Economy

If parsimony and sophistication come at the cost of ‘completeness’ in capturing the world around the reader, the advantages they offer to economics as a scientific discipline are more than worth it. Europeans have cheaper broadband access, better healthcare, stronger protection of data privacy and more efficient banks than Americans do. Ahmed’s most striking argument is arguably about remittances. By establishing how foreign remittances strengthen autocratic governments, he challenges the deeply held conventional wisdom that remittances are the lifeblood of democratising development. The problem is that the causal arrow could go both ways, and lower government spending on welfare could raise the need for remittances rather than the other way around. To borrow from the brilliant work of Jonathon Moses, migrants travel to the Gulf states when oil prices rise, leaving their children behind with their grandparents.