Tag: Development

Must-Watch: Sheryl Sandberg (2011): Barnard College Commencement

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Watch: Sheryl Sandberg (2011): Barnard College Commencement: “Women all over the world, women who are exactly like us except for the circumstances into which they were born…

…[lack] basic human rights. Compared to these women, we are lucky…. We are equals under the law. But the promise of equality is not equality…. Men run the world…. I recognize that [today] is a vast improvement from generations in the past…. But… women became 50% of the college graduates in this country in 1981, 30 years ago. Thirty years is plenty of time for those graduates to have gotten to the top of their industries, but we are nowhere close to 50% of the jobs at the top. That means that when the big decisions are made, the decisions that affect all of our worlds, we do not have an equal voice at that table. So today, we turn to you. You are the promise for a more equal world…. Only when we get real equality in our governments, in our businesses, in our companies and our universities, will we start to solve… gender equality. We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored…

http://barnard.edu/headlines/transcript-and-video-speech-sheryl-sandberg-chief-operating-officer-facebook

Must-read: Manu Saadia: “Robots could be a big problem for the third world”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Manu Saadia: Robots could be a big problem for the third world: “If manufacturing is reduced to the status of agriculture, a highly rationalized activity…

…(read: employing very few people) [then] the historically proven path to economic growth and prosperity taken by Korea and China might no longer be available to the next countries. This is what keeps many economists up at night. The rise of the robots will probably reduce economic opportunities for emerging nations…. Countries you rarely hear about today, say Uganda and Tanzania, are projected to have two hundred million and three hundred million inhabitants respectively by the end of the century. What is going to happen to these people if there are no opportunities for work and wages because the manufacturing of goods has become a trivial, automated low-returns business? Not all of them will find jobs at Starbucks, regardless of how big their cities are.

It turns out that the reinvention of work imagined by Star Trek and all the social adjustments that come with it are not just some kind of pleasant philosophical exercise for overfed upper-class Western consumers of entertainment. In a world where machines produce most of the goods at a marginal cost, a just and adequate distribution of resources is a matter of life or death for billions of people yet to be born. Developed countries will or will not enact redistributive policies in the face of growing automation. The responses are well known, from progressive taxation to universal health insurance, and access to education to unconditional cash transfers, or so-called basic income. We possess stable institutions and the wealth to settle these matters adequately. Less developed countries do not yet. We are racing toward pervasive automation faster than they are catching up.

Must-Read: Tim Harford: The Real Benefits of Migration

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Tim Harford: The Real Benefits of Migration: “UK Home Secretary Theresa May gave a speech… designed to polarise…. She succeeded…

…One statement… found the spotlight…. (Translation: immigration costs us nothing but we want to reduce it anyway.) Is May’s summary of the evidence correct? Probably not…. But there was a far bigger lacuna… [that] most commentators… missed it…. Migrants… prosper hugely… yet that prosperity hardly ever figures in debates about immigration. This is odd. I would not expect schools to fare well on a cost-benefit analysis if we ignored any gains to the under-18s. Nor would hospitals look like a good investment if we counted only the advantages to non-patients. Yet it seems that migration may still be mildly beneficial even after disqualifying any benefit to the people most likely to gain–the migrants. That is remarkable….

One might make the case that because migrants are foreign nationals, we are entitled to make their welfare a lower priority. My colleague Martin Wolf is one of the few commentators to bother asserting this openly; most simply seem to assume that foreigners count for nothing…. Being open to migration from poor countries is perhaps the best anti-poverty programme that rich countries can offer…. Whether foreigners should count as sentient beings in a British cost-benefit analysis is something I’ll leave to the philosophers….

How real a problem is… brain drain?…. Where developing countries do train large numbers of skilled workers–as with the Philippines, a world centre for nursing and midwifery–they also manage to keep a reasonable number of them at home. And… migrant remittances… [are] three times as much as is sent in official development assistance. Migrant networks can help make trade flow smoothly too. Then there is the simple matter of respecting individual liberties…. If we have gained anything from the harrowing images of desperate refugees, it is an appreciation that they are human. Economic migrants are human too… not pheasants to poach; nor brains to drain.

Must-Read: Michael Clemens: The South Pacific Secret to Breaking the Poverty Cycle

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Michael Clemens: The South Pacific Secret to Breaking the Poverty Cycle: “The average Tongan household that participated was earning just NZ$1,400 per year…

…before these jobs. The average worker who participated earned NZ$12,000 for just a few months of work. It multiplied low-income workers’ earnings by a factor of 10. Almost no other antipoverty project you’ve ever heard of can claim that. Imagine what that did to poverty…. This project was ‘among the most effective development policies evaluated to date.’ And it did that not by taking money away from New Zealanders, but by adding value to the New Zealand economy. What’s working against poverty? International labor mobility….

The last time the United Nations set global goals to fight poverty, back in 2000, it completely ignored the power of labor mobility. The Millennium Development Goals, bizarrely, mentioned migration exclusively in negative and harmful terms…. This time… [they] at least mention migration…. But they decline to mention any possibility of actually facilitating migration…. The authors… still think that mobility doesn’t matter much for global poverty. That just does not make sense in a world where remittances to poor countries are several times as large as foreign aid. It does not make sense in a world where barriers to mobility cost the world trillions of dollars every year. What’s working against poverty is international mobility. And it will keep working to help meet the Global Goals for fighting poverty–largely in spite of them.