Dani Rodrik's weblog

If it is July, it must be time to think about teaching...

This is no joke. Most people think academics get to take the summer off to vacation as they please. Even some of the better informed think the summer is just for research--with students and teaching as far from the mind as possible. The fiction is also reflected in academic salaries, which are paid for nine months of work. In principle, we do not get paid over the summer since we are not supposed to be doing any work for our institutions.

If it were only so! It is hot as hell in Turkey (yes, I can at least get away from Cambridge during the summer months...) and I am busy preparing my course syllabus for the Fall. We have to turn in our course reserve lists in early August, and if you are revising your course in any way--as I am--this means getting busy right about now.

This gives me occasion to meditate about the nature of teaching economics in a public policy school.

There is a standard mold for teaching economics to undergraduates and to doctoral students. Look at syllabi for courses in international trade in leading universities, and you will see very few differences. That is because there are some standard textbooks to follow, and because (at the doctoral level) there is a clear academic literature that has to be taught.

But how do you teach international trade and trade policy to a group of students who will be policy makers and professionals in the real world--who are too sophisticated and well informed to treat as undergraduates, but for whom the typical doctoral course is useless because it covers the research frontier and not the tools for thinking about policy? 

This is a tough one, and even though I have thought about it for quite some time and experimented with different models over the years, it is a question that still baffles me. The international trade course that I teach is targeted at second-year MPAIDs, who have excellent training in microeconomic theory and econometrics. Somewhat paradoxically, this makes the challenge even greater. With a less well-prepared group, you can resort to the usual excuse: well, these students don't have much background in economics, so I have no choice to teach an essentially undergraduate course, with a few policy anecdotes thrown in. But the students who take my course have invested in heavy duty economics for a whole year (see here for their curriculum) and now deserve better. My hope is to train them beyond simply being able to understand what is in the WSJ, FT, or The Economist. They need to be able to evaluate critically what is in the policy-relevant academic literature and think creatively about policy options in light of that literature.

This is a lot more difficult than it may appear. The last few times I have tried to do this, I found myself teaching too much of a conventional doctoral economics type course--with lots of theory and so on. Students (rightly) complained that we did not have enough time left to get to discuss policy issues.

So this time around I am trying something different. I am organizing the syllabus around policy issues rather than the standard topic headings. So, rather than have a section in the syllabus on "theories of comparative advantage," the relevant headings become "why do countries trade what they do," and "does it matter?" Globalization strategies, China, WTO, and regional trade agreements get their own sections. (See here for the syllabus as it stands at present--minus the readings.)

You might say, what's the big deal? Well, the challenge is to teach an issues-oriented course while avoiding superficiality and still remaining rigorous and strongly grounded in the literature. I do not know if I will pull it off. Check back at the end of the Fall term.

And if you have any suggestions about additional topics for the course, do let me know. (But bear in mind that my colleague Federico Sturzenegger teaches a continuation of this course in the Spring, covering financial globalization.)

What does a development professional need to know?

No, this is not a quiz for Bob Zoellick, but to all of you out there who are working in economic development--whether in government, multilateral organizations, or NGOs. Two questions specifically: 1. What is the one skill you learned in graduate school that is indispensable to your job? and 2. What skill or tool do you wish you had learned in school that you didn't?

Why do I ask? Well. tomorrow my colleagues and I are holding a faculty retreat to review the MPAID curriculum. Yes, I know, it is the best development policy program in the world as it is, but there is always room for improvement (or value in knowing there is not). So your input would be most appreciated.

And yes, you MPAID graduates can participate too. Just let me know that you are a graduate (if you wish to remain anonymous!).

As for potential applicants or students of development: let me know what you are looking for in a development curriculum.

UPDATE: Thanks to all who responded with such useful feedback. Ben may be interested to know that I read out loud his comments in the meeting today.

Going to Istanbul in June 2008?

You should, if you are an academic economist. The International Economic Association is holding its next World Congress in Istanbul on June 25-29, 2008. Here is the announcement: Download IEA2008.pdf. I cannot guarantee that the program will be top-notch (even though I am in the program committee). But I can guarantee delicious food.

A quiz on global poverty

It is Spring Conference time at the Kennedy School, and I just spoke at a panel on demography, poverty, and development chaired by our Dean, David Ellwood.

I asked the audience a favorite question of mine: would you rather be poor in a rich country, or rich in a poor country. I gave them the following terms for thinking about the question:

1. Assume you care only about your own consumption
2. Define poor and rich as someone who is the in the bottom or top decile of a country
3. Define poor and rich country analogously as a country in the bottom or top decile of the distribution of per-capita incomes across countries.

The audience was divided evenly between those who would choose to be rich in a poor country and those who would rather be poor in a rich country. The real answer is that it is not even close.  This has important implications for how we think about poverty reduction in the world.

Can you guess what the correct answer is?

Blinder and Bhagwati debate at Harvard

Is offshoring a big deal, requiring us to significantly enhance safety nets, rethink the future of education, and move upscale in the ladder of comparative advantage, as Blinder thinks? Or is there nothing new under the sun, as Bhagwati believes? The two held a debate this afternoon at Harvard, along with a supporting cast of four others (Richard Freeman, Doug Irwin, Lori Kletzer, and Robert Lawrence).
I thought Blinder made a good case, although I would have liked to see more on the distributional consequences of offshoring. The optimistic scenario is that offshoring will turn out to be similar to the intra-industry trade of the past (in manufacturing, and among rich countries), where we had a huge explosion of trade without sharp distributional changes. The tasks being traded were too similar. Maybe it will be no different with offshoring based on IT.
As for Bhagwati, once you stripped away his anecdotes and witticisms, what you were left with was--well, honestly, I am not sure what you had left . Bhagwati's main worry seems to be that Blinder's concerns will empower protectionists. As Richard Freeman put it in his comments, he is fighting the last war, which doesn't exactly move us forward. Lawrence (and to some extent Irwin) made the counter-arguments much more effectively. They both argued that the adjustments will be slower and less momentous.
But the most important point, I felt, was made by Lori Kletzer. She argued powerfully that we had to get real about doing something about the distributional and adjustment costs of trade regardless of whether IT-based offshoring is as big a deal as Blinder claims. Globalization is in trouble as it is. And as she also put it, if you are thinking like this, it does not necessarily mean that you are anti-trade.

A globalization reading group

I concluded last night a reading group on globalization that a small band of mostly MPAID students have prevailed on me to hold. We met every two weeks to discuss a recent book. See this file for the list of books:Download globalization_reading_group.doc I use the reading group as an opportunity to think of where the gaps in the literature are. One thing I have become convinced of is that we still lack a really good book on economic globalization.  The students' reaction to the books we read is quite indicative of this.  They found most of the books simplistic, criticized them roundly for their poor analytics and empirics (we must be doing something right in the MPAID program!), and in general thought the literature too ideological.  But when I tried to sell them on my take, they were not exactly non-critical either. So I have got work to do too...      

An executive program on New Thinking on Growth and Development

I have been spending much of this week (well sort of; those who know me better know that I have had much more important things to take care of this week...) teaching in an executive program that the Center for International Development at Harvard runs for economists at the World Bank and other multilateral organizations. Ricardo Hausmann, Rohini Pande, Chuck Sabel (from Columbia), Abhijit Banerjee, and Sendhil Mullanaithan are some of the other faculty who teach in this weeklong program. The attendees are fairly senior people, so the discussions are lively. I am amazed at how some of the new thinking on self-discovery, growth diagnostics, binding contrains, and experimentation is being absorbed within the World Bank and the donor community more generally. But the question is: can you really practice "different strokes for different folks" in institutions that are used to uniformity?