Agricultural Economics—Without Apology
The Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm University is celebrating its 50th anniversary this month.
To celebrate, the IIES held a symposium last week that featured presentations by (all links open .pdf documents):
among others.
I was not planning on blogging about this, but an email last week from my colleague Nicholas Magnan telling me he wanted to run the Trading Game — a simple in-class experiment I run with the students in my principles of microeconomics class every year to show them that trade leaves no one worse off — in his own classes and asking me whether I had written anything about this made me realize I should probably share this with other teachers of economics.
The Trading Game is pretty simple. Before the start of every semester I have to teach principles of microeconomics, I look at the number of students enrolled in my class, and I head out to the nearest dollar store to buy an equal amounts of trinkets.
As luck would have it, WikiMedia Commons has a picture of the very place in Durham where I buy all of my Trading Game trinkets:
The trinkets I buy are all in the $1-to-$3 range, and they consist largely of toys. This year’s trinket harvest yielded a Toys (as in the movie) puzzle, glow sticks, Donald Duck stickers, fake tattoos, miniature plastic animals, toy dinosaurs, etc. For a group of 50 student, I usually spend no more than $100 of the allocation I receive for my course.
Then, when I want to run the Trading Game in the wake of teaching students about how trade can make everyone better off in context of chapter 1 of Mankiw’s Principles of Microeconomics, I go around allocating trinkets to students at random.
I then ask students to assign a value to the trinket they have just received ranging from 0 to 10, with higher values meaning cooler trinkets.
We then go around the room recording those values. Because students often bring their laptops to lecture, it is easy to find a volunteer to record those values, but you can have a teaching assistant do it. Once all values are recorded, total welfare (i.e., the sum total of the values students assign to their trinkets) is announced.
I then tell students that they have five minutes to trade voluntarily between themselves, insisting on the fact that trades must be voluntary (i.e., no stealing) and cannot involve dynamic aspects, or credit (i.e., no “I’ll give you my cool dinosaur if you give me your awful trinket and you buy drinks on Friday night.”)
Once students are done trading, we once again go around the room recording the values they assign to their trinkets. Once all values are recorded, total welfare is announced once again.
And that’s usually where the magic happens. When I ran the Trading Game last week, my class’ “aggregate welfare” went from 128 to about 180, if I recall correctly, and you could just see that it had become obvious to students that (in this context of well enforced property rights) trade not only left no one worse off, but it increased aggregate welfare.
If I’d wanted to do things more convincingly, I would’ve asked the student who recorded values in a spreadsheet to test whether the two values were statistically different from one another.
I cannot take credit for the Trading Game, as I first learned about it in 1999, when I played it at a colloquium for student leaders organized by a Canadian free-market think-tank (yes, those actually exist).
Political evolution on the continent’s western side is often a series of eruptions: order appears to be established, and then the volcano explodes again. In Togo and Gabon, the levers of power have long seemed immutable, dominated by the same families for decades. In Guinea and Ivory Coast, both on the mend after years of upheaval, democratic order seemed to arrive at last only recently. But all of these nations bubble with uncertainty beneath the surface. Western donors and officials who visit the West African capitals to offer congratulations on stability — the new World Bank president was in Abidjan, the Ivorian commercial capital, last week — should be warned: their compliments may be premature.
Legitimacy, it turns out, is not conferred from the outside.
From an article by Adam Nossiter in last Sunday’s New York Times.
For me, the last sentence of the excerpt above sums it all up: the amount of outside recognition a regime enjoys is not a sufficient condition for state power.
A regime also needs its legitimacy to be recognized internally in order to be legitimate, and many (West) African regimes simply are not recognized internally as legitimate widely enough.
Thus, it is only when a regime enjoys both external and internal legitimacy that we can truly talk of state power. In the limit, it is probably the case that internal legitimacy can be a sufficient condition. But not external legitimacy.
Imagine what would happen if the US government were recognized by the governments of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, etc., but had little legitimacy within its own borders except in the areas around Washington, DC. Chances are whatever policies would be adopted in Washington would have little traction, say, in California or in Texas.
In a post on state power last week, I discussed how the point made above (and by Nossiter in his Times article) is made very well in Herbst’s States and Power in Africa. Another good reading on the topic is Crawford Young’s The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective.
Other books which seem interesting on the topic (but which I haven’t yet had a chance to read) are Besley and Persson’s (2011) Pillars of Prosperity (though note that there is a bit of microeconomic theory in there) and Migdal’s (1988) Strong Societies and Weak States.
That being said, I have not been trained as a political scientist, so I am not an expert on this literature. I hope a few political scientists will chime in with additional suggestions — in particular, suggestions for journal articles, which can be read more quickly than books.