Editor's Note: I'm very disappointed that no one commented on my clever pun in last week's editor's note. Given the beautiful weather outside, that's my only explanation for my perhaps snarkier-than-recently tone this week. --Tim Ogden
1. Global Development: Hey, does anybody remember the Millennium Villages Project? It seems an age ago in terms of development fads, now that we're all focused on cash grants and graduation programs, and according to some papers would fall into the "long-run" category. Andrew Gelman has a post about a new retrospective evaluation of the program (that he participated in), including a link to an evaluation of the evaluation. The results are surprisingly good, given what I expect most people's priors were at this point. Though I suppose the TUP evaluations should perhaps have shifted those priors in a positive direction. I guess I'm kind of surprised that the results don't seem to have gotten the attention I would have predicted. Of course, I don't think anyone has argued that the MVP should be a model for other programs since Nina Munk's book, so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised.
Lant Pritchett has a list of six other things in development that people aren't paying (enough) attention to, mostly variations on the continuing large gap between even the lower part of the income distribution in rich countries and the upper part of the distribution in poor countries.
Lant's first point is about the huge gains from moving. Here's a piece from a few weeks ago about the lack of geographic mobility, specifically rural to urban migration, in the United States where the overall tone is exasperation at these benighted people who stay in small towns (and ruin things for everyone else; it's an interview with Robert Wuthnow about his new book). It caught my eye because I can't imagine something like this being written about rural people in developing countries (without touching off a lot of blowback). But perhaps we should see more stuff like this about all forms of poor-to-rich geographic mobility. Speaking of those rural people, here's a new paper from Marc Bellemare about one of the dynamics that may be keeping the poorest people in rural areas (at least in Madagascar)--the intensification of income from agriculture.
2. Jobs: Last week I linked to the recent study of scheduling practices at The Gap that found that encouraging managers to set more stable schedules for retail employees led to higher productivity and sales for the firm. The exact mechanism for increased sales isn't completely clear, but it appears that managers shifted hours to more experienced workers, who unsurprisingly were more productive. While the study is encouraging overall--stable schedules are better for (most) workers and for employers--it also has a dark tinge. To see why, consider this Atlantic article about the future of jobs at Walmart (which, to its great credit, was well ahead of The Gap in experimenting with more stable schedules for its hourly workers, and other efforts to stabilize workers income). The macro trend is toward fewer jobs, at least in terms of how we used to define that term, for less-skilled and less-experienced employees, and declining job quality for those people. That's been happening at many companies (think of outsourcing of janitorial, security and similar jobs) for a long time. It seems an awful lot like what I understand has happened in European labor markets which are more regulated--stable jobs are limited, more workers, particularly the young pushed into contingent labor contracts with limited benefits, stability or security. From a distance this is fascinating: similar outcomes from radically different processes. But from a policy perspective it's frightening. In the economic development world, we've been talking for a long time about how to move more people into formal employment, like in developed economies. Meanwhile the developed economies are making great progress moving people into informal employment, like in developing countries. Maybe I should have called this item Global Undevelopment.
And to play to the academic part of my readership for a moment, here's a piece about how every effort to create better incentives in academic jobs makes things worse. I remain baffled at the general assumption in economics that managers know what they are doing, given the management they experience on a daily basis. While I can't vouch for the management abilities at the Open Philanthropy Project, chances are if you're a reader of the faiV you, or someone you know might be interested in these job openings.
3. MicroDigitalFinance: Is a neologism a step too far? Probably. But check out CFI's fellows program research agenda. There's a whole lot of "microdigital" there. Interestingly, to me at least, is that you could copy and paste these questions into a research agenda for the US financial services marketplace and no one would bat an eye, especially the ones about the changing nature of work.
A brief interruption for a public service announcement: If you're going to be in Uganda, for God's sake, DO NOT LOSE YOUR SIM CARD. Matt Levine has a line about fintech re-learning all the lessons of modern finance, painfully and in public. Seems that could apply equally well to a lot of actors in the financial inclusion space, but relearning the lessons of the need for explicitly pro-poor services, institutions and regulations. Take for instance this post from CGAP about pricing transparency for digital services. Who knew that digital finance providers might not be very upfront about their pricing without regulation?
There is still innovation and research happening in "traditional/nondigital" microfinance, thankfully. Here's a new paper from Burke, Bergquist and Miguel on lending to Kenyan farmers to enable them to buy low and sell high, rather than the inverse which is the status quo ex ante. The most interesting part is not that it does help farmers profitability but that they can track general equilibrium effects on prices of both inputs and outputs--and there are effects. It's another piece of evidence that microcredit can have positive general equilibrium effects that are missed in individual-focused impact evaluations (cf. Breza and Kinnan).
4. Our Algorithmic Overlords: With ongoing questions about how automation, AI, tightening labor markets, and shifting skills will affect employment, I suppose we can take some heart in this "against the run of play" piece claiming that progress in AI research has hit a wall. Maybe we have more time for structural adjustment than we thought. Of course, that may give more time for big tech companies to lobby for privacy laws that look tough but actually enable much of their ongoing gathering and use of data outside public view. And here's Lucy Bernholz on the need for civil society organizations to quickly come to terms with "the burden of data." I guess Lucy would be encouraged about CFI's research agenda, above. And I got through that without mentioning the Zuckerberg hearings. Oops.
5. US Poverty and Inequality: You may have already seen that Matthew Desmond and colleagues have "kicked on" from their work on evictions in Milwaukee and built a database of eviction records that covers a good portion of the US. Here's the NYTimes coverage of evictions in Richmond.
Here's a new report on the racial wealth gap and small business, that while useful continues my frustration at focusing on the idea that starting small businesses will directly address the wealth gap. Business ownership only increases wealth if there are buyers of those businesses at some point in the future. Given the pre-existing wealth gap, and the businesses that minorities are able to start, who is going to put a residual value on those businesses high enough to affect wealth? Perhaps we should consider the lessons of the global microfinance movement in building wealth through small business financing?
In case you were wondering, here's a new paper on immigrants and entrepreneurship in the US. First-generation immigrants create about 25% of the new businesses in the US, but this is as high as 40% in some regions. But, of course, those firms create fewer jobs and those jobs aren't as good as jobs in native-owned firms. In other words, they may be very good for boosting incomes (though in general there is no wage premium for entrepreneurs versus their likely earnings from employment) but likely not for building wealth.
Kieran Healy has a couple of blog posts in recent weeks looking at various ways to represent time series data, using birth data in the US and in other countries. In addition to my general interest in data viz, this caught my eye because, well, did you know how much birth rates varied from month-to-month? After contemplating whether there were some basic biologic facts I was unaware of, and soliciting help from a L&D nurse friend, I discovered that birth seasonality is a thing, is consistent across time, culture and geography, and there is still lots of debate over what factors account for it. And I also discovered that I have the most common birthday in the US (at least among people born 20 to 40 years after me).
You can see more of Kieran's visualizations of the baby boom here, and some cool animated population pyramids (with discussion and code) here.
