Chris Blattman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Final question, and I ask this of many guests. It has to do with what I call the Chris Blattman production function. You’re still young. You’re at one of the very best schools in the world; some would say the best. You’re famous. People ask me about you all the time. You’re very active on social media. You have a huge stack of very well-cited papers. You’re writing now a major book on war and violent conflict. If someone was asking you, what is the insight you have into how to do this, or how you did it, that maybe other people wouldn’t immediately see? Other than just, “Well, I worked hard” or “I went to a good school,” what is in the Chris Blattman production function that maybe we don’t see? There’s an answer to what I think my production function looks like, but the answer for most people — when I was in my maybe third year, and you do something, as you know, in academia called your third-year review, where your senior colleagues debate what you’re doing right or wrong, and then give you basically no feedback. [laughs] I persistently, I plowed into a senior colleague, a guy named Ian Shapiro, who’s a normative political theorist at Yale, to give me the feedback. And he refused to tell me. He refused to tell me. He said, “Well, you just need to do what you’re interested in. You’re clearly doing something you’re interested in. You’re excited by it, and I’m not going to tell you what other people think you should do because it’s different. That’s the secret to your happiness or to your success.” So on some level, my production function was always doing the thing that really interested me, regardless of whether or not the people around me told me it was a good idea or not. In my case, that happens to have been deciding that I like going to a place and spending a lot of time there. I’ve done it three times. First I did it in Uganda, then I did it in Liberia, and now I’m doing it in Colombia. Each time, I went somewhere, and I spent maybe six months, just hanging out and talking to people and figuring out how I think things work in a very qualitative way. Then, usually, it was studying something where there was no data on it. That’s been my shtick. Most people look for existing data to analyze. I look for data I can create. Then I would go and I would find a way to create data. Then, having created data, I would try to answer this question that interested me. In my case, it’s usually something that is the intersection of economics, political science, sociology, and public policy. Then, often, I would try to find an experiment that I could run, just to have an excuse to be there. It usually wasn’t a very good experiment, but it was evaluating something that somebody was doing that was obviously common, it was useful to have some data on it. Then my strategy in every place is to go around and try to find some community organization or bureaucrat or somebody who has a good idea, who’s a true believer, who really believes in whatever cockamamie thing they’re doing to make the world a better place. Most people — least of all me — don’t really believe it should work, but then there seems to be something going on. And if it works, it challenges how we think about the world. The first time it was cash, just giving cash to poor people. The second time, in Liberia, it was somebody doing something that turned out to be cognitive behavior therapy that was trying to take these criminal adults and totally turn their lives around. people. The second time, in Liberia, it was somebody doing something that turned out to be cognitive behavior therapy that was trying to take these criminal adults and totally turn their lives around. In Colombia, we’ve stumbled upon this little group that’s basically trying to take back governance in their communities from the gangs nonviolently, by relentlessly organizing their community, connecting it to the city government, and then trying to scale that up, test it, and see if it actually works. Then usually, as the result, I change how I think about not just that question, but the whole business of violence and development.…

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