The Dead Aid argument (the title of Dambisa Moyo's book, see earlier post) is catching on. According to a fascinating article by Jeff Chu in the April 2009 Fast Company, Rwanda's president Paul Kagame is taking the path of private enterprise, at least relative to many other African leaders. The article makes it clear that the jury's out on whether President Kagame's distinctive approach to economic development will succeed, but his is another African voice now being raised against the role of large scale government to government aid.

Whilst on the subject of economic deveopment in Africa, I read reviews at the weekend of Paul Collier's new book Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places. Some reviewers clearly didn't buy in to his conclusion, which seems to be that the western democracies must provide a military umbrella for the development of democracy in African countries. I'm looking forward to reading it – reviews will be welcome from others who get there before me.

John Calverley's new book When Bubbles Burst is highly recommended by Geoff Riley – it's in my pile for allocating to a reviewer for the next edition of The Business Economist, if anyone wants to volunteer.

It's Our Turn To Eat by Michaela Wrong, about the Kenyan whistleblower John Githingo has been getting consistently good reviews, including a long one (not available online) by Bernard Porter in the current London Review of Books. The underlying theme, I gather from these reviews, is that politics in the country are still distorted by the dreadful legacy of colonial rule. This topic has been on my mind for two other reasons. One is that Edward Miguel raised the question of signs of a trend to authoritarianism over on his Africa's Turn blog, in a post on recent events in Madagascar.

The second is that I've nearly finished the gripping memoir by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Settler's Cookbook, about her childhood and youth in pre-independence and then Obote's Uganda, which she fled early in the Idi Amin era like so many others of South Asian origin. Not only is a terrific eye-witness account of those years, and the politics of decolonisation, but it has a lot of great recipes too. As someone who grew up in northern England in the 1960s and 70s, I shall always be grateful for the impact of immigrants to these islands on our typical cuisine, so I particularly like Yasmin's recipes which spice up (literally) English classics like Shepherd's Pie and Beef Wellington, but they all look mouth watering.

Intrigued by this headline? Read this entry by Richard Baggaley on the Princeton University Press blog about a book he published in 2007, Plight of the Fortune Tellers by Riccardo Rebonato, holder of that grandly titled post at Royal Bank of Scotland which is now majority-owned by me and other UK tax payers. To give you a preview, Richard writes: “My
author Riccardo Rebonato has the job title ‘Global Head of Market Risk’
for the Royal Bank of Scotland Group. Until a few months ago this was
unambiguously impressive. Now, rather like a watch officer on the
Titanic, events would seem to have overtaken him. Riccardo though is
one of the few members of his profession who can legitimately claim to
have warned us all that things were not at all well in the world of
financial risk management.“

This series, published by MIT Press, came to my attention because of two recent titles on development economics, Edward Miguel's Africa's Turn and Abhijit Banerjee's Making Aid Work. I spoke this week to the co-editor, Deborah  Chasman, about how the series came about. (The other is Professor Joshua Cohen, the Stanford-based political theorist who took over the Boston Review about 15 years ago.) For UK readers, the not-for-profit Boston Review is a journal of ideas and reasoned debate with similarities to our own Prospect. As the mission statement says, “We see each issue as a public space where people can loosen the hold of
conventional preconceptions and bring this openness to bear on today's
most pressing issues. Our mission requires that as editors we shun
polemic and partisanship, uphold the highest standards of argument and
evidence, value ambition and originality, seek widely diverse
perspectives, and make complex ideas accessible.” The physical edition circulates within the US, but the online readership is international, and as a not-for-profit, it is available free online.

Deb, who is a refusnik from the corporate book publishing world, says the topics for the books emerge from articles in the magazine (these are typically long). I love the format of the books – an essay which has a clear point of view but expresses it in a thoughtful and reasoned way, then comments from others in the field, and sometimes a reply. They are quite short for books, pocket sized, with an appealing design flavour. Some are selected because of reader feedback on magazine articles, like Glenn Loury's Race, Incarceration and American Values, which had over 100,000 readers online.

There are no additional books on economics in the pipeline as yet, but Deb has two articles of interest to economists coming up, by Michael Kremer and Paul Collier. Recent articles on economics and related areas include Nancy Birdsall's Why Globalization Doesn't Lift All Boats, Pranab Bardhan on the myths about China and India's economic growth, and more recently Dean Baker on regulation.  I would be glad to see her running more articles, and publishing more books, on economics and finance. Serious magazines of ideas and culture pay too little attention to economics, too much to politics and culture, for my tastes. It means economics – its ideas and debates rather than the political partisanship about economics policy – is paid too little serious attention by non-economists, resulting in a chasm of understanding whose ill-effects we can see all too plainly in the current crisis.

Anyway, I'm so pleased to have discovered the Boston Review and highly recommend it to others who haven't yet started reading it.