David Jacobstein

@rambletastic @ERC_Research Congratulations, this sounds very exciting!

Honored and excited to be awarded this 5-year @ERC_Research grant for Relational State Capacity (RSC) - seeing state capacity as relational contracts (trust, credibility, clarity) between bureaucrats and citizens! 1/

@TheSummerOfDan @MC_of_A Laundry Day?

florida high school class president zander moricz was told by his school that they would cut his microphone if he said “gay” in his grad speech, so he replaced gay with “having curly hair.” i am in awe

Thrilled to see this working paper out in print courtesy of @HarvardBSC !! bsc.cid.harvard.edu/publications/m…. This is a 'preview' some of my (still being drafted) book Mission Driven Bureaucrats, with a view to improving the book. 🧵 1/

Awesome interview with Lant Pritchett on Where Development Economics Went Wrong. discoursemagazine.com/economics/2022…

Calling all scholars working on the Political Economy of Development! Please consider submitting your papers to the @JPublicPolicy PED workshop I am hosting with Dan Honig @rambletastic. More info below. Please retweet!

Insightful Alicia Juarrero quote coming: 1. "The human sciences have often been tempted to model their subject matter after the (idealized) linear, closed systems near equilibrium that the hard sciences studied and that, for those very reasons, were tractable [...]

If anyone had a right to question whether our democracy was worth redeeming, it was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Because in the face of billy clubs and lynchings, poll taxes and literacy tests, he never gave in to violence, never waved a traitorous flag or gave up on our country.

Pay everyone $1500 to get vaccine It is a stimulus check & big vaccine incentive rolled into one Result: more people get vaccine, it saves lives, helps people financially, and the $400 B pays for itself w/ economic boost from ending pandemic RT if you agree #vaccinestimulus

I have a new paper out in @Gov_Journal! Tl;dr: Just putting @WorldBank personnel in the field doesn’t do much. Country Directors DO matter; but only after the Strategic Compact gave them more power, and not always positively. 1/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

@rambletastic Fantastic and practical paper Dan. I do think two major reasons for this challenge persisting are cultural (not what one thinks, but thinks others around them think) and also the diffusion of requirements across multiple players becoming too many vetos - govexec.com/management/202…

Once more, the full policy paper is here: cgdev.org/publication/ac… 31/

So giving talks on my book I realized something kinda embarrassing.Most folks in aid agencies didn’t need the book–they already agreed. But I DID discover this frustration is more widespread than folks recognise. My thoughts on harnessing that energy: cgdev.org/publication/ma…👇1/

@TheM_L_G What would Ajax be doing?

@alanhudson1 @WorldBank_IEG Case specific info on what added value or helped a larger effort work seems more valid and useful, and less prescriptive.

Is the "what works?" question [and the Good Governance framing] a helpful or unhelpful, way of informing the design + implementation of effective policies re accountability + citizen engagement? [My view: Not really, not at that level of aggregation] #Eval4GoodGov @WorldBank_IEG

@TheM_L_G There's some sort of formula, e.g. - highest finish in past 5 years (x) x hottest net xG streak in past 2 years (y) / ranked average wage bill (z) = level of expectations. Expectations rise to match both finishes and style of play; getting one without the other is undperforming.

@fp2p They make the policy-maker the protagonist because the relevant question is best answered at a central level, framed around a sector (“what works in education?”) with implications at scale, rather than a problem-specific question that only makes sense locally.

Something v odd about the debate on RCTs. The randomistas all publicly agree that RCTs should not be reified, but it seems to happen anyway, within policy making circles. What's driving it?

@TheM_L_G If you picked a midfield from the combined teams, who would you pick after Modric, Rakitic, Perisic, Brozovic? Rebic or Mascherano?

@honigstein @Zonal_Marking Immense effort, glad the proactive team went through, but TOTT must have room for both Bonucci and Chiellini!

Recommendations for measuring organizational capacity getting noticed - what do you think? twitter.com/boschneeman/st…

@joshuahaynes Took the plunge - lots to figure out, but this seems like an interesting new world.