Dani Rodrik's weblog

Food prices and poverty

Here is a question for the economics student: Are higher world food prices good or bad for the world's poor?

If you have been paying attention to the advocates of the Doha "Development" Round, who have trumpeted the benefits that the poor would get from agricultural liberalization in the advanced countries, you would be answering that it's got to be good. After all, poor people make a living off agriculture, and if the prices of what they produce increase, their real incomes must go up as well. 

But now turn to the concerns being expressed (here and here) about the consequences of the rise in food prices due to the growing demand for biofuels (especially ethanol made from corn), and you get the exact opposite implication: higher food prices, it is now said, raise the cost of living for the poor and reduce the real amount of food aid the gets delivered.

The real answer of course is that it depends on whether a poor household is a net seller or buyer of food (that is, whether it grows more or less food than it consumes). This means that the rural poor generally tends to benefit from higher food prices, whereas the urban poor generally get hurt. How large the impact is depends, in turn, on the size of the food account as a share of total expenditures or income of a household. And whether the change is good or bad for a nation's poor as a whole depends on the geography of poverty in a country.

So as an economist loves to say, it depends. But it depends in predictable ways on household and country characteristics.

But you would not know it from the way these issues get discussed in the public debate. 

Clinton's version of Davos

The Financial Times reports about this year's version of the mini-Davos that former president Bill Clinton organizes in New York every year. Unlike the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos in January, where invitations depend on who you know and on your company's budget for such events, there is apparently a different sort of entry ticket for Clinton's event: you are allowed to attend only if you or company have done some good deeds for the world or have contributed to them.  

What counts for a good deed?

Roger Ferguson, chairman of Swiss Re in the US, got as much applause in one session for having installed compact fluorescent lightbulbs in his home as others did for leading multi-million dollar projects in Africa.

So don't despair, it seems an invitation is within reach...

IMF, the guardian hero

Today's NYT carries a story by Steven Weisman on the IMF and its search for a new mission for itself. There is nothing new in it, but the opening paragraph is certainly eye-caching:

A decade ago, the International Monetary Fund helped to stabilize the world economy after markets collapsed in Latin America, Russia and Asia. Though critics often have rued its interventionism, the fund was widely hailed as a heroic guardian of the global financial system.

Well, I was around a decade ago, and I do not recall anyone (possibly other than someone on 19th Street) hailing the IMF as a heroic guardian of anything in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. Instead the debate was about whether the IMF got it just a little bit wrong (the IMF's own post-mortem evaluation) or a whole lot wrong. I don't imagine that Joe Stiglitz and Marty Feldstein see eye to eye on many things, but both thought (along with many others) that the IMF's policies in East Asia had been grossly inappropriate. 

But there is a serious question now of what the IMF's future role ought to be. What do you think? 

Every academic's nightmare: the long wait for the referee reports

There is nothing more frustrating to an academic than the long wait that one typically experiences after submitting a paper to a journal and before a response comes back from the editors.  A new paper on this topic, discussed in Econospeak, disects the economics behind the waiting times.  As Barkley Rosser notes in is comment on the paper,

what has happened is that a bad social norm has evolved in economics where referees simply assume that they can sit on papers from economics journals for a long time and just put them aside, fearing that if they get their reports back quickly, they will simply be punished by having more papers sent to them to referee.

Over at REStat, which I co-edit, we have been using an "early reject" system to counteract this bad equilibrium. Every paper is screened by one of the four editors, and we reject a relatively high share of submissions without sending the paper to referees if the paper is, in the editor's judgement, very unlikely to make it.

When I first started using the system, I worried that I would be getting a lot of hate mail from irate authors. This has not been the case. I remember only one complaint--from an author who had two papers early-rejected--and who in fact subsequently apologized.  Instead, I have received many thank you's. 

What I think this shows is the great distress that the long waits cause. Most authors prefer an editor's quick "no" to the refereeing process, if the latter has small probability of success.  

Does blogging have an academic downside?

One of the virtues of teaching in a public policy school is that writing clearly and for a broader audience is valued, instead of being taken as a negative signal of academic accomplishment and ambition. A response to my previous post by a successful economics blogger highlights the issues in stark terms:

[w]hy my blog is popular is a great big puzzle. I don't understand it, but I do work hard at it, harder than most I'd guess, and I can't say it doesn't cost me research. But ten people will read my papers, if I'm lucky. There's no way I will ever have the impact publishing I will have blogging--not even close--so day to day it's hard to know where to put my effort. For my personal gain, it's research and forget about the blog, but I'm not sure that's best in some bigger sense. Reporters will never call based upon one (or all) of my papers....

My Department won't even mention my bog in our newsletter. I've had someone visit my office to tell me I should stop doing it because the Department
won't value it, and it may even undermine academic credibility having a blog, but I figure this is what tenure is for so I said I'm doing it anyway. But it does hurt my feelings (within the Department) to be so ignored. I only have two readers here--I think it's funny that I have more people who read at Harvard, Berkeley, etc. than here, and maybe it says something about what mid-level departments value, but it's hard having everyone figure I am just wasting my time when they have no idea what I do. So that part of doing this has been pretty hard. It has no value whatsoever to the Department, but obviously I wish it did.

Some of these snubbing Department people will eventually come up to this blogger and ask for blogging tips. Better have the appropriate response ready... 

Scholarship vs. bloggership

Some years ago I served on a committee at the Kennedy School charged with evaluating the quantity and quality of the School's published output. One of the exercises I remember doing is to correlate the scholarly output of individual faculty members with their op-ed and similar publications. My hypothesis was that if we were doing our job right those who wrote the most op-eds would be also the most prolific scholars. Otherwise what authority would the op-eds really have?

I will not reveal the results of that exercise, but it recently gave me an idea for a similar analysis of the economics blogosphere. The question is: what is the relationship between a blogger's popularity and his scholarly impact? (As far as I can tell we are all males strangely enough.) So I asked my assistant Dana Brudowsky to do some research.

We obtained rankings of blog popularity from Aaron Schiff's site, which are in turn based on Technorati data. We based our rankings of scholarship on Google citation data, using Publish or Perish. Publish or Perish is a software that retrieves Google Scholar citation data and computes a number of indices based on them. We used the simplest among them, namely the total number of citations to an economist's total body of work, to rank economist bloggers in terms of impact of scholarship. These citation totals range from 35,835 (in the case of Gary Becker) to a low of 3. (Yes, I am aware of all the problems with this... Believe me, that is not how we make promotion decisions at Harvard, even though we certainly look at the numbers.)

We limited our search to economists with a Ph.D. and who seem to have a university affiliation. When a blog has multiple authors, we gave each author the same blog rank (but of course different scholarship ranks based on Google citation data). Obviously, we could not include blogs that are anonymous. By the end of the day, we had identified about 100 blogging economists with footprints in Google scholar.

And the result? Going into this, my expectation was that blog popularity and scholarship would have little (or perhaps even a negative) correlation. After all, the skills of a blogger (writing quickly and well, working for short-term results, spending a lot of time reading and digesting others' work) are not necessarily those that a scholar who wants long-term impact needs to have. Plus, there is the time spent on the blog--which does mean less time for research. Remember the Acemoglu response: I am too darn busy writing research papers... And one can certainly be an excellent and popular blogger--providing stimulating commentary on others' work--without having large scholarly output or high impact.

And yet the correlation between how well one does on bloggership and on scholarship turns out to be positive and statistically highly significant. The rank correlation between the two is 0.27, and it is significant at the 99% level of confidence. Here is the scatter plot:

Wait a minute, you say, this does not look like a very strong positive relationship--and you are right. Even though it is statistically significant, the quantitative significance is not that impressive. In fact, if one excludes the top 10 scholars the correlation is no longer statistically significant at conventional levels. Here is the data for those who want to play with it, or check for (and report) errors.

One way to interpret the results is to say that high-impact scholarship appears to be a sufficient but not necessary condition for successful bloggership. Once one leaves out the very top scholars, there is very little relationship between scholarly impact and popularity as a blogger. (I should add, to cover myself against the statistics police, that these statements are conditional on having a blog.) Cyberspace creates its own pecking order. 

And now to the real puzzle that this little research project left me with: why are there (apparently) no women economics bloggers?

UPDATE: OK, I think I have overlooked two women economist bloggers who fit the criteria: Lynne Kiesling and Chiara Lombardini-Riipinen. I am sure that I have overlooked many other male ones as well (including Craig Newmark, who submitted a comment below). Craig Newmark also points to some anomalies in the Google Scholar citation data.  Some of these are readily explained. The number of papers seems inflated because Google Scholar treats different versions of each paper as a separate "publication." So a paper circulated under two working paper series counts as two papers.  On the other hand, I have no idea what "years" (which comes from Publish or Perish) is referring to.  In any case, I believe the citation data that I use is unaffected by either of these, since it is the sum of citations to individual "publications," with no overlap. 

UPDATE2: See further clarification on Google Scholar and Publish or Perish here.

Deconstructing economists' take on free trade

Once in a while you come across a paper that makes you nod in agreement and go "yes!" with every sentence you read. Robert Driskill's Deconstructing the Argument for Free Trade is such a paper. Driskill is a distinguished economist who knows the theory of comparative advantage as well as anyone else. And his argument is not against trade per se, but about the manner in which economists present their arguments in public and in their textbooks. His main argument is that the standard renditions

gloss over a key issue the resolution of which is anything but obvious: What does it mean for a change in economic circumstances to be "good for the nation as a whole", even when some members of that nation are hurt by the change?

In other words, instead of sticking to what they are good at--analyzing trade-offs--economists typically engage in amateur normative political theorizing about what is good for society.

Driskill also makes a more fundamental point:

Consider a scene in the movie Dead Poets Society, in which the all-boys-school poetry teacher portrayed by the actor Robin Williams asks his students: What is the purpose of language? They predictably answered: to communicate. Their teacher then corrected them: the purpose of language, he claimed, is to "woo women!"

Of course, in some contexts, wooing women is a worthy goal. But scientific writing about policy issues shouldn't be like writing poetry. Unfortunately, most economic writing on the welfare implications of trade are not a balanced weighing of the evidence or a critical evaluation of the pros and cons of arguments, but rather are more akin to a zealous prosecutor's advocacy of a point of view. As such, this writing is designed to persuade rather than to give the
reader the information needed to form an educated point of view.

...

My point is not that the economics profession is not on the side of angels in the policy debate over trade liberalization--although I will argue that a more careful argument should lead to a more nuanced view--but that the argument is poorly made. This reflects negatively on the credibility of the economics profession as a whole: critical thinkers might believe all economic arguments are as poorly supported as is the one in support of free trade; others might believe economists are mere propagandists and handmaidens in service of some philosophical or political goal. Furthermore, it obscures some key ideas that should be part of a persuasive argument in support of free trade. And finally, it has confused many people into false beliefs about what economic analysis really says about the effects of international trade.

A pervasive such false belief, for example, is that trade necessarily benefits more people than it hurts.

Driskill illustrates his arguments by drawing on the writings of a range of economists, from Deirdre McCloskey to Paul Krugman. You must read this paper if you are an economist (or keep their company). 

Librarians' folly?

I have been reading Erik Reinert's How Rich Countries Got Rich... and Poor Countries Stay Poor, which is a lot of fun because it covers ground that economists have long forgotten (even though I do have questions about Reinert's understanding of contemporary economics). One of the snippets in the book is that the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School discarded in 1984 all of the books that had not been checked out in the last fifty years (including most of its collection of Friedrich List). Reinert says that he subsequently bought some of these books from book dealers.

I find this to be outrageous, and almost hard to believe. The typical deep research (i.e. a Google search) has not turned up any more information about this infamous event in the history of librarianship. I suppose I could walk over and ask myself, but I wonder if anyone out there has any knowledge of it.

Baker library holds a special place in my heart as I spent a god bit of my undergraduate years in its bowels. After two years of working in the dining halls and washing dishes, I made a professional leap in my junior year to a research assistantship with the incomparable Raymond Vernon (of the international product cycle fame.) Ray Vernon would eventually turn out to become a mentor and strong supporter, but at the time he presented a terrifying figure to a shy undergraduate. I would ensconce myself in Baker for hours for fear of failing to come up with good results. I still remember vividly the very first two tasks he set me on: to come up with minimum efficient scale figures for the auto industry and with evidence that long-term contracts fare poorly in international trade.  What would now take about ten minutes sitting in front of a PC took me days and days of walking the stacks at Baker.

And I remember the librarians at Baker as nice and wise folks who would not have made such a blunder...     

The poll continues

See additional suggestions for new economist bloggers over at Marginal Revolution.

Economist blogger you most want to see

I have never had as many responses to a post as I have had to this one. And the results are in.  The new economist blogger you most want to see is Joe Stiglitz, followed by Daron Acemoglu. Here is the full tabulation, as of this morning:

Following up on my promise, I have written to both Stiglitz and Acemoglu, encouraging them to start a blog. Here is the text of the e-mail to Stiglitz:

Dear Joe 

I hope you are well. 

I asked readers of my blog the other day which economist they would most like to see start a blog, promising that I would make a personal appeal to the winner of the poll. (See http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/09/a-good-day-for-.html.) Well, you may not be surprised to find that you topped the list, followed by Daron Acemoglu. So here is my appeal: please start a blog! There are a lot of people out there who want to hear more from you. It’s a great way to reach out to the interested public, and I have found it a very rewarding experience. 

And if you feel like sending in a short contribution to my blog, or even being a “guest blogger, I would be delighted of course.

Daron Acemoglu got this e-mail: 

Merhaba Daron 

Umarim iyisin. Gecen gun blogumda okuyucularima soyle bir soru sordum: en cok hangi ekonomistin bir blog baslatmasini isterdiniz? (http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/09/a-good-day-for-.html) En cok oyu alanla sahsen temasa gecip, ikna etmeye calisacagima dair de soz verdim. Siralamada en ustte Stiglitz ile sen ciktiniz. Ben de okuyucularin dileklerini sana iletiyorum: lutfen bir blog baslat! Senin dusuncelerini daha yakindan takip etmek isteyen kalabalik bir merakli kitlesi var. Onlara erisebilmek icin blog harika bir arac. 

Bu arada benim bloguma da bir-ki kelime birsey yollamak, ya da “guest blogger”lik yapmak istersen cok sevinirim tabi.

Here is my next question. Does Turkey have too many or too few great economists given its size and economic standing?

UPDATE: Daron Acemoglu responds by saying blogging "seems like a lot of work." He adds "I am already overcommitted, so it's a bit scary to take something else on." But he promises to send a "guest blog" at some point.

UPDATE2: Anya Stiglitz writes back to say that she and Joe have been on the road in Ethiopia and without regular e-mail access. Apparently, Stiglitz has been doing a bit of blogging on the NYTimes website to cover for Nick Kristoff.