Just got out of a lecture by William Easterly - the big proponent of bottom up development (very anti Jeff Sachs & millennium development goals).
For someone like me who is a big believer in social entrepreneurship, Easterly's perspective of innovation and individual entrepreneurship as the key to development is very exciting. Although, I have to admit I don't think I got a lot of what he talked about. There's very little data and he kept coming back to how development has a lot more randomness than what we're comfortable with. It was interesting to talk about our human biases, where we are uncomfortable with randomness, have a huge success bias (studying successes instead of studying both successes and failures), and finally always want to attribute things to leaders. It's interesting how our inherent biases influence the way we operate and the theories we gravitate towards.
The subject matter is fairly dense and boring, but Easterly has a biting sense of humor and it was an enjoyable lecture.
In other news -
1) Today was a thoroughly unproductive day. Whenever I spend my time at Puck (Wagner building) I end up socializing and do very little work. Tomorrow I'm going to the library, lot easier to work there.
2) I registered for the Net Impact conference in Nov. Really excited about that.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment