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Aine Seitz McCarthy
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Institutional development silos

4/21/2012

4 Comments

 
I spent this weekend at the Midwest International Economic Development Conference. This was one of those conferences that I left feeling extremely ambitious, connected, and motivated but also very frustrated and overwhelmed.  There were so many fantastic papers and brilliant people inspiring big new ideas in my head. However, I've got three posts coming on frustrations and only one on inspiring new idea. So I guess frustrations are winning. Here's number one.

Please tell me why I should care.

Development is conceptually different from other aspects of economics in that we are seriously invested in one particular outcome, that outcome being improved livelihoods and welfare of poor people.  This isn't just some interesting identification strategy or abstract modeling methodology, this is a real outcome with real people. And this was a development conference, so if you aren't able to motivate me about why your research is important or realistic in actually affecting people lives, I am not really interested.

But this priority on the actual motivation of research seems to have been an afterthought on far too many of the presentations. For this lack of emphasis on why research is important, I partly blame economists and their extreme focus on empirics and methodology, loosing sight of what questions to ask and why to ask them (more on this in frustration post 2).  But mostly, I blame institutionalized silo-ing. This conference was advertized to economic departments, was put on by my applied economics department and included speakers from economics departments. But development is, like I said, conceptually different from just economics.  In order to really address issues of poverty, applying economics to research topics in health, behavior, education, technology, agriculture, fertility, migration and politics necessitates feedback from people outside of economics. Actually addressing these topics requires interaction across disciplines and sectors.  This conference really really needed representation from the public sector, from NGOs, and from real development practitioners (looking at you, MDPs).

What was really needed was more people to stick their necks out and ask: why is this [insert endogeneous effect and measurable impact here] even important? How does this relate to development and improving human welfare?

Non-academics are much better at asking this question and thinking critically about actual implementation of development. And there simply weren't enough at this conference.

If you can't answer this question convincingly, you need to to seriously reconsider your research.

4 Comments
Aine McCarthy
4/22/2012 12:56:34 am

Some email dialogue that followed the conference resulted in the following comment from a student in Comparative International Development Education:

I was impressed with all the sophisticated analyses, models and regressions that were presented, and I realize that this is what gets the attention of policy-makers (even though I question how much they themselves understand). However, I was disappointed when the numbers and analyses seemed to elicit more passion than the topics/subjects themselves. And after all was said and done, some researchers still struggled to connect their work to actual policy recommendations. I did hear a few good 'so what?' questions but many members of the audience seemed more interested in picking apart the models and controlling for different variables that I felt we all lost track of the end goal.

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ironmonkey285
4/23/2012 12:20:15 am

It is interesting to think about the importance of causation.. Obviously this is not lost to you.

One of the benefits of economists work is the methodological soundness. While there should certainly be discussion when it comes to planning an intervention (ie how should we design software to put on the 1000's of laptops we'll be giving away)..

Beyond this, though, there is some hold up insomuch as researchers from other disciplines, especially in a development context, are still trying to catch up in terms of some of the quantitative methodology (though other parts of their methodology might be more sound)..

To economists credit.. many are interested in new/tricky/sneaky methods because they are just intellectually interesting.. but many are probably interested because they think the methods can be used more generally.. and because evaluation tools/methods (and the results of robust research designs) can be used more generally.. perhaps even eventually by 'laypeople'.

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Matt B
4/24/2012 03:48:22 pm

This is my biggest complaint about econ in general, and also the reason I didn't feel a compelling urge to attend this year's MIEDC. Method over content. At least in micro the method is usually good. I totally agree that it's especially weird in development. "Let's use grants to pay our salary and go to a poor country, ask people to take my survey, so I can estimate this elasticity I've been thinking about lately." What's it all for?

Who to blame? I agree with the reasons you named. But it seems to me that the people who make it big in development spend a lot of time asking good questions. Yet there are also a lot of young people in the field who just want to apply what they know to publishing papers so they don't sink in academia. And what you learn in econ grad school is how to do math and metrics. I think it is very hard to ask good questions in development without significant firsthand experience in your country of interest. At least that's been my experience so far. But I don't know if that applied to this year's MIEDC, and I can't think of any valid instruments.

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Aine McCarthy
4/28/2012 06:40:57 am

Matt, I think you are completely right about the focus on methodology over content, and definitely over context. To me, content and context are what make the research interesting, but I seem to be in the minority. Given that this was an economics conference, the methodological tools (Ryan's new/tricky/sneaky stuff) that follow are the intellectual main event.

Matt, you're also right that it's also important to think a bit about the ethics of this research. and usually if I'm not motivated by why the research question is important at all, I'm more skeptical of the ethics.

I think that grad school in econ dev could benefit from a broader focus than just math and metrics, but to some degree its up to us to take the economics and go apply it. There are great development policy, public health, geography and education classes out there, but it takes some trans-disciplinarity to seek those out. My view is that good research starts with a relevant question, one very well informed by practice and context (eg from working with folks in education, health, policy, etc) that applies our technical skills and methodology.

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    Aine Seitz McCarthy

    International development, economics and some pretty ambitious ideas from a stubborn graduate student clinging to her sense of adventure.


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