Editor's Note: I'm back on faiV duty. Many thanks to Alexander Berger, Jeffrey Bloem, John Thompson, and Rebecca Rouse for filling in. If you would be interested in being a guest editor of the faiV at some point, feel free to reach out.
This week, I'm casting my eye back over the many things I've been reading over the last few months. Don't worry, I'm not going to try to cover all of those in one faiV, though there will be, perhaps a bit less commentary than usual.--Tim Ogden
1. Financial Inclusion and Digital Finance: The last time I was writing the faiV, various takes on the Global Findex data were being featured prominently. So it only seems fitting to come back to that as I return. Greta Bull of CGAP has a two-part blog, part I and part II, reacting to Beth Rhyne's and Sonja Kelly's take (may I take a moment to smile at the inclusion that sentence reveals?) on the Hype vs. Reality of inclusion. Bull argues that the Findex data shows greater progress on inclusion than Rhyne and Kelly see. For what it's worth I lean to toward Bull in this debate. It would be surprising, given the incredibly rapid progress in access, if the access-use gap wasn't growing, especially in countries with relatively low levels or recent gains in access as network effects won't kick in for awhile.
There is another concern beyond the use/access gap--does use of the available accounts make people better off. Here's a new paper from Kast and Pomeranz showing that providing free savings accounts in Chile led to lower debt burdens (and some additional evidence on rotten kin). On the other hand here's an open letter from Anup Signh to Kenyan Central Bank governor Patrick Njoroge making the case for urgent regulatory action on digital credit to protect borrowers. On the third hand (hat tip to Brad DeLong) mobile money seems to have saved lives (note no counterfactuals there, but it seems plausible) during Ebola outbreaks in Liberia and Sierra Leone during Ebola outbreaks by ensuring that response workers got paid.
Of course, benefit depends not just on use, but on who is using the services. Microsave found that 80% of the "addressable LMI market" in India was not being served by fintechs, and, with CIIE's Bharat Inclusion Initiative, has launched a "Financial Inclusion Lab" to help Indian fintech's address that market.
2. Our Algorithmic Overlords: If you've gotten out of the habit of reading the faiV, what better way to grab your attention back than sexbots! Here's Marina Adshade, an economist at UBC, with a thoroughly economic argument about how sexbots could make marriage better (by changing how it works and what it does). And here's Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at UCLA, making the counterargument. Apparently he reads Justin Fox.
On a much more prosaic, and more urgent, front, there have been a raft of stories on the increasingly alarming situation in Northwest China where the tech-driven panopticon seems to be racing ahead in the service of persecution of Muslims and ethnic minorities. Here is the NYTimes "inside China's Dystopian Dreams". Here's Reuters on the "surveillance state spread[ing] quietly." MIT Technology Review asks, "who needs democracy when you have data?" And here's Foreign Affairs on the "coming competition between digital authoritarianism and liberal democracy." If I have a bone to pick it's the lack of attention to the possibility of "authoritarian democracy" that comes along with a surveillance state and AI overlords.
3. Global Development: If sexbots don't get your attention, what about hyperselectivity of migrants? I think, quite a while ago, I linked to Hicks, et al. on the systematic differences between those who migrate from rural to urban Kenya, and those who stay on the farm, finding that urban productivity is a factor of the traits of the workers who migrate. But if not, now they are in VoxDev with a great summary of the work. It's particularly interesting to read in conjunction with this new paper on the hyper-selectivity of migrants to the US--the fact that migrants to the US are both more likely to have a college degree than their compatriots, and than the US native-born population. That hyper-selectivity plays a role in second generation outcomes, but has mixed results for economic mobility of Asian, African and Latino migrants.
What to do for those who don't migrate? I really like this new paper from Beaman et al. on using Network Theory-Based targeting to determine how to deliver agricultural training. Why? Well, because I find technology adoption a particularly interesting set of questions, but mostly because they "identify methods to realize these gains at low cost to policymakers."
4. Philanthropy: There's an old saw that two data points are anecdotes, but three are a trend. It's mostly applied to journalism, but I originally heard it at my first job doing market research on the IT industry. Regardless of it's source, it definitely indicates there is a trend to looking much harder and more skeptically extreme wealth-driven philanthropy (or social investment, or impact investment, etc.). Anand Giridharadas expands a talk he gave at Aspen into a full length book called Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Rob Reich, a political scientist at Stanford (who I have the temerity to call friend), has Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better, and David Callahan, founder of Inside Philanthropy, has The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age. None of them sound much like Philanthrocapitalism or Giving. I'm excited by all three, and I think you should buy and read them, but let's be realistic. You're much more likely to read this review of the three from Elizabeth Kolbert. The most interesting review--from a meta-perspective--though is this review in SSIR ofWinners Take All from Mark Kramer, clearly one of the targets of Giridharadas's book. Well done SSIR.
5. US Inequality: Continuing on that theme, it's not just the billionaire philanthropists who are undermining American society and democracy, according to Matthew Stewart. If you're a US-based reader of this newsletter you are likely part of the problem. If you prefer the academic version of an argument like this, here's a new paper from Schneider, Hastings and LaBriola on income inequality and the growing, and amplifying, gap in parental investments in children. They also read Justin Fox (and enough with the cryptic link, that's a piece about sociologists engaging with the public more like economists, including making their papers open access.) Or if you prefer the academic version in summary form, here's Schneider's tweet thread. And since it's back-to-school time, here's the most depressing back-to-school news I can imagine: School districts in my area are hiring private detectives to follow kids and make sure they aren't crossing district lines in order to go to a good school. No arguing with Stewart's thesis allowed while this is how wealthy school districts are spending their money.
It's not just the US that has concerns about the influence of extreme wealth and inequality. Here's a 3 minute book preview of James Crabtree's book, The Billionaire Raj.
