I had the honor (and I use the word advisedly) of moderating a talk given by Dr. Vijayendra Rao at the Pune Public Policy Festival, held at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics. While there was much more going on in his presentation, it was based in part on a paper called “Can Economics Become More Reflexive?”, available here.
What is reflexivity, and what is reflexivity in the context of economics? This is a rare instance where Wikipedia isn’t useful, because its answer to the first question isn’t very useful. Worse, its answer to the second question is very far from what Dr. Vijayendra Rao had in mind!
What Dr. Rao means when he speaks about reflexivity in economics is a “method that necessitates an intimate relationship with the field”. It is, as he puts it, an attempt to minimize the distance between the researcher and the subjects of their research. Even better is Mario Small’s explanation of a related concept, cognitive empathy: “the ability to understand a person’s predicament as they understand it”.
But what does this mean in practice – the ability to understand a person’s predicament as they understand it? Here’s a question for you: if I described the lives of a small family in Dhaka who stayed in a slum, and who had migrated to the city in search of employment, and further told you that they earn less than a dollar a day, what would you say was their biggest economic problem?
Your answer would likely have been the same as mine: poverty. Humor me, and answer this question as well: why are they poor? You might be a little puzzled, but I’m guessing you will say it is because of a lack of income.
That, at any rate, is what I would have said before I read a book called Portfolios of the Poor. But the introductory chapter of the book makes clear the fact that while lack of income is obviously a problem, so is the fact that the income is also irregular. And it gets worse – incomes are not just low and irregular, but they are also unpredictable.
Imagine, for example, that your annual income is halved from here on in. That’s a problem, right? But now also imagine that you will get your annual income only three times this year. Not monthly payouts, you see, but lumpsum payments three times in 2024. And not once every four months – these payments will be made at random times through the year. Maybe all three in January 2024 and none for the rest of the year. Or maybe one now, and two in December with nothing in between. How do you plan your expenses? How do you plan your savings? What instruments do you use for both of these problems?
Once you begin to think about these questions, let alone try to figure out how to frame them and answer them, you begin to understand the meaning of the phrase “the ability to understand a person’s predicament as they understand it”.
That’s reflexivity.
Another way to understand reflexivity is to think about process rather than outcomes. An economist who runs a model on data collected by somebody else has the outcome (collected data), but often has very little idea about the process that generated this data. And missing out on the process that generated the data means you risk losing out on a rich tapestry of detail and nuance that would make your analysis so much better.
A wonderful example of this is MR Sharan’s work:
Younger economists are increasingly spending time in the field to collect data and test interventions, and some display a great deal of cognitive empathy in how they approach their work. MR Sharan (2021) has written a marvelous account of ten years of travel in rural areas of the Indian state of Bihar, interacting closely with local activists and trying to understand the inner workings of village government. The book, which is meant for a general audience, is less an ethnography than a memoir but it brings into sharp focus
https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/485771643376160320/pdf/Can-Economics-Become-More-Reflexive-Exploring-the-Potential-of-Mixed-Methods.pdf
the challenges faced by citizens, particularly those from disadvantaged groups in accessing government programs. This embedded, empathetic approach is apparent, albeit implicitly, in Sharan’s research (Sharan and Kumar, 2021) where he and his co-author Chinmay Kumar analyze data from 100,000
village-level politicians in Bihar to examine the provision of public goods to lower castes. They find that leaders matter – when a lower-level lower caste representative reports to a high-caste representative, lower castes receive poorer access to public goods. However, a grievance redressal system instituted by the government is accessed more by lower-caste representatives to counter this discriminatory provision.
We’ve covered MR Sharan’s wonderful book here, but the point that Dr. Rao is making here isn’t just the fact that the book is wonderful – it is the fact that the notes that eventually led to the book also made his research better. That is to say, “participant observation can be en extremely valuable tool for economists and can result in quantitative findings that are cognitively empathetic”.
My alma mater, the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, was at one point of time second to none when it came to note-taking during fieldwork. Sadly, the art seems to have withered away over time, both within the Gokhale Institute but also more broadly. The fact that I was able to talk about reflexivity and the need for it in both economics and economics research, and that I got to do so at the Gokhale Institute was two treats in one, for which I am grateful. Getting around to read this paper, and being able to talk about it with Dr. Vijayendra Rao made it an even more remarkable experience.
Please do read the paper, and please do think about the need for reflexivity in your research – it is currently an underrated idea, and let’s try and change the status quo!
EconForEverybody 
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