Development Roast Giving international development a proper roasting

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.” – Mark Twain – As most economists, I have been thoroughly educated to believe that people maximize utility (well-being). Sometimes people do not appear to do so (at all!), but if you correctly take into account all benefits and costs, and the information …

Climate change, water shortages, rising global pollution levels and food insecurity have made environmental sustainability the most pressing concern of our time. Improvements in production systems and agriculture, and advances in clean technology, will certainly help, but as the global population becomes more conscious of the issues facing us as …

An old joke goes that a worse thing than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism at all. Under-exploitation by capitalism could probably be placed somewhere in the middle and an example of it can be seen in the area around a small town of Uyuni in …

“The brain end the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.” Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University  Which would you prefer: 1) Winning …

As a visitor to INESAD and La Paz, I am staying in a friendly hostel downtown. Last week I happened to stumble onto a Casino night organised by the owners. It was all for fun and no real money was exchanged. Everyone received 250 fake bolivianos (fbs) worth of chips. …

Everybody knows Aesop’s fable about the farmer with the goose laying golden eggs: Day after day, the lucky farmer awoke to rush to the nest and find another golden egg, growing richer by the day. But with his increasing wealth came increasing greed and impatience, and unable to wait, the …

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The historical “World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth” held in Cochabamba last month highlights the need for a new global development model that secures harmony with nature and among people. Such a new system would require a change of mindset away from the current …

“We would like to believe that we are not in the business of surviving but in being good, and we do not like to admit to ourselves that we are good in order to survive.” Dorothy Rowe “But goodness alone is never enough. A hard cold wisdom is required, too, …

China is the fifth most forest rich country on the planet with more than 200 million hectares of forest. This is about 4 times more than Bolivia, which is the 15th country in the World in terms of forest extension (see Figure 1).