Chris Blattman

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Links I liked

  1. 1/3 of Americans think the government spends more on foreign aid than Social Security or interest on debt
  2. A very good article on the Ebola crisis in WashPo
  3. An important, understudied topic: overconfidence in political behavior
  4. A wearable camera drone that snaps off your wrist, flies up, takes a picture, plies back
  5. For the New Haven folks out there, I’m giving a paper on Predicting Local Violence at Yale Thursday (Oct 9) in the political methods seminar, and in the psychology seminar on Oct 20 will be presenting (for the first time) a new experiment on reducing crime and violence among street youth in Liberia.

3 Responses

  1. The often-reported American belief that we spend way more on foreign aid than we do is frequently mocked and trotted out as evidence of ignorance and misunderstanding. But I suspect there’s more truth to it than we elites like to credit, and that the number Americans are looking at is not foreign aid as in foreign assistance provided by USAID, but spending to affect outcomes in foreign countries, for example through wars and military assistance. And when you add all that up, including the costs of caring for soldiers coming home from wars, the number is much higher. I think Joseph Stiglitz pegged at three trillion over the next few decades.

Why We Fight - Book Cover
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