Severine's last book, Peaceland, is still something I thrust into the hands of my MA students and aid colleagues. Check out her new book, Frontlines of Peace. Here is a glowing NYT review.
At first I started skeptical of her main claim--that the world does too much peace building from the treetops rather than the grassroots. I still emphasize the center a lot more than Severine, but her argument made me realize how most of my career I'd spent emulating her advice.
My strategy for the last 15y has been to look in fragile places for mostly-ignored, somewhat wacky locals with bold ideas. That's how I came to study cash transfers in post-conflict zones, alternative dispute resolution to reduce village conflicts, or cognitive behavior therapy.
These brilliant, sometimes lonely voices had tinkered their way to successful programs. Most of the time my first reaction was "this is nuts". But their belief was infectious. And I had the tools and ability to help expand and test what they did.
So, even though for national peace, I would still like to see attention to the treetops, and similar tinkering and testing there, we have a lot to learn and emulate from the grassroots. Highly recommended.
Good thread. But my own view is that without a big shift in demand for economics faculty, we should not be expanding PhD programs. Rather, we should have MA programs that are not 1-year cash cows for econ programs who then neglect their MA students. Policy schools get this right.
The weirdest part about econ Twitter these last weeks is the number of people suggesting that departments admit more students without explaining who will pay for them or where they will get jobs afterwards. I don’t want our PhD funding to be a subsidy to Citibank.
A word on policy schools. It’s easy to screw this up as well. A lot of them teach most classes with adjuncts too (although these are good practitioners who care). But it’s possible to take 8 classes of “view from the trenches” and never get technical skills.
The pandemic changed a lot of teaching for the worse, but I wanted to tweet how it spurred me to try to change the way we teach international policy and development @HarrisPolicy.
In short, we took the opportunity to try to get policymakers all over the world to teach classes.
One of the classes I'm most excited about is led by the staff of @BusaraCenter, a behavioral laboratory in Nairobi. A range of East African researchers, faculty, and Busara VP @MSchomerus are leading a class on behavioral research and economics. Students will run real studies!
What I liked the most is the theme Busara proposed -- representational and diversity issues in development, and what it means to be running research when there's such a power differential. So a quant class with meaningful anthropology, psychology, etc baked in. It's amazing.
Here's a story of unintended consequences, of academic theories and government policy gone wrong, of how damn hard it is to tackle organized crime, and of insights into what criminal organizations really want and do.
First thing you need to know: Every low and middle income neighborhood in the city has a neighborhood gang called a combo. We did a census of them. Here's how it looks. Every square inch is claimed by one combo or another.
This is valuable territory. There's a healthy retail drug market. They make and collect loans. Some even run local monopolies on staples like arepas, eggs, yogurt, and cooking gas in neighborhoods like this.
When we left off, we were talking about what happened when states try to improve governing in underserved neighborhoods. Here's a "caravana" they held in each neighborhood, alongside the liaisons, where all agencies comes out to the sector.
After two years of intense state governance, relative state went down!!
Note: when we launched this with the city, we expected crowding out, and never expected the "crowding in" effect to dominate.
Now, to be clear, we don't see clear evidence of a rise in absolute levels of combo rule. There are some signs that the state struggled to deliver, and that decreased people's happiness with the state. But even where it worked well: no evidence of crowding out!
it’s great that economists do lots of field work and interviews now. But think of the absolute sloppiest, terrible causal inference paper you can remember, from someone who doesn’t even know that they don’t know what they’re doing.