Chris Blattman

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My syllabus: Political Economy of Development

My Master’s class syllabus is here. What I’ve always wanted to call it is “Why are some countries poor, violent and unfree, and what (if anything) can the West do about it?”

But that apparently looks weird on a syllabus. So boring “PE of Development” it is.

(The undergraduate class syllabus looks very similar in readings but is taught slightly differently.)

For those interested: I’ll be posting slides weekly, and you should remind me if I forget.

Sorry, no taped lectures just yet. I’m not sure that Columbia is on that wagon at the moment. Will look into it next year though. I’m getting to the point where I’m no longer just making half of it up, so I might be willing to go on the record.

7 Responses

  1. And yet there’s a course called “Why Are So Many Countries Poor, Volatile, and Unequal?” at Harvard!

    Thanks for posting the syllabus, looks like lots of great reading.

  2. As someone, who lives and works in Sub-Saharan Africa (Zimbabwe), I find the key questions defining this course, astoundingly biased, politically and economically in the service of Western agendas and global capital. The mere fact that there is no “or” in the line up of “poor oppressive and violent” and equally no apparent ability to imagine that there can be options for societies, where the opposite of “growing incomes” is not stagnation and decline or recognition that freedom and prosperity are not one and the same. The course appears historically insular and reactionary but other than that totally consistent with Western approach to sub-Saharan Africa and other developing countries in the past, determined by self-interest and self-righteousness. Congratulations!

  3. I would rename the course as PE of Development in SSA. Most of the readings are–not surprisingly–focusing on this region. I see the practical constraints but a cross-regional focus including some works that cover SE Asia and LA could be even more exciting.

  4. Drawing upon Dan’s comment above, the “struggle to settle” argument doesn’t really work here seeing you not only have required readings, but recommended and further readings. One article on the gender component could easily be added to each of your main categories. After all, you still include Barrington Moore.

  5. Thanks for sharing this. Great list and I like the new stuff on there, acknowledging the new developments in Dev. Econ. I am curious though about why you didn’t include any stuff on industrial policy or industrial development. I feel like the reason why the folks in public health are winning the development game [in terms of impact] is because they still emphasize the old fashioned basics like water and sanitation and vaccination. Dev. Economists on the other hand have discarded the big Development questions [like industrialization and creation of BIG CORPORATIONS that provide mass employment] for the micro stuff [which are awesome and make for great papers] and more recently institutions [again great stuff, but hard to come up with policy prescriptions on these]. May be I am stuck back in time but I think students of Development Economics and Comparative PE in particular could benefit from lessons on how industrialization takes place. This might demand the opening up of development classes to a broader take of development through time [including in the North Atlantic, Southeast Asia, and other places]. Sorry for the rumbling thoughts…

  6. Thanks for sharing this rich syllabus. Perhaps I’m misreading, but I note the rigorous absence, or exclusion, of any reference to women and/or to a gender analysis. Is that a choice you make? If so … what’s the reasoning?

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