S7 Ep35: Ideas in Development: Has development economics lost its way?

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney’s conversations on evidence.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EacHFVRt9p4

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/has-development-economics-lost-its-way/id1866874059?i=1000775748550

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Lcy3FrbBuoE2nj3cnhOAm?si=76aedb574426479e

Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8924691-has-development-economics-lost-its-way

Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/has-development-economics-lost-its

What should development economists be working on – and how does their work actually reach the people making decisions?

Rachel Glennerster, President of the Center for Global Development, whose career spans the research and policy sides of development, joins Oliver Hanney to discuss her proposal for a radical simplification of aid, why she feels the micro-macro debate is largely a false one, the messy but vital process of building consensus, and what impactful careers look like in economics.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we cover the Smart Buys evidence panels in education and how cross-disciplinary consensus gets built, her three-box framework for evidence-based policymaking, why AI tools move too fast for RCT-based procurement, and what it would take to fix development economics' concentration problem.