Goodbye to a gratuitous exercise in understanding global poverty

It's been emotional. Credit: Tumblr

I've exited my MOOC (massive open online course) adventure via the exit survey and can now claim to be an MIT alumnus according to my pdf certificate (classy). Time for some reflections on 'The Challenges of Global Poverty'. I'll split this into two: first, comments on the MOOC itself for those who might be interested in doing one/it, then some nuggets on content. Feel free to skip one or the other section, or indeed both.

The MOOC itself was a beauty. 14 weeks, each consisting of a couple of video lectures, split into bitesize chunks with (mostly multiple choice) questions after each to check you were following. It was perfect for that time after lunch when you don't want to do anything productive but feel you kind of should. Then each week there was a (again mostly multiple choice) homework which sometimes required dipping into the 'further reading' section, which was basically just Poor Economics so not too taxing. Overall perhaps 5 hours a week. Finally on top of that, a final exam (you've guessed, multiple choice) and a 'project' or 600-word essay on a topic of your choice, which was self-marked (I nobly docked myself one mark out of twelve). They got the level of questioning pretty much bang on in that it wasn't so hard that you had to continually go back to the videos, but generally you couldn't answer the questions without having watched the videos at least. I found it verged on the easy side but that's probably also a function of the fact that I'm a native English speaker, doing a related degree, who had already read the book which was the foundation of the course. I could have chosen a harder MOOC.

In terms of the MOOC experience more generally, it was perfect for what I wanted: a way to channel my slightly workoholic desires towards a topic of interest which would, unlike the course I'm taking simultaneously on international development at university here in Madrid, leave me with more knowledge than when I started. The baby homeworks and multiple-choice exercises keep you hooked with enough momentum to reach the end of the course and there's even a little section with percentages and bar charts to track your 'progress' and boost your ego as you nail yet another self-graded question. I really didn't engage much with the 'discussion forum' or 'community' sections, although they were pushed a fair amount and this podcast suggests that's where MOOCs are going, as they attempt to become more like 'real' unviersity, social interacion and all. I remain unconvinced.

Abhijit Banerjee speaks really slowly so I had to double the speed (literally) on the video to avoid boredom. Content was good though. Credit: The Guardian

As for the 'Challenges of Global Poverty' themselves, they are, predictably, many: from education to entrepreneurship, food to family planning. But in essence, this was a course about poverty from the point of view of social policy, where the basic message is that you need to pay attention to the details. The world's poor often don't obey the theories of policymakers, unfortunately, due to their being normal human beings. In the course and in their book, then, Banerjee and Duflo (B&D) try to get to the micro level, using experimental studies to identify why people act in certain ways at what that means for policy.

As a final farewell, I'll note their counter-argument to those like Bill Easterly who say that randomistas like B&D, in focusing on micro-level policy questions miss the bigger picture (seamlessly taking up a theme from an earlier post - see argument #6). If, as many profess, Institutions like Democracy and Property Rights (capitalisation explained later) are what ultimately makes USA better off than Chad, then this tinkering around the edges is surely just re-arranging deckchairs? Well no. Because even if you can't precipitate a social revolution and re-engineer a country's social fabric (engineering fabric?), institutional change (small-i) is possible even when Institutions (big-I) are bad. B&D cite a study that found improvements in outcomes when limited levels of democracy are introduced in village councils in China (but wait, China's communist?), and likewise mention effective health and education policies in 'bad institutional environments' like Indonesia in the 1970s. If you're lucky, policies can even sometimes change politics. So although the 'big questions' addressed by the development high priests like Sachs, Easterly, Acemoglu and Robinson are often fun to think about, it's at the ground level where the important stuff often happens. B&D argue that the question should be “where can we make a small push and see if we can make a change?” After completing their MOOC, I'm inclined to agree.