Can philanthropists be ruthless? (Reuters)

Felix Salmon discssues the latest Foreign Policy cover article on technology and development written by Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur.

From the article:

Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur ^[1] have taken over the cover of the latest issue of Foreign Policy, with a classic of the QTWTAIN genre. The tl;dr version of their 4,000-word article (which is free, behind a registration wall): no, Silicon Valley cannot save the world. Still, there are some very good development innovations out there; the surprising thing is that you’re likely to find them not in Palo Alto but rather in Washington DC.

The strongest point that the article makes is simply that you can’t easily apply Silicon Valley techniques to development. If you look at the bright ideas of the recent past, many of them have failed — which is entirely typical of Silicon Valley. The problem is that the people who develop and fund those bright ideas tend to be the winners of the Silicon Valley lottery, tend to think that their ideas are golden, and are loathe to kill them off. 

Read it here.