The Obama Administration has a respectable story to tell on food security in lots of ways: its Feed the Future initiative, particularly, put it in a genuine...
Alex Evans
Alex Evans is a Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University, and the author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren't Enough? (Penguin, 2017), a book about the power of deep stories to unlock transformational change. He lives in North Yorkshire and is currently working on political polarisation and learning dry stone walling. Full biog here.
Into a new oil spike
Ever heard of spare capacity theory? It's defined by Gregor Macdonald as: the assumption among western bankers, policy makers, economists, and stock markets...
The tawdry spectacle of David Cameron’s Middle East trip (updated)
Presumably like many of my fellow countrymen, I am writhing with embarrassment about my Prime Minister's ugly little junket to the Middle East this week. It...
Amusing VW advert
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0[/youtube]
What it’s like to work for Donald Rumsfeld
Via Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic (who still have yet to send me a copy of their magazine two months after the subscription was paid for...). Update:...
America’s backwards development trajectory
Blimey. From the NYT - large version here.
Now that’s what I call policy coherence
Sure, everyone talks about policy coherence, joined-up thinking, connecting the dots, overcoming silos and all the rest of it. But if you want to see the...
Institute of New Economic Thinking interview on limits to growth
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzPvAGd_kDQ[/youtube]
The Boy Effect
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLix4QPL3tY[/youtube] First we had the Girl Effect. Now this. It's hilarious. (H/t @davilalu on Twitter.)
This is 3D printing (see Economist cover story this week)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7h09dTVkdw[/youtube]
China’s drought and global food prices
Taking stock of where we are on the 2011 food price spike, with a particular focus on the implications of the brutal drought in China’s grain-producing regions
Unscrambling the price spike
Article published on China Dialogue on reasons for the new food price spike, including potential implications of the current drought in China. (February 2011)...
China – worst drought in 200 years
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBGsxn_lvX4[/youtube]
Wikileaked cable: peak oil in 2012
The Guardian has a story on Wikileaked cables from the US Embassy in Riyadh this morning, which record conversations between the US Consul-General in Riyadh...
International development: yesterday’s news?
Over at the World Bank blog, Adam Wagstaff's been playing with Google Trends data from 2004 to today, to try to determine whether anyone's actually paying any...
Amazon forest tipping from carbon sink to carbon source?
That's the gist of a new paper in Science, reported in the Guardian yesterday: Billions of trees died in the record drought that struck the Amazon in 2010,...
“Temporary deglobalization” as a resilience strategy on high / volatile food prices
Edward Carr has an arresting thought on the impact of high food prices in developing countries (which hit yet another new record on yesterday's monthly FAO...
Egypt: cash gets scarce as banks stay closed
As the protesters battle it out against the hired thugs in Tahir Square, it's worth keeping half an eye on the rapid deterioration of the Egyptian economy,...
Signs of panic buying in global food markets
The last food price spike, which peaked in 2008, was a play in two acts. During Act One - until mid to late-2007 or thereabouts - rising prices were largely...
The Cancun climate talks in 2 minutes. With, er, hand puppets (h/t UKYCC)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76BgKe1naFc[/youtube]
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The True Cost of COVID-19 School Closures
Last week, I published with colleagues from the Brookings Institution and the World Bank some preliminary evidence on how much school closures arising from COVID-19 will cost today’s students in lost earnings over their careers. According to our model, just...
This Too Shall Pass: Mourning Collective Loss in the Age of COVID-19
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Foxes vs Hedgehogs: The Importance of ‘Followership’ in the Age of COVID-19
In the bright sunshine of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, a group of ‘leaders’ were about to get their arse handed to them on a plate. Unfortunately for me, I was one of them. The scenario will be familiar to anyone who has...