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Once upon a time In the fall of 2013, I took my paper with Lindsey Novak and Tara Steinmetz on female genital cutting (FGC) on the road. I presented it at invited seminars and at development conferences here and there and received a lot of good feedback before submitting it for publication.

In March of last year, the Journal of Development Economics invited us to revise and resubmit it for publication. One of the best comments we received, however, was that we were only looking at Senegal and The Gambia for the most recent years available, and since there existed comparable data sets for most of West Africa over several years, why not expand the analysis to cover West Africa, thereby gaining in external validity?

And so Lindsey got to work on cleaning 36 additional country-year data sets, i.e., all of the available Demographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicators Cluster Surveys for West Africa, for all available years, which included questions about FGC. This occupied us Lindsey for the better part of this last year (and because the data sets are repeated cross-sections which vary a bit in how they were collected both between and within countries, this generated an almost 200-page appendix), but we finally have a revised version of the paper.

An interesting new article (gated) titled “Agricultural Economics and Economics: Influence and Counter-Influence, 1910–1960” by Marc Nerlove (yes, the same Marc Nerlove who won the Clark Medal and made seminal contributions to economics and econometrics) in the latest issue of Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy:

This paper examines the effects which agricultural economists had on developments in economics and on economic policies during the years 1910-1960. These developments are viewed against the backdrop of what was happening in the economy at large and particularly with respect to farmers, and of major books and articles in economics published in the period. Some ideas of agricultural economists and the influence they had are discussed. Agricultural issues and agricultural economists, in the broad sense, had a profound influence on the development of general economics and on economic policies during this period.

The article covers many of the contributions of agricultural economists to economics. Nerlove’s contribution is obviously mentioned, but he also discusses Theodore W. Schultz, who won the Nobel prize for economics in 1979 for his work on agricultural development, among others.

After reading Mastering ‘Metrics last month, however, I am surprised by Nerlove’s omission of the contribution of Philip G. Wright, an agricultural economist who, in collaboration with his son Sewall Wright, derived the instrumental variables estimator in an 1928 book titled The Tariff on Animal and Vegetable Oils.

Similarly, had Nerlove’s article not stopped in 1960, he would have had to mention Yair Mundlak who, for all intents and purposes, derived the fixed effects estimator in a 1961 article in the Journal of Farm Economics–which has since been renamed the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

The father of Major Major, a character in Catch 22, a novel by Joseph Heller, makes a good living not growing alfalfa. “The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce.” Each day, Mr Major “sprang out of bed at the crack of noon… just to make certain that the chores would not be done.”

To this day, to be treated as a farmer in America doesn’t necessarily require you to grow any crops. According to the Government Accountability Office, between 2007 and 2011 Uncle Sam paid some $3m in subsidies to 2,300 farms where no crop of any sort was grown. Between 2008 and 2012, $10.6m was paid to farmers who had been dead for over a year. Such payments explain why Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, is promoting a rule to attempt to crack down on payments to non-farming folk. But with crop prices now falling, taxpayers are braced to be fleeced again.

From a great article in the most recent issue of The Economist. The article goes on to mention how people like the Walmart heirs, CNN founder Ted Turner, Senator Chuck Grassley, Jon Bon Jovi, and “working-class” hero Bruce Springsteen (whose net worth is estimated to stand at about $300 million) are among those hard-up rural folks who receive farm subsidies.

What is behind this state of affairs? It’s the political economy, stupid.