 going to assess how well countries are doing in terms of development goals or assessing how well a program is doing in terms of meeting its goals that it set out in advance. And I've been trying to push this idea of looking at effort in addition to looking at outcomes because a big word that was used this morning was change. People are interested in change, seeing change. And of course change for the better is even better, you know, more desirable. But because of a problem of attribution, sometimes governments get credit for things that they didn't do or might have even been hostile to. And I think, you know, people understand that fully that's not new. But in terms of measurements, trying to account for that would be new. And so the method that I showed this morning is something that I've worked with with David Singranelli and also Chad Clay from Siri Human Rights Data Project as well in terms of trying to get this notion of how can we benchmark how much effort a government is putting into meeting economic rights goals given what their ability is, you know, how much wealth they have or whatever, all the other kind of resources. And what else is being brought into the country by third parties because, you know, it's based on this thing that actions are kind of the product of ability and willingness. You know, there's an ability to do something to willingness to do it. And, you know, sometimes things get done for other reasons because there's been some intervention from some third party, right? And governments get credit for that. So we think that if you account for willingness and you account, or if you account for ability and you account for intervention by third parties, what should be left is willingness and that would be effort. And it could be completely wrong, I don't know. But, you know, pushing this thing about not giving credit where credit does not do, I guess it would be the baseline of that. And that would be the thinking conceptually about how to get effort. This technique, we've gotten some good feedback on. Some people don't like the use of residuals from regression analysis. They like to call it error, we like to call it residuals. Economists are much more likely to use them meaningfully than political scientists are. So political scientists, it's a tough sell, but among the development crowd, which in the U.S. is largely an economist, it's an easier sell. But we've gotten pretty good feedback about that in trying to think beyond outcomes. In terms of the actual results that are derived from our study, you know, we have shown that countries get a lower ranking in effort typically than they do in the Human Development Index. And we think that's exactly what we would expect to see. We would expect to see a country that's been buoyed by intervention if there are parties that have higher level of development than actually expenditure of government effort, policy effort on things. So the preliminary results are pretty favorable. The problem is having these outcomes measures that are correlated with WALF, right? You know, and HDI is the poster child, I think, for this. And they make the argument that because they have provided a logged value GDP that this has been taking into account and it somehow makes their measure less dependent upon WALF. But the thing is they have actual WALF and then they have two things that are highly correlated with WALF to start with. So you end up with just a proxy for WALF. And really, I mean, if you're trying to kind of tell a story about something, why go through so much effort to create a measure that tells the same story as something that is a component of that bigger measure? Just, it doesn't seem to make sense. You know, I mean, I like that the Human Development Index pushed development beyond just economic growth, you know. And for that, I think, you know, we're all thankful. But I think that it's a time to look past that in terms of our outcomes measures and in terms of any kind of measure towards, you know, something like effort. And something, you know, I just think it's unfair that WALF is seen as an end in itself in that measure. The PQLI, the Physical Quality of Life Index, doesn't have GDP as a component, but it does have three components that are highly correlated with WALF and it ends up being highly correlated with WALF. In terms of results of our study, as I showed in the slide, we did see that our effort scores are only moderately correlated with WALF, somewhere around .4, which is nothing to ignore, but it's not .9 either. And so, you know, we feel that there's a story that it offers that's different from the WALF-dominated measures and, you know, maybe that's a story that somebody can make use of. What's interesting is anytime you develop a measure of something, people are going to use it for purposes for which it was never intended, which is fine because sometimes people find really great uses that one just never thought of. Other times, it's inappropriately placed. And you hear the criticism about things like, oh, so-and-so used your measure for this, you know, it just really doesn't fit. And a lot of times your responses, you're right, it really doesn't work for that. It was never intended for that. So I think, you know, I was having this conversation with somebody from the Danish agency is that it would be great to have a better dialogue between people whose specialty is conceptualization and operationalization and people whose specialty is funding development work because it would be great for someone to come to us and say, this is what would be helpful. This is what we need. And working with someone with that substantive experience, with our measurement experience, I think it could maybe produce measures that would better fit certain needs. I don't know what they'd be, but it would be nice to kind of have that conversation beforehand. And that's not that we get a lot of criticism, but in terms of wanting, you know, certainly development to work for wanting there to be greater respect for economic rights and moving things ahead, it would be great to have those two kind of sides on the same page and working with one another, not talking after the fact, after each other's last piece of work, you know, just in terms of work process. The other thing I would think is I would still push for, in terms of donor aid, what it goes to is greater statistical gathering infrastructure for developing countries. There have been some positive externalities from the MDGs in terms of certain statistics have had to have been gathered, but the MDGs are obsessed on those indicators only. And if developing countries had their own statistical bureaus, they could gather a lot of other helpful data as well, so just contraceptive prevalence and so forth. And because if you're going to use data to tell any kind of story at all, whether it's country-specific or cross-country comparison, you want them to be as reliable and valid as possible. And developing countries just don't have the resources to build a statistical gathering infrastructure. Even the developed countries are pretty poor on a lot of indicators. So if you're going to use data for evidence-based policymaking and you're going to use evidence-based policymaking to make development assistance, it would seem smart to invest some money in the quality of the data upon which this is all based. And my analogy is that, you know, I know a lot of intergovernmental organizations and so forth use kind of very sophisticated models in terms of determining who's eligible for funding and what the funding level should be. And it's equivalent sometimes to putting bad ingredients in very fancy copper pots. The copper pot is not going to make a bad ingredient taste good. It's just a fancy copper pot. And I think people don't think as much about their data as their conceptual models and their strategies because it's the thing... Most people don't make their own data, so they don't think about it. It's the thing maybe that they feel they have the least control over. So they just choose to use some or not and not develop or think about the long-term picture about how they might invest in more reliable data, which would make their work more valid, I think, and probably make their spending more productive in the future as well. So that's something that I would think would be good. So how can you measure democracy? Can you measure any abstract concept? I have a cartoon on my office store that I've had for years. It's from a cartoon called Dilbert. And it's the boss from Dilbert. He says, everything is measurable if you try hard enough. And, you know, but he doesn't say everything's measurable well if you try hard enough, you know. I think people have to understand that some things lend themselves more easily than others to quantification. And people also need to understand that measures are not necessarily counting because people say, well, how can you count that? Well, many things you don't count. For example, when we measure torture, we don't count torture victims because a lot of them die and the witnesses are dead or scared and the government lies and observers witness. There's a lot of reasons why counts are maybe the last thing you would actually ever want. And there are other ways to get at measuring these things. So, you know, in terms of what is, what is, what is scalable, most things for some purposes, I would think, but, you know, this thing where human rights are divorced from democracy and development. And I had said this in the presentation that the goal is human dignity, right? The goal is to give people a dignified life. Chance to fulfill some sort of purpose or create a life of self-worth and more than their community and so forth. And, you know, from the human rights perspective, development is economic rights, fulfillment largely, social rights fulfillment as well. And I see one big bubble that's got torture and killings and imprisonment and workers' rights and women's empowerment and political participation and free and fair elections and growth and, you know, all these things in the same bubble. And the bubble is dignity and these are all kind of aspects or facets of dignity itself. So I kind of don't find, I guess, a lot of value in divorcing human rights from development because development is, and even if you look at human rights law, I can't think of the development goal that isn't enshrined somewhere in a human rights instrument. Everything we talked about today is in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights or the one on civil and political rights. Some people might say development is different because the Universal Declaration says that people have a right to primary education, not secondary education, not high school education. And I think that's a really tragically textualist reading of that because maybe in 1948 a primary education was where you needed to be, but in the information society in globalized world that we're in today, if you don't have at least a secondary education, there's no way that you're going to attain the other facets of dignity that you need. So you have to have a dynamic view of this. And also I would say that I think the human rights framework is better to push what are commonly thought as development goals because it invokes the notion of entitlement to these things. And the problem is, well, who's the duty bearer of this? And the unfortunate answer is everybody because that's what international development is about in the first place that we all have a goal to help each other achieve some sort of better dignity in our lives. Otherwise we wouldn't have things like CEDA. We would not be sitting here at all.