REVISED 6 April 2011, 11:35am
Esther Duflo responded in a comment below – you should read it. She is completely reasonable, and lays out a clearer understanding of the discipline and her place in it than did the article I am critiquing here. I have edited the post below to reflect what I think is a more fair reading of what went wrong in the article
——————————————————————————————–
Esther Duflo is a fairly impressive person. So why does she, and the Guardian, feel the need to inflate her resume?
Doing her PhD at MIT, she was one of the first doctoral students to apply economics to development, linking the two, at a time when there were few university faculties devoted to the subject.
“It was not considered a fancy area of study,” she says. “There was a generation of people who had started looking at development from other fields. They had their own theories and only a few were economists. What I contributed to doing was to start going into detail. But I did have some advisers and mentors.”
Er, no. Development economics as a formal field had been around since the early 1980s (Note: Marc Bellemare and Duflo have both pointed out that the real roots of this discipline go back to the 1940s), and economists had been working on development issues since . . . colonialism, actually. I imagine there are a lot of senior Ph.D. economists at the IMF, World Bank and various other organizations who will be amused to hear that they were beaten to their degrees by Duflo. She was not at all one of the first doctoral students to work on this, and there are/were plenty of faculties that look at development economics.
I suspect that this might have something to do with what Mark Blaug was talking about in his article “No History of Ideas, Please, We’re Economists.” In short, one of Blaug’s arguments is that disciplinary history has largely disappeared from doctoral programs in economics, with the predictable effect of dooming the discipline to repeat its errors. I would extend Blaug’s point to many who work in the larger field of development – we have a lot of technical specialists out there with excellent training and experience, but relatively few of them understand development as a discipline with a history and a philosophy. As a result, we see “new” projects proposed and programmed despite their odd resemblance to previous efforts that failed.
There is a hint of this in the article – after all, Duflo is correct in noting that she emerged as an academic at a time when other social science fields were on the ascendancy, but she the Guardian fails to ask why this was the trend at the time – especially after economics’ dominance of the field for so long. A little disciplinary history here would have helped – these other fields rose to prominence in the aftermath of the collapse of development economics as a formal field in the late 1980s…
So, Guardian, anyone over there actually schooled in development? Or interested in fact-checking?
I too was a little aghast at this representation of Development Economics. I studied in the late 90s, and got a feeling the field already had a long tradition. My professor was friends with Yunus and did an amazing job of bringing household economics to life, as well as some of the history of the field. And I believe he had a number of graduate students at the time, whose names were not Duflo.
That would certainly be a claim to fame, but I don’t aspire to it…. Here is what I posted to the Guardian web site.
Interesting comment about me being the first development economist, but fortunately that is not true, by a long, long, long shot…Ted Schultz and Amartya Sen both got a Nobel prize in the field, and development economics has always attracted first rate scholars. That is one of the many things that makes this field a pleasure, actually.
What is true is that at the time I started my dissertation work, it had gotten out of fashion a bit. I remember Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer were teaching this amazing class, and there were about 8 of us in the class, for Harvard and MIT combined. This has radically changed, first because the theory became interesting (thanks to Banerjee, among others), then because the empirical work became exciting (thanks to Kremer among other).
I think what I was trying to explain, in the quote that was weirdly mangled is that, at the time I started doing development, economic theorists had already begun to be interested in the field, and I did contribute to do (but not alone, Michael Kremer had started before me) is to start doing the same thing with empirical methods: applying methods that had been developed elsewhere, with the same care for details, to empirical questions in development economics.
Esther Duflo
Thanks for your (completely reasonable) reply. Having interacted with the press more than once, I think the mangling of quotes and uninformed placement of your work is an all-too-common outcome . . . indeed, I have seen similar characterizations of your place in the field in other outlets. So perhaps the problem lies with a popular media that doesn’t really get the field, and doesn’t understand why explaining whose shoulders you stand on (as you describe above) helps to both place your work and make clear your important contributions. Ah, but how to train them in the history and philosophy of any discipline?
After all, I am a geographer. Which in America seems to mean I make maps. <-sigh->
For those with time on their hands – please do check and you’ll see that the error was corrected almost immediately.
I suppose that ignorance of the reporting and editing process is the reason for the arrogance and snideness on display here.
A.D. McKenzie