The CGD London offices occupy a set of rooms just a stone’s throw of Parliament, not that anyone would be advised to throw that stone, however much they may be tempted. It’s a good vantage point: close enough to observe, but not so close as for the grime to rub off. This week, a senior MP was sancti...

There’s a mild statistical bent to all my favourite pastimes. Cricket is the most numbers-obsessed sport in the world; everything is counted, put into averages, investigated under all contingencies (sure, Mahela Jayawardene averages 59.72 at home, but shouldn’t we be concerned his average is a full ...

Ahhh, it’s the most magical time of year, with Christmas carols, and presents, and Love, Actually and It’s a Wonderful Life! That’s right, Christmas! Well, it is in CGD Europe, where our pandemic- delayed Christmas party has been reorganised for today, and frankly, the ambience is much, much more my...

The best thing I read this week was Michael Nielsen’s long, thoughtful, erudite criticism of Effective Altruism, the moral philosophy that argues for us to adopt an approach to life that relies on evidence and logic to establish how to achieve the most good for others over time, and to apply that un...

At a time when governments seem able to agree on very little, the consensus around the Bank’s need to scale up its engagement on climate and other global public goods is striking. But “scaling up ambition” is vague, and there remains a great deal of work to do to pin down what it means in practice f...

In the international development community, “country ownership” is considered a good thing, while criticisims of foreign aid are based on the idea that this is the problem. But only about a third of assistance is actually managed by those it is intended to help.