Thursday, March 26, 2009

In the other corner, wearing the blue trunks... A book about aid to Africa...

Boy if you thought the radical critique had little merit, wait until you read the other side...

Many people are talking about Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid. I haven't read it (hey, when reading Coetzee and Le Clézio, why bother with Moyo?) but many people I respect have... and their response is pretty uniformly negative. Here's David Roodman:

Last month I blogged a New York Times interview with Dambisa Moyo, whom the paper aptly dubbed the “Anti-Bono.” A youngish woman who grew up in Zambia and holds degrees from Harvard and Oxford, she launches a frontal assault on foreign assistance in her new book, Dead Aid. For her, ODA is DOA. I worried in my post about her simplistic interview answers, which implied that aid has nothing to do with microfinance even though donors helped make it what it is today. I ended carefully:

I look forward to reading her book, where perhaps she recognizes these complexities.

Well, I did, and she doesn’t.

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