Michael Kremer: uncertainty

Transcript context

…One strand of your work concerns peer effects. There’s your paper on the Hajj. Influence on college roommates — your paper on alcohol use. If peer effects are so strong in the United States — again, say, in high school — how should we restructure how we treat honors classes? Should we have more of them? Fewer of them? What’s the right way to think about what you might call intellectual segregation in this country? Yes. It’s a great question. Great question. I don’t know the answer to the question, but I think we should try and find out. I believe there have been some results. I’m not super familiar with the papers, but I believe there’s been very positive results from peer mentoring programs. I believe that some results in Italy very recently for this — if you can create incentives for students to help each other out, that can be very positive. This does not seem to be a problem in most developing-country education systems I know, but certainly, the US can have a system where it’s not cool to do well in school, can have a culture like that — or not cool to do too well in school. I don’t see that in Kenya, and I don’t hear about that in India. Thinking about how can we set up a system of incentives and rewards to try to address that is a really interesting question. Despite saying this isn’t even a problem in Kenya, two students, Ronna Jane and Brandon Tan, have some, I think, very preliminary . . . More work needs to be done on this, but they have some very exciting results for Kenya. You were talking about paying kids to do well as individuals. They’ve been trying something at that level in the classroom as a whole, where they reward the classroom as a whole for doing well. You can imagine that can possibly create a culture in the class as a whole, where you want each other to do well. The initial results on this are actually extremely promising. Here’s a few questions from outside of economics. Ugali is arguably the Kenyan national dish. Does it taste good?…

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