A Christian Development Economist
What is a Christian Development Economist Good For? Transcript of Keynote Talk Given at the Association of Christian Economists (ACE) Meeting, January 2015
Thank you for allowing me to speak to you today at such a wonderful conference. I want to reflect on how doing the impact study on child sponsorship and other recent work has affected my view of what it means to be a Christian development economist. I was looking for a passage that would illustrate this and came across this well-known verse in Romans 12 that I’d like for us to consider. It says, “We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.”
So my question to you and to myself is how does a development economist prophesy, serve, teach, encourage, give, lead and show mercy? What does that mean for us as development economists?
I’m going to start with leading. Traditional development economics has missed some aspects of human behavior that many Christian and other faith-based development practitioners have understood for some time. For example development economists are just catching onto the idea that “hope” is important to the poor. Frankly, as Christian leaders, we should be on the cutting edge of movements like this. We should not be just embracing, but leading, new behavioral development work in hope, aspiration, self-control, forgiveness, honesty. Why is it that, for example, that secular research economists are teaching the profession about the importance of self-control? Christians knew about the central role of self-control a long time ago, but we haven’t been faithful to investigate the central role of what we have known to be a quintessential virtue. We should be bold in our faith as researchers, investigating phenomena that have been overlooked by secular research.
Development economists have traditionally given themselves to the idea that if we just relieve these external economic constraints then people will thrive. But what I and many have come to believe recently is that development is more than about relieving external constraints. What our study on child sponsorship and other recent work has told me is that it’s not all about external constraints. External constraints may not even be constraints in the sense that they are not binding. Development is at least as much about relieving internal constraints. When internal constraints are addressed, external constraints may take care of themselves. Who can stop a community with strong aspirations for schooling from building schools? But without those aspirations, who can be surprised when building new schools has little impact?
And related to this, development is also about more than increasing income and wealth. Let me give an example. Poverty has drastically gone down in China. Wealth has gone up. I was reading this article just a few months ago about computer game addiction among youth in China. It’s an epidemic. It’s astounding. Chinese boys commonly spend eight, twelve, sixteen hours a day on video games. They even have internment camps for kids hooked on video games. Children are sent to them, not for a weekend, but for as much as six months, because parents realize that their children are truly addicted to video games. Is this what development is all about? As Christian development economists, shouldn’t we be leading and shaping society’s ideas about what human development really is and not taking our cues from mainstream economists that tries to convince us development is ultimately about accumulating material wealth? A biblical view suggests that development is about something more closely related to human dignity or human flourishing, in which income growth certainly can play an important role, but only as one of many factors in the process.
But working on soft topics like this doesn’t mean using soft methodology. It means a need for more rigorous methodology than we would normally use. So one of the best things we have to offer the public, the community, the Church, is our use of scientific rigor. To be most persuasive, it is what we can demonstrate to be true that matters. That’s our comparative advantage. Others can argue certain things to be true. Our particular job is to be able to demonstrate things to be true, or at least show that they are very difficult to demonstrate that they are not true through falsification.
The second idea I want to consider is serving. What I would envision for Christian development economists is a servant partnership with faith-based organizations. One of the best conferences I ever attended was the ACE meeting ten years ago that Judy Dean organized in Washington, DC, where it was researchers and practitioners together, pursuing and deepening these relationships. This was a conference about ensuring that God’s work is done not just with a good heart but with a good head. We should be both giving and receiving opportunities to work alongside these NGOs and collect data on their projects and programs. But also giving in terms of consulting, advice, and so forth. We just don’t do enough pro-bono work with our brothers and sisters who run NGOs. That needs to change.
Many people here are professors at Christian universities, and I want to suggest a class or a sequence of classes for your students. In the fall: development economics. In the spring: some kind of class on impact evaluation. It doesn’t have to impart high-brow econometrics, just basic statistics, sampling theory, t-tests on differences in means applied to impact evaluation. One could use the modules at the World Bank that our own Paul Glewwe has come up with to measure simple project impacts. Then the summer after the second class, take your students to a developing country to work with Bread for the World, World Vision, Food for the Hungry, or another organization. Pick your NGO, and go into the field with your students and do an impact evaluation that means something, and maybe publish together, maybe in Faith and Economics. It’s one of those win-win-win-win things: it’s great for us as researchers, it’s great for our students, it’s excellent for the NGOs. It would be wonderful to see this happening at the Christian universities.
So the third thing is prophesying. Normally when economists speak of “prophets/profits” they’re talking about an altogether different kind of thing. But I think as economists we need to be truth tellers, we need take tools of unbiased scientific research into the field and then ascertain what works and then proclaim it on the mountaintop in some way. Use these results to guide NGOs and government, also to guide donors where they should direct their funding. Sometimes this is popular and sometimes it’s not. Whenever I go to Compassion I feel like I’m some sort of rock star, but then I go to Fair Trade USA and I’m a villain. It is what it is, because in speaking truth we have to establish a reputation for being even-handed, humble, honest, and open to change.
Fourth is teaching. We should be disseminating the findings in our field. Not everything we speak of publically has to be our own research. Too much asymmetric information exists between researchers and NGOs, NGOs and donors, between researchers NGOs, and the Church. A lot of NGOS have asymmetric information within themselves, if that were possible. They don’t really even know the impact that they themselves are having, and much less their donors. We need to serve and learn from practitioners. We can learn a lot from them. This is also a ministry to the church. We need to teach people in our church by offering classes on poverty alleviation, what it means to be a Christian in an age of globalization. What interventions are effective? We need to get people away from simplistic narratives, which is what drives far too much behavior, this idea that if I just drink my fair-trade coffee it will constitute some life-changing event for coffee growers down in Guatemala. Or if I just buy this warm fuzzy animal for somebody, than this person’s life will improve, and I’ll feel better, and I don’t really want to look into the impact, but this makes me feel good, so I’m going to do it.
Paul Niehaus, professor at UC San Diego and co-founder of Give Directly, has this great new paper that shows that only 3% of donors ever claim to look into the impact of the things they have given to. 3%. So most are just satisfied with these stories that they tell themselves about having an impact on the world. So we have to ask, is this kind of giving really about the poor, or really about the giver just feeling good? At this level it becomes a spiritual issue, an issue of discipleship, a call to move as Christians beyond our toxic, narcissistic culture. We need to move people in our churches, our students, Christian groups, away from these simple narratives and start thinking seriously about how to love and care about people effectively in a globalized world.
What does it mean to be an encourager? We need to encourage on multiple fronts. We need to encourage deeper and more effective involvement with the poor. We need to give credit where credit is due in the work of NGOs and work of individuals. We need to encourage our students to pursue fields that aren’t just about them amassing wealth for themselves, but about helping others to amass just a little more wealth. We need to publically affirm good and effective poverty work.
And what about the spiritual gift of giving? Christian development economists need to be donors too. So we need to model effective giving and not just talk about it. The excuses for not giving are just becoming lamer and lamer as time goes on. You can give directly, you just go on the web and zap however many dollars you want to the cell phone of a Kenyan. What keeps us from doing that? Most of us have read the new Haushofer study, and we know it’s effective, so why don’t we do it? So what does it mean to love our neighbor as ourselves? Doesn’t it mean something like giving until we drive our marginal utility of income up high enough so that our need for money becomes equal to the need of the people we’re giving to? Do we even come close to doing that? Do we even try? But to love our neighbor as ourselves…isn’t that what that means? That we care about their well-being as much as ours? After doing this study on child sponsorship – at what number of children should I stop sponsoring kids? I’m sure it’s a higher number than 3, the number I do now. It’s dangerous to know.
Let me conclude with the gift of showing mercy. Christian development economists need to be practitioners. Yes, although our primary mode is research, we also need to be practitioners. We need to spend time with the poor and learn from them. We need to take the lead in our church communities, in our school communities, showing mercy to those around us in a thoughtful way. We need to get out from behind Stata sometimes and get out into the streets and into the campo. And I’m preaching to myself here – I love Stata, and I just want to be alone in my office and work on Stata and do estimations and have everyone else leave me alone. But we will not grow spiritually as mature believers until we learn to identify with the poor.
None of us as Christian development economists are likely to be strong in all seven of these gifts. It says in the passage that we all have different gifts. We teach our students about comparative advantage. I think the gifts work like that – you’re good for at least one, and then you pray for growth in the others even as you exercise your strong ones for the community.
Let me close in a word of prayer. Lord Jesus, thank you for this conference. Help us to love you and to love the poor. Help us to be leaders and servants and truth tellers, teachers, encouragers, givers, and lovers of mercy in the name of your Son. Amen.