Nathan Nunn: evaluation

Transcript context

…What should graduate economics stress that it doesn’t now? What should it do more of at the margin? For me, I think what would be — and you can see this in my recent research — know how to do research that’s more descriptive and that’s softer, or where the data collection is softer. In other words, we never learn — and I don’t know of any courses that teach development economists, when you go to a society, how do you interact with people and ask questions face to face? How do you run focus groups? How do you learn in ways other than surveys? We haven’t done that. How do you ask questions about the social structure, about their beliefs, their values and norms? These things that are kind of invisible, unless you ask about them. How do we do that? What should one think about? How are these societies structured? These sorts of things. We’ve taken a very scientific approach: What’s the treatment? What are the outcomes? But there’s all this contextual stuff, which traditional anthropology looked at, where we’re just ignoring. And that’s data, and that’s super important, and we’re not taught how to do that. What’s your favorite movie and why?…

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