Development economics
I spent a few years in college thinking I’d be a development economist. That didn’t happen, but I still follow, and love, the field.
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Poor Economics A primer on randomized controlled trials in development economics. It’s part about methodology – what are randomized controlled trials in the social sciences, and how might we use them to solve massive problems like poverty? – and part about the results – want more people to immunize their children? Making immunizations free roughly doubles adherence, but adding an incentive (e.g. a $0.50 bag of lentils) quadruples it, with spillover effects in other villages. (Related / fwiw: I’ve got a bet on Duflo and Banerjee winning an economics Nobel for their methodology work.)
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Portfolios of the Poor A write-up of diary and bank account studies of families living on less than $2/day in South Africa, Bangladesh, and India. It bring the more quantitative side to the “‘poor people’ don’t make bad decisions – they just face a much tougher set of constraints than we do” argument.
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Development Economics The best intro-ish development economics textbook of which I know: it’s readable and includes enough modeling to feel substantial, but it doesn’t go off the econometrics deep end.
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China Airborne Ostensibly about China’s burgeoning aviation industry but actually much more about general Chinese modernization tacts. The leaps between airplanes and national ambition don’t feel too forced, and it’s probably worth reading for the fun facts about planes alone.
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River Town This is the two-years-in-the-peace-corps bildungsroman that everyone tries to write and no one pulls off. It’s not pitched as a development book, but it profiles rural Sichuan in the 90s, before highways, the Three Gorges Dam, and much modernization.
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China Driving In which Peter Hessler drives around China, writing stories about the people he meets. He veers towrad the every(wo)man (say, the woman painting knockoff Renaissance art for sale in Western gift stores) which makes for a different stories of China’s developement.
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How Asia Works A readable account of why North East Asia has developed faster than South East Asia. The argument’s pretty compelling in Asia, though I’m personally skeptical it holds elsewhere. (Though, to be fair, Studwell doesn’t claim his theory’s a global one.)
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Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World A collection of interview and public-speaking excerpts from Lee Kuan Yew. Worth it if most of your China news comes from American or European sources (as mine baaaaaasically does.)
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Putin’s Kleptocracy How a specific, corrupt state – Putin’s Russia – functions. Most striking to me was how kinda-competitive business was early on: that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, being part of the Communist Party – even as a student – meant having access to offshore currency, which made starting a business easier. Afterward, though, it was intensely competitive. Other crazy fact: all those under-priced Russian utilities and natural resources? They were probably sold at ~market prices .. if you add in the bribes.
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers Narrative nonfiction that reads like fiction about a half-dozen people living in a Mumbai slum; Boo makes them seem like real people, not helpless, efficacy-less, nondescript “urban poor.”
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A Fine Balance Another book that’s not about development economics specifically but worth including here because it portrays “the rural poor” as real people, making the best decisions they can in very very difficult situations.
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In Other Rooms, Other Wonders Fiction about landowners and serfs in Pakistan. More real humans, gorgeously chronicled.