Justin Lahart reports:
Friday, the American Economic Association will present the John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the nation’s most promising economist under the age of 40.
The Clark is often a harbinger of things to come. Of the 30 economists who have won it, 12 have gone on to win the Nobel, including last year’s Nobel winner, Paul Krugman. Other past winners include White House National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers and Steve Levitt, of Freakonomics fame. Since it was first awarded in 1947, the Clark has been given out every two years, but beginning next year it will be given out annually.
With a deep pool of young talent to draw from, there’s no sure winner. But among economists, the clear favorite is Esther Duflo, 36, who leads the Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s Jameel Poverty Action Lab with MIT colleague Abhijit Banerjee.
Ms. Duflo has been at the forefront of the use of randomized experiments to analyze the effectiveness of development programs. If teacher attendance is a problem in rural India, for example, what happens if teachers are given cameras with date and time stamps and told to take a picture of themselves and their students each morning and afternoon? Ms. Duflo and economist Rema Hanna tried it out and found that in the “camera schools,” teacher absences fell sharply and student test scores improved. Does giving poor mothers 60 cents worth of dried beans as an incentive to immunize their children work? It works astoundingly well. By answering these kinds of problems, Ms. Duflo, her colleagues, and the many economists around the world she has helped inspire, are uncovering ways to make sure that money spent on helping poor people in developing countries is used effectively.
Harvard University‘s Sendhil Mullainathan, who founded the Poverty Action Lab with Ms. Duflo and Mr. Banerjee, is also likely on the Clark short list. He’s a leading light in the fast-growing field of behavioral economics, studying ways that psychology influences economic decisions. For one paper, he and frequent co-author Marianne Bertrand sent out fictitious resumes in response to want ads, randomly assigning each resume with very African American sounding or very white sounding names. The resumes with the very white names got far more call backs. Mr. Mullainathan, 36, is also applying behavioral economics insights to development problems. One insight: The behavioral weaknesses of the very poor are no different than the weaknesses of people in all walks of life, but because the poor have less margin for error, their behavioral weaknesses can be much more costly.
Emanuel Saez at the University of Calif.-Berkeley, another Clark candidate, has been tenaciously researching the causes of wealth and income inequality around the world, with a focus on the what’s happening at the very tip of the wealth pyramid. But because there is very little data on the very rich, Mr. Saez, 36, and his frequent co-author Thomas Piketty have combed through income tax figures to come up with historic estimates. Among their findings: That before the onset of the financial crisis, the income share of the top 1% of families by income accounted for nearly a quarter of U.S. income – the largest share since the late 1920s.
I would like to handicap the odds that any of these people, who I am sure are fine human beings, will make any contribution whatsoever to reducing poverty.
Is the test/control poverty work economics?
I am confused. Duflo and Saez are both French. Isn’t the medal given only to Americans?
Those are the three candidates for the award? I dont want to denigrate their work in any manner what so ever but one would hope that a medal with such prestige would be awarded for breakthroughs of a bit larger magnitude. The bottom two are especially blah.
Is the test/control poverty work economics?
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It’s probably easier to answer this question if you first define “economics.”
Looks like a strong bias towards MIT PhDs in the recent history of the bates medal…3 of the 5 in the past 10 years, with Duflo and Saez also alums
To bad we dont’ have a $10 million dollar prize for young economists who are helping us to understand how economics can possibly become a conceptually sound and causally powerful explanatory enterprise — because economics so far isn’t that, and it needs all the help it can get.
And we need a $1 billion dollar prize for economic departments which are making an effort to develop graduate programs which give young economists the competence to fix and improve economics as a global causal explanatory enterprise, something most of them now don’t do.
“Ms. Duflo and economist Rema Hanna tried it out and found that in the “camera schools,† teacher absences fell sharply and student test scores improved.†
So it takes PhD and years of research to prove that introducing efficient controls leads to better results?
Is the true reason for nomination a feel-good topic of the research?
Say, they’d found that in businesses with time-stamping machines installed number of workers coming late fell sharply and profits improved. Would they even be considered for award?
Say, they’d found that in businesses with time-stamping machines installed number of workers coming late fell sharply and profits improved. Would they even be considered for award?
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If the study had internal validity, it would almost certainly get published.
~Sadly, Rob Shimer should win (because Duflo is 36 and can win again, and because he’s the agenda setter in macro/labor) but won’t (because I think he just turned 40 in the past few months).
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John List also fits this “sadly” bill. He is too old to win it, too. And to circulate something I’ve heard a million times by now, it’s that he lost to Athey that led the committee to move to an annual prize instead of bi-annual.
Which I think is good, but what’s the optimal number of prizes anyway? The profession is much bigger than it was when they started this, so presumably once every two years does not mean what it meant years ago. But what is the optimal prize? Are these really incentive mechanisms anyway?
he and frequent co-author Marianne Bertrand sent out fictitious resumes in response to want ads, randomly assigning each resume with very African American sounding or very white sounding names. The resumes with the very white names got far more call backs.
I don’t know what this study has to do with racism. Why is “Greg Baker” or “Emily Walsh” a “very White sounding name”? Here is a black man named “Gregory” and here is a
A Pareto optimal improvement would be to bomb Berkeley’s economics department into the Stone Age.
Is there anyone there who isn’t a left-wing tax-consuming thief?
Before I believed that the discrimination that Mullainathan and Bertrand found had anything to do with racism, I would need evidence that people named Lakisha were equally represented among the rich and the poor, or at least, among rich blacks and poor blacks. I suspect the effect may be a discrimination against the poor and against those who deviate from the preferred naming practices of the elite. Both of things seem bad to me. They both seem like social problems, but they don’t seem like racism. Mislabeling them as such can only hinder work to eliminate discrimination.
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They tried to control for socio-economic status by varying the address of the resumes.
@anony: Suppose my theory is right that their choices of putatively “White sounding” and “African American sounding” names did not actually play off of racial biases, but off of discriminatory biases against the poor and against those who refuse to cater to the naming preferences of the elite.
Varying the address from which the resumes were sent would not control for socioeconomic status under my theory. To see why, suppose that all resumes sent out had the same name, but some said “I am a poor person with a low-class background”, and others said, “I am a priveleged rich person.” Do you think that varying the address on the resume could neutralize these blunt statements? If so, please explain why. If not, then you agree that the attempt to normalize out socioeconomic status is potentially ineffective, IF you buy that names like “Lakisha” are stronger signals of socioeconomic status than are addresses.
I should emphasize, I do not know what names like “Lakisha” signal. Maybe they signal low-class backgrounds to some people, race to others, and nothing at all to some other people. All I am saying is, the authors offered zero evidence that their choice in names signaled what they assumed it did.
I’ve covered some of Mullainathan’s work in my undergrad econometrics class, and I’m a fan of his. I wouldn’t mind seeing him win.
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