Submitted by: Tristan Reed
Students have been troubled lately by news that the university has suspended admission to the international development studies major.
As an alumnus working in international development, I am less troubled than excited. Professor Michael Lofchie’s pending review of the major presents an opportunity to better tune an unwieldy curriculum to meet the demands of the development profession and to better train students in the science of making people’s lives better. Doing that, after all, is what development is all about.
The main reason for the suspension of the major is the lack of ladder-rank faculty members associated with the interdisciplinary major. That is a valid concern that Lofchie must address, but I will not discuss it here.
Rather, I write to recommend strongly that the university reform the major with a central emphasis on microeconomics and public policy.
While the major as currently conceived requires one elementary economics course as a prerequisite and has one core course on “The Economics of Developing Countries,” it does not teach economics or public policy in a way sufficient to make students effective development professionals or, I argue, scholars.
Contrary to the impression one might get ““ or, to be honest, I got ““ volunteering as an undergraduate, development work is not mostly about living in a small village, agonizing over the justice of the World Bank’s lending requirements or communing with a new culture.
It’s about making public policy from an air-conditioned office, or occasionally, from a white Toyota Land Cruiser. And yes, this is true even in the earthiest of grassroots organizations.
If you’re good, you spend your time figuring out whether you will benefit more people building a clinic in one place or another, or wondering why so many women give birth at home when going to a clinic is safer, or designing a way to determine which new school curriculum works best to raise students’ incomes when they’re older.
These are the often mundane, seemingly small problems we spend our time solving ““ because solving them is the only way to solve the big problems of social justice and economic inequity that obsess us.
The current emphases on both liberal and Marxian social theory in the IDS courses, as well as on macroeconomics and growth theory, are vitally important to help students understand the facts of the development process as a whole.
They do very little, however, to help them understand how development works on the ground, and how to determine for themselves, their student organizations and later, their employers, what works the best.
Addressing these practical problems of development requires technical skills in microeconomics and public policy. Indeed, employers hiring in the field want graduates with those skills.
For graduates to be effective development practitioners, they must have more training in these skills than they currently receive. Equally important, to be scholars of development, they need the skills to analyze how development programs and processes affect individuals ““ not just in broad strokes, but also specifically, quantifiably and in terms of wealth and welfare.
To ensure students learn these skills, one would not have to style the major as an undergraduate version of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Master in Public Administration in International Development program, which submerges its at-times timorous students in semesters of hard-core economics and statistics.
Reforming the major simply means including the basic theory of public policy, as taught, perhaps, in UCLA professor Mark Kleiman’s “Introduction to Public Policy” course, and that of intermediate microeconomics into the prerequisites.
It means adding the theory of incentives, behavioral economics and cost-benefit analysis to the IDS courses themselves. It means teaching students how to do household surveys that identify the impact of development projects. It means bringing the latest from Dani Rodrik, Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee alongside the work of Joseph Stiglitz, Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon.
On the IDS Faculty Advisory Committee, there is only one economist, Fred Finan, and no public affairs professors.
That should change. Pascaline Dupas, who recently joined UCLA as an assistant economics professor and has made a name for herself doing incredible evaluations of development programs, would be a good resource to tap, as well as those in the urban planning and public policy departments who work abroad.
Current and aspiring IDS students and the people they hope to serve all want a better world.
Let’s teach the skills required to build one.
Reed is a 2008 alumnus, a former Daily Bruin Viewpoint columnist and development professional based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. This September, he will begin a doctoral program in economics at Harvard University.