Hi all,
After opening the last edition of the links with riots and fascists running into walls like less-loveable versions of Wile E. Coyote, I am blissfully happy not to have to start the links with a screed about human misery and imbecility, unless you count discussion of the Sri Lankan test cricket team. It’s been around eight years since Sri Lanka last played a test in England; and ten years since I saw a visiting Sri Lanka team live. The last time I watched Sri Lanka bat in England, I saw Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara at the twilight of their brilliant careers; and Angelo Mathews in the middle of the greatest year of his career. It was the last time Sri Lanka had a really good test team. The team currently scrabbling around in Manchester is a shadow of what they once were. We’re still being propped but by Angelo Mathews, now a full half-decade past the most generous possible description of his peak as a test player. Nevertheless, I’m still extremely excited to have a ticket for the Oval test: my son, with English, Argentine and Sri Lankan blood will have his first chance to fail the Tebbit test, or—if he’s like me—reject it altogether; and Sri Lanka, even in their worst years, still manage to turn out the most ludicrously unlikely cricketers. This time we’re playing Kamindu Mendis, who can bowl with either arm, in three different styles. It’s like he read Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman and decided “yup, that’s what I’ll model my career after”. They may be bad, but they are never boring.
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You know what else is never boring? Ken Opalo’s substack. Of course, he’s helped by a fascinating subject: the various function and dysfunction of African politics and economics. This week is decidedly about the dysfunction: the civil war in Sudan and what we know about the role of external powers in its progression. If you don’t know much about what’s going on in Sudan (and many people won’t given it’s complete absence from the news media in the West), the likely scale of death being wrought is truly staggering. Ken estimates there might have been between 100,000 and 244,000 deaths directly associated with the war, not including deaths from associated causes such as famine. His is an extremely downbeat take: there is little prospect or impetus towards a resolution; too many external actors involved for base reasons (including inertia!); a shameful failure of the African Union, and basically no clear idea of what a post-conflict Sudan would look like. In fact he closes by proposing that simply articulating that might be the most important thing forthcoming talks can achieve. It rings true with my own policy engagement work (on much smaller stakes). Sometimes it’s a simple failure to clearly set out what the end game is that prevents any progress on the road in front of us.
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[Of course, as soon as I praised Angelo, he was out. Dammit.] Anyway, while we’re on a downer: a VoxDev write-up of research by Sampreet Goraya on the macroeconomic impact of misallocation in the Indian economy driven by caste-bias. This is really important work even solely for the descriptive information he provides; and it rings very true to me. One thing Sri Lanka has gotten right is the relative fluidity of caste there, which takes some (but not all) of the sting out of it.
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Two excellent pieces on jobs and job creation from Development Impact. In the first Kathleen Beegle and Louise Fox discuss the impact of supply-side labour market policies and whether they genuinely create jobs, or simply reallocate what few jobs already exist. From a policy perspective, this was the question I always wanted researchers to grapple with more directly. I’ve seen studies that simply assume net benefits, and others that declare them outside the scope of the research, and those that acknowledge the question but say they just can’t say (this is the largest group). The second blog, by Kathleen, reports on a new paper from the Ivory Coast that uses a clever set-up to actually test the issue, though I recommend you read the full post and not stop after the summary. There is still a great deal we need to know more about.
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This was excellent, and widely shared already: Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav on the link between industrial policy and immigration policy. It is well-written and worth reading in full, but the key message is simple: all the fiscal and policy-based juice you can throw at the economy can only do so much if you don’t have enough of the right people to take advantage of them. And such is the political toxicity of the debate that dumb policy from the past accretes and causes an accumulating amount of damage because it’s simply too risky to talk openly and sensibly about the issue.
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Another area where it seems politically impossible to just talk openly and sensibly is on China’s role in the global economy. I see even good economic commentators reduced to barely disguised econo-nationalism by discussion of Chinese economic policy and performance, but the truth is probably much more complex, as Arvind Subramanian discusses here. I say ‘probably’ because, as Arvind points out, we’ve gone so quickly to knee-jerk response we haven’t bothered to properly understand the issues at play here, at least economically.
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[And another one bites the dust, to Joe Root no less, why do Sri Lanka always do this]. I’d recommend this piece by Tim Harford regardless of what the broad topic was if only because it offers commendably clear explanations of two fun logic puzzles—the latter of which is so counterintuitive it took me until reading Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why to finally fully grasp the intuition behind it. But the broader point is important too: generative AI like Chat GPT gets things wrong. That’s not a big deal. The problem is if you use it for things where you can’t check the steps, it may build errors into much more important work. So far I’ve used GPT almost entirely for small chunks of coding and it works extremely well for that. I’m sure I’m not at the cutting edge of its use, but I’m also sure that if I was I wouldn’t pick up all of the errors and biases it introduces while helping me.
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Finally, I always end on pop culture, and this case it’s the intersection between pop culture and food, two of my main non-econ interests (along with birdwatching, basketball and cricket, maybe I just have too many interests). St John, the Smithfields institution, celebrates thirty years of existence this month, and to celebrate, the Observer count 30 ways it has influenced global food culture. St John is, to me, the perfect restaurant. Everything is delicious and straightforward. The space is lovely, the people who work there are lovely, and they want you to enjoy yourself, sometimes by suggesting just the thing that you never knew you needed (the revelation of my first Black Velvet is a case in point). Their approach to wine is perfect: if you want to eat what you’ve ordered and want to drink what you’ve asked for, then they go together. I’ve celebrated a lot of major life milestones there, including marriage, and have never regretted it. And now I’m hungry.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
R
Disclaimer
CGD blog posts reflect the views of the authors, drawing on prior research and experience in their areas of expertise. CGD is a nonpartisan, independent organization and does not take institutional positions.
