In Development: Discussion Thread
In Development is “a new magazine dedicated to exploring how progress happens — or doesn’t happen — in the developing world”.
This week (May 11-17), the EA Forum is collaborating with the magazine to bring you their first batch of articles[1], along with their authors[2], ready to answer your questions. Lauren Gilbert, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, will also be present in this thread to answer questions about the magazine itself.
You can ask questions here in the thread, or on the individual posts.
Read all the articlesThanks to In Development for working with us to make this happen! You can subscribe to their Substack on the link below:
Subscribe to In DevelopmentParticipants in this thread:
@Lauren Gilbert is the Editor in Chief of In Development, as well as a non-resident fellow at the Centre for British Progress, the Energy for Growth Hub, and the Roots of Progress Institute. Her writing has appeared in The Economist, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Works in Progress, and Asterisk. She has previously been a program manager at Renaissance Philanthropy, a research fellow at Open Philanthropy, as well as a theoretical neutrino astrophysicist.
@Charles Kenny is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, and the author of Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding and Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Utility: Happiness in Philosophical and Economic Thought.
Nithin Coca (@ncoca) is an award-winning, Asia-focused freelance journalist who covers politics, technology, human rights, and environment, across the region, with a focus on cross-border, collaborative reporting. He is currently based in Japan, but was previously based in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Daniel Yu (@danielyu) is the founder of Wasoko, one of Africa’s largest e-commerce companies, and now the founding partner of the Africa Jobs Fund, a new program under Renaissance Philanthropy to finance and build African export manufacturing and labor mobility pathways.
Enlli McAleese will join us later in the week, when their article goes live.[3]
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Starting with four, a fifth will be added on Thursday.
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We’re currently waiting on confirmation for the GiveDirectly article. Someone from GD will take part, but it may not be the author, Paul Niehaus.
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Don’t worry, Enlli will also get a bio.
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Paul Niehaus won’t be joining us for this AMA, but you can still read his piece and discuss it here on the Forum.
Question for @Lauren Gilbert—who are your favourite global health and development authors who you have not yet published?
I have a giant list! Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethan are the top, but also I’d love to publish some of the writers that got me into global development in the first place—Paul Collier, Samantha Power, and (in my dreams) Amartya Sen.
@Charles Kenny do you think emigration is good for basically every country or do you think it is mostly beneficial for low-income countries and could be bad for high-income countries?
Hi Oscar! I think emigration has the most potential impact on emigrant incomes when it is from poor countries and (secondarily) small countries—the first because the potential income gaps are the largest the second because the chance of finding the right fit for your talents is larger in larger countries (few small island states have a thriving automobile or software industry just because they take some scale). I’d also say that lower income countries with a growing workforce but few good jobs, that most need the trade and investment links and knowledge flows that come along with diaspora populations, do usually benefit the most from emigration.
Meanwhile high income countries seeing considerable net emigration rather than flows mostly in and some out are comparatively rare and are usually seeing something weird going on that is probably economic bad news. The US may be seeing net emigration at the moment, for example, and I don’t think it is a good sign for the country. More broadly, I think rich countries with low birth rates usually want to be seeing net immigration and if they aren’t it is bad for growth. Emigration in and of itself is not necessarily a problem in that it comes along with all of the trade, investment and knowledge generation links, but if it isn’t matched by higher immigration, it is often a worrying sign.
do you think China’s success in quickly cleaning up air quality in cities like Beijing will be very hard for other developing economies to emulate? what is an example of a development problem that is harder and another that is easier to give us an idea of how hard it is?
congratulations. I look forward to reading more articles in In Development
I imagine some development projects require more study than others, and that study requiring lots of verification and expertise can reduce the velocity of aid execution. Are there some broadly and/or narrowly applicable technologies that are raising the volume and efficacy of aid in general—say LLMS or whatsapp or camera phones—or in specific areas—maybe Lenocapovir being easier to administer than higher-frequency PrEP, or solar panels being easier to put to use at different scales than combined cycle gas plants that need complex engineering and high-caliber customers, say
what do you think of the Malawi Miracle’s fertilizer subsidy policies? are we close to technologies that make more natural gas available for fertilizer production, or make meaningfully more fertilizer production from electricity economically viable?
The Jakarta transit article gave me so much hope for my beloved traffic-clogged tropical South American cities. I imagine driver wages account for a lower portion of taxi and mass transit operator expenses in developing countries than they do in rich countries. But buses and taxis seem also to have a bigger mode share in developing country cities than in rich country cities. What effects do you expect from AVs in the developing world? Should we look at rideshare/ AV taxes to fund mass transit?
Is regenerative braking going to make EVs especially useful in the Andes?
Lauren has written interesting articles on electricity pricing in Africa. Do the World Bank’s new stances on nuclear and hydroelectric plants stand to make much of a difference? Can solar power installation be a worthwhile make-work program for countries with lots of unemployment, electricity shortages, and messy political economy around construction of new power plants and power lines?
Big stars of poverty reduction like China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam seem to use a lot of coal. Are there desirable policy changes that could make more coal available to poor countries? When a country like the US figures out how to reduce coal use, does it usually become much cheaper for poorer countries to buy it?
in my middle-income country the 2 dollar sunglasses at the supermarket as well as the four hundred dollar mobile phones are made in China. with China still so efficient at production of low-end goods, is there much opportunity for other poor and middle income countries to gain manufacturing market share in textiles etc?
is there a localized flying geese thing, or like a gravity model of development? if emigration helps source countries a lot, should donors, MDBs etc focus on helping promising countries low and middle income countries that receive lots of economic migrants and border less promising low-income countries? for example South Africa seems to have some interesting industrial capabilities, has a lot of native poverty, and also receives lots of migrants from other poor countries. in that way it may be a better candidate for credit and investment than its neighbors, and bolstering its success may also help its neighbors a lot. is this kind of thing worth development professionals’ attention? I also think of India as a manufacturer of generic drugs, fertilizers, and solar panels, and an importer of natural gas, oil, coal, and Himalayan hydro that could become more abundantly available to other poor countries if more investment in nuclear power, solar, mass transit, EVs etc can reduce their import volumes. Egypt is another country with nuclear power on the way, plenty of desert to build solar in, lots of manufacturing, plenty of refugees, and a large fertilizer production industry
are GLP-1s about to be protagonists in a massive public health success story in poor and mid income countries? should we expect benefits for economic growth?
does it help for most everyone in a country to speak the same language? should states, dev orgs try to get Portuguese-dubbed content subtitled in Portuguese in front of audiences for fluency and literacy purposes (English, French, Hindi, Arabic stand out too)?
thank you for working for poverty relief and more happiness!
@Nithin Coca I really enjoyed your piece on Jakarta’s public transport. However, around the time your piece came to press, there was a fatal train crash in Bekasi. The piece itself mentions several other challenges, including the last-mile problem and competition from ride-hailing. While one crash is not a reason for people to avoid public transit, I would wager that people will be more scared to use it given the crash and its high profile. Beyond what you have written in the piece, how should the government attempt create a public transit culture, whereby use is entirely normal and common?
@Lauren Gilbert what most suprised you about starting a new magazine? Was it harder or easier than expected?
I think the most surprising thing is that Founder Mode is real? I am spending so much time sweating the tiny details and honestly it’s really fun.
It’s been definitely easier than I expected; particularly, I expected to have a hard time convincing people to contribute to a new magazine, but I’ve been amazed how willing people have been.