Tag: chris blattman

Chris Blattman on Stephan Decron’s New Book, Gambling on Development

Brad DeLong’s Learnings from the Pandemic Years

Office hours on Zoom, for one, which strikes me as a pretty good idea too.

I think I’m going to keep my office hours remote and on zoom—make them mandatory for students I think I need to see. Calling people into the office if they aren’t showing up for office hours—that seems a little heavy-handed to me. Phone calls with people you do not already know—that is not terribly effective. But zoom! It is much better than a phone call, and does not (or does not any longer) seem too heavy-handed.

https://braddelong.substack.com/p/a-monologue-what-i-have-learned-about?s=r

But his other idea is something I would love to do, but have always failed at:

The other innovation I want to adopt is for courses in which each week is a book. Having the group “discuss” the book for an hour, and then call up the author on zoom—that seems to me to be a very good innovation. It is Barry Eichengreen’s. It is a wonderful thing. It should become the rule rather than the exception in the future.

https://braddelong.substack.com/p/a-monologue-what-i-have-learned-about?s=r

I have tried this in multiple ways over the years in my classes, but nothing has really worked. My utopian classroom would be one in which every single student walks in having read the prescribed book, and we run out of time while discussing different aspects of the book.

What usually ends up happening is an involved discussion with the three students or so who have read the book, while the rest of the class listens in politely for as long as they can bear to. I should be clear – I do not mandate attendance in my classes, and I don’t blame the students for not having read the book – but I sure wish they had!

From the Sokratic point of view, the purpose of the entire educational establishment can only be to create opportunities for the Dialectic to manifest itself—and question and answered dialogue between teacher and student, between student and student, and between student and figment of the student’s imagination. Good educational systems maximize those opportunities. Bad educational systems do not.

https://braddelong.substack.com/p/a-monologue-what-i-have-learned-about?s=r

Education is about conversations, and conversations cannot happen at scale. My best learnings have happened over relaxed conversations with professors in their offices, over cups of coffee, and on some especially delightful occasions, over mugs of beer – but not in a classroom.

But how to have those in-depth conversations with as many students as possible, as often as possible, without making the experience too expensive for all concerned is the trillion dollar question in higher education, and I don’t think we’re anywhere close to solving it.

But to circle back to the original excerpt, office hours on Zoom might be a good place to start.

Also, if you teach economics, and are looking for a wonderful syllabi to discuss in depth with your students, you couldn’t do much better than How to Change the World, taught by Chris Blattman.

The Most Important *Economic* Event of the 20th Century

Before you read any further, I have a question for you: what, according to you, would be the most important economic event of the 20th century?

There is no right or wrong answer, of course. This exercise is, by definition, subjective in nature, and I’m hoping that there will be many different responses.

Here’s how I would set up my framework to answer this question:

  • The event should have affected a significant number of people
  • That effect should persist and preferably spread (positively) over time.
  • The opportunity cost of that event shouldn’t be too high
  • It would be great if positive spillovers from that event could be plausibly identified

Consider, for example, the end of the Cold War. In my view, it ticks almost all of the boxes, with the possible exception of the second, and maybe the third. But it would certainly make my shortlist.

Or what about India’s independence? Again, definitely makes the shortlist, although you could argue that the partition was a very, very high cost to pay.

China moving towards a reform based process? India? The next fifteen years after the second world war, and the slow move away from colonialism and imperialism? The defeat of Japan and Germany in the second world war? Keynes’ magnum opus being published in 1936 (or am I just being a wee bit provocative)?

Chris Blattman points us towards his choice:

We estimate the impact of the Green Revolution in the developing world by exploiting exogenous heterogeneity in the timing and extent of the benefits derived from high-yielding crop varieties (HYVs).
HYVs increased yields of food crops by 44 percent between 1965 and 2010. The total effect on yields is even higher because of substitution towards crops for which HYVs were available, and because of reallocation of land and labor.
Beyond agriculture, our baseline estimates show strong, positive, and robust impacts of the Green Revolution on different measures of economic development. Most striking is the impact on GDP per capita. Our estimates imply that delaying the Green Revolution for ten years would have reduced GDP per capita in 2010 by US$1,273 (PPP adjusted), or 17 percent, across our full sample of countries.

https://chrisblattman.com/2022/02/01/the-most-important-economic-event-of-the-past-century/ (Note that the excerpt is from a paper that he has quoted from)

And well, it’s hard to argue against his pick! It gets an endorsement in one of my favorite books of the past decade:

In the 1970s, when I was in high school, about one out of every four people in the world was hungry—“ undernourished,” to use the term preferred by the United Nations. Today, the U.N. says, the figure is one out of ten. 1 In those four decades, the global average life span has risen by more than eleven years, with most of the increase occurring in poor places. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia, Latin America, and Africa have lifted themselves from destitution into something like the middle class. In the annals of humankind, nothing like this surge of well-being has occurred before. It is the signal accomplishment of this generation, and its predecessor.

Mann, Charles C.. The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Groundbreaking Scientists and Their Conflicting Visions of the Future of Our Planet (Kindle Locations 63-68). Pan Macmillan. Kindle Edition.

Elsewhere in the book, the author (Charles C. Mann) points us towards a Wall Street Journal editorial that praised Norman Borlaug, the ‘Wizard’ in the book for having saved potentially a billion lives because of the Green Revolution.

But that book also contains a warning about the opportunity costs of this signal achievement:

Vogt, born in 1902, laid out the basic ideas for the modern environmental movement. In particular, he founded what the Hampshire College demographer Betsy Hartmann has called “apocalyptic environmentalism”— the belief that unless humankind drastically reduces consumption its growing numbers and appetite will overwhelm the planet’s ecosystems. In best-selling books and powerful speeches, Vogt argued that affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem. Our prosperity is temporary, he said, because it is based on taking more from Earth than it can give. If we continue, the unavoidable result will be devastation on a global scale, perhaps including our extinction. Cut back! Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose!

Mann, Charles C.. The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Groundbreaking Scientists and Their Conflicting Visions of the Future of Our Planet (Kindle Locations 89-94). Pan Macmillan. Kindle Edition.

Please do read the book, I cannot recommend it highly enough. One reason I enjoy ed the book as much I did is because it doesn’t take sides, but shows both the pluses and the minuses of the Green Revolution, and that as thoroughly as possible.

But while Mann doesn’t take sides, I do. On balance, it is hard to argue against the Green Revolution having been the most significant economic event of the twentieth century.

What is development economics?

That was a question sent in by a student recently, and today’s essay is an attempt to answer the question.

Have you heard of the tsetse fly? Unless you are a student of biology, or from Africa, it is unlikely that you have. And there’s no reason for you to have heard of it, of course. On the other hand, if you were to be from Africa, and from a long time ago, you likely would not only have heard of the tsetse fly, but you would have dreaded it.

Why would you have dreaded it? Because the tsetse fly feeds on the blood of vertebrate animals, and in doing so, also manages to transmit diseases between species. And this fly was so very efficient at transmitting diseases that it actually prevented the emergence of animal husbandry in those parts of Africa where it was both present and dominant.

Worse: research has established that the existence of the tsetse fly in certain parts of Africa has at least partially contributed to those parts of Africa remaining relatively underdeveloped today.

Ethnic groups inhabiting TseTse-suitable areas were less likely to use domesticated animals and the plow, less likely to be politically centralized, and had a lower population density. These correlations are not found in the tropics outside of Africa, where the fly does not exist. The evidence suggests current economic performance is affected by the TseTse through the channel of precolonial political centralization.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20130604

That’s what development economists do: they try and figure out which parts of the world are not doing well. Then they try and figure out why (imagine being able to identify a fly as a potential cause of underdevelopment!). And finally, they try to recommend policies that might make the situation better.

Three Big Questions

When I teach courses in development economics, I often introduce the subject by speaking about three “big picture” questions:

  1. What does the world look like?
  2. Why does it look the way it does?
  3. What can we do to make it better?

And honestly, that is really all you need to think about when you want to understand what development economists do. Let’s tackle each of these questions in turn.

What does the world look like?

Good development economists don’t begin with recommendations and policy measures. That’s a long way down the road. They begin by trying to paint for themselves a picture of the world.

My favorite way to paint for myself a picture of the world is by using a freely available online tool called Gapminder.

Click here to open Gapminder in your browser

What are we looking at? Hans Rosling, the Genius (I don’t use the word lightly, and the capitalized G is intentional) who came up with this tool, used to call this chart the “Health and Wealth” chart.

Inflation adjusted, purchasing power parity adjusted per capita income for each country is plotted against the life expectancy for the citizens of that country. The color coding shows you which part of the world that country is from, and the size of the bubble indicates the population in that country.

Well, ok – but what does it tell us?

Well, here’s what it tells me – see if you agree with my understanding. It tells me that the reason economists harp on so about increasing income (GDP) for all nations is not because getting rich is an end in and of itself. It is the means to an end – that end in this case being better health.

Two caveats: higher life expectancy doesn’t necessarily mean better health. But in this case, I think it is an acceptable proxy. Second, correlation is not necessarily causation! Higher wealth may not necessarily be causing better health. Maybe better health is causing higher wealth? Maybe some other variable is causing both of these things? Maybe it is all of these and more?

But all those caveats aside, at first glance, a basic fact emerges:

There is no country that is at the top left of this chart, and there is no country at the bottom right of this chart.

Poor countries tend to not do well in terms of life expectancy, and rich countries tend to do well in terms of life expectancy. If I want the members of my family to live longer, I would want my country to be towards the top right of this chart.

But back to the central question: what does the world look like? This is a generalization, of course, but most of the African nations tend to lie towards the bottom left. Most of the European nations tend to lie towards the top right. And Asian nations (and some South American nations) tend to lie somewhere in the middle.

That’s one answer to the question we were trying to answer in this section: what does the world look like?

But there are other answer possible! Here are just two to get you started:

  1. Read the excellent introductory chapter in Partha Dasgupta’s “A Very Short Introduction to Economics”
  2. Play around with the World Bank Atlas, a most excellent data repository.

Why does the world look the way it does?

The Magic That Happens When You Hit Play in Gapminder

I have been using Gapminder for over 12 years now, but I am yet to get tired of watching that video. In fact, as I often tell my students, you could do a lot worse than spending time with Gapminder open in one tab, and Wikipedia in the other.

(On a tangential note, take a look at what happened to the world between 1918 and 1921. That’s the Spanish flu at work.)

Why did I include this video in this blogpost?

Because it helps us begin to think about the answer to the second question: why does the world look the way it does?

The world looks the way it does today because some countries were able to steal a march on others about two hundred years ago. The United Kingdom, the United States of America, Japan, Germany and some other nations started moving towards the right top of the chart before other countries could. You could, in fact, make an argument these countries were able to move to the right top by making sure that the other countries stayed at the bottom left!

And when you make that argument, you begin to try and answer the second question – this argument is the anti-imperialist stance. The Asian and African colonies of the European powers of the 19th century lag behind as much as they do today because they were colonies: that’s one candidate for explaining why the world looks the way it does.

The tse-tse fly (remember?) is another candidate for a more localized answer to the second question. Politics, race, religion, geography, caste, gender, openness to innovation – there are so, so many candidate answers! People can (and do!) spend entire careers making their way through just one of these candidates.

By the way, if you would like to read books about this topic – why does the world look like the way it does – here are two absolute must-reads:

  1. Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond
  2. Why Nations Fail, by Acemoglu and Robinson

What can we do to make it better?

Can chickens cure poverty in Africa?

I’m not joking! That was a genuine proposal, made by this guy who you may have heard of. Started a software firm, dabbled in philanthropy, and is now engaged in trying to literally save the world. Yes: Bill Gates. His master plan to save Africa involved giving everybody a chicken.

Our foundation is betting on chickens. Alongside partners throughout sub-Saharan Africa, we are working to create sustainable market systems for poultry. It’s especially important for these systems to make sure farmers can buy birds that have been properly vaccinated and are well suited to the local growing conditions. Our goal: to eventually help 30 percent of the rural families in sub-Saharan Africa raise improved breeds of vaccinated chickens, up from just 5 percent now.
When I was growing up, chickens weren’t something you studied, they were something you made silly jokes about. It has been eye-opening for me to learn what a difference they can make in the fight against poverty. It sounds funny, but I mean it when I say that I am excited about chickens.

https://www.gatesnotes.com/development/why-i-would-raise-chickens

Well, I exaggerate, of course. Not literally giving everybody in Africa a chicken – but something along those lines.

Development economists were less than impressed:

But first, let’s talk about poultry. I think we can agree that we can only give away so many chickens. You’ve said that a family that receives five hens could eventually earn $1,000 annually, assuming a per-bird price of $5. But would that still be true when a third of your neighbors are in the same business? As supply goes up, I’d expect the price and profits to come down. And moving to an economy in which 30 percent of rural Africans sell chickens is a humongous increase in supply.

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/3/14/14914996/bill-gates-chickens-cash-africa-poor-development

And to make matters worse, other development economists were less than impressed with the development economists who were less than impressed with Bill Gates’ chickens:

I have friends/alumni/colleagues working around the world in many facets of the challenge of development. I have friends working for the Prime Minister of India. I have friends working for the President of Indonesia. I have friends working on the conflict in Yemen. I have friends working as civil society activists in Egypt. I have had policy discussions with policy makers all over the world. I worked for 15 years in the World Bank. I have taught development at Harvard for 15 years. In all of those conversations with friends, colleagues, policy makers, and students all kinds of difficult and pressing development questions have arisen that research could address. Never, ever, ever has “chickens versus cash” arisen as an issue at all, much less as the remotely possible “best investment” in research.

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/getting-kinky-chickens

By the way, that blog post that I quoted above? It has possibly my all time favorite title ever: Getting Kinky with Chickens.

Why am I telling you all this? Because allow me to let you in on a dirty little secret: there is zero consensus on what is the correct answer to the third question.

Well, OK, zero consensus is an exaggeration. But it ain’t a settled issue, no sir.

That is, nobody has come up with a definitive, one-size-fits-all answer to the question, “What can we do to make the world better?”

Let’s parse through the question. That might help us understand why it is such a controversial one.

What can we do to make the world better?

  1. Who, exactly, is “we”? That is, who is in charge of decision making when it comes to making things better? Do democracies work better? Or do autocracies? Or something in between?
    Remember, we are not asking which political system is the best from a moral, or political, perspective. We are asking which system is likely to give us the most rapid growth. Was Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew a true, participatory democracy, or was it a democracy with Asian characteristics? What about South Korea under General Park? And while we’re on the subject, an autocracy is not by itself a guarantee of rapid growth! Pakistan, Cambodia are two examples from our own neighborhood.
    Also remember: just because a system may give us more rapid economic growth doesn’t mean it is the best system to use. China is the obvious country to think about in this regard!
  2. Do we really need to “do” stuff, or is it more about just getting out of the way, and letting the economy work it’s magic?

3. Are we agreed on what “better” means? Lesser pollution comes at the cost of lesser industrialization, for example. Are we so sure that all seven billion of us can identify the exact point on the spectrum that works best? And if not, then we’re back to the first point: who is “we”?

And hey, even if you could imagine a world in which we somehow, magically get everybody to agree on “What can we do to make the world a better place?”, we’d begin a new round of battles, centered around a new question.

“How?” – and on this point, last year’s Nobel Prize winners have won accolades and received brickbats in equal measure.

Still, there is some good news. The unsettled nature of the debate means that this is extremely fertile ground to work upon, and you can count on development economics as a field remaining a fundamentally interesting one to work in for years, if not decades, to come.

And that, my friend(s), is what development economics is all about!

EC101: Links for 5th December, 2019

If you think of one’s opinion about RCT’s as a spectrum, I fall on the “I think it’s not a bad idea at all” part of it. How might I be wrong? Five articles that help me understand this.

  1. “Lately I find myself cringing at the question “what works in development?” I think it’s a mistake to think that way. That is why I now try hard not to talk in terms of “program evaluation”.“Does it work?” is how I approached at least two of the studies. One example: Would a few months of agricultural skills training coax a bunch of ex-combatants out of illegal gold mining, settle them in villages, and make it less likely they join the next mercenary movement that forms?

    But instead of asking, “does the program work?”, I should have asked, “How does the world work?” What we want is a reasonably accurate model of the world: why people or communities or institutions behave the way they do, and how they will respond to an incentive, or a constraint relieved. Randomized trials, designed right, can help move us to better models.”
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    Chris Blattman on the issue. (Note that this was written in 2016)
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  2. “In the early 2000s a group emerged arguing that important improvements to development and hence to human well-being could be achieved through the wide spread use of independent impact evaluations of development programs and projects using randomized control trial methods (RCT) of choosing randomly “treatment” and “control” individuals. I have been arguing, since about that time, that this argument for RCT in IIE gets one small thing right (that it is hard to recover methodologically sound estimates of project/program causal impact with non-experimental methods) but all the big things wrong.”
    ..
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    You can’t write anything about RCT’s without writing about Lant Pritchett’s opinion about them.
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  3. “Like other methods of investigation, they are often useful, and, like other methods, they have dangers and drawbacks. Methodological prejudice can only tie our hands. Context is always important, and we must adapt our methods to the problem at hand. It is not true that an RCT, when feasible, will always do better than an observational study. This should not be controversial, but my reading of the rhetoric in the literature suggests that the following statements might still make some uncomfortable, particularly the second: (a) RCTs are affected by the same problems of inference and estimation that economists have faced using other methods, and (b) no RCT can ever legitimately claim to have established causality.”
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    Angus Deaton weighs in (and if you ask me, this is my favorite out of the five)
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  4. “The economists, like the medical researchers, seem to have lost touch
    with their proper role. They are not ethically assigned to master our lives.
    The mastering assignment is what they assume when they focus on
    “policy,” understood as tricking or bribing or coercing people to do what’s
    best. It sounds fine, until you realize that it is what your mother did to you
    when you were 2 years old, and had properly stopped doing to you by the
    time you were 21. The field experimenters scorn adult liberty. And that is
    the other way many economists have lost touch. As noted by the
    economist William Easterly, another critic of the experimental work, and as
    argued at length by your reporter in numerous books, the real way to solve
    world poverty is liberty. Not dubious, fiddly, bossy little policies handed
    down from the elite. ”
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    Dierdre McCloskey (as usual) doesn’t pull punches.
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  5. A set of links about the topic from Oxfam.

RoW: Links for 14th August, 2019

Five links about gun control from the United States of America:

  1. First, from Chriss Blattman, who knows a thing or two about violence.
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  2. Slatestarcodex, on trying to make sense of the data…
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  3. … and what the comments section from that blog has to say.
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  4. Gun control, the Japanese way.
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  5. To circle back to the beginning, a contemplative article from Vox.