What’s going right with development economics (I): Process
My posts on “what’s wrong with my discipline” are a plea for further improvement rather than a condemnation of the status quo. A student’s passing remark (that my post was really depressing) and a couple of recent talks reminded me that I should really correct the record.
That is,
· I believe that there are (serious) problems with our discipline.
· I believe that there have been many positive changes during my professional career.
This post is about the second of those two points. This post is on process and the next one on products.
What’s going right on process
Greater representation among women. Economics is notorious for its leaky pipeline and under-representation among women, even compared to other STEM subjects that were traditionally biased towards males. In development economics men are not over-represented (labor/health is the other). In fact, there is greater representation among women compared to men in their doctoral studies and potentially in faulty positions (I cannot find the numbers for faculty, so any data would be helpful!)
More fieldwork than before. Little known story: When Asim Khwaja and I were doing our PhD’s, in our third year, both of us decided to go and spend a year `in the field.’ Asim went off to Skardu, and I went off to the Indian mountains, where I spent a year setting up a clinic to understand how people in the small village and town where I was staying accessed healthcare. Many of the insights from that year drove my later thinking on healthcare, but at the time that we did this, no PhD students were “going to the field.” Abhijit Banerjee, one of our supervisors had pretty much given up on us at that time (I think), but we conveniently took his silence as acquiescence (“well, he didn’t actually say don’t go”). Remarkably his support for what we choose to do and our work has never wavered and continues to this day (thank you, Abhijit!).
From what I can tell, taking a full year off to spend time in the field is still kind of not done, but students are spending a *lot* more time in the field compared to before, and many people have pre-doc and internship opportunities where they go and spend months and sometimes a year or more living in a country. So, yes, the work is still falling short on context in a lot of cases, but the opportunity and ability to learn from where your work is situated is infinitely better now.
Learning across fields. Banerjee, Duflo, Foster, Kremer, Ray, Rosenzweig….. The founding parents our field have innovated across multiple fields in economics and we are luck that, to this day, the single moniker “development economics” encompasses multiple subfields within economics. This means that, unlike the conferences on health/education/labor where only papers from the subfield are presented, we get to see papers that span the spectrum from political economy to health to firms to industrial organization to trade. Yes, this does mean that sometimes you are quite lost, but it also means that we are exposed to the latest thinking in a lot of areas, and that cross-percolation vastly improves the quality of our work.
And finally….peer review. I review many papers every year. And I am often frustrated by my fellow reviewers’ bias towards evaluating the technical details rather than whether the question and the execution of the paper is sensible given the context. I have reviewed papers where totally implausible spending patterns are deep in appendix tables or the fact that a place is buried in snow for half the year is never mentioned in a paper on facility usage, but comments from other reviewers focus on clustering for standard errors rather than the glaring contextual flaws.
But here is the thing. Peer review was never really meant to deal with the unprecedented surge in the production of academic knowledge that we are now seeing. Ugo Gentilini points out that there are 1.4 million papers on cash grants; just in the sciences 3 million papers are published a year (almost certainly an undercount) . And the quality of peer review has completely collapsed. I have reviewed papers for Science where the 2nd reviewer writes literally one paragraph. If you want to see for yourself or show your students, take a hike over to BMC Public Health, click on an article and look at the peer reviews for that article, which the journal has courageously chosen to make public. This is not a predatory journal, in fact it is a respectable journal in the field—yet, finding a single substantial review in the morass of atrocious comments will be a chore.
So, the fact of the matter is that we are all struggling. But development economics (and, I think, the field as a whole) has been quite remarkable at keeping the quality of peer reviewing at a very high standard. In fact, our primary complaint is that the reviews are too long, and it will often require a 100-page response to satisfy our reviewers. The cost of keeping our reviewing process at such a high quality may be that we have ended up monopolizing the discipline and pushing entry costs way too high, but the honest truth is that this is a trade-off not a pareto decreasing decision.
Nobody foresaw the huge increase in the production of knowledge that started with the turn of the century, and no one knows how to rejig a system built around scarcity in the production of knowledge to a system built around an abundance of knowledge production but a scarcity of knowledge curation. Honestly, I do not think we have thought sufficiently about this problem or its fundamental parameters. See for instance Ben Recht on substack. The increased monopolization of epistemic authority reflects the fact that the production of knowledge has increased while we have chosen to keep the supply of curation constant, and that has been bad for our discipline. But in science and medicine, where the supply of curation seems to have increased are now facing the opposite problem: Authority is dispersed and massively contested from all directions.
There is no “right” way here—we are just going to have to fight our way out of this.
Read more:
On the Leaky pipeline: Buckles, Kasey. 2019. "Fixing the Leaky Pipeline: Strategies for Making Economics Work for Women at Every Stage." Journal of Economic Perspectives 33 (1): 43–60.
On under-representation among women in economics: https://theconversation.com/the-gender-gap-in-economics-is-huge-its-even-worse-than-tech-156275
On the representation of women across sub-fields in economics: Sierminska, Eva, and Ronald L. Oaxaca. "Gender differences in economics PhD field specializations with correlated choices." Labour Economics 79 (2022): 102289.