A Movable Feast

The newest edition of World magazine is a feast of information and ideas for Doug and me for this blog: profiles of effective non-government anti-poverty programs; an interview with Paul Collier, author of the book The Bottom Billion; a profile of Andrew Carnegie's distribution of his massive wealth; and a final essay matching up new books about Christian hospitality and giving with the ideas of popular economists. You can expect to read a lot about these topics in future posts.

What I want to mention here was the first line of Marvin Olasky's interview with Collier. His opening sentence is "A university course on helping the poorest of the poor abroad could now have a book reading list much more interesting than was possible five years ago." I thought I'd just take a little space to advertise that such a course is not just a hypothetical concept. For those of you in the Florida State University community, next (i.e. Spring) semester Doug and I are going to be presenting, for the first time, a course on the Economics of Compassion. The economics of Jeffrey Sachs, William Easterly, and Paul Collier are definitely going to be part of the conversation. If you are interested in how to be effective in making the world a better place, I hope you will check us out.