Dear President Obama,

We would like to congratulate you on your distinguished honor as the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. We respect and admire your efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples around the world, particularly when it comes to your advocacy for achieving change...

But something else is going on here, says Princeton University psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel prize in economics in 2002. "We believe that people with certain characteristics will produce certain consequences," he says. "But we're wrong, because there is way, way more luck involved in determining success...

"[O]ne key to being a better innovator is building a diverse network of contacts. Data says that people who have more varied connections hear more diverse information, and see patterns before other people."

That is from a study on innovation by researchers at Harvard, INSEAD, and Brigham young that is...

"We've already tried something like that and it does not work."

One of the most difficult challenges of innovation is knowing when to discard an idea or...

Recently I blogged about Karen Armstrong's Charter for Compassion, an attempt to rally both the interfaith and secular communities around a unifying concept.  

Today I want to talk about an extraordinary book that...

Science is basically a bunch of little steps. Many little experiments that explore cause-effect space. If you find a new example of cause and effect, the payoff is unpredictably large. Scientists don’t like thinking of themselves as...

In 2007, GlobalGiving put in place what is perhaps the first philanthropic guarantee. If any donor is not satisfied with her donation for any reason,...

After the success of the first Development Marketplace at the World Bank in early 2000, Mari and I began sketching out additional competitions to extend the idea of creating a real marketplace for development.

One concept was to give vouchers to government officials and allow them to "shop" among...

This paper "Beyond Planning: Markets and Networks for Better Aid" by Owen Barder at CGD looks worth reading. Here is the summary:

The political economy of aid agencies is driven by incomplete information and multiple competing objectives and confounded by principal-agent...

"Growth is innovation, and you can't know in advance how to do the innovative thing, or else it wouldn't be an...

Here is a nice article by Dan Woods in Forbes about the popular concept of crowdsourcing.

In some ways he is constructing and attacking a strawman ("crowds create innovation"). But the article does clarify that the real value comes from OpenSourcing -- i.e., allowing pretty much anyone to...

Countries in every region of the world, from the poorest to richest...have all seen improvements in average levels of health and education over the past century.

An initiative called

"I wouldn't call it a competition, I'd call it a collective," Josh Potocki, the chef and owner of 158 Pickett St. Café in South Portland, said of the city's food scene. "We are all trying to raise the level of food in...

Global improvements in quality of life have been fostered by the spread of technology and ideas. Very cheap health technologies that can dramatically reduce mortality have spread rapidly across the world. The proportion of the world's infants vaccinated against diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus -- the DPT shot -- climbed...

Marc Gunther's father died -- this appreciation by Marc is well worth reading.

Excerpt:

"I'm writing about him today because, despite an often-difficult relationship, his experiences inevitably helped shape my thinking on a number of topics relevant to this blog...immigration, globalization and religion, among them...My dad had...