Last Thursday I was invited by UW’s Economics Undergraduate Board to give this quarter’s Paul Heyne Seminar—a public lecture about economics aimed at a general audience. My talk was about why USAID is great for America and also the world, why we should keep it, and how to make it work even better:
The slides are here; please check them out! But I want to emphasize one point in particular: USAID is really great brand. Every sack of grain we hand out, every clinic we fund, every school we help build has this logo on it:
It explicitly tells recipients of foreign aid who donated the money (the American people) and has our country’s name (the USA) built right into the logo. The logos/names of countries’ aid agencies are pretty terrible:
China’s is okay; at least it has the name of the country written out in English. The UK’s doesn’t have their country’s name at all! It’s only identifiable if you recognize their seal. Back before they changed DfID to FCDO, the UK briefly rebranded their aid money to “UKAID”, with the subheading “from the British people”, in a direct imitation of our awesome logo.
The US should absolutely continue giving foreign aid to the developing world, and we will certainly do so in some form—everyone agrees that PEPFAR should continue, for example. Since we are going to still be in the business of providing foreign aid, we should not abandon the best brand in the industry.
A fun side note: the seminar is named in honor of the late Paul Theodore Heyne, who was a long-time lecturer at UW. He was one of the undergraduate advisors for Jeff Smith, who was one of my own Ph.D. advisors. Jeff now holds the Paul T. Heyne Distinguished Chair in Economics at the other UW.
Comments and suggestions on my slides are more than welcome!