Category: Uncategorized

My good friend and coauthor Nick Carnes’ book White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making is coming out today. You can order it here from Amazon. My copy arrived early last week, so I read it over the weekend.

The book’s release could not be better timed, what with last month’s government shutdown and given how some politicians seem to have it in for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. My advice: Buy it; read it. I suspect it will soon become one of those classics of American politics that one cannot afford to not have read.

In his book, Nick overwhelmingly makes the case that class matters in US politics. That is, working-class folks — folks who have spent most of their career in blue-collar occupations — are underrepresented at all levels of government.

Not only are they underrepresented, class also seems to affect how legislators vote. Members of Congress who come from big business tend to favor the business sector when they vote in the House or Senate; those who were farmers tend to favor the agricultural sector; and so on. So given that working-class folks are underrepresented, this means that few of our legislators favor the working class in how they vote in Congress–what we have is effectively a white-collar government.

Though there was a time where critics of development economics could get away with throwing around terms like “neoliberal” and “Washington consensus” around in order to be heard by policy makers, it seems that nowadays, the views of development economists largely prevail in development policy. Part of that is most likely due to the overwhelming focus of development economists on answering narrower but answerable questions. That is, on questions like “Do deworming drugs improve educational outcomes?” rather than on questions like “Do structural adjustment programs foster economic growth?”

The focus on smaller questions has led to impact evaluation activities that are much more credible than they used to be. Whereas in the 1980s and 1990s one could get away with comparing outcomes pre- and post-intervention, today any impact evaluation worth its salt has to have a credible research design, i.e., one that allows credibly estimating the causal impacts of a given intervention.

So in the last few years, “impact evaluation” has become quite the buzzword, and everyone — from the greenest of students in Masters programs in development to the development NGOs, and from the big development agencies like USAID to philanthropies like the Gates Foundation — is obsessed with impact evaluation.

That’s a good thing, at least on the face of it: If we know what works, we can better target development interventions, and so development policy can more effectively lift people out of poverty.

Not in my Backyard?

But does everyone really want to be evaluated? I’ve long suspected that, for many actors in development policy, but specifically for NGOs, the answer is “No.” Indeed, many people work with NGOs because they are true believers in the mission of the NGO they work for. Oh, sure: they’ll talk about impact evaluation because the donors want to hear about it. But do they really want to be evaluated? On the one hand, there are true believers. On the other hand, there are those who think “Well, what if an impact evaluation finds no impact? In my heart of hearts I know what we do is right.”

1. A guide to the true modern intellectual?
2. The Madagascar election is remarkable in that it took place at all.
3. A gift idea for the grad student in your life: Grad School Barbie.
4. Roads and Migration Decisions in Tanzania.
5. The Sriracha factory can stay open–for now (ht: Kim Yi Dionne).