Sukhamoy Chakravarty was once considered a great Development Economist. Then people noticed that India had not developed at all- it had sunk lower in the economic league table- thanks to worthless mathematical economists like him.
Meanwhile countries which pursued export-led growth had risen up rapidly.
In an article published by EPW in 1986, Sukhamoy offered this defense of his type of Development Econ which Ian Little had derided-
Sukhamoy's great stupidity should have been obvious from his first publications. Consider his 'optimal savings with finite planning horizon'. Everybody knew that where 'planning' was implemented, people ran away and took their money with them. You could try to impose optimal savings on those who remained but they were either drunk off their heads or were clearly starving to death. To develop your resources you had to do deals with greedy foreign corporations who would extract resources and wave goodbye to you after stuffing their pockets with loot.
No doubt, some 'planning' could be done and Governments could mobilize resources for this by giving people a safe place to park their precautionary balances and the niggardly sums they had set aside for their retirement. But this did not involve any sort of 'optimal savings' rule. You tried to maximize National Savings and then you tried to maximize the return on the assets you created using those Savings. If you succeeded, then the National Savings Schemes were disintermediated. People borrowed or saved through for profit enterprises- though, no doubt, at the margin, the very poor might avail of micro-finance and Christmas Clubs and so forth.
Sukhamoy, in some other article, speaks of 'inelastic demand for agricultural surpluses' as a limit to growth. Think about this for a second. Suppose there is so much food it price falls. What happens next? The marginal farmer quits farming for some other type of employment. Those who remain in agriculture earn more as their productivity rises. But so do those who are now working in factories or offices or brothels or Universities or whatever. Endogenous growth just took off!
Project Syndicate has an article by Aravind Subramanian- who quit as advisor to the Government of India to return to Columbia some three years ago though, for some reason, he took a job at Ashoka University- which he has since quit- instead- and Davesh Kapur who is at John Hopkins
Their article is titled- The Absent Voices of Development Economics
Development economics focuses on improving the well-being of billions of people in low-income countries, but the Global South is severely underrepresented in the field. A small number of rich-country institutions dominate, and their growing use of randomized controlled trials in research is entrenching the imbalance.
This is a bit like saying- 'why are there no Chinese restaurants in China?' The answer is all restaurants in China are Chinese restaurants except one or two which are run by Americans or Italians or whatever. People who are doing Development in the 'Global South' aren't called Development Economists. They are called Economists or just plain Businessmen.
The lack of representation of marginalized groups in the corridors of power – political, financial, and cultural – is a growing source of global concern.
To whom? The guys who feel 'marginalized' because they want to make more money in the corridors of power. But less than a millionth of a percentage of the population of 'the global south' has any access to the 'corridors of power'. Moreover, they gain nothing even if one or two dusky complexioned academics capture a rent in such places.
Knowledge confers power, so who creates it matters.
Genuine knowledge- yes. You can set up a business and get rich and money buys you influence which is power. But repeating nonsense is not knowledge. It is a nuisance.
As the Nobel laureate economist Paul Samuelson famously said, “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws…if I can write its textbooks.”
Samuelson's textbook said the Soviet Union could catch up with America in terms of living standards. He looked a fool when the thing collapsed. Ultimately, textbooks don't matter if they are filled with garbage. In the short run they may have some effect. Medium to long term, they are ignored.
Development economics focuses on
providing jobs to Development Economists not
improving the well-being of billions of people in low-income countries,
China did not bother with Development Economists. It imitated what Taiwan and South Korea and Singapore had done. Taiwan did listen to two Chinese-American economists (not development economists) at Cornell and Korea listened to Irma Adelman - whose background was Agricultural Economics. Her advise was 'devalue and promote export industries'. But the UK too needed that type of advise. Adelman did get some work as a 'Development Economist' but not being much of a mathematician she was never considered a star in the subject.
but the Global South is severely underrepresented in the field.
Because the Global South either created straight-talking critics of the Aid industry or else it nurtured mathematical nutters whose work had no relevance to the real world.
Unfortunately, a small number of rich-country institutions have appropriated it, with serious consequences.
Since rich countries dole out Aid money, they give jobs to their own cretins in this field so as to keep them from harming their own economies.
And the problem appears to be getting worse.
Yet, those countries which completely ignored Development Economics developed rapidly.
Consider the Journal of Development Economics, a leading outlet for research papers in the field. Neither the journal’s editor nor any of its ten co-editors are based in a developing country. Just two of its 69 associate editors are, with Africa and Asia completely unrepresented.
This is because developing countries are shit-holes. Indians have been chief-editors of the Journal for about half the time it has existed. But they were either wholly ineffective- e.g T.N Srinivasan- or useless, like Pranab Bardhan- or both useless and incomprehensible like Maitreesh Ghatak. Okay, I may be wrong about Ghatak but, the fact is, he isn't going to want to move back to India or Africa because then he'd no longer get the type of students with the mathematical chops to advance his research program. Why? If they were bright enough to hack the maths, they could make much more money in the private sector- thus helping India to actually develop.
Then there is the World Bank’s prestigious Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE). The 2019 event celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Bretton Woods conference that established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but none of the 77 participants were from an institution located in a developing country. And our analysis of the ABCDE’s three-decade history shows that just 7% of those authoring conference papers have been from developing-world institutions.
The World Bank is about the rich lending to the poor. Naturally, the donors have the whip hand. Anyway, as Edward Lim pointed out- in India anti-development agitation pays better than actually getting the thing done. That is why India could not rise in the same manner that China did with the World Bank's help.
The long-standing problem of underrepresentation is being amplified by the growing use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to test the effectiveness of specific poverty-reduction interventions in low-income countries. Although the RCT movement deserves immense credit for highlighting the need for evidentiary rigor in development economics, it has had exclusionary consequences.
The thing is silly. Imitating what smart people are doing is better than RCT. The thing is an auditing tool for non-mission critical expenditure of an essentially ostentatious, or reputation building, type.
By virtue of their well-deserved academic reputations, RCT-oriented economists now work at the world’s most prestigious universities and research institutions and serve on the editorial boards of top economics journals. This crucial gatekeeping role gives them agenda-setting power.
No it doesn't. The 'andolanjivi' activists will get money from Soros & Co to block Development no matter what evidence pointy headed RCT mavens bring forward. In any case, it is child's play to destroy their results by pointing out methodological errors.
In the long term, Rossi's Metallic Law applies- a large enough RCT study would show null impact no matter what it focused on.
Two decades ago, for example, there were virtually no RCT-based papers in development economics; in 2020, according to our analysis, they accounted for about 40% of the articles in the leading journals.
& nothing whatever changed on the ground. Jeff Sachs had a project in Kenya. Whatever happened to it? Who knows? Who cares? The thing is just a fad- or moving deckchairs on the Titanic.
And exclusion characterizes the RCT movement itself. At the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the most influential global center for development-related RCT research, about 5% of the nearly 225 affiliated professors are based in developing countries, with no representation from institutions in East Asia.
Because East Asia was interested in actual Economics- not retarded Developmental shite.
Moreover, conducting RCTs is expensive, which means that poverty-reduction research – and funding for it – is increasingly concentrated in the richest universities (J-PAL was established at MIT).
Apparently the guy who founded it was a Saudi Toyota distributor. The family is smart and has great business-savvy. As Muslims, they have an obligation to share their wealth with the poor. Clearly they wanted to do it in a rational and enlightened manner. Good for them. They represent the future of their country as a great hub of business and fintech innovation.
Indeed, the cost of carrying out RCTs can run into millions of dollars per paper,
this is misleading. The cost of conducting RCT declines because of new technology and learning effects, though, of course, whatever benefit is being distributed may increase in size. We want bigger programs to help the poor and we want admin and assessment costs to go down as a proportion of the budget. This is certainly feasible and the technique can be incorporated into Government run schemes.
making it difficult for developing-country researchers to study their own countries without genuflecting to wealthy institutions’ academic orthodoxies.
But there are plenty of Indians who represent those 'wealthy institutions''' academic orthodoxies'. The authors are Indian themselves. Why do they feel so alienated from people pretty similar to themselves?
If these researchers cannot do RCT-based studies, they have little chance of getting published in leading journals, and risk being consigned to second-class status.
Newsflash! You guys have third-class status.
Even on a generous interpretation of authorship, our analysis suggests that developing-country institutions accounted for less than 10% of RCT-based papers in the top six economics journals in 2020.
But it easy enough to have affiliations with shithole Institutions. Just be a visiting Prof there. The bigger question is why so many Indian journals are utterly shite. The answer is that Universities are utterly shite. Academia is what you go in for if you are too stupid to do anything useful.
A subtler cost concerns prioritization of research. There is an inherent power imbalance between relatively weak developing-country governments
like India? Are these guys kidding?
and reputationally and financially powerful researchers,
who can be beaten or fatwaed if they get out of line
as well as tension between what policymakers in lower-income economies consider important and what academics deem worthy of publication in top journals.
This is sheer make believe. There may be some small countries where this is true- but that is a function of their small size, not the fact that their Development Economists aren't getting top jobs with Journals and Universities and other Institutions.
These factors surely privilege research that yields high private returns to researchers based in rich countries but meager public returns to developing-country decision-makers.
What on earth does this mean? Either this type of research is shit which 'yields high private returns' to stupid or evil researchers- in which case the thing should be banned or ignored- or else decision-makers in developing countries are utter cretins. They believe any shite which they are presented with. In this case, these guys need brain transplants. Better still, bring Whitey back to rule those shitholes.
True, scholars from developing countries in these elite institutions make important contributions to development economics.
But the thing is still shite.
But the incentives and priorities of the institutional cultures they inhabit play a powerful role.
They are told to shit out shite papers otherwise they won't get paid.
The final cost relates to the type of knowledge that is ignored. Several highly successful economies – including South Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, Mauritius, and Botswana – did not rely on RCTs to change their destinies and lift their large populations out of poverty.
Because they knew Economics is just mimetics plus common sense. Development Economics is for Indian Pundits or Western nice-but-dim nitwits.
Yet, academics from these countries generally do not sit on the editorial boards of major journals or participate prominently in development economists’ conferences and seminars – an omission that is particularly telling in the case of China, with its historically unprecedented economic transformation. It is as if these countries’ development successes have no lessons to offer.
The lesson is obvious. Development Economics is a pile of shite. Indians knew this long ago. Sukhamoy Chakraborty was reviled. Amartya Sen was praised for emigrating and taking up a worthless type of philosophical Social Choice theory.
To preempt the Global North’s monopoly of knowledge creation in development economics requires, first, recognizing that the Global South has ceded dominance as much as the North’s elite institutions have appropriated it.
Nobody forced Indian Universities to turn into shitholes.
Many developing countries have severely undermined their own universities and knowledge-production systems both through lack of funding and political interference, with the latter being especially pernicious in the social sciences.
In other words, Leftist nutters took them over and turned them into cess pits.
Unless they remedy this, they will continue to suffer the consequences of the global imbalance.
The Indian solution was to have separate IITs and IIMs and Medical Colleges and one or two Sciencey places for the Defense Industry. The Social Sciences and shite like Development Economics was left to the monkeys who flung their feces at each other. A few did manage to emigrate on the basis of Mathsy Degrees in Econ type shite. But they were 'inert game theorists' and such like.
We also must heed the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2017 Nobel lecture, in which he urged a broadening of “our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first-world cultures.”
But the guy is as British as fish and chips!
That means searching “more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in far-away countries or within our own communities,” while taking “great care not to set too narrowly or conservatively our definitions of what constitutes good literature.”
The guy is talking about fiction- which very poor people in shithole countries may be good at precisely because their life sucks and they need to escape into a fantasy land. He isn't saying we should talk to stupid and ignorant people in shithole countries to discover new things about Quantum Chromodynamics or Nanotechnology.
Substitute “development economics” for “literature,” and Ishiguro’s injunction yields a constructive agenda of corrective action for intellectuals in the Global North.
i.e. hire more dusky folk. If you can prove your country is a more horrible shithole than your rival, then you get to be Head of the Department. What's next? Appoint Professors of Literature on the basis of their inability to read or write?
It also suggests that diversity and broader representation are the best safeguards against intellectual narrowness resulting from elite capture.
Capture of what? Publishing stupid shite. Let rich countries subsidize their own cretins and get them to pretend they are helping the poor. Why should poor countries follow suit? The way to develop is by imitating those who were like you but who got richer by doing smart things. That's it. That's the whole story. Nothing more to see here, folks. Move along now.
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