at the Kennedy School.  It’s pretty technical and sometimes Lant is hard to follow if you’re not a trained economist (I shudder to think how much I missed in his class my first semester), so it seems all the ...

Well, this might not be the brightest move, as I send out my resume with links to this blog.  But since last Monday's Liberia Foundations Meeting, I've been thinking a lot about my work this summer and I think it's worth sharing what I would have done differently.  Then we can both learn from my mistakes.  I'm not embarrassed to have made them: I think that many of us in the development community make them, including some of the loudest voices out there. 

What I learned should have been blata...