In Development Magazine is back! This week, we have letters to the editor - and a debate about the quality of the South Sudanese census.
The Economist thinks effective altruism is the century’s biggest idea. I also laughed a lot at this line in a related article: “the movement is tiny, with an informal membership probably in the tens of thousands, many of whom claim to be only ‘EA adjacent’.”
Speaking of EA, I made it onto a weird conspiracy website about the shadowy network of EAs.1
White South Africans make as much as Danes. Black South Africans make as much as Bangladeshis.
Americans no longer throw dinner parties (or, really, even have people over).
Apollo predicts agentic bank runs.
Economics, by and large, contains calculation errors.
I quite liked this piece on America A and America B. It seems to understand America B in a way that most pieces2 do not.
2-6% of aid money gets shunted into crypto.
Neural similarity predicts if strangers become friends.
Very shadowy; you can tell by how my CV is online, a previous OP grant is disclosed on the about page, and In Development Magazine also discloses its funders.
America A being much more likely to write think pieces.
I have an N of like, 9-10 that confirms the neural similarity-friendship link. But we just call it "same brain."