One Year of Global Developments

Looking Backward, Looking Ahead

Scientific American, 1890. Source

I started this Substack exactly a year ago, on February 19.

For a blog called “Global Developments”, I largely managed to avoid writing anything about current events. Partly this was a conscious choice, to offer a differentiated product—essays, not newsflashes. Mostly it was my inability to write fast enough.

But a nice side-effect is that almost every post over the last year was evergreen. This is a look back on the last year of Global Developments; for those of you who are new, it might also be a gentle introduction to the blog, to see what you’ve missed. Annual rankings are boring, but I thought it would be nice to seat the blog in a chaise longue, pull out my psychiatrist’s legal pad, and see if I can discern a pattern to its obsessions.

Several themes emerge:

The Limits of Economic Measurement

Anyone who’s worked seriously with economic data knows what a cockroach-infested sausage factory they come from. Amateurs gobble down the outputs cheerfully; professionals check the innards with their forks.

This was clearly my primary obsession over the year, sparked by reading Morten Jerven’s Poor Numbers. My meta-concern is that most of the work academic economists do—all the attention given to careful identification and theoretical explication—is downstream of basic questions of measurement. This doesn’t mean we should descend into total nihilism about the value of quantification, but careful attention to the limits of our knowledge can prevent us from being fooled by bad statistics.

• “How Much Should We Trust Developing Country GDP?” was my most-read piece of the last year. Credit mostly goes to Morten Jerven, who wrote Poor Numbers; I just plucked out the best bits from that book. Once you learn that the national accounts in Zambia were compiled by one (1) person in 2010, it’s hard to look at a GDP statistic in the same way again.

• “No, South Korea Was Not Poorer Than Kenya in 1960.” The Korea-Africa economic comparison is a personal obsession of mine, having grown up on my Mom’s stories of her childhood in Zaire. This little bit of economic history tries to pick the grounds of this comparison apart; Kenya and Korea’s similar GDPs in 1960 conceal deep historical differences.

• “Beyond GDP: One Table of Neoclassical Economics Solves the Europe vs. America Debate, For All Time, Forever and Ever, Amen”. As an earlier post, this didn’t get as many eyeballs, but I think it’s a nice subversive take from within the framework of squarely neoclassical welfare economics on measuring what actually matters. I hope it gets more airplay when Europeans and Americans resume their seasonal Twitter argument over whose society is more dysfunctional.

I also had drafts about P.C. Mahalanobis, statistics under Chinese socialism, and measuring GDP from satellite nighttime lights that I shelved; you may see these over the coming year.

The role of foreign advisors in development

Policy advice has typically been the main way that economists interact with developing countries, but on closer examination the historical record of foreign advisors at promoting development has been spotty.

This year, I wrote about three Western development experts: Albert Winsemius, Edward Mitchell, and Albert Hirschman. General themes are that advice is never apolitical, and that a close attention to local context is necessary for success. Expect to see more in the coming year on this theme, including (potentially) on W. Arthur Lewis in Ghana and Wolf Ladejinsky in Japan.

• “‘You Can Even Kill Them’: Albert Winsemius and the Rise of Singapore.” Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is now a touchstone for would-be autocrats touting economic growth. This post traces the influence of the Dutch economist Albert Winsemius on Singapore’s economics—and, at one critical moment, its authoritarian political turn.

• “Quiet Americans: Research Malpractice and the Vietnam War.” This was my favorite piece of the year. Careless application of bad econometrics—springing from a young, ambitious economist’s ignorance of context—may have led to a prolonging of the Vietnam War.

• “The Real Development was the Friends We Made Along the Way.” Albert Hirschman’s emphasis on close observation, his self-subversive distaste for sweeping theorizing, and his lifelong commitment to the possibilities of reform, make him the patron saint of this blog. This post chronicles his remarkable early life as an anti-fascist résistant, and his classic Strategy of Economic Development.

The possibility of radical reform

The tension between What Is and What Can Be makes development intellectually fascinating. Academics naturally gravitate towards What Is, since empirical research is inherently backwards-looking. But development, when it is successful, is inherently a process of radical change. Part of the job of economists, then, is to enlarge the space of possibilities and imagine outcomes beyond what is immediately feasible, so that when the envelope expands, places are ready to seize the opportunity.

• “Leasing Like A State, or: Public Housing is Development Policy.” My first piece, arguing that there is a potential connection between the manufacturing success of Hong Kong and Singapore and their ambitious public housing programs. African cities are also falling far short of their population’s growing housing needs—could public spending on housing be a way of improving economic competitiveness?

• “The Beginning of the End of Africa’s Last Colonial Currency.” Since independence, the CFA Franc has bound the currencies of 14 West and Central African countries to France’s. This piece examines the potential macroeconomic and developmental impacts of this strange institution, in the broader context of the history of colonizer and colonized.

• “What is it like to work in an Ethiopian factory?” This was one of my favorite pieces, but the most difficult to write. Ethiopia’s ambitious push to industrialize has stalled, with factories failing to absorb labor—in part, perhaps, because working conditions and wages are so poor. This piece documents some of these workers’ experiences, and entertains the possibility that improving conditions for workers may help the cause of Ethiopian manufacturing growth.

A Call for Feedback

The main goal for Global Developments is to write the kind of blog that I’d like to read; I’m grateful that so many others have joined along for the ride. I’d like to take this opportunity to request feedback. I’m perpetually surprised by what posts are popular, and which are not. If you have opinions—what you dislike about the blog, pieces you’ve enjoyed, what you would like to see more of—please let me know in the comments section below. (Yes, I will try to write more, and faster.)

Fawning praise will also be accepted—building a Substack readership from scratch can be tough work. Early on, I was reminded of an old joke about the great director Orson Welles. Looking at an empty theater, the audience diminished by a snowstorm, Welles is said to have asked: “Why are there so many of me, and so few of you?”

Now there are a lot more of you. Thanks to Tyler Cowen, Noah Smith, Brad DeLong, Alice Evans, Adam Tooze, Ken Opalo, Davis Kedrosky, Lauren Gilbert, Angus Bylsma, Deena Mousa, Yaw Asamoah, among others, for spreading the word. And thanks to you, reader, for being here.