How the audience educates the lecturer: skepticism and freedom

I am also taking classes at LSE via the external system; quite a change from a generation back, since today via the global communications network one can listen to any number of world class experts in any field. the LSE public lecture website is:

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/publicEventsVideos/publicEventsVideosPrevious.aspx

Hi Bill – as a development professional based in London but with a baby, attending lectures a joy I’ve had to forfeit, but podcasts (LSE, Global Prosperity Wonkcast, Development Drums, etc.) have been a great substitute during commutes! I’m disappointed you’re not allowing the podcast to be put up – I was looking forward to being challenged as usual by your insights. Any chance you can reconsider?

I learned a long time ago to always make sure there was a good skeptic on my team. I’m naturally enthusiastic and optimistic, but as you say ‘damage is done by overconfident people who thought they knew the answer when they didn’t’.

I still balk at the painfully negative way in which many skeptics communicate, and am more inclined myself towards a good healthy dose of humble curiosity.

Humility (which avoids the overconfidence) and curiosity (which assumes that there are answers and factors that we don’t know about yet) might do the same work as your skeptical criticism, but with less intellectual arrogance. Because the confidence of a true skeptic that nothing will work until proven otherwise (according to his or her often narrowly defined idea of what constitutes evidence) also does damage.

Maybe what I’m looking for is a truly creative form of skeptism, one that embraces as much humility and curiosity as we are asking the enthusiasts to embrace. Then I suspect real innovation could flourish.

it is refreshing to hear that you also struggle with the conundrum of genuinely wanting to Do Something but not knowing exactly what To Do.

i don’t think it takes a skeptic to acknowledge that we don’t really know what to do to make a signficiant impact on global poverty, but it is important for us to carefully analyse each step we take in the direction we think is taking us there, something that sometimes seems to be missing from the development and humanitarian circles. as some of the other commenters have mentioned, having an online community of people with similar professional constraints, personal doubts, and philosophical dilemmas allows those of us who do want to see the field of international development improve is reassuring and will hopefully lead to improvements in aid delivery.

@Robert Tulip: I’m sorry, but unless your definition of “reasonable” is much different than mine, I do not agree with you – and I think Prof. Easterly’s provocative lecture did show that “we don’t know how to solve global poverty”.

The Doing Business Indicators you are quoting only go back until 2004 – and they are not even complete for all countries within this short period. So unless you want to leap forward and assume that you can generalize the sources of growth based on an unbalanced 7 years panel, I do not understand why the the sources should be “reasonably well understood”.

Also, keep in mind that the Doing Business indicators are compiled by the WB – like the CPIA, such indices can always have some degree of coder bias, so one should be careful and construct hypotheses in a conservative way so you always test against the bias.

And even if the indicators are correct, you cannot derive any policy implications: Even if some function – say “enforcing contracts” – is important in fostering entrepreneurial activity and growth, such institutional arrangements are highly endogenous and the success of setting up such arrangements depend on many underlying conditions.

My point is just that we should be much more humble and acknowledge the complexity of reality and to – paraphrasing Socrates – admit that we only know that we know nothing – even though that might not really help to get you published in high-ranked journals.

Amartya Sen came to LSE three times this academic year and they are all on the website! Rodrik and Sachs(like most of honest professors, presidents and nobel laureates who came to LSE this year) are available for a global audience at LSE`s website. Why is Bill so afraid?

Professor Easterly, I wanted to ask you about your use of Soviet-era five year plans as indicative of the pitfalls of “planning.” However, I did not get the chance at your LSE talk.

Do China and India, both heralded as development success stories, not devise five-year plans until now? Perhaps you too suffer from sample selection bias.

I was at your lecture at LSE last week and had coffee afterwards with several other development students. We all had roughly the same opinion: we thought the bit about dictatorships would be shorter and that you’d move on to address the substantive policies the East Asian autocrats pursued. We all agreed that your NYRB assault on Chang proved that those policies are not sufficient for growth, but also that his work indicated they are at least necessary, and were frankly a bit disappointed not to see a substantive engagement with those ideas. That aside, we also had trouble with the “and that’s a good thing part,” since you seemed to suggest that if we knew how to solve poverty, the only way we could operationalize it is through Leninist coercion. But surely ideas have power, and persuasion has power, and if we did have a proveable answer, there would be popular demand from poor people to help them implement it.

Those complaints aside, the first half of the presentation was terrific. I hope our reactions are somewhat helpful.