Marc F. Bellemare Posts

I have received a lot of positive feedback on my first two posts of the year (see here on how development economics has seemingly become about anything and everything, and see here on whether agricultural economics departments should invest further in international development). People seem to be enjoying the longer-form thoughts I share here about the fields I have worked in and, in the process, about the economics profession more broadly.

My interest in writing these posts goes back to my first year of college, when I took two classes which have profoundly influenced my thinking—one on the philosophy of knowledge, one on the analysis of scientific discourse—when doing a minor in philosophy.

I spent part of last summer working on a forthcoming article with Dan Millimet on Yair Mundlak and the fixed effects estimator. While working on that article, I was reminded of how the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA, my professional home) used to be known as the American Agricultural Economics Association (it was known by that name when I attende my first AAEA annual meeting in 2003) and how, before that, it had been known as the American Farm Economics Association.¹

Note the change in focus: From farm economics to agricultural economics, and from agricultural economics to agricultural and applied economics.

This emphasis on “applied economics” and whether it remains relevant is the subject of this post.

At the end of my last post, I said I was going to write about whether there is still a place for development economics in agricultural economics departments in light of how development economics has changed over the last 20 years to go from a field of economics looking at how market failures constrain economic development to being a “field” of economics about anything and everything, as long as it uses causal inference methods and uses data from a low- or middle-income country, loosely defined.

While you may think this is an inside baseball post about agricultural economics, the first half of this post is about development economics overall, and even the bit about agricultural economics might provide food for thought for people outside of agricultural economics.

(Over the last few years, I have explained to a number of colleagues and graduate students that I was not interested in doing development anymore. I am writing this post to avoid having the same conversation over and over, probably against all hope since no one reads anything anymore anyway. Other mid- to late-career folks might find something useful in this post, having perhaps witnessed the same changes I have over the last 25 years.)

“The mediocre teacher tells; the good teacher explains; the superior teacher demonstrates; the great teacher inspires,” said William Arthur Ward.