“Humans are suckers for finding patterns where none really exist, like seeing the shapes of lions and giraffes in the clouds.”
William Easterly’s review of Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives and Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism is very much worth reading for its own sake, as well as being a timely reminder for the limits of our ability to understand cause/effect, whether in developmental economics or other fields.
Jake, have you read literary criticism? It’s as rife with BS as the fiction it discusses! There’s no “right” answer. It’s all a wash. Trust me, I know what I’m doing. Yeah, OK, man…
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