a big constraint to women’s empowerment is men: so if there are no men in the room, the meeting is probably not doing all it should

A common delusion is that that the region has good policies, but implementation is the problem. In reality, implementation failures reflect poor policies borne of very low domestic policymaking capacity. Too many governments in the region merely act as implementation arms of multilaterals, foreign donors, philanthropies, and other external actors. ... See more

Never bring a model to a political economy fight.

Atrocities tend to rhyme.

These are problems that can only be solved by policymakers (including program managers working for donors, IFIs, and philanthropies) reclaiming their roles as bridges between rigorous academic research and policy formulation and implementation. That means internalizing the fact that the craft of policymaking is both an art and a science. Socio-hist... See more

More than half a million Germans migrated to the United States in the two decades before the rise of the Third Reich, largely for economic reasons. It would be absurd to claim they were morally superior to those who stayed and participated in the Nazi regime. They were simply spared the moral test that so many of their compatriots, whether through ... See more

Beginning with the New Deal and extending through the first three decades after World War II, the federal government created centers of economic power that offset the power of the giant corporations and Wall Street.

Unions pushed for and won legislation in 1935 that legitimized collective bargaining, and then, in subsequent decades, built economic ... See more

I had an exchange this week about the importance (indeed, primacy) of economic growth in development. I’ve had many such exchanges over the last few years, and at some point they all turn to the same point: even if this is true, what can we do about it? I used to say that growth is hard, not complicated: more like playing the trumpet than building ... See more

In the midst of all of that, the Arab world is moving on. The new game in town is Saudi-Israel normalization. The two-state solution is off the table. Palestinian freedom is off the table. Washington is distracted with other issues; it’s not a priority. So I think all of those are the context in which they’re saying, “Look, right now, Palestinians ... See more