Links I Liked

I’m running a two week summer school on How Change Happens in Cape Town in July. Sign up here.

Newspapers should have had the headline “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000 since yesterday.” Every day for the last 25 years [h/t Max Roser]

New Oxfam report. From 2009-2015, the 50 biggest US companies received over $423 billion in tax breaks; Over that time they spent over $2.5 billion on lobbying Congress. Now that’s what I call a return on investment.

If US – North Korea tensions continue to escalate, it is worth remembering their exceptionally bloody history [h/t Jeffrey Kaye]

“I see her as the John Maynard Keynes of the 21st century”. George Monbiot really likes Doughnut Economics

One Indian’s 17 year struggle to prove he wasn’t dead. He ended up founding the Uttar Pradesh Association of Dead People. Eat your heart out Gogol.

The 2016 aid numbers from the OECD (29 of the world’s wealthiest countries) are now in. Headlines: total aid was $142.6bn in 2016, 9% up on 2015. A quarter of the increase went on refugee costs within donor borders. With very little fanfare, Germany became the second G7 country (after UK) to reach the 0.7% aid target.

Announcing Unpaywall: unlocking Open Access versions of paywalled research articles as you browse

Loving Dilbert’s descent into the jargon matrix. Time for an aid version? I’m putting Robert Chambers down for Morpheus, every fuzzword-spouting aid bureaucrat you’ve ever met as Agent Smith, but who can play Neo, the leather-clad Messiah who can vanquish aidspeak make development intelligible again?