Mama liked you more and now you're more successful

There is a strong link between individual height and economic and educational success, in part because height reflects childhood nutrition that also affects cognitive development. Research by Anne Case (Princeton) and Chris Paxson (Brown) shows more success, remarkably, even for taller relative to shorter siblings. Aside from random genetic variation, moms do not necessarily give the same size piece of apple pie to each kid.

There is no data on apple pie slices, of course, but there is data on whether moms got prenatal care and smoked or drank during pregnancies. Good behavior varies between pregnancies even for the same mom, which affects birth length and weight, which affects height, which affects success.

I'm a little touchy about this line of research as a 5'8" male raised on Captain Crunch and TV dinners. The more serious development point is that improving early childhood nutrition has a huge payoff because it affects lifelong individual success.

SOCCKET II: so glad to hand over The Snark to the Next Generation

It's refreshing to get the complaint that I was too nice -- on the soccer ball that lights up the night for poor kids, the SOCCKET. Aaron Ausland of the blog Staying for Tea more than makes up for it with a thorough takedown of it as a Playpump repeat fiasco in the making.

Angela, Please don't celebrate your Domination over Greece quite so much

You will not read this blog post today

There is widespread consensus that development in Africa is held back by the capricious policies of the government. I am referring, of course, to the US government. A crucial duty-free provision of the US African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) will expire in September, killing off the African textile export jobs on which 200,000 families depend.

US government policy on Africa is capricious because nobody cares.

The NYT has not mentioned AGOA in print since 2010 and virtually all of its mentions over the last decade were in Nick Kristof columns; the last regular NYT news story on AGOA was in 2003.

The Washington Post last mentioned AGOA in 2009 in a story headlined:

Clinton Pushes Kenyan Leaders to Follow Through on Promised Reforms

Don't blame the newspapers: they cover what their readers want to read. (The specialized business press, FT (already linked above) and WSJ have done better covering the current crisis.) We had our own bitter experience with this when we lobbied hard to save AGOA jobs in Madagascar, with an impressive lack of success. Apparently none of the three readers of those posts had much ability to influence US government policy.

So my prediction is that this post today will have no readers and will have no effect whatsoever, unless enough of you non-readers get outraged enough about this non-effect to use your non-influence to save the day.

Harry Potter and the Soccket of Fire

Joseph Campbell in his classic The Hero with a Thousand Faces described a "monomyth" common to many classic tales, which has since been applied to classics of our time like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

According to my extensive research (1 Wikipedia article), these boons are things the hero brings back that "may be used to improve the world."

These hero stories are also very common in development and philanthropy, the latest example being the Soccket, a boon in the form of a soccer ball that generates electricity for poor children, discovered by some very admirable innovators.

Now I'm not going to do what you expect and get all crotchety at this point and say this is all useless nonsense. The great thing about the Hero Stories is that they sometimes really do come true, and in fact our market system is great for generating real hero stories.  Our most recent real-life hero story might be entitled "Steve Jobs and the Tablet of iPad".

The difference of course is that Steve Jobs only became a hero after the iPad was accepted by consumers. The problem in development philanthropy is that we get excited about the hero story before we even know whether the "boon" works for the intended consumers. (As Seth Gitter points out, there is no information on the Soccket web site on whether it is good bang for the buck or really any evidence on how poor kids reacted to the Soccket)

So my constructive advice for the Soccket creators is please give us a little more evidence on how well the Soccket works for those poor consumers and a bit less of rich people testifying how excited they are about this story.

And the lesson for the day is that the real-life hero narratives in development are more likely to come from private entrepreneurs than from philanthropy.

UPDATE 2:45pm EDT RESPONSE FROM SOCCKET CO-INVENTOR (I EXTRACTED FROM LONGER EMAIL)

Hi Professor,

As co-founder of Uncharted Play and a co-inventor of the SOCCKET, I want to thank you for your interest in, and perhaps more importantly, your critique of our movement. Constructive comments like yours help us to confirm that we are on the right track to creating the maximum positive social impact in communities around the world.

… I am no stranger to the need for objective monitoring and evaluation of development efforts, and I have made sure to incorporate rigorous data collection into the DNA of Uncharted Play as an organization. Further, we design all of our products for, and in collaboration with, our end users in developing contexts. For example, children's feedback from Mexico, South Africa, El Salvador, Nigeria, and Brazil has been critical as we continue to iterate our technical designs for the SOCCKET.

…kids have found the product to be truly magical. The response has been universally positive, and variations on the same scene unfold each time we first present the ball. First, it's pure joy – and that is before the kids even know there is anything different about the ball.  When we actually say that the ball is special, that it can harness energy and power a lamp or a phone, there is always a collective yell of excitement.  Then, when we plug in a lamp to demonstrate,the kids’ eyes just pop out of their heads, and you can see the wheels beginning to turn.  There’s a moment of silent amazement, and then, right away, kids start brainstorming their own ideas. …I certainly think that type of creative inspiration qualifies as a "boon" for our users even if there is no MDG that adequately captures it or tried-and-true metric for recording it.

In this vein, the point you made in your post about the need for testimonials from users is well taken; we will be adding user comments from our field studies to our website….

{added responses to Seth Gitter}:

Uncharted Play is a social enterprise, not an NGO, so we are held accountable by our investors and kept afloat by revenue.  As such, it would be all too easy to ignore impact evaluation altogether so that we can dedicate more of our financial and human resources to sales, marketing, etc.. However, as I mentioned above, we are truly focused on collaborating with communities to implement meaningful, catalytic programs, and - rather than resting on our laurels or focusing strictly on profit - we are taking aggressive action to track outcomes, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

We are a new company (just over 1 year old), and we do not have the resources to support a randomized controlled trial, especially since funding for this is often restricted to 501(c)3 organizations (which, as I mentioned above, we are not). Thus, we can only speak to improvements from pre- to post-intervention as tracked by our partners on the ground.

By replacing pollutant kerosene lamps and providing extra hours of light after the sun goes down, clean energy solutions like the SOCCKET can immediately and dramatically improve the lives of billions around the globe. By tracking suppressed demand for kerosene, we are gathering very persuasive evidence about the SOCCKET’s direct impact on households.

Further, Uncharted Play is focused on FUN and letting kids be kids. If it were just about producing as much energy as efficiently as possible, we would be distributing a hand-crank. The big difference is that, unlike a hand-crank, a soccer ball is fun. We are working to distribute a product that emphasizes the joy in life, not another object that simply reminds users of what they lack. The whole point of SOCCKET is that it's supposed to be fun. We aim to remain firmly in the territory of the whimsical without degenerating into mere frivolity.

Our studies are not publicly available at this time.  If you have any suggestions about where we could get funding to help us launch an open online platform, please let my team know - we'd love to do it!

Thanks again for your interest...

Best – Julia

Julia C. Silverman, Co-founder & Chief Social Officer, Uncharted Play, Inc.

Rulers of the Twitterverse

Foreign Policy has just released its annual Twitterati 100. Here are the economists (gee I wonder why I got a small bump in followers yesterday?)

Other Twit 100 development favorites you should be following if you are not already: @charlesjkenny, @m_clem (Michael Clemens), @viewfromthecave, @africaisacountry, @AndrewMwenda, @lpolgreen, @BinyavangaV

Some personal favorites omitted: @cblatts, @wrongingrights,@alanna_shaikh (the latter two would have helped with complaints of underrepresentation of #FPWomeratti)

But aside from everything else, let us all express profound gratitude to @FP_Magazine for the omission of @NYTimesFriedman .

UPDATE 3:30pm EDT: Speaking as a well-known feminist, happy to see this Democratic Revolt of the #FPWomeratti : an online collaboration to nominate women left out of the heavily male Twit 100.

I am particularly glad to see recognition for {if you are a female friend, insert your name here}.

Why Can’t China Just Become Like Us?

by Zhenbo Hou The biggest anxiety that some people have about China’s rise is whether a rapidly-growing authoritarian capitalist economy, ranked 2^nd largest in the world, will be able and willing to adapt to the unique global responsibilities and pressures that arise from being number one. For a development establishment most familiar and comfortable with liberal democracy, it is an article of faith that, in order for China to truly lead the world, they must eventually become “like us.”

What people in the “West” must realize and eventually accept is that China’s contribution to the 21^st century is not only about lifting 300 million people out of poverty, but also about enriching the debate about how development happens. From the orthodox perspective, several seemingly contradictory phenomena have taken place in China over the last thirty years: A property boom occurred, although the right to personal property was not guaranteed until a constitutional amendment in 2004; the state has maintained a level of control over the banking system and capital markets that was regarded outside the country as hopelessly “inefficient;” finally, and most notably, the party has remained in power - managing a country of 1.3 billion people.

For Western tastes, China’s political reforms might seem too gradual and marginal in nature. However, for any Chinese citizen who lived through the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, when hard-line ideological policing dominated daily life, the shift has been drastic, and the freedoms that most people enjoy in China today are worthy of being cherished. Society is now relatively disease and hunger-free; cars and home ownerships has become a strain on the nation’s ability to supply, rather than a rare luxury; travel and study abroad are commonplace for those with the means. In last week’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, Apple revealed that they have started to develop more “China friendly” apps on its newest Macbook Pro, in order to cater to their largest market. Surely such evidence doesn’t support the notion that China is headed for a Soviet-style collapse.

All this being said, China has no room for complacency about its next phase of reforms. As Chinese people become more aware of the issues that are happening around them, they will want to make their voices heard, and want their opinions to matter. It is estimated there are 500-600 million netizens in China, with 300 million of them posting onto Weibo (China’s Twitter) on a daily basis. The government has responded gradually but surely: the peaceful resolve of the Wukan incident signaled support for village –level elections in China and the release of public expenditure record by central government ministries will attract more public scrutiny. Whether these measures will be enough remains to be seen, but they reflect the cautious approach to politics epitomized by Zhou Enlai, Chinese Premier under Mao, whom when asked about the significance of the French Revolution of 1789 by President Richard Nixon, responded, “It is too early to tell.”

Zhenbo Hou is a fellow of Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in Westminster, London. He is currently working as an economist in the Millennium Development Goals Unit of the Nigerian Presidency in Abuja. A Chinese national, Zhenbo is a graduate of Warwick University and the London School of Economics.

The significance of Rio+20

Delegates gather in Rio to commemorate 20 years of nothing happening since a UN Summit where nothing happened.

Yet another perspective on China: It's History, Stupid

Chris Blattman featured yesterday the new paper by Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg, How Deep are the Roots of Economic Development? The paper is a great survey of the exploding literature linking today's development outcomes to ancient roots. ( I denote the survey as "great" based on the usual criteria: frequency of citation of my own research.)

The Spolaore and Wacziarg paper also allows yet another angle on the debate of the last few days on China's rise. China's middle income position today at least partially reflects long-run factors: two favorable and one unfavorable . The two favorable historical factors are very long experience with (1) technology and (2) organized statehood. The unfavorable factor (3) is a long history of autocracy and violence.

China's remarkable rise in the last 3 decades could just be the intersection of favorable historical factors (1) and (2) with increased globalization. In other words, China's miracle could just be overcoming previous miserable under-performance relative to its own long-run potential. Further rise could then require finally changing the adverse factor (3):  autocracy.

The Parable of Sam and Joe

At birth, Sam was 361 percent richer than Joe.  Then for most of their lives, Joe’s income stayed at the level of dire poverty while Sam’s kept growing steadily.  By the time they reached middle age, Sam had become 20 times richer than Joe. From that low point, things finally turned out big time for Joe and he started catching up to Sam, but today Sam is still 253 percent richer than Joe. Whom would you prefer to be, Sam or Joe? If Sam followed one career approach and Joe followed another, would you rather imitate Sam or Joe?

As you may have guessed, Sam is Uncle Sam, standing in for the average American income. Joe is actually Zhao, standing in for the average Chinese per capita income, and their “lifetimes” are from 1870 to 2011 (“middle age” is around the 1970s, and “today” is 2011).

Yesterday’s blog post provoked a few negative comments and suggestions that I look at other blog posts by Helmut Reisen and Gideon Rachman that prove America’s decline relative to China’s rise.  Anyone questioning the orthodoxy on American decline and Chinese superiority even gets the ominous label of “denialist.”

This is not to deny China’s remarkable economic miracle, just a reminder that the miracle is about growth and not about levels. And this parable suggests that growth is not necessarily a good guide to well-being and success.

What American Economic Decline?

Despite the recent troubles, the US economy has shown consistent, resilient growth for nearly a century and a half.  If we take the long view, the US is not in decline at all.

Universe of Development: The Prezi

Inspired by Cary Huang's breathtaking interactive graphic The Scale of the Universe, we give you The Universe of Development. Hover over 'More' and click full screen mode. Then use the arrows to navigate.

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List of sources.

Deaton v Banerjee, the short version

In March, Abhijit Banerjee and Angus Deaton, two of the most brilliant development economists of our time, squared off at DRI’s Debates in Development conference. Here's the four-minute version:

For Banerjee, co-author with Esther Duflo of Poor Economics, development experiments are valuable because they force researchers to think rigorously about causality, and help create an agenda for learning.

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/78374656]

For Princeton development economist Angus Deaton, identifying a causal effect is not so useful because it inevitably depends upon the interaction with other "helping factors."  More generally, blind trust in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) leads to overconfidence and lack of sufficient scrutiny of  potentially bad evidence.

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/78370828]

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So that was the short, short version, but if you've got a little more time, we have got a longer version. Continue Reading

What we discovered on a stroll to our local coffee shop

So we went to buy some coffee from La Colombe the other day...

and found out that all profits go to the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation...

and that Leonardo helps projects that support help for our planet...

which Leonardo says helps the planet.

We found out even more about how Leonardo helping the planet helps the planet...

… but after all that, we were still not totally clear. Except for the part about tigers.

Save the Poor Beltway Bandits!

By William Easterly and Laura Freschi It is a rare day that we former Aid Watchers congratulate the US Agency for International Development on self-imposed changes that will actually help aid benefit the poor.

Today is not that day.

That day was February 6, when USAID changed its own rules to allow itself flexibility to buy more goods and services locally. Buying and contracting locally, rather than shipping goods from the US and contracting services through American companies, can be a cheaper and more efficient use of US aid dollars.  It can also help local economies thrive, and strengthen small businesses, local governments, and NGOs.

USAID plans to increase its funds spent through local actors to 30 percent by 2015, from 11 percent in 2011. Huzzah. This small but promising change means that hundreds of local nonprofits will no longer have to go through contractor middlemen. It means that where public financial management systems are strong and representative enough, more local governments can be helped with direct support rather than through experts employed by American contractors. It also means that the American companies (the so-called “Beltway Bandits”) that earn hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts each year from USAID stand to lose a little.

Naturally, these firms have accepted the prospect of this loss in revenue with equanimity, acknowledging that the reforms will improve outcomes for the proper beneficiaries of aid, and have set about adapting their business model to the new funding environment.

Haha, that was a joke. They’ve actually gone and hired a major Washington lobbying firm to kill the reforms in Congress.  Joining forces as the Professional Services Council and the public-facing Coalition of International Development Companies (from the website: “Did You Know…that funding through international development companies offers superior accountability and transparency?”) they have employed the Podesta Group, which, according to lobbying disclosure forms, has been hard at work “promoting the work of international development companies” in Congress at PSC’s behest.

And the Podesta Group has delivered: House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-California) has told USAID he will seek to block these reforms, just in time for the markup of the international affairs budget beginning next week.

“This agency is no longer satisfied with writing big checks to big contractors and calling it development,” thundered USAID head Raj Shah in a speech in DC last year. The Beltway Bandits and their lobbyists only want him to take out the words “no longer” and then utter the remaining sentence.

More Governance in Government’s Governing

By William Easterly The new World Bank blog People, Spaces, Deliberation has already achieved one milestone: it covers exhaustively the field of “governance” with little or no usage of words that have historically been prominent in such discussions (see chart).

We were inspired by the new blog to translate one historical document that is now badly out of date and frame it as a practical roadmap for further engaging civil society:

Original	Translation
We hold these truths to be self-evident	The mainstream consensus among experts is
that all men are created equal,	All efforts should be inclusive,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,	Development as a Multi-Stakeholder Initiative must be Broad-based and Community-driven,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.	Including Social Sector Goals, Participation, and the pursuit of Capacity-Building.

It’s called brain circulation, Europe, get used to it

By Tanja Goodwin Earlier this week, we pointed out the new wave of emigration from Portugal to its former colonies. As the number of emigrants has increased, so has the emigrants’ skill level. The new generation of migrants is no longer made up of blue-collar workers, but of teachers, advertisers, engineers and architects. “This amounts to a hemorrhaging of highly educated people—the very people [the euro zone’s weakest economies] will need if they are to take off when circumstances get better,” says Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

The specter of “brain drain” has haunted international organizations and think tanks for decades, threatening that emigration of skilled workers would leave poor countries short of the human capital needed to develop. After much research, this simplistic concept has been largely overthrown. Today, almost everyone recognizes the benefits arising from income gains to the emigrants, greater human capital in the source country, knowledge transfer and remittances. Almost everyone.

Academics got it: “The recent empirical literature shows that high-skill emigration need not deplete a country’s human capital stock and can generate positive network externalities.”

The World Bank got it: “Our results show large positive benefits of high-skilled migration for citizens of high emigration countries.” […] “The size of the net gains is so large, that these distributional impacts are likely to be of second-order in any welfare calculations.”

Even the UNDP got it: “In migrants’ countries of origin, the impacts of movement are felt in higher incomes and consumption, better education and improved health, as well as at a broader cultural and social level. Moving generally brings benefits, most directly in the form of remittances sent to immediate family members.”

The media did not: Major outlets were quick to call the recent increase in skilled emigration “Portugal’s ‘brain drain’ dilemma” (BBC podcast). CNBC offered this pessimistic take: “Some worry that with less talent in the country there is less chance that Portugal will be able to innovate its way out of the downturn.” Other articles report that brain drain is causing alarm—though this alarm seems to be mostly in the media. (One recent exception is this piece in The Economist).

“Brain drain” will ultimately not be bad for Portugal just as it has not been bad for Africa. And just as Europe would never suggest barriers to skilled migration, Africa will certainly not consider this either.

Returning to El Dorado

By Tanja Goodwin Expect to see controls on African migration increase dramatically any time soon. Oh, and just to clarify: that’s migration TO Africa, not FROM Africa.

Portuguese, facing high unemployment and their economy plagued by austerity, are flooding the shores of Angola and Mozambique. Angola has again become Portugal’s El Dorado as unprecedented numbers of Portuguese workers have flocked to the former colony: from 2006 to 2009 alone the number of visas issued for Portuguese increased from 156 to 23,000. Some already complain about difficulties in obtaining legal permissions to stay in Angola. The number of Portuguese workers settling in Mozambique has increased by more than 30 percent over the past two years.

It’s likely just a matter of time before some African countries limit their “green cards” to prevent European immigrants from stealing Angolan and Mozambican jobs. Undoubtedly, Africans will try to protect their cultural identities by banning Port Wine from their menus, for example. Immigration officials may soon be allowed to deny pregnant Portuguese women entry into Angola or Mozambique at their discretion to avert the birth of “anchor babies.”

At least African countries don’t have to fear that Portuguese will be living off their welfare programs. Portuguese seem to find well-paying jobs: Remittances sent from Angola to Portugal have increased more than seven-fold. In 2009, they even surpassed remittances sent from the UK.

500 years after Vasco da Gama’s first landing in Mozambique and Diogo Cão’s arrival in Angola, the Portuguese are heading south again. No doubt, their greeting manners have improved. This time they’re coming with resumes, not rifles.

Don’t Help me, Trust me – Your African Coffee Producer

By Tanja Goodwin At a recent speech at DRI, Andrew Rugasira described what happened as Good African Coffee, the business he founded in Uganda’s Rwenzori mountains, began to take off. As farmers began to produce higher quality coffee and see higher prices for their crops:

Something really extraordinary began to happen.  The values that we don’t really hear about in a lot of these development reports began to manifest: entrepreneurship, business exposure, dignity, esteem, the pride in producing a product that they knew was going into a market…

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/78374531]

Find Andrew's full speech and other video from DRI's conference here. 

While the role of beliefs and values as catalysts for economic growth may still be “underrated and underdebated,” development economists have recently begun taking a closer look.  As a new working paper by Chris Coyne and Claudia Williamson explains, higher levels of self-determination, mutual respect and trust allow impersonal market transactions to happen efficiently, and more market transactions improve economic specialization and productivity.

Since every pound of African coffee we buy in the US relies upon dozens of formal and informal contracts between farmers, packagers, exporters and retailers, the “culture of contracting” matters. And contracts rely on interpersonal trust between strangers each pursuing his or her own self-interest.

Trade sets off a positive feedback loop: In Uganda, the more local producers sell their coffee to strangers, the more they will trust new buyers. The more buyers receive good quality the more they will trust, and look for, coffee from Uganda. Trade induces more trade.

But does aid induce more trade? For Coyne and Williamson, aid flows tend to create dependency and weaken the incentives for people to engage in business and trade, economic activities that rely upon contracts. Where aid triggers rent-seeking activities like corruption or fraud, it is also likely to reduce trust among strangers.

Coyne and Williamson find empirical evidence that trade and aid affect values in opposite ways. This implies it’s the business relationships—not the handouts—that help African farmers in the long run. Yet for Rugasira, getting investors and retailers to look beyond Uganda’s image as war-torn playground of Idi Amin or Joseph Kony has been incredibly difficult. He concluded, “If we treat [African people] like entrepreneurs, people with dignity and self-respect…we might find that we have a different set of results.”