No food this time. I have been reading a few different development, evaluation, economics, and other exciting-topic blogs this morning and was inspired to share a bit of what I've been reading lately, mostly during & for my internship (and practicum literature review), but also for fun. Yes, I have a nerdy definition of fun. :)
The most interesting thing I've been reading about is called the Acute Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), created by two researchers at the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative. You can download the working paper here, read a review and debate of the paper on Duncan Green's blog here, and peruse an Economist article about it here. The most interesting aspect of the debate was whether or not it makes sense to create Indices in the first place, the primary argument (against) being that you have to deconstruct the Index to understand what it means, so why go to the trouble of creating it in the first place? What's helpful about the MPI is that it provides a standard way of quantifying multidimensional poverty in 100+ countries, something that hasn't been done in a clear or coherent way, until now. But I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
Also on my reading list the last few weeks? Here's a peek:
- Out of Poverty by Paul Pollack. Basically an argument for local, contextualized, and low-cost solutions in development, especially in the agricultural field.
- Data Visualization by Ben Fry, Once Upon a Stacked Time Series by Matthias Shapiro (Political Math blogger), and the necessary Java tutorials and emails back and forth with my sister to start learning how to make some wicked sweet visualizations.
- Speaking Stata: How to face lists with fortitude, On numbers and strings, & How to move step by: step
- A few good blogs I found today (and earlier): AidWatch, From Poverty to Power, Chris Blattman's blog, and IPA's blog.
- I've also been reading various impact evaluations from J-PAL and IPA, mainly focused on anything having to do with "commitment savings products" or microenterprise projects that promote group-based microsavings before loans.
That's plenty for now - I've probably lost most of you! :)
2 comments:
Hot damn, that's some hyper-specialized reading! Out of Poverty sounds like a good one, and perhaps more accessible for those of us not pursuing graduate degrees in the development arena :)
Ha, call it PhD prep, Molly. :) Out of Poverty is good and highly accessible. I'd also recommend anything by Mohammed Yunus, Three Cups of Tea, and I'm supposed to be reading The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier. :)
I forgot to mention that I'm also sporadically reading Half the Sky- I'm only through the first chapter, but it's going to be a good read!
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