Skip to content

Category: Development

Published March 27, 2012

Beyond the Market, Part 1: Hustle and Flow

I am teaching my Law, Economics, and Organization class this semester. The class is for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, so there is a good variety of backgrounds and interests among the students who enroll in it.

Since the class is a seminar, I spend about half the time teaching, with the other half spent discussing specific papers.

Last Friday, in the context of the module on relational contracts, we discussed two classic papers. The first is Greif’s (1993) paper, in which he discusses the various mechanisms used by 11th-century Jewish merchants around the Mediterranean to sustain long-distance trade. The second is Bernstein’s (1992) investigation of how diamond traders choose to “opt out” of the legal system by developing their own extra-legal institutions.

Hustle and Flow

In the spirit of both articles, I wanted to link to a somewhat dated article in Wired,  a Q&A with Robert Neuwirth, who published a book titled Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy last fall. Here is an excerpt:

Continue readingBeyond the Market, Part 1: Hustle and Flow
Published March 14, 2012

Eugen Weber and the Western Tradition in 26 Hours

In college, I declared economics as my major before doing a Masters in economics and a PhD in applied economics. Having been trained as an economist through-and-through, I am thus woefully ignorant of what the humanities and other social sciences have had to say about development policy.

While I did read outside of economics during my minor in philosophy, my philosophical readings were largely confined to political philosophy and epistemology — two topics that are of direct relevance to economics.

In recent years, however, I have decided to remedy my ignorance by reading classic social sciences books surrounding development policy. I was thus very happy when Chris Blattman posted his list of books development economists should read but usually don’t.

I have so far read six of the titles on Chris’ list. All were very enlightening. Perhaps more importantly, all contributed in some way to my research and teaching.

One of my favorite books on the list was Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen, which is an account of how France modernized between 1870 and the end of World War I. It has also become my favorite nonfiction book. When I realized that Weber had been teaching at UCLA, I imagined how interesting it must have been to take a class with him.

I no longer need to imagine it. A student in my principles of micro class, who noticed the book on my desk when she visited during my office hours, brought to my attention this series of video lectures on the Western tradition, taught by Weber himself. There are 52 lectures, each lasting 30 minutes. Watching these lectures should be a very nice way to spend my next 26 hours of spare time.

(HT: Haoxiaohan Cai.)

Published March 8, 2012

Spring Break Classic Posts: Thoughts on the Debate Surrounding Randomized Controlled Trials

(It’s Spring Break here this week, so I am taking the week off from blogging to work to revise a few articles and begin working on new research projects. As a result, I am re-posting old posts that some new readers might have missed but which were very popular the first time I posted them. The following was initially posted on May 25, 2011.)

Last weekend, Nicholas Kristof published a column in the New York Times in which he praised the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in development policy. In a fit of econ envy, Kristof even went so far as to confess that if he had to do it all over again, he would major in economics in college instead of political science.

As a result of Kristof’s column, however, the use of RCTs in development policy has come under a considerable amount of scrutiny in the development blogosphere.

Continue readingSpring Break Classic Posts: Thoughts on the Debate Surrounding Randomized Controlled Trials