Asif Dowla retweetledi
The college that does the most to lift poor kids into the middle class probably isn't one you've heard of. It's not Harvard. It's not MIT. It might be a CUNY campus.
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Asif Dowla
19.2K posts
Asif Dowla
@audowla
Landers Endowed Chair, author of the book, The Poor Always Pay Back, Chelsea fan, husband, father of three, interested in learning new things, RT≠ endorsement
Maryland, USA Katılım Temmuz 2015
643 Takip Edilen1.3K Takipçiler
@jackcalland @WilsonMKing Even with the evidence in hand, I seriously doubt a finance minister will be convinced to give out free cash.
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@audowla @WilsonMKing I don't disagree that it's hard. But it's *impossible* without any evidence
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RCTs can of course also shed light on macro questions!
Keynes theorized about the sources of excess labor supply in equilibrium. Breza et al (2021) induced it experimentally
Does Paul Rosenstein-Rodan's "Big Push" actually exist? Egger et al (2022) show it does!
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde@JesusFerna7026
A fundamental lesson from my posts these last two weeks on modernization, industrial policy, and development is that development economics should be about understanding why South Korea got rich but Bolivia did not. The current field has largely given up on that question. Sharply identified RCTs on small micro programs are a fine way to publish in the AER and get tenure at a fancy university, but a profession that knows everything about microfinance impact evaluations and almost nothing about industrialization has misallocated its own intellectual capital on a pretty heroic scale. Four images of Seoul:
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@jackcalland @WilsonMKing You have to convince them that, instead of building rural health centers or an export processing zone, giving money without any strings attached is a good idea. Not easy. As a former Indian Finance Minister said, economists don't have to contest elections; we do.
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@audowla @WilsonMKing Persuading the finance minister will always be difficult, but surely made easier with credible findings of positive effects in hand
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Delighted that the recording of this great conversation has posted. The primary focus on the discussion was Joel's recent book with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini, Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000. The key argument of the book is that the kinship/clan structures in China determined the nature of social cooperation while the weaker structures in Europe led to corporations ranging from universities to guilds and so is the deep root for the Great Divergence.
In evaluating the argument, Jim Robinson emphasized the difficulties of tracing out how family structure differences, which Two Paths... associates with the ways the Catholic Church determined European marriage and family laws, thereby creating a sequence of nonkinship-based institutions that determine the timing of the Great Divergence. I focused on 1) the role of contingency, for example events such as the Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion or the destruction of the Ming Treasure fleet and 2) the absence of an analysis of how Confucian ethics interacted with kinship organizational structure, which is necessary to sustain the kinship/inefficiency argument.
UChicago | Stone Center on Inequality & Mobility@UCStoneCenter
Last month, we brought together Joel Mokyr, James Robinson & @sndurlauf for an at-capacity discussion on the roots of the Industrial Revolution and the divergent economic paths of Europe & China. Interested in the next event? Be the first to know: bit.ly/4f09cBu
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@nomhossain @akib_kn Giving free bed-nets
Conditional and unconditional cash transfers
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@akib_kn Are there issues RCTs have helped us understand better?
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Pick one (broad) question in development that everyone 'agrees' is important, and then walk us through how RCT and macro/meso evidence have helped us understand it better.
Lauren Gilbert@notanastronomer
want to argue about macro vs. micro dev questions? send your one page pitches to submissions@indevelopmentmag.com
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Point 4. We are already seeing a bit of a revival when it comes to the explicit study of industrial policy in the mainstream.
See the folks in these papers + Tishara Garg has very new and interesting work on IP!
It’s a very exciting time to be interested in these topics!
Oliver Kim@oliverwkim
Some stabs at the question
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Some thoughts re: the profession’s so-called focus on RCTs and poverty versus industrial policy and growth, from someone who has hyper-fixated on this fact for some time.
First it would help to read this review by Juhasz, Rodrik, & Lane, published in the Annual Review (1/n)
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@ryancbriggs @MeganTStevenson There is an older survey paper by Easterly that reviews the theoretical work and concludes that no empirical evidence has been found. This paper also serves as proof of the 'big push'. BRAC's massive intervention pushes the poor beyond the trap and into a virtuous cycle.
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@audowla @MeganTStevenson It’s the first that I’m aware of. I think that’s huge for theory
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But seriously, have we learned anything important about theory via RCT’s in the last 20 years? Beyond the fact that most things evaluated don’t really work?
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck
This is not an argument against RCTs. It's an argument against RCTs that are not testing any relevant theory. Of course we want to know why South Korea got rich and Bolivia did not, but we won't figure it out with cross-country regressions or arm-chair guesswork either.
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@ryancbriggs @MeganTStevenson I guess this was the first rigorous empirical proof of the existence of a poverty trap.
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@MeganTStevenson So ironically the key variation here wasn’t experimentally manipulated, but I think this was a big deal in that it’s exactly what poverty trap theory predicts nber.org/system/files/w…
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@akib_kn @nomhossain @zaeemal_ I would prefer a student to work on how to foster prosperity in a messy, imperfect institutional environment. AJR did a real disservice to the profession, setting the benchmark of perfect institutions as a precursor to development.
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@nomhossain @zaeemal_ Meaning why I would prefer him/her to work on macro issues in dev?
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Asif Dowla retweetledi
A fundamental lesson from my posts these last two weeks on modernization, industrial policy, and development is that development economics should be about understanding why South Korea got rich but Bolivia did not.
The current field has largely given up on that question. Sharply identified RCTs on small micro programs are a fine way to publish in the AER and get tenure at a fancy university, but a profession that knows everything about microfinance impact evaluations and almost nothing about industrialization has misallocated its own intellectual capital on a pretty heroic scale.
Four images of Seoul:
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@hcyeoi As a proud Chittagonian, I have to say you don't know what you are talking about. Of course, you haven't tasted proper shutki dishes. Eggplant cooked with swordfish shutki is worth dying for. Fried Bombay duck shutki is fantastic
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@mattkahn1966 @ManhattanInst Perfect example of the saying, a Republican is a liberal who got mugged.
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Great profile! Congratulations @manhattaninst
wsj.com/opinion/reihan…
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The US Treasury is too poor (and has too few reserves) to bailout -- or even provide a swap to -- the very rich Gulf family oil and investment businesses ...
With @StephenPaduano
ft.com/content/1f93e4…
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@binayak_sen She is the niece of the Finance Minister. I know her and her family. I agree she should be widely read. She was teaching creative writing at Michigan and is now a professor at the University of North Texas.
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Surah poets.org/poem/surah
Read this—a poem by Tarfia Faizullah, a Bangladeshi poet born in New York. If you like this, there are more of her poems showcased on poets.org.
She is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018) and Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014).
Faizullah’s writing, translated into Bengali, Chinese, Persian, and Tamil, has appeared widely in both the U.S. and abroad, including in publications such as The Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Poetry, Ms. Magazine, Oxford American, The New Republic, and The Nation.
She needs to be interviewed by scholars and literati and deserves to be widely publicized in Bangladesh.
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Here's the full story. Dude used the India Pakistan rivalry to get Pakistan to agree. 🤣
Gaurav Sabnis@gauravsabnis
An embarrassing side plot is that the US researchers who wanted to study vulture population collapse first went to India. Govt & bureaucrats stymied them so much that they gave up & tried Pakistan. Which let them collect the data that identified Dicloflenac as the culprit.
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We don't know the full story behind the proposed swap lines. For now, all we have are Bessent's statements which, IMO, are a bit "strange" (pun intended) in that they signal a growing awareness in the US that dollar dominance may require some "negotiation" to sustain.
FIN.
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Are Bessent's proposed swap lines with Gulf and Asian states an indication that the dollar has become what Susan Strange--the OG theorist of the geoeconomics of international currencies--called a "Negotiated Currency"?
A short 🧵(1/10)
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@paulnovosad One of the panelists on the BBC show AI Decoded said that in the age of AI agents, humans will lose their agency!
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One of the panelists on the BBC show AI Decoded said that in the age of AI agents, humans will lose their agency. That is an astute observation.
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@ATabarrok I am told that he is responsible for the Openknowledge.worldbank.org, through which you get free downloads of all World Bank Publications.
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Never agreed with his politics much, but Barney Frank earned my lasting respect the day he used "Pareto optimal" correctly in a speech.
Politics & Poll Tracker 📡@PollTracker2024
Politico: Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), a liberal icon who was a key architect of the landmark Wall Street regulations Democrats enacted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, has entered hospice care at his home in Maine. And as one of his last acts, he is preparing to release a book repudiating his party’s left flank. A champion of liberal causes during his 32 years representing Massachusetts in the House, Frank says progressive Democrats have “embraced an agenda that goes beyond what’s politically acceptable.” politico.com/news/2026/04/2…
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