Hi all,
Last week I wrote the links half-asleep and sent round fewer links than usual; this week I’m about six coffees down and we might have the opposite problem: so much nervous energy that the links will be nineteen deep. I spoke at an event last night at the LSE publicising the book Mark Lowcock and I recently wrote about the history of DFID, alongside Clare Short (no less inspiring and no less of a firebrand than she was in 1997), James Putzel and Stuart Gordon that ended with a dinner full of interesting stories and book recommendations. But it came at a cost: I was up this morning at 5am to make my son his school lunch before setting off to take two seminars at BSG. I’ve been dosing on caffeine since 0530, and at some point I’ll just fall forward asleep. The event is on YouTube already—well worth watching (not for me, I hasten to add, but my fantastic colleagues on the panel, and Clare in particular). And on to the links, before the caffeine wears off:
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I told you I was tired last week. So tired, in fact, that I completely forgot to link to the piece I wrote myself, about the future of the global poverty line. The poverty line has come to define how we think about international development, certainly since the adoption of halving global poverty as the centrepiece of the Millennium Development Goals (something that Clare Short was instrumental in, incidentally). Whether you believe it really does drive how development cooperation and aid has been undertaken since that moment or not, it has certainly framed our understanding of it. And yet, the measurement of poverty is rife with problems, some of which are getting progressively worse. In this piece, I argue that these threats to our understanding and measurement of what poverty is are existential, but also that none of the current alternatives are fit for purpose. My own preferred measure—a prosperity gap squared approach which gives the largest weight to the poorest but provides useful information for places where living standards are low, but extreme impoverishment rare—is unlikely to catch on. I don’t know what will happen next, and I don’t have a fully formed view of what should. I would welcome thoughts on it.
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I probably learnt more new things from this piece by Hannah Ritchie than from anything else I read this week. Every once in a while, I see headlines suggesting that generative AI is a massive source of carbon emissions, and one that threatens the progress we’ve made in cutting them so far, which seems alarming but hard for me to assess as a claim. Happily, I can outsource that task to Hannah, who looks at the actual data. There are three key points here. First, the carbon cost (or electricity use of AI) remains really very small on the global scale. It’s not nothing, but as she hints, we should perhaps chill a little. Second, we’ve had scares about the carbon cost or electricity consumption of computing technologies before, and they have not manifested because the efficiency of computing is constantly improving at a breakneck pace; the same is already looking true for AI. And thirdly, that doesn’t mean that in specific locations the energy demand won’t be significant, though again, how that translates into emissions is very uncertain.
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On the subject of climate, it would be remiss of me not to note that we’ve had yet another disappointing COP. But disappointment was expected: here is Charles Kenny and here is Ken Opalo. I am extremely in Ken’s corner on this one. The fact that climate change is a big big problem and a scary scary prospect has led us to make a number of damaging changes to how we approach development and development aid. The correct response should have been to recognise that two big problems exist at once, that action to solve one does not automatically address the other and to explicitly and sensibly consider how to address each—recognising that they will very often be essentially independent (I am talking, here, about mitigation; adaptation and development are very much interlinked—so much so that I would argue that correctly understood they are essentially indistinguishable, and in fact we should be doubling down on development as our primary means of adaptation in poor places).
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Yet more fascinating stuff from the Development Impact Job Market Papers series: one by Samuel Marshall on the role of labour market power (and specifically monopsony power held by hiring firms) in setting wages—interesting throughout, though including a result about migration that gave me a twisted brain; and another by Nikita Kohli on the role of labour unions in Brazil in supporting both employment and wages in the formal sector.
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Two very good pieces on gender in VoxDev this week, too: first, Gaurav Chiplunkar and Penny Goldberg on the role of female entrepreneurship in determining broader labour market outcomes for women in India; and secondly Charles Gottlieb and co-authors on how paid work, care work and unpaid domestic work are distributed across countries and within countries over time. This one is rich in descriptive detail, including about the sheer range of outcomes that are observed in places at similar levels of GDP per capita.
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I had absolutely no idea what to expect when I saw that Branko Milanovic had written an article called ‘Would Lenin have approved of the IMF?’ This was not a question that had ever occurred to me; nor can I say it’s ever come up in conversation with anyone I’ve spoken to, and I say this as someone who probably has more conversations about Marxism and Marxist-Leninist thought than is normal (to be fair, the modal number of such conversations in the general population is almost certainly zero). Nevertheless, it’s a starting point for what turns out to be a very interesting set of reflections on what the IMF is for, and why its core mandate matters and should be protected, not what I was expecting to read.
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Finally, BlueSky seems to be taking off. We have a CGD starter pack (a handy collection that allows you to follow various CGD Fellows and Non-Resident Fellows), and some good packs from the likes of Pseudoerasmus, and we’re even starting go get useful question-and-answer threads on how to cluster standard errors. I’ve now pretty much exited Twitter (the account still exists, but I no longer use it, and will soon delete it… not sure what is stopping me yet); the straw that broke the camel’s back for me was my notifications promoting content from people I don’t follow and have less than zero interest in the existence of, like Allison Pearson, of whom the less I am aware the better my life is. If you’re not already on, jump in—the water is warm, the community getting more interesting and with greater diversity; we’re even starting to get some good basketball content. The only things I miss from Twitter are BronHistory and the fact that my only ever truly viral thread exist on it.
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.
