Economics & Marginalia: July 26, 2024

Hi all,

We lost an intellectual giant last week with the passing of James C. Scott. If they’re very lucky, most great scholars manage to get one really big idea out there into the world, the kind of idea that people cite and are influenced by even without having read the book or paper it came from. The best of these ideas seem blindingly obvious once they’re expressed to you, and shape the way you think about the world from that point onwards. Scott had at least three of those big ideas. There was Seeing Like a State, the book every economist pretends to have read, which sets out how the state’s need for ‘legibility’ in society leads it to not just ignore important complexity, but actively eliminate it, with occasionally devastating consequences. If I’m honest, I never loved Seeing Like a State, for all that I can see the power and importance of the central idea because just as that high modernist desire for legibility and rationality can backfire, it’s also the basis of much of the infrastructure and public health and education that underpin so much human progress. Then there’s Weapons of the Weak (which is probably my favourite), about passive resistance in unequal relationships, a book that instantly snapped into clarity everything I had seen in my early career as advisor to developing country governments receiving foreign aid and ‘advice’ on reform. And, though I’ve never read it I know The Moral Economy of the Peasant had a similar effect on others. There were a number of good tributes to Scott, but I particularly liked this thread by Dan Banik, his student and friend (and host of the incomparable In Pursuit of Development, which once featured Scott).

By the way, if this week’s links come to you at an odd time, it’s because they’re being written from a train bounding northward, swapping grey London skies for… well, grey Scottish skies a few degrees colder. I’m not sure we’ve thought this one through fully, but there is the promise of a full day of birding at the end of it and the view is good and only gets better as the train continues its journey.

1. After the recent election in the UK, there’s been a happy trend towards appointing Ministers and senior advisers with expertise in the brief they’ve been given, which sounds commonsensical but is a rarer phenomenon than one might imagine; it’s a real pleasure to hear Ministers who know and care about their brief speaking in Parliament. But good people and good intentions are not enough to govern effectively. You also need good data. Tim Harford discusses the crumbling UK data infrastructure, pointing out that the evidentiary basis upon which we make public policy is getting worse. Two points to add to this: it’s not just the big surveys that need improvement and investment. It’s also the government’s default approach to collecting information. Basic data about many interventions just aren’t collected, and the opportunity to learn about how things get implemented is missed. It’s not just about impact evaluations and causal estimates. Just counting what we do would be a good start. And second, things may be bad in the UK, but they’re abysmal in developing countries. We need more data and much more investment in it.

2. And while we’re on UK policy, I liked this from Mark Miller and Roli Asthana—proposing that UK development policy follow its domestic policy in prioritising ‘securenomics’. The basic premise is pretty simple. Just as UK policy prioritises jobs, growth and productivity, so should its international development policy—better aligning with the stated priorities of people in developing countries. There is a lot to like here: a focus on export growth, on investment and working with local institutions as they are and not as we wish they were. More broadly however, it’s striking how many of the ideas here are or have been part of the UK’s approach to international development in the past (indeed a fair few of the people they cite are ex-DFID officials). Intellectually, the need for growth, investment and working with the grain of local institutions won’t be new to old development hands in FCDO (though the focus on technology transfer is a newer, and useful). The difficulty has always been doing something about it with the tools available and institutional constraints on the UK side that determine how officials work in and with developing countries. I think this is a good agenda, but implementing it will require a lot of change and strong leadership within FCDO.

3. Two links on migration. First, a new Michael Clemens paper (and, for the short of time, thread) for PIIE which looks at the dilemma facing South Korea: negative sustained GDP growth or a fundamental shift in labour migration. The point is simple, and clear: with the working age population shrinking, there is no plausible way to maintain economic growth that does not involve significant inward labour migration. And in Project Syndicate, Penny Goldberg points out that Greece’s recent move back to a six-day working week is a manifestation of the same dilemma. We are quickly approaching the sharp end of this dilemma, the point at which more and more countries realise that the real migrant crisis is that there aren’t enough migrants.

4. The last part of Ken Opalo’s series on the Kenyan protests looks at Ruto’s ways out in the medium term. The summary seems to be that there is no easy option. And yet, reading this, I’m struck by how impossible much of this seems altogether. Can Ruto command the support he needs to make meaningful reforms (either popular or elite support)? It seems unlikely. Is the most likely outcome just more ‘muddling through’ until everything sort of falls apart further.

5. Muddling through is usually how things go, but occasionally it becomes clear that a better way is available. I felt that way when I first read about the pilots in anticipatory cash transfers, a means of getting support to people who are affected by natural disasters but before the disaster strikes, allowing them to minimize or even avoid altogether the damage it does. Ashley Pople and Stefan Dercon summarised the—outstanding—results of one such pilot, in Bangladesh, which used modelling to predict flooding and found huge effects from early anticipatory support. And I piggybacked on that to propose that this approach should be scaled up substantially (and how): it’s faster, more effective, more localised. A little ambition here could go a long way.

6. I really liked this from Andrew Gelman, about cognition in young children, and their ability to articulate non-obvious ideas. It’s probably my favourite thing about parenthood now: talking to my son and listening to him problem solve on the fly. He is totally unconstrained in his ideas, and makes me very aware of the limits to my own imagination. If he wants to count the number of leaves on a tree, he immediately starts thinking about how to do it; if he wants to know why something is the way it is, he immediately comes up with stories to explain it—including many that would just never have occurred to me.

7. Finally, it has been ages since I’ve been excited about seeing something in the cinema, but the new Joker trailer—for a film I was completely unaware they were even making—has me itchy with anticipation. Even though it doesn’t have anything as meme-worthy as ‘we live in a society’, I can’t wait to see it. The first Joker is one of those films I loved when I watched it, but which has faded for me since then, and I find it much less interesting now. I imagine that will happen with this one, too, but if we get 2 hours of fun in the cinema, that’ll do for now.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R