The bottom billion
why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it
by Paul Collier · first published 2007
67% recommend33% neutral
"In this elegant and impassioned synthesis from one of the world's leading experts on Africa and poverty, economist Paul Collier writes persuasively that although nearly five billion of the world's people are beginning to climb from desperate poverty and to benefit from globalization's reach to developing countries, there is a "bottom billion" of the world's poor whose countries, largely immune to the forces of global economy, are falling farther behind and are in danger of falling apart, separating permanently and tragically from the rest of the world. Collier identifies and explains the four
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…neighborhood of $1 – $2 trillion (with a "t") dollars to various developing countries. It hasn't done much. Why not? That's a question that a host of books have attempted to answer (I recommend Dead Aid, The Bottom Billion, and Why Nations Fail to the curious). I don't think we'll ever get a complete answer but we should at least be asking the right questions. (Relevant observation: I'm a grant writing consultant for nonprofit…
on “Good News You Might Have Missed in 2013” ↗Don't just read Moyo. Read 'Poor Economics' by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Duflo is at MIT and is all about trials to figure out what works with aid. Read 'The Bottom Billion' by Paul Collier who is a development economist at Oxford. Read 'The Idealist' by Nina Munk which is about how we can say that Geoffrey Sach's millennium village project has failed. Read 'Africa Rising'…
on “Why I stopped being a voluntourist ” ↗I'm surprised by the anti-world bank sentiment here. You should read 'The Bottom Billion', which was written by the director of the Development Research Group at the World bank (2003-2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottom_Billion
on “World Bank app competition” ↗The Bottom Billion is a good book about the factors that make the poorest regions in the world, of which Sub-Saharan Africa is the largest block. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottom_Billion
on “Evidence for Abundance” ↗Just because a business is losing money, doesn't mean it has zero value. Paul Collier, author of the "Bottom Billion", said poor countries get screwed for their resources because they don't put them up to bid. He even said the British government valued certain frequencies at 2 billion, but they later sold for 20 billion…
on “Anonymous v. Koch brothers” ↗…now is full of internal corruption which is just the petty fiefdoms all squabbling over the spoils, while the industry is being badly managed. Lets see if I can find the economics book on that... The Bottom Billion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottom_Billion Chapter 3 is on "the natural resources trap" I haven't read it in over a decade and the analogy may fall apart, particularly when it comes to stuff…
on “Google CEO tells employees productivity and focus must improve” ↗