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Considering the socio-economic conditions of a country as vast and diverse as India and the challenges which India faces right now, one thing was clear that people wanted the tried and tested person to sit at the top seat. The one who is experienced and whose politics is centered around development, which the country needs most. The entire elections these days are fought on development agenda, not Caste, not Religion. And who other than Narendra Modi could have been a better choice, for the great development work in Gujarat which he has done especially when the state faced tough time after 2001 Earthquake and 2002 Riots. Narendra Modi is the best deserving person for the Prime Minister of India.But is there any other person who is as curious and lover of modern technology that he intends to solve most problems which the country faces through it, who is as experienced to deserve the top seat, with a clean background and intention, politically smart, with as modest background and not a slightest of nepotism in his career. Yes there is. His party is the part of ruling alliance of the country right now. Some of us may not know him well, blame his marketing skills or the large gap which exists between North and South India. His name is Chandrababu Naidu:Here are the reasons why after Modi, if there is any non-BJP person who deserves the top seat, can be Chandrababu Naidu, the President of Telugu Desam Party (TDP).At the early age of 28 he was Andhra Pradesh's youngest member of Legislative Assembly and the youngest minister in the cabinet.He has served as the longest Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh from 1995 to 2004 and again was sworn in as CM of Seemandhara in 2014. During his tenure, the achievements and recognition which he has received speak loads of the work he has done in the state.He is identified as India's only politician with 21st century vision for his developmental and result oriented policies, all over the world. He has this reputation worldwide. How many times have we seen the US President or Prime Minister of UK, especially visiting a State's CM on their visits to India? Yes, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair visited Hyderabad and met Naidu personally while he was the Chief Minister of the state."Bye Bye Bangalore, Hello Hyderabad"The slogan coined by Naidu is self explanatory. He is credited with bringing Information Technology in the state. This is exemplified by the presence of top IT companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Deloitte, Oracle etc. having their campuses in Hyderabad. In fact Microsoft Corporation has established a software development centre in Hyderabad, second such centre outside Seattle. He intended to create Hyderabad as the new IT hub of India and had been successful in his ambitions so far. Not only IT, he is actively involved in attracting some big FDIs in key sectors such as biotechnology, healthcare and various outsourcing services.In a World Bank Survey in September 2015 on India's top 10 states on doing business, Andhra Pradesh takes the second place after Gujarat. This itself speaks of his efforts to attract investments in the state.National Geographic mentioned in its 2002 issue about Hyderabad- "Hyderabad is poised to become the hi-tech capital of the subcontinent. Not only is it remarkable that all this has happened, but that it has happened so fast."Andhra Pradesh Value Added Network (APVAN)Can be termed as most ambitious project ever, APVAN. The aim of APVAN was to wire up the entire state into one large network (or intranet) and hook up every government office with it. This way, information could be accessed and shared across the board at a great speed. Naidu already has a similar but smaller system set up in his office where he can connect to the network and get data on things like condition of power generation and transmission, education levels, etc. He already uses this data by keeping the ministers and bureaucrats on their toes by calling them at all times of the day and questioning them based on the data. Now Naidu envisions a similar system set up across the entire state. Such a network would have multiple purposes. The first one is to give all government employees and ministers access to instant information and data. The second one is to streamline government working. This is to be achieved through a system of online government (sort of like online banking). Here, citizens would be able to print out forms, apply for licenses and permits, pay their taxes, along with having access to all the information. Further more, Naidu currently has a file-tracking system in his secretariat where he can track every minister’s files and see how long it took and what decision was taken. He hopes to make even this information public and have the citizens track the ministers’ files.On the path of the transparent government through the use of technology. This is Chandrababu Naidu for you.Janmabhoomi (Birth Place)He understands the importance of involving people in the decision making process of the government right from the lowest level. For this purpose Janmabhoomi was initiated which not only focused on people participation in the decision making in the villages but also aimed at increasing the literacy rate and spreading awareness among the masses.This program relies on having the people work with each other at the grassroots and to get them involved in the development process. India has always had a culture of a panchayat which is a group of generally five elders in the village who mediate and judge problems in the village. This system is now part of the Indian judiciary. Extending upon this, Naidu has tried to mobilize the people into working with each other in setting up organizations and committees. Some of them are credit groups (providing low-interest short-term loans), water associations, education committees, and health committees. While the government will be out to educate and organize such groups, its main role in this program will be to implement suitable policy and train the people and group them according to their skill. One major development through this program has been an attempt at making the government more transparent. Naidu hopes to have the citizens more involved in the decision making process and as such hold the government bureaucrats accountable for their actions. This means that the people would have a right to the information and be able to audit government accounts. Although this is a great plan into streamlining and improving the bureaucracy, it is obvious that it would not go down too well with the bureaucrats. In terms of the social objectives of Janmabhoomi, it has been very successful with improvements across the board, in areas such as water, sanitation, health, and also veterinary care.Pattiseema lift irrigation schemeIn order to solve the water and irrigation problems in the state, linking the rivers is tested method. Naidu understands its benefits very well. As of September 2015, he is credited with the completion of first link in the national water grid, which seeks to interlink the nation’s rivers, by formally connecting rivers Godavari with Krishna by completing the Pattiseema lift irrigation scheme. This will irrigate two crops on 1.7 million acres and ensure adequate water supply in a large part of the parched Rayalseema region.Though dating back to more than three and a half decades the project work on Pattiseema took off effectively only a decade back. But finally it was Naidu who accelerated the work on the scheme and ensured its completion in a record five and a half months and thus overtaking the Ken-Betwa project which was expected to be the first completed river linking project in the country.Awards/RecognitionDeclared as "South Asian of the year, 1999" by the Time Asia Magazine."IT Indian of the Year" in a poll conducted by India Today and 20:20 media“IT Man of the Year” award by Computer World in 1999 for his vision and contributions in harnessing IT for improving the lives of common citizens.In 1998, when the World Link magazine of the World Economic Forum decided to pick a dream cabinet of political leaders, Chandrababu Naidu shared honours with British PrimeMinister Tony Blair; Iranian President Mohammed Khatami and Foreign Minister of New Zealand Don McKinnon among othersFuture Plans for Andhra PradeshHe intends to make Andhra Pradesh one of the top three developed states in the country by 2022 and the number one state by 2029. In order to translate his plans into action he has already tied up to work with the Lee Kuan Yew Institute of Excellence to further ease the ways for doing business. The results have been encouraging so far as the state has already managed to secure Rs 1.13 lakh crore of investments which are now in various stages of implementation.Amravati - The Capital CityThe most ambitious of the Chandrababu Naidu’s new initiatives are his plans for Amaravati, the new capital of the reorganized state. The capital city with 32 kms of riverfront is being built with the active cooperation of Singapore which has helped with the master plan of the smart, green and sustainable city.The idea is to initiate the project by building 17 sq kms as a vibrant business hub with offices and residences with metro rail, bus rapid transit, downtown roads, arterial roads and collector roads. Naidu biggest success on this front so far has been to secure the peoples participation for procuring land for the project on a voluntary basis by promising to deliver them a part of the gains by returning a portion of the developed land and ensuring annuity payments meanwhile. So far Naidu has managed to secure 33,000 acres of prime land for the capital project in lieu of a promise to return 8,000 acres of developed land to the landowners. This is one of the most innovative plans for urban development that India had attempted till now.All these are major gains considering that the reorganization of Andhra Pradesh had left the state coffers almost empty with hardly any resources. The transfer of the then capital Hyderabad, which is the most resourceful region of the state, to Telangana robbed Andhra Pradesh off a major bulk of the taxes. And the promised compensation form the central government fell far short of expectations.The scarcity of resources had forced Naidu to work out new plans to build a tax base for the reorganized state. Naidu’s new idea is to tap the potential of the long coast line of the state to build new ports and industrial corridors to generate employment and revenues. The Vizag Chennai industrial corridor and the corridor connecting Chennai Bangalore industrial corridor to Krishnapatnam port in Andhra Pradesh are two focus areas of the port based industrial infrastructure projects that Naidu has initiated.These are few of the many great work initiated by Chandrababu Naidu. But sadly very few people are aware of his achievements. The work done by him is in no way inferior to what Modi did in Gujarat, rather his might be better, but what he lacks, I think, is the connect with the people in the northern parts of India. He focuses on regional politics and doesn't have a cadre as strong as BJP/RSS to spread the party's wings all over the country.But he is undoubtedly one of the deserving candidate for the PM's, who is not associated to BJP. Don't know whether he will ever be able to get the PM post, but keep an eye on Andhra Pradesh in the coming few years. Naidu continues to haunt Bangalore and now Hyderabad (Telangana). New York times rightly identified Naidu as "The High-Tech fix for one corner of India."If only India had more such fixes for every corner.Thanks for A2A.

'How economically advanced are the slums in India?'Advanced is a loaded word in general and especially so in the context of slums. Generally, we're taught to denigrate slums and look down on people who live there. The truth is, in the face of both governmental inertia and societal apathy, slums develop out of necessity and are a veritable bee-hive of economic activity and resourcefulness, the likes of which are unprecedented in all other social strata and endeavors. Not only that, over time, the economic activity of slums becomes the very life blood of not only cities in which they exist but through the inexorable process of globalization, its tentacles feed every part of global economic activity. Nowhere is this truism clearer than in Dharavi, the sprawling slum at the heart of Mumbai, India's most populous city, and its financial and entertainment capital.Dharavi's location: very economically advancedTo its north, the Mahim-Sion link roadTo its south-west, the central railway lineTo its south, the western railway lineClose proximity to Mumbai's newest, swankiest business district, the Bandra Kurla Complex.Thus, Dharavi is surrounded by 4 railway stations, several bus-lines, and is close to both international and domestic airports of Mumbai (1).Location-wise it doesn't get better than this (see figures below from 2, 3, 4), especially for swamp land that a little more than a century back was deemed worthless, and thus ignored and neglected by governments.Total area? ~550 acres (~175 hectares), i.e., smaller than New York's Central Park, but with an estimated, astounding density of ~18000 people per acre in some areas, i.e., 6 to 8X more dense than Manhattan.Even densities of up to 336, 643 have been measured in some areas of Dharavi (5).A very brief history of Dharavi explains why its location is now so economically advancedPredating the current city of Mumbai, in the late 17th century, local Koli fishermen lived in the swamp lands near the Mithi River.Recognizing the great potential of a natural harbor, in 1534 the Portuguese captured seven separate islands, the as-yet-non-existent Mumbai, which became a wedding gift to England's Charles II in 1662.Promising 'free settlement, freedom of religion and unregulated trade', the British East India Company encouraged internal migration to stock the growing city with the labor necessary to feed its global trade from this vital port city (1).Starting in the 1800s, the city of Mumbai began reclaiming land to accommodate its increasing population. Over time, the reclaimed land in the swampy areas near Mahim river became Dharavi (3).The government back then considered Dharavi unfit for inhabitation.Swamp land near-impossible to build on, inconveniently far from the then city center, deemed of no interest.For a century, impoverished migrants from all over India seeking economic opportunity in the booming port city had little choice but to settle in places like Dharavi.It was 'unregulated, available and free of cost' (1).As the city of Mumbai grew further north from its southern base, communities labeled undesirable were forcibly evicted to the then city edges, i.e., nearer to Dharavi.The impoverished migrants provided a ready supply of cheap labor and conveniently in return, the city, government, employers needed to provide little in terms of services.Not housing, not stable employment, nor health care, let alone investment in terms of insurance and pensions.New migrants and the original inhabitants, the Kolis, developed the land themselves, without any government support.Over time, families and relatives of pioneer migrants came to settle and Dharavi's population grew in distinct patterns of caste, religion and occupation.As the then city proper South Mumbai boomed, those unable to afford housing there also gravitated towards Dharavi.Historically, the colonial overlords lived in the wealthier South Mumbai and that old class divide still brands the city even as it consumes its neighboring environs in its insatiable appetite for growth (see figure below from 6).In the process and over time, Mumbai's growth around and beyond the previously shunned and derided Dharavi has today made it one of the most monetarily valuable and coveted real estates in the world.Eventually, with the city council being forced to recognize Dharavi as part of Mumbai's central municipality (7), a few public toilets and water taps were installed.With this denominational change, Dharavi residents earned at least a modicum of respect.Estimated anywhere from half a million to a million in number, they'd become important vote banks for local politicians.Ever since, they exist in a constant tussle between their original no man's land identity limned in sheer pluck and ingenuity, and the western-oriented dreams of politicians, city planners and Mumbai's middle class who aspire to live in a 'world-class' city, whatever that means.Already there's a pattern to note. Cities attract two types of migrants, those considered desirable and the rest, undesirable.The former tend to be the affluent or middle class while the latter are typically the rural impoverished who leave ancestral homes for better economic opportunities in cities, often in desperation.Historically, cities and their governments didn't care about the latter migrants so didn't prepare for them, welcome them or even accommodate them in a civilized and methodical manner.Dharavi serves as a convenient poster-child for this process. Today comprising ~80 neighborhoods, ~1 million inhabitants and ~100,000 microenterprises, migrants living there include potters from Gujarat, leather tanners from Tamil Nadu, embroidery specialists from Uttar Pradesh, and many others.By and large, they are either Muslims or Hindu lower castes including the so-called untouchables.They may have left their ancestral land behind but they brought with them the specialized knowledge pertaining to family trades, culture and practices. These formed the bedrock of Dharavi's economic activity.Sign of chameleon-like adaptability, today recycling is one of Dharavi's major economic activities.Unencumbered with environmental, factory or labor regulations makes Dharavi's labor and production costs low, at the expense of health, safety and longevity.Current cottage industries in Dharavi include large-scale recycling, leather tanneries, metal work, wood work, machinery manufacturing, printing, garment finishing, and shoe, luggage and jewelry manufacture (8).'What kinds of products do they produce?'Dharavi's recycling businessDharavi is estimated to recycle ~80% of Mumbai's plastic, numbers estimated to be far higher than those in the UK (9; see figures below from 4, 10, 11). As the world's ninth most populous city, this is no mean feat.Dharavi's potteries (figures from 11, 12, 13, 14).From hand embroidery to leather goods to goat intestines that will eventually end up as surgical thread (see figures below from 4, 11, 15), Dharavi's economy is complex, mulifaceted, just like the migrants who've made it their home.Dharavi is already organically exporting its microenterprise, mixed-use space economic model to other slumsDharavi's staggering complexity, ingenuity and industriousness begs the question, what's a slum?What is a slum?Apparently, the word slum was first used to describe dense, impoverished and unsanitary housing of 1820s London (16). The UN's attempt to define slum, 'Slums are neglected parts of cities where housing and living conditions are appallingly poor. Slums range from high-density, squalid central city tenements to spontaneous squatter settlements without legal recognition or rights, sprawling at the edge of cities' leaves much to be desired and unsatisfactory when applied to Dharavi. A more detailed attempt captures key slum attributes, with the worst ones having all of them (16):'Lack of basic services: Inadequate access to safe water sources and sanitation facilities is the most significant feature. It is sometimes supplemented by absence of electricity, waste collection systems, surfaced roads, rainwater drainage and street lighting.Substandard housing or illegal and inadequate building structures: Houses are often constructed with non-permanent materials. Given local conditions concerning climate and location, these materials may be unsuitable for housing.Overcrowding and high density: A majority of the slum dwelling units suffer from high occupancy and the living space per inhabitant is scarce.Unhealthy living conditions and hazardous locations: Due to lack of basic services, such as sewage, waste and pollution management, unhealthy living conditions occur. Buildings may also be constructed on hazardous or unsuitable land.Insecure tenure: Lack of formal documents entitling settlers to occupy land bring about an insecurity in residential status.Poverty and social exclusion: As a cause and consequence of slum conditions; income and capability poverty restrain human and economical development.Minimum settlement size: A single household cannot be referred to as a slum since the term constitutes a precinct.'Is Dharavi a slum?Strictly using the UN's more detailed yardstick, no doubt Dharavi is a slum (see figure from 17 on the left). But the reality is far more nuanced and murky.Even a straightforward survey of Dharavi's inhabitants puts paid to the notion of ranks of the desperately impoverished belonging to the lowest rungs of society.As Mumbai grew upward, around and beyond Dharavi, reaching out to and encompassing its erstwhile suburbs, its perennial, desperate housing shortage drove new waves of Dharavi migrants, from blue collar workers like carpenters and electricians to white collar workers such as engineers, graphic designers and even those in the civil service such as clerks and police, all pulled to Dharavi by a common thread, affordable housing (see figure below from 18 on the right).For example, a study showed that 'in Mumbai in May 2006 we had 4,426 Police Constables (13 more than there were a year earlier) and 81 Police Inspectors living in slums: officers of the law who are illegal residents of the city' (14).According to Krishna Pujari, who organizes a controversial slum tour through Dharavi, 'All sorts of people live in Dharavi. MNC [multinational corporation] workers, BPO [business process outsourcing] workers, 60 percent of our police force' (10).In Dharavi, lack of modern amenities equals lack of basic dignityLack of proper water supply, sewage systems, toilet facilities makes cholera, malaria, typhoid, dengue common in Dharavi.Unregulated, toxic industries (tanneries, paints, plastic recycling) further contribute to chronic diseases.In Dharavi's leather accessories manufacture, 15 to 17 hour days are common, including 2 to 3 hour breaks for lunch and dinner. Only ~1% of these enterprises and workers have access to on-premise toilet facilities (8).Such callousness reveals an unpleasant though essential truth. Querying the use of the word slum is far from an exercise in semantics. It holds a mirror to our values. Inconsiderate, superficial, unthinking, uncaring? Sure, slum’s fine. Introspect and probe? Slum’s revealed as yet another way to shun and otherize.By now, copious news coverage and sociological research confirms that, lack of public or private investment notwithstanding, Dharavi generates valuable economic output for Mumbai and beyond.In terms of its economic output, quite unlike modern, organized labor with entrenched long commutes and other environmentally unsustainable practices such as high-rise sleeper/bedroom communities, strip malls, colossal car showrooms, etc, it's not just a question of what but also how.Much of Dharavi is mixed-use space, i.e., living and working quarters cheek by jowl.Small-scale microenterprises, with most businesses employing 20 or less.The recycling aspect of Dharavi's economy makes it even more avant-garde.Whatever is intended by the use of the phrase 'economically advanced', Dharavi far outpaces conventional notions of sustainable economic development.Enlightened politicians and city planners, if such species do exist, could see in this aspect of Dharavi an economy of the future, the much-vaunted, eminently desirable Circular economy.Desirable because other than abandoning a wantonly destroyed Mother Earth to take to permanent space stations or colonizing Mars or some such science fiction fantasy a la WALL-E, sustainable economic development is the only way out for humans and for Mother Earth.From such a perspective, instead of looking to teach down to, Dharavi becomes a place to learn from.A natural experiment in urbanology, what Dharavi lacks is the modicum of dignity that non-slum dwellers take for granted, clean running water at home, hygienic sewage drainage, indoor toilets, basic health care, job safety and security, and regulated pay.As for what it takes to make a sustainable living-working space in the 21st century, Dharavi's natural experiment already points us the way ahead. If that isn't economically advanced, I don't know what is.BibliographyPage on bekon.lth.seEriksson, Charlotta. "Dharavi: Space, time, human condition towards a theory on unplanned settlements." (2013). http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:832996/FULLTEXT01.pdfPage on artdurnev.comPage on yimg.comEchanove, Matias, and Rahul Srivastava. "The High-Rise and the Slum: Speculative Urban Development in Mumbai." (2012): 789-813. Page on berkeley.eduMumbai case studyEngqvist, Jonatan Habib, and Maria Lantz. Dharavi: documenting informalities. Royal University College of Fine Arts, 2008.Page on nceuis.nic.inWaste not, want not in the £700m slum404 page - Motherland MagazineNational Geographic Magazine - NGM.comPage on comm-dev.orgMegha Gupta's Dharavimarket.com aims to sell products by Dharavi's craftspeople across the world - The Economic TimesPage on udri.orghttp://kaustuv.net/projects/MIRG/Informal_Economy_and_Vocational_Training_in_India.pdfhttp://mirror.unhabitat.org/pmss/getElectronicVersion.aspx?nr=1156&alt=1Dyson, Peter. "Slum tourism: representing and interpreting ‘reality’ in Dharavi, Mumbai." Tourism Geographies 14.2 (2012): 254-274.Larsson, Emma, and Maja Nilsson. "Towards sustainable sanitation in slum areas: A field study in Mumbai." (2013). http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:640967/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Here is my post from my blog, Marginal REVOLUTION. See also the link to Tyler Cowen's post at the end.Working with the World Bank, Deaton has played a huge role in expanding data in developing countries. When you read that world poverty has fallen below 10% for the first time ever and you want to know how we know— the answer is Deaton’s work on household surveys, data collection and welfare measurement. I see Deaton’s major contribution as understanding and measuring world poverty.Measuring welfare sounds simple but doing it right isn’t easy. How do you compare the standard of living in two different countries? Suppose you simply convert incomes using exchange rates. Sorry, that doesn’t work. Not all goods are traded so exchange rates tend to reflect the prices of tradable goods but a large share of consumption is on hard-to-trade services. The Balassa-Samuelson effect tells us that services will tend to be cheaper in poorer countries (I always get a haircut when in a poor country but I don’t expect to get a great deal on electronics). As a result, comparing standards of living using exchange rates will suggest that developing countries are poorer than they actually are. A second problem is the cheese problem. Americans consume a lot of cheese, the Chinese don’t. Is this because the Chinese are too poor to consume cheese or because tastes differ? How you answer this question makes a difference for understanding welfare. A third problem is the warring supermarkets problem. Two supermarkets each claim that they have the lowest prices and they are both right! How is this possible? Consumers at supermarket A buy more of what is cheap at A and less of what is expensive at A and vice-versa for B. Thus, it would cost more to buy the A basket at store B and it would also cost more to buy the B basket at store A! So which supermarket is better? Comparing standards of living across countries isn’t easy and then you want to make these comparisons consistently over time as well! Deaton, working especially with the World Bank, helped to construct price indices for all countries that measure goods and services and he showed how to use these to make theoretically appropriate comparisons of welfare. Deaton’s presidential address to the American Economic Association in 2010 covers many of these issues.I see Deaton’s work on world poverty as a tour de force, he made advances in theory, he joined with others to take the theory to the field to make measurements and he used the measurements to draw attention to important issues in the world.Earlier in his career, Deaton developed tools to bring theory to data on consumption. A key contributions is the Almost Ideal Demand System. We all know that demand curves slope down which means that a fall in the price of the good in question increases the quantity demanded but in fact economic theory says that the demand for good X depends not just on the price of good X but at least potentially on the prices of all other goods. If we want to estimate how a change in policy will influence people’s choices we need to allow demand curves to interact in potentially many ways but we still want to constrain those reactions according to economic theory. In addition, economic theory tells us that an individual’s demand curve slopes down but it doesn’t necessarily imply that the aggregation of individual demand curves must slope down. Aggregation is tricky! The Almost Ideal Demand system, due initially to Deaton and Muellbauer, in 1980 and further developed since then shows how we can estimate demand systems on aggregates of consumers while still preserving and testing the constraints of economic theory.The study of consumption leads naturally to the study of savings, consumption in future periods. Here we have Keynes’s famous propensity to consume theory (consumption is a fraction of current income), Milton Friedman’s permanent income hypothesis (consumption is a fraction of estimated lifetime income), Modigliani’s Life Cycle Hypothesis (borrow young, save when middle aged, dissave when old). Robert Hall, building on the work of Ramsey, showed in the 1970s that rational expectations implies the famous Euler equation that bedevils graduate students, which shows that suitably discounted changes in marginal utilities should follow a random walk. Deaton played a big role in testing the new theories, mostly finding them wanting.Deaton’s book, The Great Escape, on growth, health and inequality is accessible and a good read. A controversial aspect of this work is that Deaton falls squarely into the Easterly camp (Deaton’s review of Tyranny of Experts is here) in thinking that foreign aid has probably done more harm than good.Here is Deaton on foreign aid:Unfortunately, the world’s rich countries currently are making things worse. Foreign aid – transfers from rich countries to poor countries – has much to its credit, particularly in terms of health care, with many people alive today who would otherwise be dead. But foreign aid also undermines the development of local state capacity.This is most obvious in countries – mostly in Africa – where the government receives aid directly and aid flows are large relative to fiscal expenditure (often more than half the total). Such governments need no contract with their citizens, no parliament, and no tax-collection system. If they are accountable to anyone, it is to the donors; but even this fails in practice, because the donors, under pressure from their own citizens (who rightly want to help the poor), need to disburse money just as much as poor-country governments need to receive it, if not more so.What about bypassing governments and giving aid directly to the poor? Certainly, the immediate effects are likely to be better, especially in countries where little government-to-government aid actually reaches the poor. And it would take an astonishingly small sum of money – about 15 US cents a day from each adult in the rich world – to bring everyone up to at least the destitution line of a dollar a day.Yet this is no solution. Poor people need government to lead better lives; taking government out of the loop might improve things in the short run, but it would leave unsolved the underlying problem. Poor countries cannot forever have their health services run from abroad. Aid undermines what poor people need most: an effective government that works with them for today and tomorrow.One thing that we can do is to agitate for our own governments to stop doing those things that make it harder for poor countries to stop being poor. Reducing aid is one, but so is limiting the arms trade, improving rich-country trade and subsidy policies, providing technical advice that is not tied to aid, and developing better drugs for diseases that do not affect rich people. We cannot help the poor by making their already-weak governments even weaker.Here is Tyler’s post on Deaton.