Jeff Hui

This book is targets people that don't really want to know the details, but only what to do. Because of that, it's explanations are simplistic and addresses more emotional concerns than analytical criticisms.

The fundamental ideas underlying the formula is reasonable: drawing from Benjamin Graham's Value Investing ideas. I don't think it's a matter of will is be profitable in the long run or not, but how much that compares to the market (eg S&P500). He did note how difficult it was to get historical data, and doesn't talk about overfitting or going beyond just back testing performance that he references all the time.

The author dismisses a lot of the criticism of the formula without supporting evidence. Only claiming that - less people will believe it and therefore it will continue to work. Which isn't a compelling argument.

There's a lot of useful value here - even though the writing style and target audience is a bit too narrow:

- has some assumption of a teacher/student context
- assumes a more mathematical context
- generally assumes an academic context is most parts

But it's a good articulation of how to solve problems.

The tactics seem useful, but everything else is either redundant bloating of the book or motivational pep talk. It'd be nice to see some data to support it over a few testimonials.

It definitely can be much shorter without the theoretical storytelling, but there are some core ideas that are good takeaways.

I think the argument he makes applies primarily to African countries. His arguments skew heavily to this demographic which the author then applies to “global” south. His arguments aren't wrong, just his generalizations.

For example, if you had resources to help the poorest people in the world, how would you employ it? Help the very poorest and the expense of other less poor? Help all poor people equally, albeit a little? Or help the most number of people? Many of the programs and efforts have been focused on helping as many people as possible. This means a disproportionate amount of aid will be in countries that have the most density of impoverished people to make that a aid the most impactful. Where are those people? India and China - the countries data which he often discounts and excludes to make his numbers more convincing. But organizations like the gates foundation focus most of their efforts there.

In fact, if you look at the data by country, it's difficult to say any country is getting worse - only that some countries are improving faster than others (eg China having improved dramatically). It might not come off as that in this book, but the authors own recent blog post agrees and poverty rates have been dropping - just not as much as he world like.

In regards to the World Bank's Metric itself, I think there is good reasoning why it could be changed, but it's less useful year to year if you change the metric (the World Bank's adjustment accounts for individual purchasing power, but tries to keep it unchanged). Also the metric improved by 4%/yr and not 2%/yr as described. The world bank also added other benchmarks with higher daily cost of living (the highest being $5/day).

There's one thing that I wonder, Keynesian Economic policies seem to help individual countries. But it doesn't stop foreign tampering. While Western Countries can and should stop this practice, it doesn't stop other countries from doing this (eg China and Russian). Because there are benefits to the country that tampers. The trade policies of the WTO or the World Bank are an attempt to minimize foreign countries from employing military action against smaller nations.

But overall, a good book to make you think.