Development Roast Giving international development a proper roasting

 “Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterward” St. Francis Xavier “Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.” Michael Levine Bolivia spends at least ten times as much on each senior citizen as it does …

Two years ago, I wrote an article entitled “Economics from the Internet to Reality” which showed first how the Internet had changed the study of economics by facilitating and universalizing it and second how the real world shows us situations where the economics is fully carried out. I cited the …

I have been awfully quiet about climate change issues since the “Climate Gate” scandal broke on November 17th 2009. But by now there are several associated issues, such as “Glacier Gate” (1) and “Amazon Gate” (2), and it is time to figure out what it all means. Climate Gate was …

Back in 2006, I published a newsletter postulating that “Social Mobility in Bolivia is Finally Improving!” The article was based on casual observations (mostly Evo Morales becoming the President of Bolivia and a former maid becoming the Minister of Justice). Recently, however, I have made a formal, quantitative estimation of …

The World is full of drugs, some of which are good and some of which are bad. What they all have in common is that they create addiction (a craving for more). One of the first drugs you get exposed to in your life is the casomorphine in breast milk. …

By Stanislaw Czaplick Bolivia has an enormous natural resource potential that properly managed could promote economic development and address the pressing need for poverty reduction. There is a relatively new development policy approach, which combines environmental conservation and poverty reduction and which is based on the existence of a “Poverty-Environmental Degradation” …

Every 1st of May the day of the worker is celebrated in many parts of the world, and in Bolivia it has become a custom for the government to give certain benefits to the workers on that day. This year was not the exception and the government promulgated 5 Supreme …

Bolivia’s rapidly diminishing Chacaltaya glacier has been widely used as a symbol of Anthropogenic Global Warming (1). However, it is an unfortunate choice of symbol, because the retreat of this specific glacier is demonstrably not due to increasing temperatures caused by CO2 emissions.  

Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) with average per capita incomes that do not even reach half the regional average ($4140 for Bolivia compared to $9321 for LAC) (1). Average productivity per person of working age is now exactly the same as …

“Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics” Homer Simpson By itself, a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere has only a modest effect on global temperatures – an increase of around 1ºC. Even a quadrupling of CO2 in the atmosphere would only cause a direct temperature increase …