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A nice post by Frances Woolley titled “Economists Aren’t in the Prediction Business–and That’s a Good Thing” over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative reminded me of how much I dislike “determinants” papers, and so I thought I should write a short post about the topic.

I frequently run into “determinants” papers. Typically, a student in the second-year qualifying research paper seminar I teach in our PhD program will submit a paper proposal that is a “determinants” paper. More frequently, however, I see “determinants” papers when new manuscripts are assigned to me for handling at Food Policy.

“What’s a ‘determinants’ paper?,” you ask? A “determinants” paper is a paper in which the authors do not specifically try to answer a question of the form “Does X cause Y?”

I am in Ithaca this week to run some lab experiments (more on those in early 2015) with my PhD student Yu Na Lee and my friend and coauthor David Just. It will be nice to return to my old stomping grounds, get to see old friends, and get a bunch of work done on a few separate projects.

Because I am going to be in town, the Dyson School’s Graduate Student Association has asked me to present on the topic of social media for economists. If you are interested, do come by. The seminar will be on Friday, from 11:45 to 1, in Warren 101.

A recent post over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative on the staples trap made me dust off an idea I had a few years ago about the futility of development policy. The staple trap is such that

While exporting [natural] resources can generate great wealth, the danger of such a path is that a staples economy becomes overspecialized in raw material extraction to meet foreign needs, and runs up large external and domestic debts over-developing the resource base and associated infrastructure. These become hard to service if and when external demand collapses, setting the stage for widespread financial dislocation along with painful losses of jobs and output.

What I discuss in this post is similar to the staples trap, but it is not quite the same. The staples trap is generally the result of market forces: As demand for a staple increases, the industry surrounding that staple develops and generates side industries (e.g., processing, packaging, exporting, etc.)

What I discuss here is the result of policy making–and it illustrates the futility of development policy, by which I mostly mean “industrial policy” rather than specific development policies like building roads and bringing clean water into villages. If I can be Minnesota nice about it, this post illustrates the development policy trap.