Oliver Kim
@oliverwkim
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PhD student @berkeleyecon , researching development and economic history.
Berkeley, CA
Joined November 2009
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Happy birthday to Albert Hirschman, who would be 106 today.
Hirschman—anti-fascist, resistance hero, later a development economist—may be the most interesting person to ever take up the profession.
🧵 and blog post on his remarkable life and work. 1/
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Happy birthday to Albert Hirschman, who would be 109 today.
Hirschman—anti-fascist, resistance hero, later a development economist—may be the most interesting person to ever take up the profession.
🧵 and blog post on his remarkable life and work.
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THREAD: On the role of bad social science in the Vietnam War—and how not understanding local conditions, and thinking through endogeneity (yes, endogeneity) can lead to policy conclusions with tragic, deadly consequences.
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🚀JMP alert🚀
My paper w
@FergJoel
applies machine learning to 1970s-80s satellite imagery to revisit one of the 🇨🇳 Chinese Miracle's first major reforms, the Household Responsibility System—the end of collective socialist agriculture.
What we found was quite surprising. 🧵
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🧵: At historical growth rates, it will take >2,000 years for 🇸🇳 Senegal to catch up to 🇫🇷 France's 2019 GDP p.c.
How long will it take for developing countries reach rich world income levels?
I've built a quick tool to simulate growth scenarios: .
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Hirschman had fought fascism in four countries, earning two graduate degrees along the way.
He was still just 25 years old.
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🧵 of interesting tidbits (updated as I find them) from Joanne Meyerowitz's "A War on Global Poverty", which I highly recommend for any economist interested in the history of development and foreign aid: (1/?)
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This is a crazy chart—most African countries have registered **negative** agricultural TFP growth over the last decade.
(From new VoxDevLit article by Suri and Udry)
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For more info, I recommend Adelmans’s wonderful bio, Worldly Philosopher, on which this thread is based. For Hirschman’s own work, his Hiding Hand essay is a great start—he remains a joy to read in the original. ( ).
HBD to a thoroughly admirable man. Fin
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The key point is not that Mitchell’s statistics were shoddy, but that he was too ignorant of reality to know. There will always be a market for bad ideas, and politicians looking for post-hoc scientism as cover.
As academics, we must do better at not providing it for them.
FIN.
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It’s estimated that, w Hirschman’s help, Fry’s group saved over 2000 people—including Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and Marcel Duchamp.
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Man have I got the JMP for you
The economic takeoffs in China and (now increasingly) India are among the most economically consequential things to ever happen, affect a third of humanity, and there are bizarrely few top econ papers about it?
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In my post, I go into greater detail on Hirschman’s ideas, and their relation to modern development economics. His approach of “petite idées”, informed by empirical observation, seems the model for a clear-eyed way of thinking about development.
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In my post, I go into greater detail on Hirschman’s ideas, and their relation to modern development economics. His approach of “petite idées”, informed by empirical observation, seems the model for a clear-eyed way of thinking about development.
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🧵: On the role of bad social science in the Vietnam War—and how not understanding local conditions, and thinking through endogeneity (yes, endogeneity) can lead to policy conclusions with tragic, deadly consequences.
More, and a link to my new newsletter post below:
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At Berkeley, he met Sarah Chapiro, another Jewish emigre, in Berkeley’s I-House cafeteria. They married soon after.
When America went to war in 1941, Hirschman enlisted, and served on the Italian front (his 3rd army in 5 yrs).
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Only 6% of economists move to a higher-ranked school than their PhD—the lowest % of all social sciences, third-last among all fields after Classics & Religious Studies(!)
(from the excellent new Wapman et al Nature article on US PhD production)
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Colombia proved a crucial turning pt for Hirschman. As a development economist, Hirschman became unusual for his time in doing extensive fieldwork. In part due to his “non-traditional” bkgd, he developed a wry literary style that poked fun at sweeping mathematical models.
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After 3mo on the front lines, Hirschman went to Italy, to join his sister Ursula. He became involved in the anti-Mussolini underground, carrying messages in a false-bottomed suitcase.
Somehow he also found the time to finish his doctorate in economics!
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Prospects for an African industrial revolution?
Fascinating table of manuf. unit labor costs relative to China by continent, from Naidoo and Ndikumana 2020.
As of 2015, they estimate that African ULCs are on par w China; South Asian ULCs 62%(!) lower.
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This tendency, Paul Krugman has argued, pushed Hirschman’s ideas out of the mainstream of economics.
And it’s also why I think his ideas are ripe for a comeback.
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Only when the Vichy police started asking q about Hirschman himself did he make his discreet exit.
Hirschman hiked across the Pyrenees, made his way to Lisbon, and boarded a ship to America—where he would soon start a research fellowship at UC Berkeley.
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When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Hirschman rushed to Spain. He enlisted in the POUM, a Trotskyist militia which George Orwell later joined.
Hirschman likely fought at the Battle of Monte Pelado, a costly defeat for the Fascists.
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After the war, Hirschman helped work on the Marshall Plan and European reconstruction, till suspicion of his wartime leftism pushed him out of DC.
Almost on a lark, he took an offer w the World Bank to go to Colombia—beginning his long+fruitful connection to development. 14/
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Hirschman was born in Berlin in 1916 to a Jewish family. He was just a teenager when he became involved as an activist in the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was confronting Hitler’s rising Nazi Party in the streets.
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If they gave Econ Nobels to practitioners of economics, not just researchers, who would deserve the prize?
Some picks, in rough order of importance for human welfare:
- Wan Li, for Chinese rural reform
- Manmohan Singh
- Mario Draghi, for "whatever it takes"
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It’s estimated that, w Hirschman’s help, Fry’s group saved over 2000 people—including Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and Marcel Duchamp.
(The 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic—which I haven't yet seen—covers Hirschman's remarkable work w Fry.)
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Hirschman had fought fascism in four countries, earning two graduate degrees along the way.
He was still just 25 years old.
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Modern economists can recognize this as a classic example of endogeneity--in this case, reverse causality.
Sansom likened it to "observing that all who had the flu had been visited by doctors, [& concluding] that the doctors caused the flu." 11/
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Hirschman had by all accounts a “quiet” war—save at the end, when he was picked to interpret at the very first Allied War Crimes trial, for German Gen Anton Dostler.
Newspapers report the interpreter’s face turning pale when he translated the death sentence. 13/
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There he met Varian Fry, an American trying to organize an underground to rescue Jews from occupied France.
Hirschman soon became Fry’s right hand man, forging passports and scouting routes thru the Pyrenees.
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Singapore is known worldwide for two things: its fabulous wealth and its authoritarian party-state. Less well-known is how one UN-appointed Western advisor had a hand in creating both.
My 🌐 latest post 🌐 explores Albert Winsemius's legacy in Singapore:
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He enrolled at HEC, one of France’s top business schools, but found the accounting work dull. He won a fellowship to study at LSE, where he studied under Hayek and Lionel Robbins—an early sign of his anti ideological streak. 4/
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When Hitler took dictatorial control after the Reichstag fire, Hirschman and his cell of young activists took to the streets, passing flyers, urging resistance.
But after several of his friends were arrested, a 17yo Hirschman was forced to flee to Paris. 3/
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Resurgent antisemitism sent him back to France, where he joined the French Army, and was trained up just in time for them to surrender.
As a natural target for the Nazis, Hirschman adopted a false identity and joined the thousands of refugees fleeing south to Marseilles.
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We leave research on these causes for future work. Our methods can also be applied anywhere in the world, from 1978 on, to measure agri. productivity—a new frontier for economic history.
Looking fwd to your comments.
PDF:
My site:
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This tendency, Paul Krugman has argued, pushed Hirschman’s ideas out of the mainstream of economics.
And it’s also why I think his ideas are ripe for a comeback.
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Are African Prices Too High? My latest for Global Developments.
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Latest in HirschmanWatch: Albert Hirschman (left) will be portrayed in Netflix’s new series Transatlantic, on Varian Fry’s underground network which rescued several thousand Jews and refugees from Nazi-occupied France.
Biggest star turn for an economist since A Beautiful Mind?
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Colombia proved a crucial turning pt for Hirschman. As a development economist, Hirschman became unusual for his time in doing extensive fieldwork. In part due to his “non-traditional” background, he developed a wry literary style that poked fun at sweeping mathematical models.
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I've just updated the Research Tips page on my website, with new advice on 3rd and 4th years of the economics PhD. Hope this is helpful, or at least mildly amusing:
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If you'd asked us at the start—did ending collective farming boost agricultural yields? Our prior would have unequivocally been yes.
But we simply can't see the evidence from space.
This finding deeply challenges our conventional understanding of the origins of China's miracle.
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When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Hirschman rushed to Spain. He enlisted in the POUM, a Trotskyist militia which George Orwell later joined.
Hirschman likely fought at the Battle of Monte Pelado, a costly defeat for the Fascists.
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Unfortunately, as is often the case, bad research won the policy debate. RAND’s official history notes how Washington was eager to accept Mitchell’s results, despite the rebuttals, as a substitute for the hard work of actual reform. 12/
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After 3mo on the front lines, Hirschman went to Italy, to join his sister Ursula. He became involved in the anti-Mussolini underground, carrying messages in a false-bottomed suitcase.
Somehow he also found the time to finish his doctorate in economics!
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At Berkeley, he met Sarah Chapiro, another Jewish emigre, in Berkeley’s I-House cafeteria. They married soon after.
When America went to war in 1941, Hirschman enlisted, and served on the Italian front (his 3rd army in 5 years).
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After the war, Hirschman helped work on the Marshall Plan and European reconstruction, till suspicion of his wartime leftism pushed him out of DC.
Almost on a lark, he took an offer w the World Bank to go to Colombia—beginning his long+fruitful connection to development.
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Hirschman was born in Berlin in 1915 to a Jewish family. He was just a teenager when he became involved as an activist in the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was confronting Hitler’s rising Nazi Party in the streets.
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Cost curve of world oil production, 2030.
From a pure data graphics standpoint, a remarkable amount of information about the world condensed in a single chart.
- from Erickson et al (2020) in Nature: Matters Arising.
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Only when the Vichy police started asking q about Hirschman himself did he make his discreet exit.
Hirschman hiked across the Pyrenees, made his way to Lisbon, and boarded a ship to America—where he would soon start a research fellowship at UC Berkeley.
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He enrolled at HEC, one of France’s top business schools, but found the accounting work dull. He won a fellowship to study at LSE, where he studied under Hayek and Lionel Robbins—an early sign of his anti ideological streak.
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In Samson's view, Mitchell's story was exactly reversed!
Areas with higher land equality precisely because they had been controlled by the insurgents, while areas with high inequality were more likely to be controlled by the govt because the govt didn't do land reform!
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Other RAND economists were skeptical of the study. Tony Russo, who had just returned from VN & seen rural conditions, wrote a scathing critique of the methodology.
Russo was later fired. (His friend Daniel Ellsberg tried to reverse the decision, but failed.)
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Even in a highly neoclassical model, lower US life expectancy + high inequality + low leisure erode most of the income differences between the US and Europe.
Europe is generally speaking a nice place & America can learn a lot from them. And it is true that inequality is higher in the US. But Europeans consistently overweight how much inequality drives US-EU average growth & income differences. *Median* US incomes are much higher too.
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Of course, clear-eyed, ground-level observers of Vietnam had been crying out for meaningful land reform for years.
(Even clearer-eyed ones were asking why the US was there at all.)
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There he met Varian Fry, an American organizing an underground to rescue Jews from occupied France. Hirschman soon became Fry’s right hand man, forging passports and scouting routes through the Pyrenees.
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In his report, Mitchell ran a province-level regression of S Vietnamese govt control on local land inequality as of 1960, and 5 other "independent" variables.
He found a positive relation.
Mitchell's conclusion? That redistribution would encourage more insurgency. 5/
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TIL deforestation was a major contributor to Korea's 19th century economic decline (which led to its eventual colonization)
Institutional failures led to rampant deforestation -> worsening floods -> fall in agricultural productivity
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Resurgent antisemitism sent him back to France, where he joined the French Army, and was trained up just in time for them to surrender.
As a natural target for the Nazis, Hirschman adopted a false identity and joined the thousands of refugees fleeing south to Marseilles.
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Hirschman had by all accounts a “quiet” war—save at the end, when he was picked to interpret at the very first Allied War Crimes trial, for German Gen Anton Dostler.
Newspapers report the interpreter’s face turning pale when he translated the death sentence.
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The latest evidence on this is that in rich countries from 1870-2015, housing has actually been the best-performing asset class, with a real return of 7%, beating stocks. You also need to include the rental yield, not just price appreciation.
from Jordà et al (2019)
from 1896 to 1996 average return on investment in housing was 0.06% annual!!!
0.06%!!!!
6% total over 100 years!!! TOTAL
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When Hitler took dictatorial control after the Reichstag fire, Hirschman and his cell of young activists took to the streets, passing flyers, urging resistance.
But after several of his friends were arrested, a 17yo Hirschman was forced to flee to Paris.
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While the politicians + generals debated, a star young economist at the RAND Corporation, Edward Mitchell, turned to analyze the land reform question.
Mitchell had never been to Vietnam.
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There are ways of reconciling our findings w the literature. Our satellite model still finds that *aggregate* yields rose in the 1980s.
A price liberalization, in 1979, may have been the cause.
It's also possible labor productivity rose—but we can't see labor from space.
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Robert L. Sansom, a Rhodes Scholar, wrote another incisive rebuttal.
From his field research, Sansom knew how much the land reform implemented by the Viet Cong, and before them the Viet Minh, had done to reduce inequality in the areas under their control. 9/
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Land reform wasn't tried again until 1970, with some success--until the North's invasion in 1975 brought the experiment to a halt.
But in the intervening yrs from 1966-70, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had been killed. One wonders what might have been. 13/
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Rare but illuminating example of ideas in economic development directly shifting policy -- Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi discovering Alice Amsden's research on South Korea leads to a new Ethiopian industrial policy.
(from Tom Lavers's "Ethiopia’s ‘Developmental State’", p.151)
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S Vietnam had tried land reform in 1956, but it had been hijacked by local landlords, and very little was redistributed.
Meanwhile, the Viet Cong enacted land reform in the areas under their control—and attracted 1000s of recruits in the process. 3/
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We use these satellite features to train a random forest to predict rice + wheat yields in nearby Asian countries.
We show that our satellite-based models can accurately predict yields—and, notably, can precisely pick up the effects of weather shocks in China.
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In 1967, 🇺🇸 was mired in the Vietnam War. The corrupt South Vietnamese regime was doing little for its people: in 1966, 42% of farmers were landless peasants.
To help the war effort, 🇺🇸 policymakers considered land reform—redistributing land from landlords to peasants. 2/
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"The ideal province from the [pov of govt] control," Mitchell wrote, "is one in which... few peasants operate their own land... and no land redistribution has taken place."
His report was covered by the NYT, and eventually published in "World Politics". 6/
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The key point is not that Mitchell’s statistics were shoddy, but that he was too ignorant of reality to know. There will always be a market for bad ideas, and politicians looking for post-hoc scientism as cover.
As academics, we must not provide it for them.
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Using methods from remote sensing + env science, we measure plant cover in the 1970s-80s directly from space. Healthy plants reflect a higher ratio of infrared to visible radiation, letting us track crops throughout their growing cycle.
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With our satellite data, we use 2 causal designs.
#1
: we look at the HRS's provincial rollout. Our satellites can peer right at the border between provinces that reform earlier and later, and control for fixed characteristics of these places.
We see no effect on grain yields.
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✨Announcing my new Development newsletter✨
Today's post:
950 million people will move to Africa's cities by 2050—and the market isn't building enough homes. Public housing should be part of the solution.
Examples from Hong Kong, Singapore, & Ethiopia:
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But Chinese statistics, particularly from the pre-reform era, are notoriously unreliable. Few output statistics are available at the sub-provincial level, making precise causal identification difficult, limiting prior research.
Enter historical satellites.
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A neat feature is you can simulate how long it will take if a country grows at rates seen in the 🇩🇪, 🇯🇵, 🇨🇳 economic miracles.
Even at a spectacular 🇨🇳 Chinese rate of growth (7%/year), the 🇨🇩 D.R. Congo will take 64 years to reach current incomes in the 🇺🇸 USA.
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@berkeleyside
@MingweiSamuel
@IDoTheThinking
Do you all have a Venmo? Would be great to chip in if you guys are paying for these out of pocket
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#2
: We use unofficial gazetteer data (generously shared by Almond et al 2019) on the HRS's rollout across counties.
If you think provincial borders are "weird", we can look at the mean yields of counties who decollectivized earlier vs later.
We see no effect on grain yields.
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Anyone else lay awake at night thinking about the time Alan Blinder surveyed a representative sample of US firms about their marginal cost curves and 40% picked MC curves that were downward sloping?
Yeah haha me too
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Modern economists can recognize this as a classic example of endogeneity--in this case, reverse causality.
Sansom likened it to "observing that all who had the flu had been visited by doctors, [& concluding] that the doctors caused the flu."
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Of course, constant growth rates is a VERY strong assumption---use these estimates wisely. But I hope this brings into focus the harsh logic of compounding growth, and the staggering levels of 🌐 inequality.
Comments + suggestions welcome!
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Starting in Anhui Province in 1978, the Household Responsibility System (often incorrectly attributed to Deng Xiaoping) broke up Mao's collective farms and brought back household farming—loosely, the end of communism in rural China.
The common view is that it boosted yields.
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Fascinating result. Don’t have a great intuition for how large a 1% Gini decrease is — please chime in if you do — but as a benchmark Brazil’s Bolsa Familia is estimated to have reduced Gini by 1-1.5%: .
"Reducing each country’s Gini index by 1% per year has a larger impact on global poverty than increasing each country’s annual growth 1 percentage point above forecasts."
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You can read my full post, "Quiet Americans: Research Malpractice and the Vietnam War", here on my new newsletter, Global Developments:
If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing.
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Comparisons for richer countries work as well!
At its present growth rate, 🇨🇳 China will achieve current 🇺🇸 US income levels in 35 years–sooner than 🇯🇵 Japan, which will take 80 years.
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@psohaistt
@tylercowen
Unfortunately no one easy answer. Proximate factors are low fertilizer use and low irrigation but there are complex institutional + political forces behind those.
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The new Netflix series featuring Albert Hirschman is out!!!
Happy birthday to Albert Hirschman, who would be 106 today.
Hirschman—anti-fascist, resistance hero, later a development economist—may be the most interesting person to ever take up the profession.
🧵 and blog post on his remarkable life and work. 1/
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@raphamartins11
(2), How Asia Works, is one of my favorite economics books -- stay tuned for WP(s) empirically testing some of its claims...
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Needed a quick topographic sketch of central China for research; got distracted and did a little Tolkien style map
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Great article by Joe Studwell on Botswana's development history and prospects -- what he calls a "gatekeeping state" run by a cattle elite. I am no expert on Botswana but interesting to see a more tempered account than the glowing one of Why Nations Fail.
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These findings are insane:
“Nestlé’s entry into LMIC formula markets caused about 212,000 infant deaths per year among mothers without clean water access at the peak of the Nestlé controversy in 1981, and… approximately 10.9 million excess infant deaths between 1960 and 2015.”
In this
@VoxDev
piece,
@paul_gertler
& team reveal Nestlé's aggressive marketing tactics for infant formula in low- and middle-income countries. The result? A steep decline in breastfeeding and numerous infant deaths.
Learn more:
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"I would like to see a building, say, the Empire state, [with] the name of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician, with all the names... Everybody should have something to point to." -- Mike Lefevre, a steel mill worker from Chicago, Studs Terkel's Working.
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In Samson's view, Mitchell's story was exactly reversed!
Equal areas were more equal precisely because they had been controlled by the insurgents, while areas with high inequality were more likely to be controlled by the govt because the govt didn't do land reform!
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New WP & 🧵: In response to COVID-19, 186 countries gave cash transfers, and 181 subsidized utilities like electricity and water. But which form of aid do recipients prefer?
w/
@BerkouwerS
,
@pbiscaye
,
@E_o_hsu
,
@1KenLee
,
@TedMiguel
, & Catherine Wolfram:
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