It isn’t every day you hear the suggestion that British imperialism has ‘done more to alleviate poverty than all the world’s aid programmes in the last century’, and to hear such praise from the lips of an American is rarer still. All the more so when the American in question is an eminent economist called Paul Romer and is speaking at the TED Global event in Oxford (see www.TED.com), where earlier in the week Gordon Brown had received a standing ovation.
Yet I am immensely proud to say I was there in person to witness Romer’s speech — in fact I even tracked him down the following day to say how compelling I had found his argument (though, at an event attended by Cameron Diaz and Meg Ryan, the fact that I spent my coffee break stalking a Stanford University economist suggests my Asperger’s has got out of check again).
The good professor wasn’t there simply to praise British imperialism, I should add, and his kind words for our efforts mostly extended to Hong Kong and Singapore, in particular the former’s beneficial effect on China.
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