I hope that William Easterly and Laura Freschi of Aid Watch will reconsider resuming blogging in the near future. Their insights on development matters have been most valuable. I remember, as a college student in wintry New Haven, experiencing a change in my approach to development issues after reading The White Man’s Burden. I read it a few months after reading The End of Poverty while volunteering in the summer at a hospital in eastern Ghana.

I wonder how things would have turned out – as far as my opinion goes in the Easterly-Sachs debate – if I had read the two books in reverse.

Although the blog’s skepticism over interventionist prescriptions oftentimes left me jaded about the prospect of ending poverty in our time, I liked the diversity of the subject coverage and the authors’ dogged commitment to holding aid do-gooders’ feet to the fire.

Finding a substitute for Aid Watch will be hard.