My development students often tell me that they really like the class but that the material is so depressing. Nothing seems to work, especially the dramatic, large-scale, end-all-poverty in 5 years types of projects that are so initially exciting. I’m not teaching development per se this semester but I am teaching a class on Global Political Economy and I included a section on aid. We just finished reading Nina Munk’sThe Idealist, which is an amazing book that my students both loved and found depressing. Not so much that the MVPs didn’t work as planned, but that anyone as smart and accomplished as Sachs would have thought that they would. I asked them to think about the theoretical channels by which these villages would be able to be self-sustaining after 5 years. Even in theory we couldn’t identify how that would exactly work.
By the end of the book…
View original post 162 more words
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments