The CSAE Blog

Every week, Ranil Dissanayake updates us on the latest interesting links and other readings he came across. Ranil is a Senior Economist at the UK Department for International Development, but the opinions expressed in his writings are entirely his own and do not represent the views of his employer.

Well, I’m back in London and while it’s not the 30-degrees-and-the-sea-everywhere-you-turn Salone was, there are worse places to be in the spring. Add that to a genuine surfeit of cricket (most of which I was too busy to follow in Freetown), and it’s been a pretty soft landing (well, if you exclude the fact that we conceded 450+ to Bangladesh at home). It’s been a ridiculously busy week between the travel, landing to a firestorm of deadlines and the cricket, but I did manage to read some economics and general marginalia this week – and it was a pretty good crop. Continue reading →

How da bodi?

Apparently, that’s how you greet someone in Krio, the lingua franca of Freetown. Unless, of course, someone is pulling my leg, which is always somewhere between ‘likely’ and ‘certain’. I’ve been here since Sunday and since the boat trip from the airport to town it’s been fascinating. Parts of my trip have brought to mind the line a particularly perceptive colleague used to describe some programmes he’d seen offering direct support to firms: “It’s like releasing tadpoles into a toxic lake”. Still, there’s plenty to be positive about, too and it seems like an amazing place to work. Today’s links are a little threadbare, and you can blame the office here for keeping me so busy with meetings (all productive!). But I’m here till early next week, and I’ve come equipped with bird guide and binoculars and I fully intend to put them to work this weekend.

 1.       It was International Women’s Day this week (indeed it was a national holiday in Sierra Leone) so a few good links about gender to kick off. First, 538 takes stock of progress on the original issues highlighted in the first women’s strike in the US in 1970. I should point out ‘good’ links don’t necessarily mean ‘happy’ ones at this point. Second, Vox looks at the gender wage gap and the relative stagnation of progress in the 21^st Century. I think it understates the challenges of occupational segregation, but hey – how many mainstream media outlets even use the phrase? Lastly, Markus Goldstein (whose Gender Innovation Lab is probably the home of my favourite research into gender and economic development in the world) posts a very nice summary of work by Oriana Bandiera and Greg Fisher (among others) on whether women respond differently to wage incentives than men. Related and brilliant: dialogue in the movies, broken down by the gender of the character.

2.       “I want a Lululemon pair of yoga pants, not the ones from Target.” I was not expecting to read Dietrich Vollrath say this in a blog about the profit share in GDP and its implications for productivity, but he does. And the article is typically excellent, another piece of forensic investigation into the economy undertaken through readily available statistics. It’s a skill too few have.

3.       One of Branko’s more personal blogs, about how he learnt economics and his relationship to Friedman and Samuelson. It’s easy to forget that we all learn in a cultural context which shapes us in many more ways than we may initially realise.

4.       Sad! Low ratings! Crooked! Fake news! Actually, this link is only about fake news, and if I was more liberal with the truth and a better headline writer I’d call it about the fake news of Fake News. But really it’s simpler than that. We notice changes much more than levels: fake news might have grown recently, but it’s still a small portion of overall news consumption and probably doesn’t affect our views very much. We don’t need extra help to remain in our echo chambers.

5.       The great Give Directly experiment on a universal basic income in Kenya gets very good coverage from Vox, and commentary from Justin Sandefur. Justin uses the phrase ‘disintermediating the state’ (that’s ‘cutting out the middleman’). I get the need to do so sometimes. But I also think it can’t be our default. It will be brilliant to eventually see the results of GD’s experiment – it’s genuinely one of the most revolutionary that the development field has put up. I hope, though, even if it’s brilliant, we don’t switch everything to this approach. The state matters for many things, even when it’s bad at most of them.

6.       And lastly, Chinese State-Owned rap videos. I have no words.

 Have a great weekend, everyone!

 R

Hi all,

 These links seem often start with obituaries these days (which is probably down to nothing more than my age, and consequently the ages of my role models and intellectual heroes growing up – many of who were 30-40 years older than me). This isn’t an obituary, but it created the same kind of awful sensation in the pit of my stomach: news that Joel Embiid, after 31 games of games of pretty much unprecedented brilliance for a young player, has been ruled out of playing basketball for the rest of the NBA season. To put that in perspective, over the last 4 years, he’s played around 6 months of competitive basketball, during which time he’s managed to be so brilliant that he was chosen with the third pick in the NBA draft and it’s been suggested he may already be one of the greatest centers ever. It will absolutely suck if his career never takes off because of his brittle bones and ligaments. Sigh. Oh well, at least Eoin Morgan has just bashed a century. [And of course, as soon as I finished that sentence, he was run out].

 1.       On to a happy link first – how’s this for an awesome technology: a mosquito trap sophisticated to differentiate between different species, collecting them automatically so we can analyse the pathogens borne in the blood they’ve sucked from people they’ve bitten. It could provide information to feed into public health programmes or simply be used to analyse how diseases and disease burdens change. Amazing.

2.       There are many superb lines in this Russ Roberts blog. One is “I am answering your question, I told him. You just don’t like the answer.” Another is “published and true are not synonyms”. He talks eloquently and honestly about the limits of knowledge in economics (you could apply this to many, many other disciplines, but Roberts happens to be an economist) and the reticence of many to acknowledge them. He also, as an aside, talks about the famous Autor finding about the effect of China on US manufacturing jobs, mentioning that a recent paper suggests that it overestimates this effect. The funny thing is, as Francis Teal pointed out to DFID in the keynote talk at our economics conference last year, Autor’s findings are already that most of the decline in the US is explained by non-China factors.

3. Here’s another academic disagreement that’s been getting good coverage recently: Laurence Chandy and Brina Seidel (or Gertz, I’m getting confused…) did some work suggesting that we can now just redistribute our way out of poverty. Three very good articles point out the substantial problems here. First Berk Ozler notes how hard it is to know exactly who’s poor, and how poor. Second, Chris Blattman points out how hard it is to know what changes will work at scale and maintain long term support. And lastly, an excellent piece by Maya Forstater at CGD making the additional points that the related Sumner/Hoy redistribution would wind up redistributing from the poor to the slightly poorer, driven by a fairly arbitrary poverty line. She adds in a few kicks at shoddy thinking about taxing the super-rich and tax havens, to boot.

4.       Via Adam, a new VoxEU article on the effect of migrants at firm level in France. Here’s a spoiler: it’s good. First, it’s associated with an increase in firm-level productivity. Secondly, it’s associated with an increase in capital investment. Thirdly, it’s associated with an increase in exports. And lastly, it’s associated with an increase in the wages of their native-born colleagues. Good thing migration is so popular all the world round, right?

5.       This is definitely one for the economists only: Noah Smith on the virtues of structural econometrics and quasi-experimental econometrics. I really strongly recommend that all economists read it, though – I don’t think most people quite appreciate some of the points he makes about the limitations of experimental econometrics, though those of econometrics based on big (often crazy) models are rather better rehearsed.

6.       In which Alex Tabarrok discovers that development is complicated.

7.       And to close it out, this is a special brand of crazy that I find almost endearing: an American man has taken out a full page ad in The Times essentially declaring that he is the King of England. Well, I suppose whatever Idi Amin can do…

 I’m traveling next week, so the links might be a little late or threadbare next Friday. Apologies.

 Have a great weekend, everyone!

 R

Hi all,

 So it seems like every week these e-mails start with an obit or some cricketing insanity. This week we’ve got both: first India’s continuing attempt to re-popularise binary coding outside of the computing field (just look at all the 0s and 1s in this scorecard), and secondly the passing of Kenneth Arrow (significantly closer to a century  at 95 than any of the Indian batsmen). Tim Harford has a nice, short appreciation here. Arrow was such a foundational figure in modern economics it’s almost a surprise to realise he wasn’t long-dead already. It’s a sign of how relatively young modern economics is that the co-author of the First and Second Fundamental Theorems of Welfare Economics (all capitalised, of course, because very econ student learns the FTWEs) could also be a co-author of a ground-breaking letter stating the economic risks posed by climate change. Arrow was a remarkable economist and inspired further remarkable economics: Amartya Sen made his name extending and critiquing Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, already a canonical finding in economics 45 years ago.

 1.       You don’t need to be remarkable economist to recognise the mismanagement of the Venezuelan economy or be outraged at the consequences of it. Vox’s reporting of the numbers is a bit bizarre (“three quarters of respondents report losing an average of…” – wtf?), but it seems that the latest national surveying shows that most of the population has lost, on average, 19 pounds in body weight over the period of the crisis. This amounts to a crime against humanity, frankly; and I can’t believe this isn’t a bigger deal around the world. What’s worse is that the political leadership responds to this stark evidence with increasing certainty in their own capabilities. I’d say it couldn’t happen anywhere else, but events across Western Europe and in the US prove me wrong. This is what scares me the most: we feel that if things turn bad, people will recognise their mistakes and change course. No: they may well just double down on what caused the damage in the first place.

2.       Speaking of economic mismanagement, you know your new currency isn’t taken seriously when it trends on ebay as a collector’s item. That doesn’t exactly speak of market confidence that it’s going to last long, does it? However, since each bond note is selling for more than its dollar value in Zimbabwe, maybe the Reserve Bank should just cut out the middleman and start selling the notes as a novelty gift to foreigners? (thanks to Adam Lyons for pointing me to that one).

3.       Let’s pile on some more bad news, while I’m still frothing with outrage: apparently, we’re all at risk – banking crises in other countries can cause domestic banking crises even in the absence of direct financial ties or trade relationships. That bodes well for the next five years.

4.       To cheer us up a little, I thought the James Martin memorial lecture given by David Miliband recently was excellent. He mounts a sturdy defence of DFID and singles our new Economic Development Strategy and our work on the Jordan Compacts for particular praise; and he inches towards an approach to reconcile global and local politics.

5.       There’s hope, too, in this excellent New Yorker piece on behavioural science and its role in policy making in the US, using the example of Flint, Michigan. We constantly make little movements of progress that help us build a better world. The shocks that push us back are more visible, but the war will be won by the creeping tides of progress.

6.       There are echoes of this in this Tim Harford piece about setting rules and targets – we’ve made a lot of progress in identifying patterns, which has left us open to new mistakes – and we keep working out ways to get around them.

7.       And lastly, because the first half of this e-mail was a total downer, let’s end on a joyous note: Boogie Cousins has just signed to play alongside Anthony Davis in New Orleans, which means they’ve finally found an on-court combo cool enough to overcome the tragedy of being called ‘the Pelicans’ (seriously, I love birds but when they were selecting names did they just ignore the teams called things like Thunder, Rockets, Bulls, and all those other awesome things to pick that?!) And if you’re not enough of a basketball tragic to be excited by that, here’s Giannis Antetokuoumnpo (it’s pronounced exactly how it’s spelled) dunking the soul right out of Steph Curry. It’s only 28 seconds and watch it for the look on DeAndre Jordan’s face at 0:20s.

 Have a great weekend, everyone!

 R

Hi all,

 Days when Sri Lanka win a last-ball victory against Australia and Lasith Malinga gets through four overs without accidentally breaking his bowling arm in the process of sitting down are good days. We should savour them when they come, rare as they are. My first thought, seeing the headline was ‘oh God, fake news has come to cricket’, but no, it’s verifiable. As opposed to certifiable, which is the adjective that runs to my head when I see most accusations of fake news. Sad!

 1.       Chris Blattman loved this piece by Dani Rodrik entitled Global Citizens, National Shirkers. Rodrik argues that the internationalist values that until fairly recently seemed to have won control of the political discourse have brought with them neglect of domestic problems and the failure to persuasively argue the case for the domestic benefits of internationalist policy. I may be arraying myself against two much heavier hitters with this opinion but I really disagree with a lot of what Rodrik writes, and by extension Blattman’s praise. An internationalist, outward facing discourse does not have to come at the expense of a progressive, thoughtful discussion about domestic problems and historically hasn’t. While it’s true that the last ten or so years have seen an increasingly global policy agenda coupled with the relative neglect of domestic redistribution and alleviation of deprivation, that’s a recent phenomenon. We have had extended periods when we cared about both and worked for both – both here in the UK and abroad. Putting them in opposition to one another is, as Owen Barder recently put it, a classic trick: to pit two progressive causes against each other; and it distracts us from the real problems.

2.       Speaking of distractions, I mourned the death of Hans Rosling last week, but he himself might have seen the attention I paid him as a distraction from what really matters. I was sent this brilliant tribute to Rosling by a colleague, and it argues that to really honour him would be to have made him unnecessary. “So how do we let Hans Rosling rest in peace?… by remembering that mothers in Bangladesh no longer give birth to five children on average, nor four, but TWO POINT TWO children “. Remember less of him and more of his message.

3.       As a quick fillip after a couple of down-notes, it may be hard to see right now, but some polling shows that America is getting more tolerant of religious minorities over time. It certainly doesn’t look like it right now, but it always pays to look deeper. Underlying currents and the short term movement are often at odds.

4.       Imagine you wrote a blog critical of a Nobel winner and he showed up to leave a long and detailed comment – agreeing with you. Sounds fanciful? Incredibly, it actually happened this week, with Daniel Kahnemann showing up on this blog to explain why he agrees that he was wrong (noting with bitter irony that he fell for a cognitive bias he a Tversky first identified in the 1970s). What a hero he is.

5.       I loved this piece by Tim Harford, about how giving workers control of their working environment can increase their productivity. I’m not going to make any pointed comments about clear desk policies or the restriction on me putting my world map up on the wall, but I’ll just leave you with the thought that if I was allowed to supplement my geographically-challenged brain with the map, I’d save about 20 minutes a day googling ‘where the heck is the Gambia?’

6.       I’ve got to draw this one to a close, as I’m running ridiculously late but here’s my favourite piece of randomness I read this week – Jack Slack on how to defend yourself against multiple attackers: “so far there is only one proven method: run, swing like a mad man when you need to, and run some more.”  Read it for the gifs. They’re hilarious…

 Have a great weekend, everyone!

 R

Hi all,

 “If I say one in ten girls doesn’t go to school, or one in seven girls doesn’t go to school – I’m not talking about statistics. I’m talking about girls. There’s this idea that numbers are something else. No, this is reality.” Hans Rosling died this week, and if you weren’t upset about it, you probably haven’t seen enough of him. A few things were circulating on social media, with many people posting his Ted talk about the miracle of the washing machine, but my favourite is this interview on what appears to be a Danish Newsnight. What’s brilliant is not just the clear commitment to social justice and building a better world, it’s his anger at misrepresentation and willingness to fight back. People like this are rare, and needed very much now. The reach of those willing to lie and obfuscate for their agenda is wide and deep, and it takes a lot of people with a lot of fire to fight that.

1.       Keeping with that theme, some Trump to start us off: Francis Fukuyama doesn’t like Trump, and like many other observers, is wondering how well the American institutional structure will stand up to the pressures his Presidency may put it under. Unlike Daron Acemoglu, however, Fukuyama is an optimist. Indeed, he even believes that the institutional structure has too many checks and balances, even in the current context and makes the case for removing them here. I don’t pretend to know nearly enough about this to arbitrate this heavyweight debate. I can, however, offer a pithy one-liner stolen and repurposed from Keynes’ attack on Clemenceau in The Economic Consequences of the Peace: Trump appears to ‘have one illusion – himself – and one disillusion – mankind’. If Trump does try and isolate the US, though, China may well be waiting to step into their role.

2.       The most stunning thing about this Vox article, entitled What Donald Trump doesn’t Understand about Trade is how short it is. The main point it makes is that trade is not a zero sum game, one Tim Harford makes better here.

3.       Even better is this excellent double-whammy from CGD. First, Michael Clemens and Hannah Postel report on work they did on a guest worker scheme in the US which demonstrated that it was a great development intervention, it did not steal any ‘native born’ jobs (the jobs already existed and were unfilled), and added around $4000 per worker to the US economy. Charles Kenny then elaborates in one of the best pieces of the week; protecting US workers from trade and from immigration isn’t likely to get them any more jobs – it will just accelerate the pace of mechanisation.

4.       Returning to the topic of fighting with the truth, an excellent article by Michael Faye, Paul Niehaus and Joanna Macrae about cash transfers, following recent negative headlines in the UK.

5.       Ever since Chris Woodruff and Michel Fafchamps’ paper ‘Identifying Gazelles’ pointed out how hard it is to identify which firms we should concentrate our efforts on if we want to encourage growth, other researchers have tried to find ways of either circumventing this problem or getting better at gazelle-spotting. Two pieces this week report progress, first David McKenzie on targeting informal firms to focus on the ones most likely to formalise; and secondly, Ramana Nanda on using trial-and-error experimentation to round up lots of firms and let the non-gazelles out quickly.

6.       If, like me, you want to know more about the Congo – this WaPo blog is a good start, though it’s not going to cheer you up.

7.       Ok, I’ve depressed you all enough. Two things that make me happy to close (I have no idea what makes you all happy, so you’ll have to make do with this). First, a confluence of two of my favourite things: Planet Money econogeekery and birds (transcript). And second, an epic long read about Anthony Bourdain eating around the world and appreciating all the cultural diversity it has to offer. It also talks about my favourite of his essays, My Aim is True. And if none of that cheers you up, here’s Taylor Swift dancing at the Grammys (you can stop complaining now, Danny).

 Have a great weekend, everyone!

 R

Hi all,

 I’m on leave tomorrow, so the links come early. Normally this intro would be where I make a token Taylor Swift joke and a glum mention of the latest cricketing disasters (seriously  – 8 wickets in 19 balls? Were they worried they’d be late to check in at the airport?). But I’ve been slightly uneasy all week at what I’ve been reading in the news and what I’ve been hearing from my friends, so here is something serious instead: on my 8^th birthday I remember watching the news and seeing people climbing the Berlin Wall as it was made obsolete by the East and West German Governments (of course I didn’t understand what was happening, only that my parents’ reaction showed it was important). On my 35^th I watched the votes pour in for a President whose main promise was to build new ones. I am deeply worried that those of us who are trying to use evidence and statistics to argue against policies we feel are wrong and counterproductive are misjudging both the objectives and the appeal of these policies (and polling suggests they are more popular than not there). I don’t know exactly what to do about that, beyond feeling that an alternative, positive vision is needed, not just a repudiation.

 1.       Before moving off the topic altogether, another consideration of the effects of trade. I said recently that trade was not really about competition between countries so much as a way of organising production and consumption across borders. This investigation of US-Mexico trade makes the point again, pointing out that “most US imports from Mexico are intermediate and investment goods… A tariff on Mexican goods is more likely to raise costs for US businesses … than to lead people to substitute American-made goods for Mexican ones.” Still, that might not stop anti-trade policies running – apparently, one of Trump’s economic advisers wants to dismantle cross-border value chains. I’m predicting that will either be forced into a stall or will end very badly indeed.

2.       Another thing I said last week is that the typical middle-aged worker is unlikely to simply retrain if his job dies out in a more competitive global economy. Plane Money seemed to hear me, because they went off and ran a piece on a long-standing US assistance programme which has the explicit aim of getting these workers reskilled and into new jobs. It’s fascinating – well worth a listen: the best laid plans can run aground against the messiness of the real world.

3.       Changing the subject – a great blog by Berk Ozler on the long run effects of an unconditional and a conditional cash transfer programme. Long story short: it’s complicated. Few of the short term effects of the unconditional transfer persist in the long run, while the conditional transfer may not have the full range of short term benefits, but a larger long term effect in some dimensions. Very interesting, and I recommend reading it all.

4.       I mentioned this paper recently, but am only now finding time to read it: Chris Blattman on the political effects of an income generation programme. It’s only one piece of evidence, so we need to be cautious about extrapolating the results, but it’s very interesting. He finds that the programme increases political opposition, and speculates that this may be because it frees participants from the need to survive through patronage from the state.  It would be amazing if more programmes asked these questions – it’s important data to understand social contracts and politics.

5.       For someone who gets his unredacted thoughts and brainfades published online every week, this is pretty scary: you can never be sure your data is truly gone when you want it gone. Thought that being the case it can’t hurt to ask: when my last laptop died, I lost a note I wrote about the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and some of its research – has anyone got a copy?

6.       Long-time readers will be aware that I think Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the man. How many Hall of Fame Centres are also successful writers and cultural commentators? His New York Times book review of two recent books about Islam and identity is brilliant and timely. In it, he quotes Norman Vincent Peale: “The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.”

 Have a great weekend, everyone!

 R