Duncan Green's Blog, page 15

Links I Liked

How to track the national mood? Welcome to the ‘fxckometer’ – ‘number of posts containing the word (or FFS) on Mumsnet’. Turns out it’s highly correlated to school closures. Brilliant and funny from The Economist. Tobacco killed almost 8 million people in 2019 (about the same as the global Covid death toll so far) according […]

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Development Nutshell: round-up (16m) of FP2P posts, w/b 24th May

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Defending civic space during and after the pandemic

Guest post by Thomas Carothers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Multiple studies of the effects of the pandemic on civil society, including a major IDS report released last week, paint a discouraging picture. Civil society has come under assault from many directions at once, including executive overreach, securitisation of public life, the constriction of online […]

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2021 State of Civil Society Report – a great new summary

Civicus publishes its annual ‘State of Civil Society Report’ today. It’s great, with a v cool website and the report is beautifully written too (thanks for that – I have to read a lot of plodding devspeak, so it makes a real difference!). I recommend the overview if you’re looking for a succinct, accessible summary […]

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The UK aid cuts have been a political & human train wreck so far, but that could/should change

What is going on with the cuts to the UK’s aid budget? Judging from first impressions, the axe is being arbitrarily taken to a lot of really good aid programmes, with no overall plan or rationale. Surely that must be wrong – this is a £10 billion budget we’re talking about, even after the cuts. […]

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Links I Liked

Snouts in the pharma trough. Covid has created 9 new pharma billionaires, yet we’re failing to vaccinate billions of people. Covid vaccines, funded by public cash, should be first and foremost a global public good. Oxfam. Relative support of left and right leaning parties by education and income in the 1970s and 2010s. Short version […]

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Development Nutshell: round-up (12m) of FP2P posts, w/b 17th May

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What Brits Say v What They Mean, now with author credit

Got a very exciting email yesterday (yes, it does happen). One of the most-read posts on this blog over the years has been the table ‘What Brits say v What they mean’, which I first published in 2011. A colleague had pinged it over, and I was frustratingly unable to locate the original source. I […]

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It’s often easier to have policy impact with research on a ‘new issue’, but proving it is just as hard

Next up in my series of interviews on the real-world influence of researchers at the LSE Centre for Public Authority and International Development, I explore the impact of Claire Elder’s work on Somalia, which raises a whole host of issues around how research can influence policy and practice: How the act of researching for a PhD […]

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Global Covid death toll 3 times higher than the usual stats suggest, and much more skewed towards poor countries

Some really important number crunching in The Economist this week. They have built an estimate of the number of ‘excess deaths’ worldwide – that is mortality above the pre-Covid average. This gives you a more accurate picture of how many people have died, because so many Covid deaths are not recorded as pandemic-related (whether because […]

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