Whenever your pie making blogger reads the Economist, he finds himself writing in the third person. The problem of urban and suburban requires quite more creative solutions than have been put forward so far, since hauling large amounts of metal for every person is more energy and space intensive than most cities can sustain in the long run. The best one put forward so far is electric bicycles. These have several advantages:
(1) Less energy used hauling unneeded structure (no trunk or backseat)
(2) Easier battery replacement/upgrade (since it's smaller and easier to access)
(3) Smaller parking lot requirements (also known as bike racks)
(4) Simpler recharging infrastructure (standard plugs run to the bike racks)
Most families will continue to need access to a chemical-fuelled car for longer trips or heavier loads than an electric vehicle can handle. Trying to deny this is foolhardy, but encouraging younger office workers and students to ditch their cars for electric bikes should be much easier.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Reinventing Foreign Aid Essay #3
This is the third summary and commentary on the essays in Reinventing Foriegn Aid
Use of Randomization in the Evaluation of Development Effectiveness
By: Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer
Like Banerjee and He, Duflo and Kremer advocate using randomized clinical trials to evaluate aid programs where ever possible. The reason they give is that this technique is the best choice for avoiding omitted variable bias. They compare the technique to other popular methods of generating the "counterfactual", or what would have happened had the program not been used, such as Difference-In-Difference (DD). They argue, using data taken from various education programs studied in Kenya, that these techniques tend to overestimate the benefit of aid programs.
As an example of how to properly evaluate programs, they examine the costs and benefits of three education interventions: teacher training, free textbooks and deworming treatments. These interventions where assigned randomly to schools throughout northern Kenya, and student test scores were used to evaluate the benefits. They found, counterintuitively, that the deworming treatments were both the cheapest to administer and had benefits that spread to other nearby schools, as breaking the chain of infections resulted in healthier students overall. They also cited the success of the PROGRESSA program in Mexico as an example of how to use randomized trials to evaluate a pilot program.
They conclude that if the goal of a pilot program is to test scalability and cost-effectiveness, then aid programs need to be treated more like prescription drugs. For these, randomized trials that use a sample of the entire likely recipient population have proven to be the most effective means of determining both safety and effectiveness. Instead of a systematic means of picking the recipients of aid programs, such as one per polity or "most needy", a random distribution across all eligible aid recipients guards against accidentally or intentionally omitting variables when evaluating programs.
The authors go on to discuss several factors required for effective randomized trails:
(1) A large pool of potential recipients, such as small villages or individual students.
(2) A politically acceptable means of randomly distributing the aid. This is often enabled by budget constraints and the need to "pilot" aid programs.
(3) An independent, or at least reputable, group with plenty of funding to perform the evaluations.
(4) Clear and believable metrics that define benefits and costs.
In other words, randomized trials are a good tool for development aid Planners, groups like the World Bank or CARE, to help them decide which new ideas they should roll out in a large way. They are not necessarily the right ones for "Seekers", to use Dr. Easterly's term, who generally aim to solve specific local problems that do not have a large potential recipient base. A criticism that can, the authors admit, be made against this approach is if it is so effective, why isn't it used to evaluate health and schooling programs designed to help the poor in developed countries? The answer lies partly in the implicit arrogance of development aid being something we can impose on other societies, while most forms of development and economic planning, as well as many forms of educational evaluation, are viewed askance in the developed world.
The next essay discusses the political economy of aid evaluations, which will explore this problem more deeply. Smaller aid programs with narrow scope also need some form of independent evaluation, and I think that's where a travelling pie-maker would fit in nicely. Now to work out the logistics of the Sustainable Baking Travel Blog.
Use of Randomization in the Evaluation of Development Effectiveness
By: Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer
Like Banerjee and He, Duflo and Kremer advocate using randomized clinical trials to evaluate aid programs where ever possible. The reason they give is that this technique is the best choice for avoiding omitted variable bias. They compare the technique to other popular methods of generating the "counterfactual", or what would have happened had the program not been used, such as Difference-In-Difference (DD). They argue, using data taken from various education programs studied in Kenya, that these techniques tend to overestimate the benefit of aid programs.
As an example of how to properly evaluate programs, they examine the costs and benefits of three education interventions: teacher training, free textbooks and deworming treatments. These interventions where assigned randomly to schools throughout northern Kenya, and student test scores were used to evaluate the benefits. They found, counterintuitively, that the deworming treatments were both the cheapest to administer and had benefits that spread to other nearby schools, as breaking the chain of infections resulted in healthier students overall. They also cited the success of the PROGRESSA program in Mexico as an example of how to use randomized trials to evaluate a pilot program.
They conclude that if the goal of a pilot program is to test scalability and cost-effectiveness, then aid programs need to be treated more like prescription drugs. For these, randomized trials that use a sample of the entire likely recipient population have proven to be the most effective means of determining both safety and effectiveness. Instead of a systematic means of picking the recipients of aid programs, such as one per polity or "most needy", a random distribution across all eligible aid recipients guards against accidentally or intentionally omitting variables when evaluating programs.
The authors go on to discuss several factors required for effective randomized trails:
(1) A large pool of potential recipients, such as small villages or individual students.
(2) A politically acceptable means of randomly distributing the aid. This is often enabled by budget constraints and the need to "pilot" aid programs.
(3) An independent, or at least reputable, group with plenty of funding to perform the evaluations.
(4) Clear and believable metrics that define benefits and costs.
In other words, randomized trials are a good tool for development aid Planners, groups like the World Bank or CARE, to help them decide which new ideas they should roll out in a large way. They are not necessarily the right ones for "Seekers", to use Dr. Easterly's term, who generally aim to solve specific local problems that do not have a large potential recipient base. A criticism that can, the authors admit, be made against this approach is if it is so effective, why isn't it used to evaluate health and schooling programs designed to help the poor in developed countries? The answer lies partly in the implicit arrogance of development aid being something we can impose on other societies, while most forms of development and economic planning, as well as many forms of educational evaluation, are viewed askance in the developed world.
The next essay discusses the political economy of aid evaluations, which will explore this problem more deeply. Smaller aid programs with narrow scope also need some form of independent evaluation, and I think that's where a travelling pie-maker would fit in nicely. Now to work out the logistics of the Sustainable Baking Travel Blog.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
More bicycle poetry
Twenty three millimeters
One two five PSI
A pain to put on
But pure joy to ride
The cold rain does sting
My hands start to burn
Seems no effort needed
to make the wheels turn
Each bump I can feel
But friction, good bye
Twenty three millimeters
One two five PSI
I recently replaced the rear tire on my Trek 700 with the smaller, higher pressure "racing" tire. The effect is poetry in motion.
One two five PSI
A pain to put on
But pure joy to ride
The cold rain does sting
My hands start to burn
Seems no effort needed
to make the wheels turn
Each bump I can feel
But friction, good bye
Twenty three millimeters
One two five PSI
I recently replaced the rear tire on my Trek 700 with the smaller, higher pressure "racing" tire. The effect is poetry in motion.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
The 1 Page Development Report
[I'll get back to the Reinventing Foreign Aid commentaries soon, the third essay requires me to do some extra background reading on statistical methods.]
I attended a memorial yesterday for the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide held by the local Rwandan diaspora. It was a beautiful, touching and long service to help both the healing of the survivors and to ensure that no one, least of all the children of the diaspora, ever forgets. The keynote speaker was Steven Kinzer, author of A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It.
"The Man Who Dreamed It" is the very intelligent, charismatic and controversial Paul Kagame. Kinzer reported some 30hrs of interviews with the new President of Rwanda, including asking him why, of the all the millions of pages of reports written on how to develop Africa and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, the place was still such a mess. In typical Kagame fashion, he replied "I reject the premise of your question. Everyone knows how to develop Africa, but no one has been willing to do it. You don't need reports that could circle the continent, you just need one page."
Kinzer: "Okay, what, in your opinion, should go on that one page?"
Kagame: "It all starts with one fundamental thing. Without this nothing else matters, so don't even try."
Kinzer: "And that is?"
Kagame: "Security, internal and external. If people are not safe they will not leave. What good is building a school if the army is going to come steal the windows and doors? You must have security to start, otherwise the rest is meaningless."
Kinzer: "Once you have security, what comes next?"
Kagame: "First health, because if people are unhealthy they can do nothing. After that is education, because we live in a knowledge economy. Next is infrastructure, good roads, airports, internet so people can do business. After that you must have a good business environment because it is your entrepreneurs who will bring prosperity. And all of this must be administered by a government that is honest and not corrupt. There, one page, but no one has had the will to implement it before now."
The "now", of course, is Rwanda itself. The ethnic tensions tracing back to the Belgian practice of clearly defining Hutu and Tutsi are still there, simmering under the surface. Among the diaspora, anger at those who participated in or did not intervene in 1994 and before then is palpable, as well it should be. In Rwanda, these feelings are directed not at abstract concepts like "countries" and far-away people, but rather at their neighbors. Paul Kagame, and most everyone in Rwanda today, knows that it is only the advancing prosperity of the country that keeps everyone looking towards the future rather than looking to settle the scores of the past.
Can this development be sustained? Only time will tell, and the sharp reductions in global trade we're seeing today can't help. The history of "Jewels of Africa" in the 20th century is not good, but here's to hoping that the lessons of history can be learned and, more importantly, implemented.
I attended a memorial yesterday for the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide held by the local Rwandan diaspora. It was a beautiful, touching and long service to help both the healing of the survivors and to ensure that no one, least of all the children of the diaspora, ever forgets. The keynote speaker was Steven Kinzer, author of A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It.
"The Man Who Dreamed It" is the very intelligent, charismatic and controversial Paul Kagame. Kinzer reported some 30hrs of interviews with the new President of Rwanda, including asking him why, of the all the millions of pages of reports written on how to develop Africa and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, the place was still such a mess. In typical Kagame fashion, he replied "I reject the premise of your question. Everyone knows how to develop Africa, but no one has been willing to do it. You don't need reports that could circle the continent, you just need one page."
Kinzer: "Okay, what, in your opinion, should go on that one page?"
Kagame: "It all starts with one fundamental thing. Without this nothing else matters, so don't even try."
Kinzer: "And that is?"
Kagame: "Security, internal and external. If people are not safe they will not leave. What good is building a school if the army is going to come steal the windows and doors? You must have security to start, otherwise the rest is meaningless."
Kinzer: "Once you have security, what comes next?"
Kagame: "First health, because if people are unhealthy they can do nothing. After that is education, because we live in a knowledge economy. Next is infrastructure, good roads, airports, internet so people can do business. After that you must have a good business environment because it is your entrepreneurs who will bring prosperity. And all of this must be administered by a government that is honest and not corrupt. There, one page, but no one has had the will to implement it before now."
The "now", of course, is Rwanda itself. The ethnic tensions tracing back to the Belgian practice of clearly defining Hutu and Tutsi are still there, simmering under the surface. Among the diaspora, anger at those who participated in or did not intervene in 1994 and before then is palpable, as well it should be. In Rwanda, these feelings are directed not at abstract concepts like "countries" and far-away people, but rather at their neighbors. Paul Kagame, and most everyone in Rwanda today, knows that it is only the advancing prosperity of the country that keeps everyone looking towards the future rather than looking to settle the scores of the past.
Can this development be sustained? Only time will tell, and the sharp reductions in global trade we're seeing today can't help. The history of "Jewels of Africa" in the 20th century is not good, but here's to hoping that the lessons of history can be learned and, more importantly, implemented.
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