Hi all,
Getting back into the weekly routine with the links makes them simultaneously easier and harder to write: there is less to choose from each week, which makes the selection of the final list easier, but it’s harder to write the intro, which always takes the longest. It doesn’t help that the weather has turned miserable: incessant rain, cold enough for the heating to kick in and mainly grey and depressing (though of course as I write those words, the clouds part and I get a magnificent sunset). This week has been exhausting: the little one has had his first full week of his school nursery. He’s been brilliant, but all the rushing to get him ready, pick him up and deal with an exhausted child at the end of the day has reduced the parents to a wreck (and an ill-timed dishwasher apocalypse has not helped). My respect for the many parents of young children I’ve worked with has only increased. Fortunately, this has been another exceptional week for economics and development content, so I can summon the energy for one last push.
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I have been thinking a lot about poverty and poverty measurement recently. I wrote something for Asterisk a while back about the history of poverty measurement, and I’ve got something in the works about how to think about poverty measurement in the future. I’m clearly not the only one with poverty on their mind, though: Max Roser has a piece in the NYT proposing the adoption of an additional, vastly higher poverty line with global relevance: $30 a day (on a PPP basis). It’s behind a paywall, but he’s tweeted the vast majority of the article, too. I have a lot of sympathy for the position Max stakes out here, and I like the article, but this is not the first time multiple poverty lines have been proposed (either globally or in a single country). In practice, what always seems to happen is that under political pressure, from both sides of the political spectrum, attention falls back to the less generous, lower line. On the right, there are those who prefer to look at who is flourishing, with the expectation that the flourishing of some will lift those languishing; on the left, there is the pressure to devote attention and resources on the very poorest. Related, in the comments, Josh Merfield also notes that what empirical measures of poverty actually capture is not always aligned with our intuition of what the poverty line measures.
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Last week, I linked to Dietrich Vollrath’s excellent Asterisk piece on the wrong kind of city; this week Ken Opalo draws on Dietz’s work (including both that article and his earlier paper with Jedwab and Gollin) to propose a politically and bureaucratically feasible approach to promoting faster economic growth in Nigeria: unleashing its cities by freeing them from dysfunctional central politics, and by intelligent investments in infrastructure. It is unsurprisingly excellent. What Ken brings is a really broad intellectual curiosity with a depth of knowledge and precision that comes from genuine expertise; the combination makes his substack one of the very best things to read on development.
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Mark Lowcock and I have a book coming out next week, the culmination of a couple of years’ research into the birth, life and death of the UK’s Department for International Development. The book draws on a huge amount of material, including interviews with most of the leading figures in the department’s life. We wrote the book because we thought there was something important to learn about how this widely respected (imperfect, to be sure, but effective and important) organization built, sustained and ultimately began to lose its capability to achieve impact. It’s a case study in how to build an effective organization, and ultimately in how to break one apart. Mark draws on our work to weigh in on the organizational changes being mooted for Germany’s (also well-respected) development apparatus. No surprises for guessing what he thinks of them.
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The sound you hear right now are the angels rejoicing: Michael Clemens and Mariapia Mendola have a new VoxDev piece on drawing on a huge amount of survey data which they use to investigate competing theories about what kind of person migrates from poor countries to richer ones. This is an exceptional article. You get a discussion of theory, with the Becker and Roy models explained pithily and clearly; you get the empirics which are used to take these theories to the data; and you get a discussion of why this all matters for the policy and politics governing migration. And as a bonus, there is a neat explanation and demonstration of Simpson’s paradox. How much more can you ask for from a 5 minute read? Also on VoxDev (which we should not take for granted: we are lucky it exists), an excellent interview with Christopher Adam on the macroeconomic effects of Covid and the process of recovery from them in sub-Saharan Africa.
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This, from Tim Harford, is also very good: how our own reactions to misinformation can amplify it, and make the problem worse.
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Getting research right is hard; doing research in exactly the right way is hard. There are thousands of small decisions you make in a research project which, though taken with the best intentions, can sometimes aggregate into a fatally flawed or misleading project. There really isn’t any foolproof protection against this sort of thing (as compared to, say, outright fraud, which may be very hard to detect, but at least it’s hard to commit unintentionally). A recent paper on Open Science, an approach to make research better and more replicable, may have been a victim of exactly this, leading to its retraction from the journal in which it was published. Andrew Gelman covers the story (so far).
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Finally, Francis Ford Coppola has a new movie out. I can’t say I’m wildly tempted to go see it, given it is being advertised by a trailer of almost incredible pomposity, but it has prompted the Ringer to consider which filmmakers have ever had a run of great films as good as Coppola (The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now). There are two problems with their list, which considers only filmmakers with streaks of four consecutive masterpieces. The first is that Apocalypse Now is a wildly over-rated movie, dependent on about 16 great minutes to make everyone else forget the other 2 and something hours (thank you Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando). The second is that the list is incredibly US-centric, and ignores hundreds of filmmakers who leave Coppola in the dust. Off the top of my head I can think of Takeshi Kitano (who has EIGHT masterpieces in a row to open his career, including Hana-Bi, A Scene at the Sea and Kids Return); Wong Kar-wai (again, his first eight films, culminating with 2046, and including In the Mood for Love); Almodovar (All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Bad Education, Volver); Kieslowski (the five-film run to his death, culminating in the Three Colours trilogy)… and I could go on. And on that note:
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.
