Poor Economics Changed my Life

I remember the day clearly: for some special reason I had made the 2-hour journey to Lilongwe, the capital city of Malawi from my small rural village, for probably only the second or third time since I’d landed in the country. It must have been sometime in summer 2011 and I’d arrived in Malawi in January. Already I had a routine: every time I made it to the Peace Corps office I would hungrily comb the bookshelves for anything new or interesting. There it was: the May 17, 2010 copy of The New Yorker. A year-old hand-me-down New Yorker may not sound like much, but to someone who had been in the African bush for much of that time, it was like gold. I greedily snatched it up and took it back to my site. There, alone in my hut, I read an article about Esther Duflo that changed my life. This amazing little Frenchwoman at MIT was doing something called development economics, a field I’d never heard of but which sounded so cool and exciting and applicable to work in the development field. Her work really resonated with me. The idea of being so methodical in the assessment of development interventions, using randomized control tests (RCTs) seemed to me so obvious yet groundbreaking. One study cited was conducted in Kenya, and involved the question of the efficacy of bed nets, and whether they would be more likely to be taken up if sold or given away for free. I assisted with an USAID-funded bed net distribution in my village and I saw not only the willingness of villagers to take a freely offered good, but that the good was not always used in the way the donor intended. In this instance, living only 12 kilometers from Lake Malawi, many bed nets became fishing nets, which are arguably useful tools to generate income, but clearly not doing much to prevent malaria, as was USAID’s original goal.

I couldn’t stop talking about “The Poverty Lab: A new method for development economics” to anyone who would listen. The article mentioned that Esther Duflo was about to publish a book and by the next time I found the internet I saw that it had already been published. I quickly emailed my mom, adding copies of Poor Economics: A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty by Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, and More than Good Intentions: How a new economics is helping to solve global poverty, by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel, to the top of the list of things she must bring when she came to visit me the following September. From then, the rest is history. I voraciously read the books and visited the J-PAL (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab) and IPA (Innovations for Poverty Action, the organization founded by Dean Karlan) websites frequently, even applying for research assistant positions without ever having heard of STATA. I love the idea of frank evaluation of poverty interventions as they are implemented. What’s working? What’s not? Why? How can we improve? Can this be replicated somewhere else? These are important questions to ask if we as development practitioners care about actually, measurably improving the lives of the poor, and not just pleasing the donors and ourselves by appealing to their pet issues and projects, or focusing on the amount (of money) spent as opposed to the amount (of change) accomplished.

It was Esther Duflo and her work which first got me excited about the hard, analytic, data-driven practical side of development work. Yes we know that education and health are “good,” but what is the best way to deliver these goods to people in the developing world, and once delivered, are they effectively improving peoples’ lives? How can it be better? How can we ensure there are even fewer people living in extreme poverty next year as opposed to last year? My perseverance as a Peace Corps volunteer (evacuated from Niger, living without electricity, bucket bathing) proved to myself that I had both the heart and the grit to survive and thrive in development work. But I didn’t have the technical background to really do any of the things that I saw clearly needed done, so in early 2013 when I received a J-PAL email update announcing 14.73x, The Challenges of Global Poverty, an MIT-hosted MOOC, I immediately signed up. It was a pretty amazing experience to be one of roughly 35,000 students from all over the world, watching Professors Duflo and Banerjee lecture on their research and then engaging with each other on the discussion boards, bringing our varied experiences into the debate. I’m sure in a small way I can even credit Duflo and her work with my initial attraction to the GHD program. I want to walk out of this program as a competent technician. I want to understand the research she and her colleagues are doing in order to implement the programs and changes to programs her data suggests.