A research agenda on education & institutions

From Tessa Bold & Jakob Svensson for the DFID-OPM-Paris School of Economics research programme "EDI"

 

1. A focus on learning in primary is still essential - don’t get too distracted by secondary and tertiary

2. More focus on teachers’ effort, knowledge, and skills

3. How do we go from pilots to scaled-up programs? (and related - can we design interventions that explicitly allow for existing implementation constraints at scale)

4. How can we use ICT to bring down the cost of sharing information on performance?

5. More research on public-private partnerships such as voucher programs

Stop highlighting our differences? #moreincommon

Last night at my local primary school Governor meeting one of the other governors objected to a table showing a disaggregation of recent pupil discipline issues categorised by ethnic grouping. “Should we really be calling children ‘White Other’ or ‘Black Other’?” Turns out these are the standard official government categories offered to students/parents to self-identify with. As a researcher I'm naturally interested in as many descriptive categories as possible to help understand the factors that drive differences in outcomes between individuals, but every time we ask the question we also ask people to think in ethnic or racial or national terms, highlighting our differences not the more in common. 

 

As Chris Dillow wrote recently in an excellent take-down of David Goodheart:

"The thing is, we all have multiple identities: I’m tall, white, Oxford-educated, bald, heterosexual, male, bourgeois with a working class background, an economist, an atheist with a Methodist upbringing. And so on and on. The question is not: what are my identities? But rather: which of these identities matter?

 

… 

 

Even if you accept biological essentialism, the question of which of our multiple identities becomes salient is surely in large part a social construct.

 

...

 

No good can come from raising the salience of racial or ethnic identities."

The issue comes up often in national censuses. For the last South Sudan census in 2008 it was decided it was too politically charged to ask people their ethnic group. Lebanon hasn’t had a census to count the number of Christians and Muslims since 1932. In the UK, the government recently started asking schools for pupil’s nationalities, with a stated aim of allowing for better targeting of support, but leading to widespread suspicion and calls for a boycott. 

 

The first step to thinking about when we should and should not ask for ethnic identities might be assigning some plausible values to the likely costs and benefits of doing so. A new paper by Evan S. Lieberman and Prerna Singh has taken a systematic approach and coded over 1000 census questionnaires for 150 countries over 200 years and whether they ask for ethnic identities. 

"Through a series of cross-national statistical analyses, the authors find a robust association between enumeration of ethnic cleavages on the census and various forms of competition and conflict, including violent ethnic civil war”.

That seems like a pretty high price to pay.

The Political Economy of Public Sector Performance Management Reform

Reflections from Prajapati Trivedi, founding Secretary of the Performance Management Division in the Government of India Cabinet Secretariat, in Governance. 

"The new government of Prime Minister Modi never formally declared that it is closing the RFD system. It simply stopped asking the departments to prepare RFDs (performance agreements). Indeed, the government went on to appoint three more Secretaries for Performance Management as my successors. The system was, however, allowed to atrophy and no formal answer about the status of the RFD system was either given in the Parliament in response to questions on the topic or was forthcoming under India's Right to Information (RTI) act. Thus, we can only speculate why the RFD system came to an abrupt end.

First, it is possible that the review of the working of the RFD system in the past 4 years by the incoming Modi government revealed a story that did not match their election rhetoric. Modi had portrayed the outgoing government of Singh as weak on governance and could not, therefore, acknowledge the existence of a rigorous system of performance monitoring and evaluation of government departments. After all, it had promised to do in its election manifesto what was already being done.

Second, the review of actual results for the performance of individual government departments perhaps revealed that “reality” of performance was better than the “perception.” It is fair to say that Manmohan Singh lost elections because he could not “talk the walk.” The performance data revealed that on average government departments were achieving 80% of the targets assigned to them via performance agreement (RFDs). By contrast, the opinion polls at the time revealed that the electorate rated the government performance at around only forty percent 40%. Thus, continuing the RFD system would have revealed facts that went against the main narrative on which the government of Modi came to power.

Third, it is possible that the new government found that the performance results for the past 4 years based on the departments' ability to meet agreed commitments did not meet their preconceived biases.

Fourth, a system based on ex ante agreements and objective evaluation of performance at the end of the year reduces discretion and was perhaps seen as inimical to the personalized style of management preferred by the incoming Prime Minister.

And fifth, I have yet to come across any workplace where performance evaluation is welcomed by staff. Senior career civil servants did feel the pressure to perform and were waiting to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of incoming administration. Performance management is a leadership issue and not a popular issue.

There are several key lessons of my experience that may be relevant for policy makers working on a similar system in their own countries.

We succeeded beyond our wildest expectations in terms of the scope and coverage of the performance management policy because we emphasized simplicity over complexity. We defined performance management as simply the ability of the department to deliver what it had promised.

It is my strong conviction that unless you can reduce the performance measurement to a score, it will remain difficult to grasp and hence difficult to sustain over time. For the performance score to be meaningful, however, performance management must be based on ex ante commitments and must cover all aspects of departmental operations.

Performance management is best implemented as a big-bang effort. Pilots in performance management do not survive because those departments chosen as pilots feel they are being singled out for political reasons.

Finally, the single biggest mistake of the outgoing government was to not enshrine the RFD policy in a law. A similar policy for accountability of state-owned enterprises in India was embedded in a law in 1991 and it has survived changes in government." 

Liberia Fact of the Day

"The treaties that govern space allow private individuals and corporations to travel the stars, but only with the licensure and legal backing of an earthbound government. It’s similar that way to the laws of the sea. And today, on Earth’s oceans, more than 11 percent of all the tons of freight shipped is carried on boats that fly the Liberian flag (In contrast, U.S.-registered ships carry just 0.7 percent of the freight tonnage).

In exchange for lower taxes and looser regulations, both the shipping companies of the present and the Martian explorers of tomorrow could pay to register their vessel with a small country they have no other connection to (Liberia earns more than $20 million a year this way) and carry its flag (and laws) with them, wherever they go."

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 538 (via The Browser)

The key to better education systems is accountability. So how on earth do we do that?

And what do we even actually mean when we talk about accountability?

Perhaps the key theme emerging from research on reforming education systems is accountability. But accountability means different things to different people. To start with, many think first of bottom-up (‘citizen’ or ‘social’) accountability. But increasingly in development economics, enthusiasm is waning for bottom-up social accountability as studies show limited impacts on outcomes. The implicit conclusion then is to revisit top-down (state) accountability. As Rachel Glennerster (Executive Director of J-PAL) wrote recently: 

"For years the Bank and other international agencies have sought to give the poor a voice in health, education, and infrastructure decisions through channels unrelated to politics. They have set up school committees, clinic committees, water and sanitation committees on which sit members of the local community. These members are then asked to “oversee” the work of teachers, health workers, and others. But a body of research suggests that this approach has produced disappointing results."

One striking example of this kind of research is Ben Olken’s work on infrastructure in Indonesia, which directly compared the effect of a top-down audit (which was effective) with bottom-up community monitoring (ineffective).

So what do we mean by top-down accountability for schools?

Within top-down accountability there are a range of methods by which schools and teachers could be held accountable for their performance. Three broad types stand out:

• Student test scores (whether simple averages or more sophisticated value-added models)
• Professional judgement (e.g. based on lesson observations)
• Student feedback

The Gates Foundation published a major report in 2013 on how to “Measure Effective Teaching”, concluding that each of these three types of measurement has strengths and weaknesses, and that the best teacher evaluation system should therefore combine all three: test scores, lesson observations, and student feedback.

By contrast, when it comes to holding head teachers accountable for school performance, the focus in both US policy reform and research is almost entirely on test scores. There are good reasons for this - education in the US has developed as a fundamentally local activity built on bottom up accountability, often with small and relatively autonomous school districts, with little tradition of supervision by higher levels of government. Nevertheless, as Helen Ladd, a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University and an expert in school accountability, wrote on the Brookings blog last year:

"The current test based approach to accountability is far too narrow … has led to many unintended and negative consequences. It has narrowed the curriculum, induced schools and teachers to focus on what is being tested, led to teaching to the test, induced schools to manipulate the testing pool, and in some well-publicized cases induced some school teachers and administrators to cheat. 

Now is the time to experiment with inspections for school accountability … 

Such systems have been used extensively in other countries … provide useful information to schools … disseminate information on best practices … draw attention to school activities that have the potential to generate a broader range of educational outcomes than just performance on test scores … [and] treats schools fairly by holding them accountable only for the practices under their control … 

The few studies that have focused on the single narrow measure of student test scores have found small positive effects."

A report by the US think tank “Education Sector” also highlights the value of feedback provided through inspection systems to schools.

"Like many of its American counterparts, Peterhouse Primary School in Norfolk County, England, received some bad news early in 2010. Peterhouse had failed to pass muster under its government’s school accountability scheme, and it would need to take special measures to improve. But that is where the similarity ended. As Peterhouse’s leaders worked to develop an action plan for improving, they benefited from a resource few, if any, American schools enjoy. Bundled right along with the school’s accountability rating came a 14-page narrative report on the school’s specific strengths and weaknesses in key areas, such as leadership and classroom teaching, along with a list of top-priority recommendations for tackling problems. With the report in hand, Peterhouse improved rapidly, taking only 14 months to boost its rating substantially."

In the UK, ‘Ofsted’ reports are based on a composite of several different dimensions, including test scores, but also as importantly, independent assessments of school leadership, teaching practices and support for vulnerable students.

There is a huge lack of evidence on school accountability

This blind spot on school inspections isn’t just a problem for education in the US, though. The US is also home to most of the leading researchers on education in developing countries, and that research agenda is skewed by the US policy and research context. The leading education economists don’t study inspections because there aren’t any in the places they live.

The best literature reviews in economics can often be found in the “Handbook of Economics” series and the Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP). The Handbook article on "School Accountability" from 2011 exclusively discusses the kind of test-based accountability that is common in the US, with no mention of the kind of inspections common in Europe and other countries at all. A recent JEP symposium on Schools and Accountability includes a great article by Isaac Mbiti, a Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) researcher, on ’The Need for Accountability in Education in Developing Countries” which includes; however, only one paragraph on school inspections. Another great resource on this topic is the 2011 World Bank book, "Making Schools Work: New Evidence on Accountability Reforms”. This 'must-read' 250-page book has only two paragraphs on school inspections.

This is in part a disciplinary point - it is mostly a blind-spot of economists. School inspections have been studied in more detail by education researchers. But economists have genuinely raised the bar in terms of using rigorous quantitative methods to study education. In total, I count 7 causal studies of the effects of inspections on learning outcomes - 3 by economists and 4 by education researchers.

Putting aside learning outcomes for a moment, one study from leading RISE researchers, Karthik Muralidharan and Jishnu Das (with Alaka Holla and Aakash Mohpal), in rural India finds that “increases in the frequency of inspections are strongly correlated with lower teacher absence”, which could be expected to lead to more learning as a result. However, no such correlation was found for other countries in a companion study (Bangladesh, Ecuador, Indonesia, Peru, and Uganda).

There is also fascinating qualitative work by fellow RISE researcher, Yamini Aiyar (Director of the ‘Accountability Initiative’ and collaborator of RISE researchers Rukmini Banerji, Karthik Muralidharan, and Lant Pritchett) and co-authors, that looks into how local level education administrators view their role in the Indian state of Bihar. The most frequently used term by local officials to describe their role was a “Post Officer” - someone who simply passes messages up and down the bureaucratic chain - “a powerless cog in a large machine with little authority to take decisions." A survey of their time use found that on average a school visit lasts around one hour, with 15 minutes of that time spent in a classroom, with the rest spent “checking attendance registers, examining the mid-day meal scheme and engaging in casual conversations with headmasters and teacher colleagues … the process of school visits was reduced to a mechanical exercise of ticking boxes and collecting relevant data. Academic 'mentoring' of teachers was not part of the agenda.”

At the Education Partnerships Group (EPG) and RISE we’re hoping to help fill this policy and research gap, through nascent school evaluation reforms supported by EPG in Madhya Pradesh, India, that will be studied by the RISE India research team, and an ongoing reform project working with the government of the Western Cape in South Africa. Everything we know about education systems in developing countries suggests that they are in crisis, and that a key part of the solution is around accountability. Yet we know little about how school inspections - the main component of school accountability in most developed countries - might be more effective in poor countries. It’s time we changed that.

This post appeared first on the RISE website. 

Rising DFID Spending hasn't Crowded Out Private Giving

Last week I was poking around the ESRC’s 'Administrative Data Research Network’ and discovered the Charity Commission data download website - containing every annual financial return made by every individual charity in England and Wales since 2007. The data comes in a slightly weird file format that I’d never heard of, but thankfully the NCVO have a very helpful guide and Python code for converting the data into .csv format (which was easy enough to use that I managed to figure out how to run without ever having really used Python). 

One obvious question you could ask with this data is whether the private income of international charities has dropped as DFID spending has gone up (more than doubled over the same period) - it is conceivable that people might decide that they could give less to international charity as more of their tax money is being distributed by DFID.

That does not seem to be the case at all. There are two ways of identifying international charities - by their stated area of operation, or by their stated objective category. I’ve coded charities that have no UK activities as “International”, and also picked out the charities that ticked the box for "Overseas Aid/Famine Relief” as their activity category. These two categories do overlap but far from perfectly. 

Charities have multiple categories of income - I focus here on the ‘voluntary’ category which basically means all donations, whether large or small. 

Charities with exclusively international activities, and those focused on 'overseas aid' did appear to take more of a hit than domestic charities from the 2008 global financial crisis and recession, but since then growth has tracked the income of other charities (and is 40-50% higher in 2015 than in 2007 (not adjusting for inflation)). 

You can download the Stata code here, csv files (large) here, and variable descriptions here.

Introducing... the Global Schools Forum

There’s nothing like sitting in a room full of people who build and run schools in the developing world to make you feel pretty inadequate. At least I did, last week at the Global Schools Forum. It can feel like a pretty long and abstract chain from the kind of policy research and evaluation that I do through to better policies and better outcomes, and I envy being able to see directly a tangible difference for real people.

You may have heard of the emergence of some international low-cost private school chains such as Bridge International Academies, but the movement is growing quickly, and there are many new organisations trying to do similar things that you probably haven’t heard of - some profit-making, some non-profit, some that charge fees, some that don’t, international, local, big, small, and everything in between. The biggest school operator you don’t hear that much about is the Bangladeshi NGO BRAC, who run thousands and thousands of fee-free schools.

Last week a whole range of school operators and the donors who support them gathered at the 2nd Annual Meeting of the “Global Schools Forum” (GSF); a new membership organisation of 26 school networks (of which 14 for profit and 12 non-profit) operating in 25 countries, and 17 donors and financing organisations, with networks ranging from 1 to 48,000 schools. Running one school is hard enough; trying to disrupt a dysfunctional system by growing a chain of schools is harder. One of the goals of the GSF is to help create a community of practice for school operators, and a “How-to Guide” for scale, sharing information about the best IT and finance systems, the best assessments for tracking performance, or the best training consultants. It’s a place to connect operators with new people and new ideas.

This year we heard more about public-private partnerships than last year, in part because of the presence of several of the operators in the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) pilot. Government schools (with government teachers) will be managed by a range of local and international providers, including the Liberian Stella Maris Polytechnic and LIYONET, international NGOs (Street Child, BRAC, More Than Me) and school chains (Bridge International Academies, Rising Academies, Omega Schools). Other operators at the forum came from India (Gyanshala, Seed Schools, Sodha Schools), South Africa (SPARK, Streetlight Schools, African School for Excellence, Nova Pioneer), and East Africa (Peas, Silverleaf Academies, Kidogo, Scholé), to name just a few.

So what?

The number of non-state school operators planning for scale is rapidly increasing, but even at dramatic rates of growth, it would take a long time to reach any kind of significant proportion of schools. There are two possible routes to scale - either growing chains and networks to scale themselves, and/or acting as demonstration projects for government, to prove what is possible. This second route was highlighted by a number of speakers. Anecdotally at least, many exciting school reforms seem to come from the personal experience of government Ministers actually seeing something better in practice with their own eyes. More rigorously, Roland Fryer has demonstrated in the US with a randomized experiment that it is possible to “inject charter school best practices into public schools” and achieve positive gains in learning.

To find out more about the Global Schools Forum keep an eye on the website (coming soon) globalschoolsforum.org and follow @GSF_talks on twitter.

The Global Schools Forum is supported by The Education Partnerships Group (EPG) @EPG_Edu, UBS Optimus Foundation @UBSOptimus, Pearson Affordable Learning Fund @AffordableLearn, and Omidyar Network @OmidyarNetwork.

LSE on the UK gov’s new housing plans

"The fundamental problems with housing remain the same as in the last fifteen years and of those the most fundamental is the lack of land for development. Only fundamental reforms of our housing supply process will help and this proposes none. Indeed it in some ways goes backwards. It goes from a set of (not very good) mechanisms delivered in 2007 with the Regional Spatial Strategies to a set of aspirational gestures. Frankly the Secretary of State could build more houses with a magic wand."

From the Spatial Economics Research Centre blog

Cash-on-Delivery Aid for Trade Facilitation

One of the new ideas in our CGD trade-for-development-policy-after-Brexit paper was using the "Cash on Delivery" approach for trade facilitation. "Cash on Delivery" is an idea well developed by Nancy Birdsall and William Savedoff but still under-actually-piloted, and as yet not proposed for use in trade facilitation, for which it may actually be a really good fit. From the paper:

"The UK can improve upon its existing Aid for Trade offer by making increased use of results-based programmes. “Cash-on-delivery” aid (paying for outcomes, not inputs) is most appropriate where local contextual knowledge matters, where the best combination of inputs is uncertain and local experimentation is needed, and where precise design features and implementation fidelity are most critical (see, for example, the discussion by Savedoff [2016] on energy policy). All of these criteria also apply to Aid for Trade.

A typical Aid for Trade programme might carry out an extended diagnostic project to identify the constraints to change, and then design and contract a project to address these constraints. The payments would typically be made for activities (for example, technical assistance for improving a certain process) that, according to a theory of change, should lead to the desired outcomes. But contracting for activities and inputs doesn’t allow for sufficient experimentation and change.

A better approach is to contract for outcomes (i.e., to offer cash on delivery) and allow those with the required information the flexibility to determine the best way of achieving those outcomes.

Common concerns around cash on delivery focus on exactly what outcomes are contracted for, how they are measured, and whether there is any risk of distortion of priorities according to what is measurable or gaming of indicators. Indicators should be quantifiable, ideally continuous (to allow for variable payment in proportion to the degree of progress), and independently verifiable. Another common concern is how governments might fund any up-front investment costs. Here, then, the proposal is not that cash on delivery should replace all aid, but simply that it replace a portion of aid in a piloted manner. Further, if the outcomes are focused on “soft” rather than “hard” infrastructure, these up-front costs should be limited.

With trade, contracts could be based on the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ indicators. We have reasonable econometric evidence (Hoekman and Nicita 2011) that these indicators of the cost of importing and exporting (in both time and money) are associated with greater volumes of imports and exports.

An alternative but similar set of possible indicators that could be used as outcomes for contracted payments are the OECD Trade Facilitation Indicators, which probe border procedures in more detail. Moïsé and Sorescu (2013) estimate that streamlining the costs represented by these indicators could reduce trade costs by 15 per cent for low- and lower-middle-income countries.

Rather than trying to tell a specific country how best to reduce that time and cost, we could instead just write a contract to pay a specified amount for each hour the country reduces the time it takes goods to clear the border and exporters and/or importers to comply with documentary requirements.

The potential gains to developing countries are high. The estimated gain to a low-income country from reducing its cost of exporting to that of a middle-income country is 2 per cent higher exports (Hoekman and Nicita 2011). For a typical low-income country, such as Malawi, with total annual exports of around US$1.5 billion, a 2 per cent increase would be worth US$30 million a year. The expenses associated with reducing export times would almost certainly cost less than this amount.

In summary, the UK could take the lead in applying a more innovative and potentially much more effective approach to Aid for Trade by using cash on delivery. It could be used as a complement to the other proposals in this note and, as a relatively new approach, could be established relatively promptly as a pilot."

How to spend aid in fragile countries

The classic dilemma in figuring out how to spend aid money is the trade-off between:

     a) achieving scale and sustainability by supporting national government systems (but losing control), and

     b) keeping more direct control by working through NGOs, but sacrificing scale and sustainability.

This trade-off is less acute when the recipient government is an effective service provider and respects human rights. Often however the countries that most need external assistance do so in large part precisely because they aren’t blessed with well qualified governments.

One possible solution to this dilemma is providing mass cash transfers - a route to supporting poor individuals whilst side-stepping their government. Another (neglected?) route is supporting local service providers directly. An example of this is the Girl’s Education South Sudan provision of ‘capitation' grants to schools (full disclosure, I was hired to do some analysis). This pipe provides both government and donor (currently DFID) finance direct to the school bank account (held by the school’s governing/managing committee).

Here is a ring-fenced pipe, separate from the main government treasury, at scale, that can send money direct to every school (whether public or private) in a country, with receipts, full government engagement in delivery, in-person monthly reporting, and disaggregated real-time data. All of which potentially an exciting opportunity for donors if they want to fund education in emergencies.

What does the money do? Overall measured enrolment has been trending upwards over the last few years. My analysis suggests that at least some of this aggregate enrolment growth can be attributed to the grants. First, looking at the individual school level, schools tend to report higher levels of enrolment and attendance the year after receiving a grant, after allowing for school fixed effects by conditioning on past attendance or attendance. Second, I exploit a natural experiment whereby the government-financed component of the grants (not the donor-financed component) was arbitrarily held up by state governments for a set of (~control) schools that had gone through all the same hoops as some other (~treatment) schools that did receive the grants. The estimated effect of receiving grants on enrolment and attendance levels remains similar. Similar gains are found for schools that qualified to receive cash transfers for girls. The results are robust to measuring enrolment using the national remote SMS reporting system (sssams.org), or the smaller in-person sample survey.

What about learning outcomes? The focus of the cutting edge in global education research is rightly on what kids actually learn at school rather than just getting bums on seats. But there are still a few countries, including South Sudan, where access and enrolment in school is still a major issue. You should probably take most statistics on South Sudan with a grain of salt, but one estimate of the Net primary enrolment rate is just 43%, which is really pretty low.

However, one of things that does seem to really matter for student learning outcomes is how teachers are motivated and held accountable. Private schools tend to get more effort out of their teachers, largely because they are paid directly by the school and not by a remote government office. For example in Uganda, teachers in private schools spend more time in the classroom teaching than their counterparts in public schools. But this isn’t an inherent feature of the ownership and management of public versus private schools. In principle all public teachers could be hired and paid directly by schools, financed by a single central government school grant, rather than all teachers being put directly onto a single national payroll. This might inadvertently be happening in South Sudan anyway, as recent rapid inflation is reducing the value of local currency denominated teacher salaries, whilst the donor (hard currency) -financed school grants maintain more of their absolute value (and increase in value relative to teacher central payroll salaries). Shifting more funding directly to schools and allowing the list of eligible schools to include non-state providers could open the door to quality-focused international NGO chains such as Peas.

Table: Uganda Primary School Service Delivery Indicators

It’s very easy to just be incredibly depressed by news coming out of South Sudan, including warnings of a potential new genocide, but as ever, sanity lies in the stoic serenity prayer - we should focus on what we can change (and on the evidence needed to enable the distinction be made between what we can and can’t change).

You don’t need to be a cosmopolitan to support more migration

New from Dani Rodrik:

"how strong a preference must we have for our fellow citizens relative to foreigners to justify the existing level of barriers on international labor mobility? More concretely, let φ stand for the weight in our social welfare function on the utility of domestic citizens relative to the utility of foreigners.

When φ=1, we are perfect cosmopolitans and we see no difference between a citizen and a foreigner. When φ→∞, foreigners might starve to death and we wouldn’t care.

For the policy in question [allowing the movement of 60 million workers from poor to rich nations] to reduce social welfare in the rich countries, it turns out that φ must be larger than 4.5. Is a welfare premium of 450 percent for fellow citizens excessive? Is it reasonable to think that a foreigner is worth less than 22 percent a citizen?"

How the UK can lead the world on trade for development

Prime Minister Theresa May has said that the UK will be a "global leader on free trade”.  How can the UK use that opportunity to give the biggest possible boost to global development?  If the UK wanted to be the world leader on trade-for-development, what would the policies look like? 

There are options to consider not only on tariffs, quotas, and preferences, but also on improvements in UK systems and aid for trade as well as taxation.

I suggest some answers in a blog and paper with Ian Mitchell and Michael Anderson at CGD.

Experimental Conversations

When I was studying for my undergraduate degree, probably the most enjoyable book I read I think I happened to stumble across in the library (back in the day when you had to actually go to the library to find book chapters and physical copies of journals to read), called ‘Conversations with Leading Economists’. The conversational style, discussing in conversational language how ideas came about and how theorists interacted with each others' ideas and with data, was an amazing breath of fresh air, and a world away from the weirdness of the textbooks which often appear to pass down strange and seemingly grossly unrealistic theories and models of the world as if they were some kind of natural law. The list of interviewees includes Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, Gregory Mankiw, Franco Modigliani, Paul Romer, Robert Solow.

That conversational style can probably be slightly more commonly found these days in the post-blogging social media world, but there are still plenty of important thinkers who don’t very frequently blog or write op-eds (they’re busy being important thinkers), so Timothy Ogden has provided the wonderful service of writing up a series of interviews with some of the leading voices in both academia and policy on the use of randomized evaluations and field experiments in development economics.

You can buy the book 'Experimental Conversations’ here.

Read the chapter with Angus Deaton for free here

And subscribe to Tim’s weekly newsletter here.

I miss being wrong

My favourite morning cycle commute podcast at the moment is probably the Ezra Klein show, and the Ta-Nehisi Coates interview is excellent. The podcasts are usually about an hour long, but perhaps in tribute to the 4.5 hour interview that Coates just did with Barack Obama, this particular episode is a glorious 1 hour 40 mins long. This is exactly what the unlimited space in the long tail of the internet is for.

There’s a good discussion near the end on the recurring Ezra Klein theme on changes in media and the death of blogging.

"Because nobody wants to hear it. I used to blog, as you used to blog. And blogging, as a form, is open to this real-time, ongoing learning process. That went away. But in addition to that, as your profile rises, people say you must have this high profile because you know, because you’re an authority."

That’s Ta-Nehisi. Ezra adds that for him podcasts are the new blogs, because the core of the death of blogging is in the inability to be wrong - and he feels more comfortable saying stuff off-the-cuff that might be wrong on the podcast than on the blog.

Clearly I’m a long way from the level of ability or prominence of either of these guys, but I don’t think I’m alone in blogging much less than I used to and really missing the habit. And I’m almost certainly not going to start a podcast. Perhaps then an early New Year resolution to start being more wrong?