But it is perhaps for the best that Moyo did not write on these issues, because she knows little about them. Referring to America's AIDS program, she states: "In 2005, the United States pledged US $15 billion over five years to fight AIDS (mainly through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). ... But this had strings attached. Two-thirds of the money had to go to pro-abstinence programmes. ... " The year of the pledge was 2003. And last year about one-thirteenth of the program was dedicated to both abstinence and marital faithfulness programs. It is not a small thing for an economist to be off by a factor of nine. And it is not a minor thing for Moyo to dismiss and distort the achievements of a foreign aid program that helped save her homeland of Zambia from social and economic ruin. In 2004, 7 percent of Zambians who needed AIDS drugs were receiving them. By September 2009, that figure should exceed 66 percent. AIDS drugs, admittedly, do not guarantee economic growth. But I suspect that a generation of hopeless mass death would have undermined Zambia's economic prospects.

There are other limitations to "Dead Aid" -- its assertion that decimated global capital markets are a ready alternative to aid for African nations; its naive attitude toward Chinese engagement in Africa; its strange contention that African nations might be best served by "a decisive, benevolent dictator."

But Moyo's largest error is an overbroad condemnation of aid itself. "Aid fosters a military culture." "Aid engenders laziness on the part of the African policymakers." Surely there is a difference between aid provided to oppressive kleptocrats and aid given to faith-based organizations distributing AIDS drugs.

If Moyo's point is that some aid can be bad, then it is noncontroversial. If her point is that all aid is bad, then it is absurd. The productive political agenda is to increase the good while decreasing the bad. The productive academic debate is distinguishing between them.

Instead, "Dead Aid" chooses to push the envelope of absurdity, proposing a "world without aid" on a five-year timetable. Moyo does not detail the possible outcomes. But we can reliably predict one of them. Many now alive would be dead.