Author: Marc F. Bellemare

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.

I had promised myself I would deactivate my Twitter X profile after the election to take a break from frantically cycling through the same four or five political pundits’ accounts since early summer. The date to re-activate my account (to avoid it being deleted) came and went without me wanting to do so. And just like that, there went nearly 20,000 followers accrued over the span of 14 years.