Economics & Marginalia: September 20, 2024

Hi all,

Thanks to everyone who offered advice for toddlers at sporting events—the little one was impeccably behaved until he finished his lunch, after which time we had to beat a hasty retreat and follow the rest of the day’s play on my app, thus missing probably the best session of Sri Lankan test cricket in the last five years. Oh well: we had the aim of introducing the beautiful game to him, and we succeeded, even if he did interrupt my explanation of the fielding positions with a cry of “STOP saying those silly words, Thathi!”.  That was me told. He saw a couple of good shots and a couple of good wickets and ate a surprisingly good burger. All in all, a successful outing. If he becomes a world famous spin bowler, this is where it all began. Over the summer (if you can call it that), the links have been coming every other week as CGD gives us some Fridays off to ‘enjoy’ the weather; that has ended with the coming of autumn, so from now till next summer, the links are back to their usual weekly routine. I hope that does not come with too sharp a drop in quality!

1. It’s not the just links that have been quieter than usual recently. Dietrich Vollrath seems to have largely abandoned his blog, but for those of us who have suffered withdrawal symptoms, there is some good news: he is featured in the most recent edition of Asterisk with a long read that looks at the development challenge posed by urbanization without any real productive focus. Those readers who have been with me since the links were just a tiny ball of geekery in the cradle may have a twinge of recognition here: it draws on research I shared in working paper form more than a decade ago, with Doug Gollin and Remi Jedwab. Like that paper, this is fantastic. It covers so much ground: the economic development along different models in different kinds of cities; the epidemiological transition in cities and how our medical advances have created ‘cities of babies’; and the Buenos Aires problem of a too-dominant primary city. And it’s not all gloom: he ends on the optimists case for urbanisation in developing countries. Highly recommended.

2. Another piece that calls back to an older work is Dani Rodrik’s Project Syndicate article proposing a new trilemma: between climate change objectives, the continued development and prosperity of the middle classes in middle-income countries and global poverty eradication. It’s worth reading, but I don’t think there is a real trilemma here, and by the end of the article, Dani seems to have convinced himself there isn’t one either. You can have all three, you just need policy and funding to be arrayed to achieve them. If we find ourselves picking between good things here, it’s because we choose to, not because we must.

3. Rachel Glennerster’s first blog as CGD President uses here experience working with Rukmini Banerjee and Pratham on their Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) intervention to reflect on how policy reform happens successfully. Her first experience with the Pratham team came when her son was just a few months old; he’s now off to university, but Pratham and TaRL is still evolving and improving—and she argues that this kind of constant innovation and learning is important, as is collaborative working with a wide range of actors. This is the kind of thing that CGD is really well-placed to do, and it’s exciting that Rachel is taking over here.

4. A lot of that piece reflects on the learning process in implementation. In Nature, Noam Angrist and Stefan Dercon have a new piece which calls for much more attention to what they describe as the ‘implementation gap’ in public policy, demonstrating how incredibly varied performance in turning announced policy into concrete action is, and how important it is that we understand what drives that variation. The Nature link is behind a pretty impregnable paywall (though not entirely—where there is a will, there is a way), but the working paper version is very good too. Latin America is, happily, an exception to the norm that what gets announced rarely gets followed through. This is a really important research agenda, and I’m glad they’re looking at it.

5. This is interesting, from ODI: Nilima Gulrajani and Heba Aly kick off a four-part dialogue on what the future of ‘Northern donorship’ should be, if indeed it has one. They identify many of the tensions that make development cooperation complex and contested these days, and I know people in a number of donor agencies are grappling with these issues. There are some fundamental tensions between what aid-recipient governments say they want and what seems to be politically feasible in aid-giving countries. Perhaps this ends with a decisive rupture; but I rather suspect it winds up limping along, injured, but just about connected, like a marriage in an Ingmar Bergman movie.

6. This year saw one of the all-time great Ig Nobel awards: Saul Justin Newman’s award for debunking the bogus ‘blue zone’ claims, and this interview with him is fantastic. This blew my mind: “Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst [record-keeping]. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.” The data is just a complete shambles. Repeat after me: there is never a bad time to ask about the data.

7. I will make Sesame Street references at the drop of a hat, so the recent VoxDev piece that shows exposure to Sesame Street was positively associated with propensity to vote for candidates from minority backgrounds is not just interesting research (that fits with my priors, as a brown child who grew up with Sesame Street and even then noticed it was the only place I saw people of colour on TV those days), but a great opportunity to share three of the greatest moments in television history: Stevie Wonder performing Superstition on Sesame Street (that headbanging kid 38 seconds in is all of us); the late, lamented James Earl Jones reciting the alphabet like it’s the soliloquy from Hamlet (the smile on G gets me every time); and Kermit / Jim Henson interacting with a small child who keeps going off script (watch to the end, it’s too adorable for words, and apparently none of this was planned). And on that note…

Have a great weekend, all!

R