Coming soon to an auditorium near you

Next week will bring to LSE two heavyweights in their respective fields who have been dubbed the profits of doom. Nouriel Roubini was one of the few economists to warn about the impending financial crisis while Bill Easterly never misses an opportunity to tell us how the aid industry can doom development if it continues on its current path.

While Bill shares some of Angus Deaton's concerns about the merits of experiments, his scientific and methodological approach to development economics and policy is actually not that different from that of Duflo et al. He refutes top-down policy-making arguing instead for decentralized experimentation to find out what really works in development. And yet conformity rents are pretty low in the scholarly profession (why?) so if asked, I bet he would not see it this way....

His nemesis will stop by later in the month as well. Busy times!