Chris Blattman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…You wrote some long while ago, maybe it was even 2007, that people who work for development agencies should not expect to fly business class. What’s your current view of that hypothesis? I still live by that hypothesis, and I don’t know if I was at all influential on this. I’d like to think I get 2 percent or 3 percent of the credit, but within a few years, the World Bank did severely limit the amount of business class travel or the conditions in which it’s possible. Given how many of my World Bank friends, previous to and after this, were mad at me is why I’m conceited enough to think I might have had a tiny bit of influence. Mostly, I hope it was just good sense. You think it’s correct to save money? Or to remove the sense of entitlement or some other reason?…

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