Tag: good intentions
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Tom’s Shoes: A Closer Look (Adam Ruins Everything)
This video is funny and disturbing at the same time. Good intentions, stereotypes, and warm fuzzies can be destructive. Thinking with an economic lens that evaluates actual outcomes is essential. Yet, attempts to introduce such a lens are usually met with strong resistance. It feels so right; how could it be wrong? As I've said…
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“Orphans” Versus The Abandoned: The Church’s Complicit Role in Poverty
FCS Urban Ministries: Big Heart to Love the Abandoned Bob Lupton has an excellent piece on how most orphans in Haiti are, in fact, children who have been unwillingly abandoned because their parents are without the means to care for them. Yet faith-based "orphanages" market these children as orphans. He concludes: "There are…
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Stop Trying to Save the World (Good Intentions Are Not Enough!)
New Republic: Stop Trying to Save the World: Big ideas are destroying international development, Michael Hobbes One of the first classes I took in the economic development program at Eastern University was a class where we spent the entire semester studying the wide variety of economic development models that had been tried. Few worked. The…
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How The Smokey Bear Effect Led To Raging Wildfires
NPR: How The Smokey Bear Effect Led To Raging Wildfires Yet another story of the unintended consequences. … Growth rings tell how old the sectioned tree was. But when Swetnam holds up one, he points to something else: fire scars. They're black marks, about the size of a fingernail clipping, left by fires. … ……
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The Church’s Contribution to the Corruption of Business
I came across this video clip by Noah Riner, an MBA student at Stanford last night. His observation is the constant refrain I've heard from businesspeople, over and over and over again, throughout my life. Charles North and Bob Smietana wrote a book called Good Intentions: Nine Hot-Button Issues Viewed Through the Eyes of Faith…
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The Small-Time Landlord vs. Big-Time Tenants’ Rights
The Bay Citizen: The Small-Time Landlord vs. Big-Time Tenants' Rights San Francisco's strong renter protections are a big reason why the city has the region's highest vacancy rate. In San Francisco, one of the toughest places in the country to find a place to live, more than 31,000 housing units — one of every 12…
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Good Intentions, Bad Policy
New York Times: Good Intentions, Bad Policy Perhaps the single most important policy-related insight in economics is that changes in policies lead to behavioral responses. More generous unemployment insurance leads to longer spells of unemployment; implicit government guarantees of financial institutions lead to too much risk-taking. Well-designed policies, like a congestion tax or carbon tax,…
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The Challenges of Criticizing Aid
Social Edge: The Challenges of Criticizing Aid … As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the aid industry (and, yes, I definitely view it as an “industry”) is one of the few fields that tends to be immune to criticism. There are two groups of people who are particularly sensitive to hearing about the failures of…
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Shopping for justice: The trouble with good intentions
Christian Century: Shopping for justice: The trouble with good intentions Julie Clawson needed a new bra. Most of the time Clawson, a Chicago-area pastor, would have just gone to the store, plunked down some cash and headed home with a new bra. But she had been reading about globalization, and her conscience made her wonder…