Linking aid to military intervention

William Easterly, a professor at New York University and one of the world’s leading conservative development economists, has done a belated review (PDF) of Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion ( “Foreign aid goes military”, New York Review of Books 55(19), 4 December 2008). Easterly looks at the increasing trend to link development to calls for Western military intervention. He also argues Collier is guilty of statistical fallacies such as confusing correlation with causation.