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27 Apr
What brings me to today’s post is the new piece on hunger in Foreign Policy Xanax Xr 25mg by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. On one hand, this is great news – good to see development rising to the fore in an outlet like Foreign Policy. I also largely agree with their conclusions – that the poverty trap/governance debate in development is Ativan Online With No Prescription oversimplified, that food security outcomes are not explicable through a single theory, etc. On the Ativan Online With No Prescription other hand, from the perspective of a qualitative researcher looking at development, there is Ativan Online With No Prescription nothing new in this article. Indeed, the Ativan Online With No Prescription implicit premise of the article is galling: When they argue that Ativan Online With No Prescription to address poverty, “In practical terms, that meant we’d have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives,” the implication is that nobody has been doing this. But what Ativan Online With No Prescription of the tens of thousands of anthropologists, geographers and sociologists (as well as representatives of other cool, hybridized fields like new cultural historians and ethnoarchaeologists). Hell, what of the Peace Corps?
Whether intentional or Ativan Online With No Prescription not, this article wipes the qualitative research slate clean, allowing the Ativan Online With No Prescription authors to present their work in a methodological and intellectual vacuum. This is the first of my problems with this article – not so much with its findings, but with its appearance of method. While I am Ativan Online With No Prescription sure that there is more to their research than presented in the Ativan Online With No Prescription article, the way their piece is structured, the case studies look like evidence/data for a new framing of food security. They are not – they are illustrations of the larger conceptual points that Banerjee and Duflo are making. I am sure that Banerjee and Duflo know this, but the reader does not – instead, most readers will think this Ativan Online With No Prescription represents some sort of qualitative research, or a mixed method approach that Ativan Online With No Prescription takes “hard numbers” and mixes it in with the loose suppositions that Banerjee and Duflo offer by way of explanation for the “surprising” outcomes they present. But loose supposition is not qualitative research – at best, it Ativan Online With No Prescription is journalism. Bad journalism. My work, and the work of many, many colleagues, is Ativan Online With No Prescription based on rigorous methods of observation and analysis that produce validatable data on social phenomena. The work that led to Delivering Development and many of my refereed publications took nearly two years of on-the-ground observation and Ativan Online With No Prescription interviewing, including follow-ups, focus groups and even the use of archaeology and Ativan Online With No Prescription remotely-sensed data on land use to cross-check and validate both my data and Ativan Online With No Prescription my analyses.
You really should read the whole thing Order Soma Cod Fedex.
As one who Ativan Online With No Prescription has a Masters degree in Development Studies but who chose to Ativan Online With No Prescription do a PhD in anthropology because I found that development research is Ativan Online With No Prescription all too often dealing with quantitave, “generalisable” data, and Ativan Online With No Prescription who has concluded said PhD, I find it really interesting that Ativan Online With No Prescription the RCT movement in economics seem to be taking credit, in the Ativan Online With No Prescription media and in policy circles, for what ethnographers – anthropologists, rural sociologists, historians, human geographers – have Ativan Online With No Prescription been saying all along. This is that things are a lot more complicated than Ativan Online With No Prescription people want to think, that it is extremely difficult to find a Ativan Online With No Prescription generalisable explanation, and that at the end of the day, what Ativan Online With No Prescription leads one to better understanding of issues is attention to personal stories, and Ativan Online With No Prescription an attempt to tease out how those stories are linked to Ativan Online With No Prescription larger structures, like local politics, regional politics, the economic structures, colonisation, culture etc. etc. One cannot arrive at this Ativan Online With No Prescription sort of understanding without spending time trying to understand the interaction between all these elements. Now that Ativan Online With No Prescription economists have discovered qualitative research it seems as if it were never there, as if there aren’t people who Ativan Online With No Prescription have been pointing to the importance of understanding nuances and Ativan Online With No Prescription personal stories.
I have Ativan Online With No Prescription deliberately refrained from commenting on RCT in economics because I wanted to Ativan Online With No Prescription read some of the texts, but since Edward Carr took thoughts out of my head I thought I would quote him and Ativan Online With No Prescription call attention to the fact that these kinds of studies have Ativan Online With No Prescription been going on for a long while. If economists are not aware of that Ativan Online With No Prescription (I think some of them are) it is their fault for not looking at other social sciences.
My copy of Karlan’s book is Ativan Online With No Prescription in the post to me, and I look forward to Ativan Online With No Prescription reading it. I doubt that I will learn anything new from Ativan Online With No Prescription it, but I feel it is important, as an economic anthropologist, to Ativan Online With No Prescription know what economists are doing. I wish economists would extend the Ativan Online With No Prescription same courtesy to other disciplines whose works often overlap with theirs.
And on RCT itself, check out the link that my brother, a Ativan Online With No Prescription medical doctor and researcher, sent me. It is a Lancet article titled “A philosopher’s view of the long road from RCTs to effectiveness”. Remember, RCT has been in medical and pharmacological research for a while.
PS, I promised a Ativan Online With No Prescription while ago to blog a list of must read economic anthropology books. I should get to Ativan Online With No Prescription it pretty soon.


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