How to Crowd-Fund an Economics Book

Eva Vivalt, an economist, is looking for financial backers to fund her book on Kickstarter. Along with a group of students from Georgetown and GWU, Vivalt is conducting meta-analyses of various aid programs. Here’s her project summary:

Have you ever wondered whether aid programs actually work? Wouldn’t it be useful to know how effective programs are in achieving their objectives (e.g. reducing poverty, improving health, improving education)? This book will review the quantitative evidence on the effectiveness of aid programs in a very thorough and rigorous way, using meta-analysis. After explaining this method and its merits, each of ten chapters will apply it to a different type of aid program. Throughout, the lessons that we can draw from these analyses will be discussed using plain English.

Donors will be able to vote on which interventions they’d like to see addressed in the book.  “[W]e’re organizing this research around a Kickstarter as a way of getting more people involved,” writes Vivalt. “We want to be helpful to the public at large, so one part of our Kickstarter campaign is to ask people: which interventions would you like to see featured?”

(HT: Marginal Revolution)