Category: Economic Development

When David Landes published The Wealth and Poverty of Nations in 1998, he entered one of the most enduring debates in world history: why some societies become rich while others remain poor. Landes’s answer was simple and blunt: “If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the…

Imagine you’re sitting at a bar next to some co-worker you barely know who is drinking heavily and droning on about how awful his ex-wife is, a real lying, cheating, disingenuous old bag. After an hour or so you almost start to feel bad for the poor lady. Such is the case, I found, with…

I so wanted to be won over by this book by the brilliant Indian economist, Amartya Sen. His central thesis is simple and compelling: “…the basic idea that enhancement of human freedom is both the main object and the primary means of development.” However, the empirical evidence he musters to support his case is often…

There aren’t any “I’s” in the word “development,” but there are plenty in this 2005 bestselling book on development by “Economist to the Stars” Jeffrey Sachs. The professor presents his personal vision of a grand plan to quickly eradicate extreme poverty, as though indigence was an easily treatable form of small pox. If someone would…

In 2011, Eric Ries made a big splash in Silicon Valley with his book “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.” He defines “startup” rather loosely (“an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty”) and encourages organizations of all sizes to avoid creating elaborate…

I’ve spent the past seven years working for Intuit, the company behind such successful consumer software products as TurboTax, QuickBooks, Quicken and Mint.com. A fundamental principle to our product management approach is the “follow-me-home.” That is, we literally shadow our potential customers – usually small business owners and American taxpayers and budgeters – to observe…

In his 2000 bestseller “Development as Freedom” Pulitzer Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen made the uplifting argument that the cornerstone of international development ought to be the promotion and growth of human freedom. What his thesis notably lacked was evidence. It seems to me that evidence supporting Sen’s important hypothesis is precisely what Daron Acemoglu and…