Melissa Dell: evaluation

Transcript context

…How much do you think there’s persistence in you in the sense that did growing up in Enid, Oklahoma, shape your later ideas and research? Or is that just orthogonal? No, I think it’s definitely not orthogonal. If we were anthropologists, you’d spend half your paper or half your book talking about your own perspective and your own history and how that influences the way that you see things. We don’t really do that as economists. We like to think of ourselves as being 100 percent objective and all of that. But obviously, the questions that we’re interested in are priors. The way we approach them depends on our backgrounds. I think that’s part of the reason why having diversity is super important, because if you have more people with different backgrounds, they’ll ask different questions, which are all quite important. So in my case, a lot of the questions that I’m interested in — probably the reason I find them interesting does go back to things that happened in my childhood. I have written about issues related to security — a paper on the Vietnam War and the effects of bombing versus other strategies, and whether or not those were effective for achieving US objectives. Or I’ve done stuff on the drug trade in Mexico and effects of trying to crack down on the drug trade. I think part of my interest in security goes back to the fact that my parents both worked at an air force base when I was growing up, and I was surrounded by people in that world. There’s lots of examples like that that I could point to, that in many ways, the things that we as researchers find interesting are a product of our experiences and, oftentimes, the experiences that happened as a kid or in college. If we read the Old Testament, are those fundamentally stories of cultural persistence? After all, Judaism is still with us, right? That’s quite remarkable. Wonderful that that’s the case, but it seems to be a whole book about cultural persistence.…

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