Published in Christianity Today, March 3, 2026 What is God’s heart? What does he value? What relative importance does he place on the different facets of our flourishing? He certainly…
Read more
A year ago this week on election day, Christianity Today ran the following article that my British political scientist friend and colleague Matt Beech and I wrote on trying to…
Read more
Bruce Wydick and Nolan Sherwood, University of San Francisco An online tour of prominent impact investing firms reveals some truly spectacular websites with truly spectacular claims. Beautiful infographics herald transformative…
Read more
by Bruce Wydick and Jeff Bloem We’re approaching an exciting new era in the relationship between development practitioners and development researchers. After decades of academic paternalism, market fundamentalism, and the…
Read more
Why should a development NGO invest in the modern tools of impact evaluation? I’ve met with many Christian development NGOs who are eager to understand the real effects of their…
Read more
A number of years ago on a flight from SFO to the East Coast I was seated next to a guy who told me he was returning home after doing…
Read more
David Levine and Bruce Wydick Americans—and the world—should cheer the government’s news Friday to lift the pause on the distribution of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. The decision will…
Read more
(Written for Christianity Today’s Better Samaritan Blog 1/15/21, click here for link to CT’s online post.) What is the role of hope in escaping poverty? A quick glance at the…
Read more
This blog appeared as a guest post earlier this month for reopeningthechurch.com, sponsored by the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College and National Association of Evangelicals. Like many churches, the…
Read more
Development practitioners and development economists have an interesting relationship. We talk about the same things, have many of the same interests, but don’t understand each other well. Practitioners sometimes see…
Read more
Microcredit has arguably been through more ups and downs than virtually any modern poverty intervention. For decades up through the 1980s, the thought was that the poor would never repay…
Read more
That Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer would eventually win the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences has never been the subject of much debate in the development…
Read more
Part of growing in our engagement with the global and domestic poor is understanding the stage where we are currently along this road, and what our possible roles can be…
Read more
This post is taken from a blog post for the Center for Effective Philanthropy and contains excerpts from my new book Shrewd Samaritan: Faith, Economics, and the Road to Loving our…
Read more
I returned from Guatemala on this week, helping lead a group of 25 people on a visit to the village where our non-profit organization Mayan Partners works in the western…
Read more
In the next weeks and months, the United States and China will enter into a serious dialogue on trade. At stake is the Chinese economy, the protection of U.S.…
Read more
#Giving Tuesday has to be one of the coolest “day” ideas in recent memory, but as the day ticks away, the question remains where to give? Because there are only…
Read more
(Originally appearing in the Huffington Post 7/19/2016) In front of the glowing new offices of Twitter on the edge of the Tenderloin, I watch the programmer step over the soiled,…
Read more
Those of you who knew my father well know that he was in many ways a great man, and more importantly, a very good man. He was also an excellent…
Read more
Some undergraduate students from Harvard asked me to write an article for a symposium on behavioral economics they were publishing in their undergraduate economics journal, the Harvard Economics Review. I…
Read more
Reflections on Hope and Oaxaca (Extended version of piece appearing in Christianity Today, December 2015 print issue) This year we moved to a small village in Oaxaca for six months to…
Read more
What is a Christian Development Economist Good For? Transcript of Keynote Talk Given at the Association of Christian Economists (ACE) Meeting, January 2015 Thank you for allowing me to speak…
Read more
The more I am involved in practitioner and academic development work, the more I have become aware of a great divide separating the secular and faith-based international development communities. In not…
Read more
Last Thursday, Vox ran a story highlighting our randomized trial with TOMS Shoes subtly titled “Buying TOMS Shoes is a Terrible Way to Help People.” In the piece the author,…
Read more
Reflections on a Self-Experiment: 24 Hours of Homelessness in San Francisco
We as development economists are poverty “experts” in many respects. We are experts at talking and writing about poverty. We are experts at developing mathematical models that explain poverty. And…
Read more