“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.