developing nations
8 Books to Explain Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
Monday, July 7th, 2008It is a common conversation piece among those trying to understand how the world works: how did it come to be that Sub-Saharan Africa is far less developed than the rest of the contemporary world? While there is no one simple answer, there is an answer. One that involves several intertwining threads with some causes […]
Life in the Peace Corps, Part 5, Living
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008For background, I am describing some of my experiences from the US Peace Corps in Guinea, West Africa. More information on this series is available in the introduction.
Many often wonder what it is really like to live as a Peace Corps Volunteer. The fact is it can be a very different experience depending on which […]
Life in the Peace Corps, Part 4, Teaching
Friday, June 20th, 2008For background, I am describing some of my experiences from the US Peace Corps in Guinea, West Africa. More information on this series is available in the introduction.
Although, I was one of only two Americans in a small rural school with one class per grade teaching in a foreign language, my experiences in the […]
Life in the Peace Corps, Part 3, The Beginning
Friday, June 13th, 2008After completion of our training in Senegal, we traveled to Guinea to see our host country for the first time. As the rains had been late in Senegal, our time there was mostly marked by sand and heat and more of the same. The brilliant green lushness of coastal Guinea having already seen months of […]
Life in the Peace Corps, Part 2, Training
Friday, June 6th, 2008On Fridays over the next several weeks, I am describing experiences from my service in the U.S. Peace Corps.
An overnight flight from New York’s JFK airport on Air Afrique put us in Dakar, Senegal the next day. In June, when the rains had still not come, Senegal was a very dry and very hot and […]
Space Solar Power, The Next Leapfrog Technology ?
Monday, June 2nd, 2008Recently, this article on CNN.com revisits the idea of collecting solar power in space and beaming it down to Earth. With such a large world demand for energy expected in the next 20 to 50 years, and declining costs for access to space, could this be the time for this science fiction technology to become […]
Life in the Peace Corps, Part 1
Friday, May 23rd, 2008For the next several Fridays, I am going to retell some of my experiences from my service in the United States Peace Corps. This is probably not obviously directly related to the aim of True Progress, but I feel that it can be instructive and I believe that the Peace Corps has a specific […]
Education in the Developing World
Monday, May 12th, 2008Increasing the quality and quantity of education in poor countries is critical and absolutely necessary to their development, but let’s not lose sight of how disruptive a free and generous education can be. Education changes cultures, economies, and governments, and for nations entering that transition period the way must be prepared.
Defining Sustainable Technology
Friday, May 9th, 2008Sustainable technology is an idea that may produce a new level of real progress around the world. But often today, the term is more of a marketing badge that may or may not prove to be true when put to the test. I have written before about sustainable technology and some of the problems with […]
Review - Guns, Germs, and Steel
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond is an excellent explanation of why the world is the way it is. Combined with William Easterly’s book reviewed earlier on this site, a reader can finally get his or her hands around the broad historical causes that have produced the world that we live in.
This is […]
Development Off the Grid
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008And, I mean way off…
Picture yourself in a small tropical village a few hundred miles south of the Sahara Desert. About 800 people live there. You are probably related in one way or another to most of them, but you don’t really know how exactly, beyond your own close-knit extended family. There is no electricity, […]
Review - The End of Poverty
Sunday, April 13th, 2008The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Out Time by Jeffery Sachs, is an optimistic, forceful argument for the economic potential of developing countries and the necessity of increased in aid from rich countries to realize it.
Jeffrey Sachs is an accomplished macro-economist, currently at Columbia University, who has experience helping poor countries get on track […]
Review - Development As Freedom
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, provides a powerful argument that development and progress cannot be measured on the basis of economic output and consumption alone, that personal freedom is a very important and in some areas predominate variable in determining whether progress has been or will be […]
The Challenge of Sustaining Sustainable Technology
Monday, April 7th, 2008One small step forward…
While I was serving as a teacher in the small town of Kankalabé (population: ~5000), Guinea in West Africa, the European Union financed a project to install a running water system in that town. The project, of limited benefit, was soon sabotaged and has since been nothing but a monument to unrealized […]
Week-Long Aid Missions, Charity, and Sustainability
Sunday, April 6th, 2008Is this for them or for us?
A couple years ago, I was advising a group of undergraduate engineering students from Rice University on a project they were pursuing for Engineers Without Borders. They were designing a rainwater catchment and drip irrigation system for a village in Mali, West Africa. Having heard about their project and […]
Review - The Elusive Quest for Growth
Saturday, April 5th, 2008The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William Easterly is an honest answer to part of the question, “why hasn’t the world improved like we thought it would?” Easterly conducts a post-mortem conference on western aid programs since the end of World War II, finding that in many cases […]
Appropriate Technology and Development
Friday, April 4th, 2008Please, That’s Not Appropriate Here…
Appropriate Technology, a somewhat condescending (from the receivers point of view) title for a movement that arose in the 1970s, focuses on providing an improved intermediate step on the technology staircase between developing and industrialized countries. While some of these ideas have been expressed for many decades (see The Ugly American […]