Archive for the NYU Wagner Category
It’s hard to believe that 7 weeks have already passed since the semester began. It’s been quite busy as evidenced by my lack of writing. What has taken up most of my time?
I’ve got the work of about 5 classes right now, although two will be done as of tomorrow night. I have a paper for my fundraising class and a paper for my team building class. I also have a problem set due Wednesday, which I’ve mostly written, but also needs polish.
So far, courses are all pretty good. I’m a little disappointed with fundraising, but the book is excellent and I have enjoyed the assignments. I do with Hands On Gulf Coast had gotten back to me so I could have done some analysis on them, but ah well.
My favorite course to date is the International Economic Development course taught by Jonathan Morduch. He’s an engaging lecturer and the material, focusing mostly on microfinance, is very interesting. Contrasting with the laser focus of microfinance is Paul Smoke’s and Leonardo Romeo’s Decentralized Development Planning course. I enjoy it because we talk about high level planning systems and processes in developing countries. Currently, the focus is just on learning about those systems, but we will eventually get into case studies to transform the abstract into something concrete. I’m looking forward to that.
Outside of class, I work 20 hours a week building a budget spreadsheet. I’m in the Finance and HR department of the school, so I’m working on a school-wide tool to track expenses and build budgets. It’s kinda cool and I’m learning a ton about pivot tables. Who knew they were so powerful? Just about every developer and spreadsheet junkie out there making a living playing with Excel. I’m slowly joining the ranks.
Anyway, I’ll write a more detailed post when I’m not about ready to pass out.
I posted this originally on my Afghanistan Project Team’s site (igid.deveer.org), but have put it here, too. The background for the post is that my team and I wrote a paper that recommended increasing funding to USAID’s Alternative Development Program and Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Program initiative. The goal is to give a majority of the Afghani population viable economic alternatives to the illicit opium industry and, over the long-term, decrease corruption. Now read the rest of the post:
Despite having written our paper, a recent USAID report states that the Afghan government is still corrupt, despite years of effort in fighting corruption. Laura Freschi wrote in an Aid Watch blog post that asks some interesting questions about the USAID recommendations:
“Could USAID explain how concerted efforts are failing to defeat corruption as a whole when each individual project is successfully meeting its targets?”
“One of the six recommendations for future action in the report is to provide more resources and support for the High Office of Oversight (HOO), the anti-corruption agency which has until now has shown an “apparent unwillingness” to go after high-level corruption. The report notes that “often the officials and agencies that are supposed to be part of the solution to corruption are instead a critical part of the corruption syndrome.” How is the solution to aid money being stolen to give additional aid money to those who are stealing it?” [bold, my emphasis]
With respect to our project, both USAID and our team recommend: the coordination of donors and focusing anti-corruption efforts on issues Afghan citizens care about. We depart from the USAID report’s focus on governance issues and instead recommend increased funding for livelihood programs that reduce Afghan citizen’s dependence on the illicit opium economy. Freschi’s (bold) question still applies to our recommendation, how do we minimize the stealing from our program as we increase funding for it?
I would be interested to see discussion of corruption in the programs we recommend increasing funding for – Community Development Council program in the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development and the Alternative Development.
Sources:
Well, I finished my exams last week on Thursday. Classes in general are DONE! I turned in my last paper late Monday night. To celebrate on Tuesday, I worked on El Pueblo’s website. Yeah!
Actually, I didn’t turn in the paper. Beth, a group member on the Afghanistan Project, submitted the final document to the Professors. You want to read the paper? Well, it lives on the Afghanistan site I set up for class. You can read the final paper here.
We scrambled to finish and compile the Afghanistan paper over the weekend – it pretty much consumed Friday morning through Monday night – but I’m very happy with the final product. I think we have a well thought out set of ideas based on a broad survey of historical and current readings. Because Afghanistan policy and activity unfolded while we did our research, we were able to capture sources from about a week ago. One article about opium addiction published on May 6, 2009, formed the basis for our concluding thoughts and remarks.
Now, I just wait for the grades to roll in. The Financial Management exam was tough but fair. I know I made careless and not so careless errors, but I was happy my balance sheet, activities statement, and cash flow statement all balanced the way they ought to. Even if the answers were wrong, they were at least consistent!
I thought the microeconomics exam was tougher than previous practice exams and was tougher than I was expecting. I struggled through a couple problems, but I think I arrived a solid solutions and conclusions for each.
All grades will be posted by the 18th. More news on academics then.
Michael Diamond is a political scientist and lawyer who write about the domestic violence clause in the US Constitution. I haven’t read through this website yet, but my professor (Mary McBride) told me about this guy’s thoughts on how to fix the environmental crisis we face today by simply using what’s written in the Constitution.
I’m using this blog post as a place holder for that website and to spur me to read his book that outlines the case.
http://domesticviolenceclause.org/
My Ecoleadership Professor, Mary McBride, told me about this Op Ed in the New York Times by Mark Taylor. Great piece about the flaws of the higher-education system and six recommendations on how to reform it.
A couple of the ones I liked: have students work on theses and projects rather than papers; abolish tenure; abolish permanent departments and have universities focus on problems (like water or energy) because the study of these problems is multi-disciplinary; and stop training our graduate students to be academics because there are few who will be able to get academic jobs.
He also criticizes the university’s business model and says that the only way they can operate is to use cheap graduate labor to do research and teach classes. Very true.
Taylor echoes my own feelings and trepidation about taking on massive NYU debt. Although I have thoroughly enjoyed my semester at NYU (the past 6 weeks aside), I always wonder how practical any of this knowledge is. My first job in the Navy taught me that even government managers who oversee nuclear engineering projects don’t actually need a degree in it, they can learn it on the job just like everyone else. So, if your job teaches you what you need to know, and the university education system fails to give you even the basic work-place skills (like conflict resolution, negotiation, how to run effective meetings), what is the point of the education system?
Although I am not an academic and haven’t fully experienced his critique of the tenure system, my initial reaction to his piece is that he hits the nail on the head. I believe the reason my professor, McBride, liked it is because she advocates a similar, non-tradition classroom experience. My final group project was a skit that spoofed America’s Next Top Model, replacing Model with Cell Phone because we want to educate younger folks (14-21 year olds) that their decisions to buy cell phones has an impact on the world around them.
Taylor ends with this quote:
For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.
So will I. You can read the full article, here.
Last week in my Ecoleadership Class, we talked a bit more about James Speth’s book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World. I had to read this book as part of a group assignment. I presented three of his chapters – Consumerism, the Corporation, and Capitalism. In the corporate chapter, Speth describes the current characteristics of the corporation – separation of owners from managers, limited liability, personhood, etc – and talks about ways the corporation can be reform. Speth asserts that many see corporations as responsible for the environmental degradation we experience. He also notes that many see the biggest impediment to reforming corporations, voluntarily, is the primacy of the shareholders. Managers of the corporations must act in a way to increase value to shareholders.
Speth talks about ways to reform the corporations to diminish their influence in politics and to hold them accountable for environmentally damaging practices. His thoughts include: revoking corporate charters, eliminating corporate personhood, as well as reforming corporate lobbying rules.
Why am I writing about this? In my cynical world, where Congress in completely enthralled by the money the corporations offer for their reelection campaigns and their post-personal-aggrandizement-at-tax-payer-expense (I mean public service) careers, there is no political will to decrease the corporations power.
Just yesterday morning (Tuesday, 21 April 09), Democracy Now! interviewed Thomas Linzey, an attorney advising Envision Spokane, to discuss his groups’ efforts to get a community bill of rights included in Spokane’s city home rule charter. Linzey describes the home rule charter as a city’s mini constitution.
The relevance of this discussion is … the following exchange:
AMY GOODMAN: You’re a part of this whole corporate charter movement. Explain what that is.
THOMAS LINZEY: It’s an understanding that our activism is limited in the United States. We’re, in essence, placed into a box, which is limited by something called corporate rights. Corporations today have the same constitutional rights as you or I, but because of their wealth, of course, they can exercise those rights to a greater extent. So, even though you and I have First Amendment rights and Fourth Amendment rights and Bill of Rights protections under the US system of law, corporations have those rights too. So, Wal-Mart Corporation, for example, has First Amendment rights and Fourth Amendment rights under the law.
And what the folks in Spokane have started to say is, well, as a hundred-some communities on East Coast which have begun passing these ordinances and laws as well, is that to say to themselves, “We can’t build a sustainable, environmentally, economically sustainable system, if our activism is defined for us within that box. And so, we need to break out of that box somehow.” And one of the most amazing things about this—these particular Community Bill of Rights, which are being amended into the Spokane city home rule charter, is that it actually deals with that, declaring in that bill of rights that corporations don’t have rights that can actually exceed those rights of people within the city of Spokane. And so, it’s pretty groundbreaking stuff, in addition.
It’s pretty cool to learn about something in a book and hear that someone is actually working on making it happen. It gives me hope that despite the failure of Washington politicians, people in this country can still make a change to take control of their environment, literally and metaphorically.
I highly recommend listening to what the folks in Spokane are doing,Here’s the link to the interview.
If you want to look at my group’s notes on Speth’s book, you can get them here.
I’m reading an article by Edward Anderson and Hugh Waddington entitled “Aid and the Millennium Development Goal Poverty Target” published in the Oxford Development Studies, Vol 35, Number 1, March 2007 [or go to the online version and pay $30 to read the article ...].
Needless to say, it’s been a long while since I did the sort of math that requires derivatives, solving for curve maxima, and looking at statistical analysis to determine coefficients. That’s what this article is about, though. At this point, you’re probably reconsidering the $30 investment. The authors go through a pretty rigorous development of an estimated amount of foreign aid required to meet the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the level of poverty in 1990 by 2015. The poverty level is defined as the number of people living on an average $1/day.
Anderson and Waddington develop the assumptions and solutions, with all the caveats that come with using any data collected and published any where in the foreign aid world, to arrive at a number of about US$50 billion per year, or double the current amount.
Implicit in the calculations are that a country’s growth as measured by the gross domestic product (GDP) is the best way to measure the reduction in poverty. What about alternative growth indicators that include other factors such as health, environmental degradation, and overall well-being? We know that our current form of capitalism, with emphasis on not-so-free markets, is incapable of pushing us to environmentally sound, sustainable growth. And what do we really mean by growth?
So my question is: What does this analysis look like if we use the more holistic determinants of prosperity and well-being? How much aid do we need to provide? Does everyone need to earn $38,611 per capita (2007 US figure from UNM, also here at BEA) income to feel unfulfilled, while at the same time depleting the earth of all its resources?
I think the answer is no, but coming to that conclusion needs some mathematical gymnastics and some rethinking about what sort of growth is important to us, to our offspring, and to our planet’s ability to sustain our definition of growth. Sounds like a dissertation, if someone hasn’t already written it.
This was the catchy title for the conference I attended this past Friday at NYU. Some of the big names in international development, who happen to work at NYU, were there. Actually, they put the conference together. The Conference was put together by the Development Research Institute, co-directed by Bill Easterly and Yaw Nyarko. Although the conference is entitled, What Would the Poor Think, the real topic was “Debates in Aid Evaluation”.
I wouldn’t call them debates, really, rather presentations of a range of opinions. You can see the official conference summary on the Aid Watch Blog. Rather than recap a blow by blow of who said what, I’ll just say that the conference gave me quite a bit of food for thought.
Easterly called for more transparency and accountability for donor agencies. Having come from a small nonprofit, when I hear donor, I think of a small foundation giving a few thousand, maybe even tens of thousands. In the aid world, we talk about the likes of the World Bank, United Nations Development Program, and other agencies like the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The money they have is big – Billions, but usually doled out in millions to hundreds of millions or so. Naturally, you would want some accountability on hundreds of millions of US dollars going to countries around the world.
Esther Duflo, from MIT, discussed randomized evaluations of programs to determine how they work. Landt Pritchett, of Harvard, said that you need to have evaluations that occur on a shorter time scale than the end of the project so that lessons learn can be incorporated into the project and it can improve.
There were others, but it was a quote that Pritchett had in his slides. While in Sudan doing research, he talked to a group of people, a woman asked him “Is this information you are gathering from us just to help you write your report or can you really be helpful to us?”
For me, this is the one hundred million dollar question. What can the research, the reports, the evaluations, the aid transparency, or the good governance do to help a single person in Darfur right now? I wonder about this question because I want my work to have some relevance to the people. I want the work to directly improve the lives of others. I enjoy this school thing and could probably enjoy being a professor – molding the minds of our youth – but would I find the work fulfilling enough? Would writing papers that go into journals satisfy my need to be in the field or close to it?
Maybe there’s another way to do the work, or simply that work – writing research papers – comes at a later stage in my life. For now, I need to slog through classes. I spoke with my professor for international development – John Gershman. We discussed career opportunities for PhDs, for professors, and some areas of work that will be up and coming in the field. It all sounds great – who wouldn’t want to run around and do weapons nonproliferation work? But this question still remains, “can you be helpful to us?” I want to be able to answer, “Yes.” Always.
February 10th, 2009 in
NYU Wagner |
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On Friday, I attended the New Student Retreat at Wagner. Although I enjoyed the day, I think orientation more appropriately describes the activities. We spent time hearing how important the academic code is, we performed a group building exercise, heard Irshad Manji give us an inspirational speech, performed a mini-case study, and met some staff, faculty, and fellow students.
The time I spent on Friday going through the orientation simply reinforced the correctness of my decision to attend Wagner. I left feeling more excited about the opportunities that await me here at Wagner. Many of the other students are younger than I am, but there is a level of enthusiasm and dedication to public service that refreshes, renews, and invigorates.
What can I say that is concrete? There are professors and students interested in all aspects of public service and international development. Each time I’m asked what I’m interested in, I feel like I answered something different. Sometimes it was overall resource management – like, where do we get some of the tantalum we use in cell phones and how do we not let it fuel war? Another time, I said I want to work on post-conflict development. Although I might not have been able to articulate it on the spot, upon reflection, I don’t think these are mutually exclusive aspects of international development. The improvement of an economy depends on supplying raw materials, services, or manufactured goods needed by others around the world. Supplies of raw materials are limited and their extraction from the earth needs to be managed to ensure that by-products of the extraction or processing don’t cause further problems that could impede a country’s population in rising from poverty. Conflicts disrupt the flow of materials by breaking supply lines, scaring off workers, or conscripting them to fight.
How do you balance the competing political reasons that cause people to fight with the equitable distribution of a country’s wealth amongst its people? I don’t know that a few classes at NYU will enable me to answer this question – great minds have worked on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without resolution – but it will provide me some frameworks for thinking about how to create solutions.
Where does this interest in post-conflict development come from? Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve killed too many innocent people in both countries to not take responsibility for rebuilding what we destroyed. I’d like to be part of that solution. More broadly, I’d like to be part of Obama’s pledge to rebuild our standing around the world. Participating in diplomacy and building prosperity are the keys to improving our standing. We’ve flexed the military muscle. Now it’s time to show that we’ve got brains to flex, too.
Still, I’m open to where my academic wanderings might take me during my time at Wagner. I still enjoy writing and I do enjoy number crunching. Let me refine that – I enjoy doing something with the numbers I’ve crunched. Having information is great, but I’d rather use it to make better-informed decisions. What would work like that look like? I don’t actually know, but that’s what I’m open to. I think, though, that my openness will still revolve working on improving the god-forsaken places where war and conflict have destroyed hope.
In Mississippi, my presence as a volunteer brought hope to the survivors of Katrina. I hope to do the same in other places around the world, while also offering something concrete as a result of my presence. I look forward to exploring how I can do that.
Given that the events and talks on Friday stimulated the thoughts that percolated over the weekend, I guess it really was a New Student Retreat.
January 18th, 2009 in
NYU Wagner | tags:
reflection |
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Already I’ve run into a bit of a problem with earning my degree in one year. Apparently, if you start in the Spring of 2009 and you want to focus on international development, there is no way to complete your one year masters degree in one year. Why? Because two required classes – one required for the degree and one required as a prerequisite for higher-level development courses – are offered at the same time on Monday. Ugh.
That’s fine. It costs a little more money, but perhaps it’s not so bad to have a little more time to learn something about the field. The other unfortunate situation I’ve run into is finding the courses I want to take already full. This happened with two courses, so one more year might give me the opportunity to take it again.
So far, I’ve registered for the following:
The Ecoleadership course’s syllabus looks absolutely fascinating and everything I want to study. Ah well, perhaps the five people ahead of me on the waitlist will drop or, or some other five people signed up to take the class. We’ll see.
The alternative – Organizational & Managerial Development – does also interest me. This course – taught by the same instructor as Ecoleadership – will look at organizational development theory and require us, the students, to apply the theory to real life situations in building a more efficient organization. This process always fascinates me – the mechanics behind making an organization tick – and it’s something I had to spend a lot of time doing with Hands On Gulf Coast. It would be interesting to learn what the ‘pros’ see and how they might navigate tricky waters.
All in all, I am excited about my course load for next semester and being in school. Next step – financing the investment in higher learning.
