Chris Blattman

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Did it just get hotter in here? Alex and Tyler at MR launch an online development course.

The competition has arrived! Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have launched MRU —  Marginal Revolution University –and their first course is… development economics!

Development Economics will cover the sources of economic growth including geography, education, finance, and institutions. We will cover theories like the Solow and O-ring models and we will cover the empirical data on development and trade, foreign aid, industrial policy, and corruption. Development Economics will include not just theory but a wealth of historical and factual information on specific countries and topics, everything from watermelon scale economies and the clove monopoly to water privatization in Buenos Aires and cholera in Haiti. A special section in this round will examine India. There are no prerequisites for this course but neither is it dumbed down. We think there will be material in Development Economics that will be of interest to high school students in the United States and Bangladesh and also to PhDs in economics, even to those who specialize in this field.

Actually, I will be an eager follower. I already have aspirations on class by class commentary, but let’s be honest, I’m barely holding it together over here.

I’m basically assuming that they have discovered a technology that lets them slip out of the space-time continuum to sleep, and Tyler is principally holding it back because it would disprove his book.

At least that’s what I tell myself to stay sane.

Here is my development syllabus, if interested. The course is not online, and frankly I am not sure if Columbia would even allow that, but I promise to look into it in the future.

10 Responses

  1. How does it possibly make sense that someone like Tyler Cowen, who is ideologically dedicated to increasing poverty and inequality, would involve himself in Development economics? The whole point of developmental econ is that libertarianism is a dangerous fantasy of deranged imperialists, and that people who want to live in nice places need to understand precisely how much public and private institutions do.

  2. Very interesting development syllabus. Thanks for posting.

    However, the syllabus insults economic geography. While I realize that development economists apparently think little of geography, I’ve never actually seen or read any substantive refutation of either of the main “geographic” theories of development: (1) geographic similarity kamarck/crosby/diamond/sachs (of which you cite just one paper, Nunn’s Columbian Exchange), and (2) New Trade Theory’s market access… (e.g., from krugman’s geo & trade) (Also, I didn’t see any Malthus, which I’ll let pass…)

    Both theories, which are in no way mutually exclusive, enjoy all kinds of empirical and intuitive support, emerge from a wide variety of models (and, basic, fundamental models not just tick-tacky models which clearly aren’t general), and can explain loads of observed development… I see that both are widely ignored (i.e., neither show up in Acemoglu’s growth textbook), but I’ve never seen a halfway intelligent critique of either. Indeed, most of the severist critics of geography display little evidence that they know what the theories entail.

    Or am I missing something?

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