In John Quiggin's article, "The world is enough" he states a fairly optimistic view on our current capabilities in regards to ending poverty while protecting the global environment. He has some very good arguments for why these goals are currently feasible, such as increased fuel efficiency of vehicles, future buildings being more efficient, and the future technology grids of developing countries being able to leap frog into cutting edge energy solutions without the dependency on fossil fuels. Overall, this article does bring a lot of hope on the climate change issue since it does establish that it is possible to meet our goals rather than portray the devastating path the world is currently headed. Some of its suggestions are already gaining traction, such as electric cars. In fact, Tesla was the 3rd most bought car in California this quarter. However, I’m not entirely sure about how true his claims are on Internet shopping reducing a large number of individual shopping trips to just one being an effective way to reduce emissions. While this is just anecdotal evidence, in my experience, when people go grocery shopping they try their best to plan it out so that they won’t have to go shopping again for the rest of the week. I think this extends to other facets of shopping, when the onus is on the individual, since these tasks use time that is valued by the individual. Thus, individuals try to get as many items as possible on these trips. However, with the rise of Amazon 1 day shipping and one click purchase, consumers are not incentivized to just go to the store once a week, because there is no time cost of ordering an item and having it shipped to their door the next day. Thus, it is more likely for consumers to deaggregate their shopping carts and actually increase trips (and therefore emissions) for the shipping company to deliver there impulse purchases. Furthermore, the whole internet shipping delivery system (while it does try to optimize its routes) cannot come close to reducing its emissions to the amount it would take for someone to just drive 5 miles to their nearest Walmart. Often, products you order online will be shipped in from out of state, and will use heavy polluting methods like planes. However, if the world could focus on providing energy to developing countries through clean methods and use these countries as a possible testing ground for clean energy technology to be adopted at home that would be instrumental in reducing poverty, while doing so sustainably. In the Turn Down the Heat report, looks at the impact of increasing global temperatures on food and energy systems, water resources, and ecosystems. The paper focused on the impacts of climate change on Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and Central Asia. Some common impacts are increased droughts in certain areas that undermine crop stability and can increase food prices which would hurt the poor the most, increased extreme weather and its associated damages to infrastructure and crops, and the damage associated with higher sea levels. While the first article showed that it is possible for us to reach our goals, this paper shows us why we really need to meet them. With climate change impacting nearly every place in the world negatively and hurting the poor, children, and elderly the most, there is a great need to implement more policies to help protect the planet! However, the current administration seems dead set on reverting to old forms of energy like coal that are not only hazardous to health, but also not even that helpful to the economy. Rather than complain about change and grab to inefficient and damaging ways of the past, we should incentivize innovation in green forms of energy production and efficiency to replace these antiquated forms of production. While they may be more expensive initially, their social costs would make that investment a lot more attractive. This brings me to another reason why there is hope in the future: the next generation is a lot more motivated to reduce climate change. While past generations really dropped the ball on climate change and even turned it into a political issue, from what I can see, there seems to be a general understanding among my generation that climate change is an important issue that needs to be addressed. As the population demographics shift, there will be more attention placed on this issue and hopefully it will become bipartisan. When that happens, there will be great reason to rejoice.

In Juliana Yael Milovich’s working paper, “Does Aid Reduce Poverty?”, she looks into the relationship between the number of years countries have been temporary members of the United Nations Security Council (to estimate the average amount of economic aid disbursed by the United States between 1946 and 1999) and the impacts on reducing people who are multidimensionally poor (using the MPI index) and with GNI growth. She finds that a 1% increase in U.S. aid results in a decrease of the MPI by .61% on average with reductions in the education, health and living standards categories by 0.82%, 0.36% and 0.64%, respectively. However, she finds that the relationship between aid and income poverty, as measured by the gap and headcount ratio at $1.90/day and $3.10/day, does not seem to be statistically significant. One interesting aspect that I noticed regarding this article was how limited data existed for the multidimensional poverty index in the early 2000s and how there was no data previous to 2000 (of course this is due to the MPI not existing before then) and how that impacts the quality of data. Obviously, since there is a lack of data the data has lower quality. This raises the question of how well can studies account for this lack of data when performing analysis. While it can be mitigated, there will be a loss of strength in the conclusions or a limiting of the potential questions a researcher could pose. Milovich was able to get around these limitations by looking at the impact of aid before MPI was taken into account 1946-1999 and when it was (after 2000), which also coincided with increased aid from the US during the Cold War. However, having data on those 53 lost years would be invaluable. Fortunately, in the future this data will be available, which is exciting for researchers going into this field now, since the data will only get more and more comprehensive. This also raises the question of what variables are we not taking into account that would be important for future analysis. Could access to internet and internet freedom (considering the restraints placed on China's and Russia's internets) be an important variable in the future? A side note to my statements above, is that if the MPI had not been recorded then the conclusion of this paper would just be a statistically insignificant relationship between US aid and the headcount and gap ratio. Thus, the improvements in non monetary aspects of the poor would not have been realized.

In “Interest Rates in the North and Capital Flows to the South: Is There a Missing Link” by Barry Eichengreen and Ashoka Mody, the authors demonstrate that there is a statistically significant connection between the flow of capital to developing countries and the global interest rates. They find that as the interest rates of developed countries, such as the United States and Japan rise, the amount of capital that domestic investors are willing to invest in foriegn developing countries decreases and vice versa when interest rates in the developed countries fall. One interesting take away I had from this was that often the development of a country is not in their own hands. I feel like, often, people will blame other countries for their own lack of development. While there are cases where it is fairly obvious that the main detriment to economic growth is an extremist ruler (or ruling party) that institutes governmental laws that wreak havoc to the economy, in some cases, like some countries in Latin America (who followed the prevailing economic theory of market liberalization in the Washington Accord), had lower than expected growth due to external factors. This paper shows that in some cases, the external factor of global interest rates can limit the possibility of growth before any new policy is even implemented. This could result in countries believing that the policies they implemented were poor policies, when these policies may actually would have been beneficial to growth, if they had been implemented in times of low global interest rates. These beliefs are held on a false assumption and could cause the government of the developing country to be reluctant to use policies that would be beneficial when there are low global interest rates, because when they tried them in the past, the policies failed. Furthermore, a country or other countries may compare the growth between two countries when they implemented similar policies, but at different global interest rates, and conclude potentially discriminatory beliefs about the general characteristics of the people of the lower performing country. This reminds me of the importance of being vigilant about the assumptions of models in economics.

In “The Economic and Social Burden of Malaria” by Jeffrey Sachs and Pia Malaney, the extent of which malaria has hampered economic growth and caused high social costs in regions in the tropics is highlighted through the diseases detrimental effects to society by increasing child mortality, increasing the dependency ratio, reducing school time and productivity, reducing the savings rate, reducing cognitive abilities, reducing investment in female education, increasing the mortality rates of other diseases, reducing foriegn investment into high malaria concentrated areas. What surprised me the most about the impact of malaria on human populations in the tropics was how prevalent the impact is throughout major facets of society. As mentioned earlier, malaria has impacts from child mortality, education, cognitive abilities, the mortality of other diseases, and even foriegn investment. While I did know that malaria has likely been responsible for over a billion deaths in human history, I just contained that into a health issue and never really thought of it as education, GNP, and foriegn investment issue as well. This also concerns me, because, while I know there are some organizations working on ways to combat the disease, there has not been a lot of recent news (at least on my radar) about improvement in fighting malaria. I understand that the news has about a 30 second lifecycle and most of it only shows negatives to increase viewership, but I would still expect there to be at least one positive story popping onto my news feed now and then, since I do enjoy learning about how technology is improving lives. Recently, I did stumble across a video about how scientists were able to introduce the bacteria called Wolbachia into mosquitoes that stopped them from carrying all four of the Dengue diseases. The fascinating part about this solution to Dengue is that when the Wolbachia mosquitoes breed with wild type mosquitoes, the resulting offspring are Wolbachia mosquitoes. Thus, over time and with enough releases of Wolbachia mosquitoes, there is a chance for the whole mosquito population to stop carrying Dengue. In order to test this out, the scientists made a smart choice by consulting local communities and explaining how releasing these new mosquitoes into the area would reduce cases of Dengue and even gave residents the opportunity to help raise Wolbachia mosquitoes. The results were a great success with a 70% reduction in Dengue cases in areas where the mosquitoes were released (that is an underestimate in its impact, since people in the community were highly mobile and often traveled to non Wolbachia mosquito areas). I’m not entirely sure if Wolbachia bacteria has the same effect on the transmission of malaria, but it is something that hopefully will get looked into. This approach works with nature, instead of fighting it, so while it may be costly in the short run, once it is able to take advantage of nature’s exponential growth, in the long run it will be relatively cheap.

In Theodore W. Schultz’s article, “The Economics of Being Poor”, he discusses some common fallacies he finds in economic thought, such that “the presumption that standard economic theory is inadequate for understanding low income countries and that a separate economic theory is needed,” and that land and energy are the most important to agricultural improvement, while human capital really is the most important factor. When I do agree with the majority of what he described, I think that there are some parts of his article that are contradictory to the Rodrik article on the beginnings of development economics we discussed previously in class. When Schultz wrote that “the presumption that standard economic theory is inadequate for understanding low income countries and that a separate economic theory is needed” was a fallacy, it seemed to contradict what Rodrick said when he discussed how high development theorists were largely ignored because in their era the extent of the complexity of modeling was not high enough to model for phenomena like asymmetric information and other aspects that deviate from the ideal perfect econ 100 class type of model. However, in Rodricks article, I remember him saying that much of what these high development theorists said had some merit and that it was disheartening to think about the 50 odd years lost when these ideas were not looked into and their creators grew old. I also thought it was interesting that the early contributors to economics in England had very similar economic situations in comparison to developing countries today. It was something that I was unaware of since it is very difficult to imagine a developed country like Britain as its developing self after seeing it all my life as a developed country. However, wouldn’t that also go against Schultz’s point of similarity? While it is true that Britain was similar to developing countries today by his metrics, Britain a couple hundreds of years ago did not have to compete with the fully industrialized countries that developing countries today do.

In the research paper "Women Empowerment and Economic Development," Esther Duflo initially talks about how development itself improves the equality of women but concludes that there still needs to be policies to make men and women equal. When Duflo discusses how development policies improve the equality between men and women she often focuses on young girls in the household. She often concludes that development policies that focus on reducing the possibility of putting families in distress which then reduces the chances of a family prioritizing care for the boy over the girl (e.g. insurance) or that development policies that raise the financial value of a woman and thus incentivizes families to protect their investments more (e.g. reducing child mortality to increase education investments, greater opportunities). While these are valid reasons to focus on development to increase gender equality, they seem to just focus on the economic side of equality and only help women indirectly. As Duflo continues on, she examines why developed countries still have not reached complete equality even though families don't have the extent of extreme financial poverty and their daughters seem to have the same opportunities as boys. However, women often are biased into certain fields or believing that they are inherently not good at certain jobs. I recently listened to a podcast on Planet Money about why women suddenly stopped going into computer science around 1984 and they found that due to companies marketing computers and video games to boys, such products were thought to be just for them and thus boys had more interest in them and the associated field of computer science. This example fits well with this paper. While indirect policies will help women they can only do so up to a certain extent until the incentive for families and women to succumb to the cultural pressure outweighs the increase in economic value of equality. In order to change the cultural hindrance to equality, more direct policies will have to be taken into account, even if these policies hurt the chances of men. To do this then, I think that first cultural change must be to realize that it is unfair for any life to be limited in its potential, regardless of gender and then to realize that fix this unfairness we will have to target the groups that experience this the most: women, minorities, ect. This will make it easier for others to stomach policies that may hurt their own economic and cultural positions.

In “Growth Strategies,” by Dani Rodrik, the path that underdeveloped countries that have been able to converge with developed economies is contrasted with the prescribed path that was the common sentiment in the 1980s and was written down as the Washington Consensus. One common thread between what we read in the textbook and this paper is the underdevelopment explanation of the false-paradigm model. In the initial sections of the paper, Rodrik discussed how the convergence of good developmental policy ideas, dubbed the "Washington Consensus," was established in the 1980s and he provides a summary of these generally accepted ideas in Table 2. However, this is not done to show how well all of these policies have been used, but to contrast on how often not all of these policies are necessary for the convergence of underdeveloped countries with the economic well-being of developed countries. In fact, in some situations where these policies were implemented, the countries did not converge. Rodrik also repeatedly states that successfully converging countries often used uncommon methods. This falls inline with the false-paradigm model, in which underdevelopment can be attributed to inappropriate advice from well meaning but often uninformed, biased, and ethnocentric advisers. While the experts who produced the Washington Consensus likely knew that there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to underdevelopment, by generalizing such policies as such, it lost the importance of taking into account of the inherent uniqueness of each country. Thus, those countries may just take the tenants of the consensus without adjusting for their unique situation and essentially be given poor advice. Another idea that perplexed me was regarding the necessity of a "political entity that is strong enough to establish property rights and enforce contracts [that] is also strong enough, by definition, to violate these same rules for its own purpose." While there are some examples of even the United States confiscating property (e.g. eminent domain), this does seem to go against the teachings of Amartya Sen and the role of government in providing freedoms and capabilities to its own people. If a government is able to confiscate property, then doesn't that infringe upon the individual's freedom to own property? Or can it be argued that it is necessary for the government to seize that property in order to provide freedoms to more people than the individual? But at what point does the social benefit outweigh the cost to the individual? If this is taken to an even more extreme example, the mandatory draft of men into the military during times of war, how do viewpoints change? In this case, the government is encroaching upon a fundamental freedom, the freedom to live.

In Krugman's article titled "THE FALL AND RISE OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS", he details the unfortunate waste of great economic minds resulting from the lack of technical ability to produce models in the field of high development theory, while the rest of the economic research scene had rapidly implemented rigorous models into their research. The author theorizes that the lack of satisfying modeling techniques lead to many great economists of the high development theory field to reject modeling due to fear of losing too much clarity when discussing their theories. Thus, such a model may predict an entirely false outcome and could be a detriment to the field than an advancement. While Krugman does state that he dislikes the assumption that all social fields must try to be like physics with rigorous models that are correct to 5 standard deviations and that those types of models are pure. While such modeling is possible in fields where there is a great amount of observable data (i.e. the petabytes of data generated every run at the Large Hadron Collider), it is essentially impossible to make such models in economics, since the cost of obtaining the same degree of observations would be too large for such a model to be economical. Furthermore, some components of the economy can be difficult to objectively measure, since they are inherently subjective in themselves. For example, measuring confidence in the economy to grow by investors is subjective and can be influenced by many factors. Furthermore, this sentiment can change at a moment's notice or by a single tweet. That can make surveys taken just minutes before inaccurate. This adds a dimension of difficulty to the job of an economist that a physicist is unlikely to ever experience; the laws of the universe are in a constant state of flux. However, I do think that there is room to make a comparison between physics and high development theory. While high development theory was held back by the lack of technical knowledge of how to model phenomena, physics is generally held back by the machines and techniques used to run experiments and generate data. Before the Large Hadron Collider was completed there was a great amount of theoretical work published on potential explanations of the inner workings of the universe. However, these predictions could not be tested until the infrastructure to make observations was completed. This is comparable to what high development theorists experienced early on; they did not have the correct tools, in this case modeling techniques, to show if their theories had merit. Recently, there has been a lot of speculation of whether a leaked document stating that Google has reached quantum supremacy with its quantum computers is true or not. If this is true then quantum computers could potentially open the gate for even more rigorous economic models than current models, since it could offer vastly more cost effective computing and solve simulations that would have taken centuries for the fastest supercomputers to do in minutes.

In the paper, “Institutional Barriers and World Income Disparities” (Wang, Wong, Yip, 2018), the underlying reasons behind why 10 countries labeled “fast-growing economies” have succeeded in economic growth that has outpaced the U.S. growth rate over the past 50 years or more and why 10 countries labeled “development laggards” have failed to grow at as fast a pace as the fast growing economies. The paper goes into dividing these 10 development laggards into two groups: the trapped economies and the lag-behind countries. The trap countries experienced multiple poverty traps, while some of the lag-behind countries actually started off in a better position than the fast-growing economy countries. One trend that caught my attention was the high prevalence of an agriculturally based economies in the development laggards countries, such as Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Comoros. Having a primarily agriculture based economy rarely produces significant GDP growth since their main exports are commodities. This results in very little profit margin, since there is no distinguishing factor to prevent other players from entering the market and lowering prices until there is no profit left in the industry. To further exacerbate this issue, is that there is little structure for innovation in the agricultural sector, since these countries have relatively underdeveloped technology sectors. While innovations may be able to reduce the production costs temporarily, once those practices are adopted by the rest of the producers, margins will become slim again. This causes their economies to be heavily reliant on consumer demand, thus when that falls like it did for cacao in Côte d’Ivoire and it did for tea, coffee, and cotton for Kenya, those countries are left at the whim of the market and will see a decline in that sector. This need to pivot economies from an agricultural base to a more industrial base was noticed by the mentioned in the article and how these countries tried to implement that transition seemed to be the difference between elevated levels of growth and poor economic growth. The two main policy mistakes seem to be overprotectionism and focusing on an import-substitution industry over an export driven economy. Using excessive or needless protective fiscal policies such as tariffs can lead to local companies becoming inefficient and causing their goods and services to be more expensive. This makes things harder for consumers and other companies that rely on the protected companies. Furthermore, by protecting industries excessively from world competition, those companies fail to innovate and may waste resources that should have been devoted to R&D to lobby the government. The focus of establishing import-substitution industries is also an inefficient path to growing an economy. When a country doesn’t allow free trade, it causes the prices of goods and services to increase, which can result in inflation, which hampers the economy even more. Also, the industries that some countries tried to replace were heavy industries that had little margins to begin with. The fast growth economies often focused on high tech industries, which have a lot of potential for high margins and encourage a lot of investment into R&D, which further stimulates the economy. By devoting so many resources into an already saturated industry that requires a lot of capital to establish, the lag-behind countries are essentially wasting potential investments in high tech industries or a more specialized industry that the country could have a competitive advantage in. Thus, this could cause the decline of the economy. In contrast, an export driven economy induces firms to increase competitiveness and brings monetary capital into the economy.

The paper titled, “The Economic Lives of the Poor” (Banerjee & Duflo, 2006), gave me a new perspective on many of the issues plaguing the poor and extremely poor. One of the topics that went against my expectations was how the poor spend money on food. Intuitively, one would expect the poor to spend as much of their money on food until they are no longer malnourished. It was surprising that often people in poverty devote a sizable chunk of their income to entertainment rather than food purchases. Whether it be spending on TVs or festivals, it seems wasteful to devote resources to such activities. Even then, when they do purchase food they don't prioritize nutrition and will spend on foods that do not provide the most nutrition per dollar. This seems very inefficient, especially since malnutrition impacts their ability to stay healthy and to work to earn further income. This makes me wonder what are the underlying reasons behind these decisions? Would poor people be more likely to purchase more nutritious food if they are educated on the nutritional value of rice vs a more efficient grain? Do they feel inclined to purchase TVs due to a need to fit in or demonstrate their wealth? Or is it possible that they are looking for a means to mentally escape their situation? Furthermore, I'm interested in exploring if there is a connection between the percentage of income spent on festivals and the importance of such festivals to the culture of the country. It would be to contrast this percentage of income spent with the percentage spent by U.S. households on holidays, such as Christmas, Labor Day, Halloween, ect. If there is a statistically significant similarity between the percentages, would it be possible to conclude that certain percentage of income is needed for spirituality purposes or for an individual to feel like he is part of society? It is also interesting to consider that the individual who is not regularly eating believes that spending money on such entertainment has more utility to them than actual food. Another facet of this article that intrigued me was the prevalence of the poor being small time entrepreneurs. The typical assumption of people with low income is that they are unemployed, which makes it more interesting to me that often these low income households run their own businesses. However, it is concerning that they often produce commodity products and with the many players in that commodity market and little differentiation, they often make little money off their work. It would be interesting if economists could determine an underserviced industry that would allow for these people to have less competition (and charge higher prices) or find a way to differentiate their products. Also, I think it would be worthwhile for economists to recommend ways to increase the efficiency of these small scale operations until they can grow to a size that they can take advantage of economy of scale.

The paper titled, “The Economic Lives of the Poor” (Banerjee & Duflo, 2006), gave me a new perspective on many of the issues plaguing the poor and extremely poor. One of the topics that went against my expectations was how the poor spend money on food. Intuitively, one would expect the poor to spend as much of their money on food as they can until they are no longer malnourished. It was surprising that often people in poverty devote a sizable chunk of their income to entertainment rather than food purchases. Whether it be spending on TVs or festivals, it seems wasteful to devote resources to such activities. Even then, when they do purchase food they don't prioritize nutrition and will spend on foods that do not provide the most nutrition per dollar. This seems very inefficient, especially since malnutrition impacts their ability to stay healthy and to work to earn further income. This makes me wonder about what are the underlying reasons behind these decisions. Would poor people be more likely to purchase more nutritious food if they are educated on the lower nutritional value of rice vs a more efficient grain? Do they feel inclined to purchase TVs due to a need to fit in or demonstrate their wealth? Or is it possible that they are looking for a means to mentally escape their situation? Furthermore, I'm interested in exploring if there is a connection between the percentage of income spent on festivals and the importance of such festivals to the culture of the country. It would be to contrast this percentage of income spent with the percentage spent by U.S. households on holidays, such as Christmas, Labor Day, Halloween, ect. If there is a statistically significant similarity between the percentages, would it be possible to conclude that certain percentage of income is needed for spirituality purposes or for an individual to feel like he is part of society? It is also interesting to consider that the individual who is not regularly eating believes that spending money on such entertainment has more utility to them than actual food. Another facet of this article that intrigued me was the prevalence of the poor being small time entrepreneurs. The typical assumption of people with low income is that they are unemployed, which makes it more interesting to me that often these low income households run their own businesses. However, it is concerning that they often produce commodity products and with the many players in that commodity market and little differentiation. This means they often make little money off their work. It would be interesting if economists could determine an underserviced industry that would allow for these people to have less competition (and charge higher prices) or find a way to differentiate their products. Also, I think it would be worthwhile for economists to recommend ways to increase the efficiency of these small scale operations until they can grow to a size that they can take advantage of economy of scale.