I have signed up for the course on Development Economics offered by Marginal Revolution University. MRU is an initiative by Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen (I am sure you have heard of Marginal Revolution blog before). The courses on MRU are free.
So far I am about 15% through the course and I have enjoyed it thoroughly, especially the optional module on people which is essentially a literature review. Some takeaways seem simple and intuitive even to the extent you have heard them often - ideas like human capital and importance of institutions like property rights. Other ideas can be counter-intuitive like geographical factors can be crucial so governance is not everything and charter cities by Paul Romer. The key is drawing a context to that in a structured flow.
My personal bias seems to be on liking ideas in practice / bottom-up (Townsend, Bauer, Easterly, Ostrom) than bold new top-down ideas (Sachs, Romer). The top-down ideas in my view may run execution risk and subversion of the core idea because of conflict of interest. For example, it seems Honduras government backed away from original plan for charter city. Bottom-up idea may not be useful if it's based on anecdata, but I think problem of anecdata is easier to solve than problem of subversion/conflict of interest. Works of Townsend and de Soto show that bottom-up can be connected to bigger picture. Maybe just paint me Hayekian for now.
The literature review module has a session on Partha Dasgupta on the topic of environmental sustainability by and measurement of well being beyond GDP. For example, if a poor country chopped down all the trees and sold all the wood, the country is notionally richer in GDP but surely poorer on sustainability. Amartya Sen also asks this question. Mandar pointed to articles rallying against rampant consumerism - to which my pushback is that the focus is misplaced, and rampant consumerism is a result of rampant focus on GDP growth when the world needs productivity improvement and GDP growth at the same time. Basically I need to read more about Dasgupta and Sen on this topic. So far there seem to be questions but no clear answers. Let me know if you have a pointer.
Aside, recently someone also shared this article by person involved in BetterBirth project. I liked the discussion on how some ideas spread faster and some - while equally or more beneficial - don't. One can draw a parallel to economic ideas and link it to making development economics ideas spread.
So far I am about 15% through the course and I have enjoyed it thoroughly, especially the optional module on people which is essentially a literature review. Some takeaways seem simple and intuitive even to the extent you have heard them often - ideas like human capital and importance of institutions like property rights. Other ideas can be counter-intuitive like geographical factors can be crucial so governance is not everything and charter cities by Paul Romer. The key is drawing a context to that in a structured flow.
My personal bias seems to be on liking ideas in practice / bottom-up (Townsend, Bauer, Easterly, Ostrom) than bold new top-down ideas (Sachs, Romer). The top-down ideas in my view may run execution risk and subversion of the core idea because of conflict of interest. For example, it seems Honduras government backed away from original plan for charter city. Bottom-up idea may not be useful if it's based on anecdata, but I think problem of anecdata is easier to solve than problem of subversion/conflict of interest. Works of Townsend and de Soto show that bottom-up can be connected to bigger picture. Maybe just paint me Hayekian for now.
The literature review module has a session on Partha Dasgupta on the topic of environmental sustainability by and measurement of well being beyond GDP. For example, if a poor country chopped down all the trees and sold all the wood, the country is notionally richer in GDP but surely poorer on sustainability. Amartya Sen also asks this question. Mandar pointed to articles rallying against rampant consumerism - to which my pushback is that the focus is misplaced, and rampant consumerism is a result of rampant focus on GDP growth when the world needs productivity improvement and GDP growth at the same time. Basically I need to read more about Dasgupta and Sen on this topic. So far there seem to be questions but no clear answers. Let me know if you have a pointer.
Aside, recently someone also shared this article by person involved in BetterBirth project. I liked the discussion on how some ideas spread faster and some - while equally or more beneficial - don't. One can draw a parallel to economic ideas and link it to making development economics ideas spread.
No comments:
Post a Comment