Your assignment is to write a 10-page (double spaced, appropriately cited where required) book review comparing and contrasting one “domestic” policy book and one “international” policy book. The structure is straightforward: you should spend about 3 – 4 pages
summarizing the thesis of one book, 3-4 pages summarizing the second book, and then 3-4 pages comparing and contrasting the insights, overlaps, differences, policy prescriptions
and so forth between the two books, and how the books relate to what we have talked about in the course.
the two books you should use are:
International policy- Poor Economics (Bannerjee and Duflo)
domestic policy-The Tyranny of Experts (William Easterly)
for some context about what we speak on in class here are some notes/study guides
section 1: this section talked about was income tax i, supply and demand graph, types of gods(hybrid, private, intermediate), consumption, equilibirum in the market, poverty level, measured income, etc
section 2:
1 ) What is a non-profit organization? What are the ways that potential donors can judge non-profit performance?
2 ) The beginnings of large-scale international compassion: Herbert Hoover and World War I aid to Belgium, and later to other parts of Europe.
3 ) The pause as the U.S. dealt with the Great Depression and World War II
4 ) Significant events at the end of World War II: the Mashall Plan (US), the IMF and the World Bank —initially set up to deal with reconstruction in the devasted industrial economies of Europe and Japan.
New economic models (Solow) turn from emphasizing “how do we get out of this Depression” to “how do we grow the productive capacity of the economy.” Remember, the focus of the Solow model was on capital.
What is capital? How do is capital financed?
The end of the colonial period and the freedom for dozens of new countries.
5 ) The threads in #4 above led to an established view of internation aid to developing countries that was focused on capital investment, initially infrastructure resources (dams, aluminum factories, and so forth), although later adding health and education. In addition, domestic agriculture policies (effectively price floors) in the US and Europe created a supply of “surplus” agricultural products that were then “donated” to developing countries
6 ) A look at the data shows 30 + years of almost complete stagnation and no progress.
7 ) @ 2000 a new generation of development voices challenged the status quo from different directions: Moyo, Easterly, Collier, Sachs, Kremer, Banerjee, Duflo, and others. Interestingly, all were critical of the failed status quo, but they came at that criticism from different directions.
8 ) The data shows that something has changed….many countries have finally seen an increase in their real per capita GDP.
9 ) One of the hallmarks of how things have changed since @2000 in this increasingly prominent role that so-called NGOs (nonprofits, charities, social entrepreneurs, etc.) have played in economic development, hence our watching the two videos which present two different perspectives.
section 3:
As with international issues, the 19th century say the locus of domestic compassion in the U S being private, non-profit, and religious charities.
2 ) #1 above changed significantly with the advent of the New Deal during the Great Depression. We read an academic study of that in Gruber & Hungerman, which was both on topic to this point but also was a good introductory paper to read as to how skilled applied economists use the tool called an “instrumental variable” to look for causality.
3 ) The point in #2 expanded especially with LBJ’s Great Society. We ended up with numerous, overlapping, means tested, outcome specific programs (remember the list we read about how many federal programs fund food assistance). The big exception is the Earned Income Tax Credit.
4 ) The “need based” nature of the programs creates a major policy problem called a “benefits cliff.” In Waging a Living we saw four stories of how this benefits cliff affects lower income working adults (as seen through the eyes of the documentarians).
5 ) We discussed which of these problems would remain or go away under different systems, such as Universal Basic Income.
6 ) Switching directions, we noted the longstanding recognition of knowledge as being an input to the PPF, and t hat raised the issue of education. Is education a public or private good? Is your education skills acquiring or a skill-signaling enterprise? There are tons of data and many policy questions in the Economics of Education,
7 ) Turning to one of the most enduring, we talked about the issue of charter schools, and watched a second documentary, The Lottery, which was both on point for the documentarians own viewpoint, but just as importantly, a window into the statistical reality on the ground of how economists can use data from “natural experiments” to control for types of self selection in analyzing a question like the impact of charter schools.
8 ) We closed with brief overviews of two topics that I personally find interesting from the point of view of potential economic analysis; a) the Great De-Institutionalization of the 1960s of people with mental illnesses, and b) the interaction of Jim Crowe and it’s repeal with the New Deal and the Great Society. I wish we had more time to go into the weeds on these two questions because I believe that they are extremely important in talking about policy issues today: re poverty in the U.S..
