March 14, 2012

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo

Date: Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Guest host: Deb Albus, former Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Council for International Cooperation

From the Publisher:

Winner of the 2011 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book of the Year Award

Billions of government dollars, and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs, are dedicated to helping the world”s poor. But much of their work is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best, harmful misperceptions at worst.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low.

This important book illuminates how the poor live, and offers all of us an opportunity to think of a world beyond poverty.

April 18, 2012

How Ottawa Spends, 2011-2012: Trimming Fat or Slicing Pork?

by Christopher Stoney, G. Bruce Doern

Date: Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Guest host: Hon. Ralph Goodale, Member of Parliament for Wascana

From the Publisher:

Leading scholars from across Canada examine a new era of “life under the knife” in the context of the Harper agenda after five years in power, the partisan calculus of a minority Parliament, and a deep global recession still in crisis mode.

Given the budget-related pressure for an election, the book poses questions about the degree to which the budget agenda involves the political arts of “trimming fat” versus “slicing the pork” of partisan spending.

Several closely linked political, policy, and spending realms are examined, including economic stimulus, environmental assessment, energy and climate change, health care, science and technology, immigration, and northern strategy (including affordable housing).

Related governance issues such as the use of new media, regulatory budget cuts, Industry Canada as an economic regulator, and federal compensation costs are also discussed in detail.

May 24, 2012

Civilization: The West And The Rest

by Niall Ferguson

Date: May 24, 2012

Guest host: Dr. Ken Coates, Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation, University of Saskatchewan

From the Publisher:

From one of our most renowned historians, Civilization is the definitive history of Western civilization’s rise to global dominance-and the “killer applications” that made this improbable ascent possible.

In Civilization: The West and the Rest, bestselling author Niall Ferguson argues that, beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts that the Rest lacked: competition, science, the rule of law, consumerism, modern medicine, and the work ethic. These were the “killer applications” that allowed the West to leap ahead of the Rest, opening global trade routes, exploiting newly discovered scientific laws, evolving a system of representative government, more than doubling life expectancy, unleashing the Industrial Revolution, and embracing a dynamic work ethic. Civilization shows just how fewer than a dozen Western empires came to control more than half of humanity and four fifths of the world economy.

Yet now, Ferguson argues, the days of Western predominance are numbered-not because of clashes with rival civilizations, but simply because the Rest have now downloaded the six killer apps we once monopolized-while the West has literally lost faith in itself.