Author: Jason Kerwin

The current best practice in development is to conduct rigorous evaluations to determine how well different interventions work, and to pick the ones that are the most cost-effective. It is entirely right and good that we should do this; without question, it beats the old method, still common in some circles, of just assuming that an approach is a good one and running with it. I identify strongly with this movement, which can loosely be described as the RCT approach (or the “randomista” camp) and in no way want to see it fail.

If anything, it still has a ways to go in winning over the broader development community. To pick one example, many people are convinced that a lack of access to sanitary products – things like menstrual pads/cups or tampons – are a major limiting factor in girls’ school attendance and success in poor countries, and so providing these things will help girls stay in school and excel academically. My advisor thought that might be the case as well, and so in this paper with Emily Oster she tried it out in Nepal, to see whether that approach works. The answer is a fairly resounding “no” – the girls liked the menstrual cups and used them, and benefited in other ways, but school attendance was unaffected. That has not stopped tons of NGOs from still focusing on this intervention (and they still insist it will help with school attendance). The impact evaluation movement still has much work to do, especially in publicizing its results – it’s pretty frustrating to see people cling to approaches that don’t work.

But I look at most of the projects people evaluate, including the ones I work on myself, and my perception is that they won’t really do what we want them to. What we want, really, is “development” – an improvement of people’s lives. Sen notwithstanding, there is now a strong consensus that that means reducing poverty. It is very hard, if not impossible, for people living on less than dollar per day to improve their lives in the ways that really matter, like health, education, and improving their living conditions. So people need more money, that is, larger incomes.

Most of the poor people in question are subsistence farmers in rural parts of the tropics, especially Africa. That means that anything that really promotes economic development – with all its attendant benefits in health, education and happiness – needs to either 1) increase the income people get from farming or 2) involve them substituting from farming into something else. Those are the only options, plus some convex combination of the two. If neither occurs, incomes cannot rise.

Pure logic has taken us this far, but with a little practical knowledge we can go further. First, the only real way to get more income from farming in a place like Malawi is to improve the productivity of a given patch of land. Most of the arable land is already in use. So we’re talking about increasing per-acre productivity here, and nothing else. Second, in rural Africa farming is pretty much the only game in town. Around this area some people fish, but in most places even that is rare, and in any case probably can’t be increased sustainably; people already catch a ton of fish in the local lake. Not farming, then, means going someplace else.

The two options for improving livelihoods for most of the world’s poor are therefore either improved agricultural productivity or people moving away from the countryside, i.e. to cities. If that sounds familiar, it probably should: every industrialized nation that I can think of has follow this exact path. Many people migrate to cities, while a few take advantage of massively improved productivity on farms to grow tons of food with few workers. Everyone gets much richer. The transition from rural to urban can be ugly and painful, but we forget how ugly and painful the status quo is: subsistence farming is hard, dangerous, and not really getting much better.

It’s hard to see how most of the projects people work on or evaluate could possibly help people either produce more from the soil or get out of the countryside. Raising incomes isn’t the be-all of development; it’s worth helping people even if we can’t permanently solve their problem. But we should look harder at ways to improve farm productivity, and, much more important, help people move to places where there are other jobs.

In Southern Malawi, mangoes and drought march arm in arm. I’ve been fairly obsessed with mango trees ever since starting data collection for my dissertation: my minibus becomes an oven without shade, making it uncomfortable to work in there and possibly overheating and destroying my laptop. Moreover, as a card-carrying white dude, there are limits to how much sun I can take in a place with some of the highest UV levels in the world. Mango trees provide the only decent shade in TA Mwambo outside of man-made structures, and by decent I mean crazy awesome. In a place where almost all the plants are dead, you can still find massive mango trees with full, green leaves. This is because of their huge taproots that dig through the dry, sandy soil for up to twenty feet in search of groundwater: many of these trees are as deep as they are tall.

A few days ago, some of my staff started saying that a drought was coming because there are too many mangoes on the trees.* I wasn’t sure what to make of this – an old wives’ tale, like the idea that pets can predict earthquakes? As it turns out, I had misunderstood – they meant a drought in terms of a falling water table, driven by limited rains in the mountains that feed the rivers here, and by poor rainfall last year. Apparently this causes mango trees to bear more fruit. Now, I have no idea why this would be the case, or even whether it’s true – Google turned up nothing definitive, and I’m no botanist. But it’s definitely true that the trees are covered in tiny, green fruit that bang on the roof of my bus when I’m trying to escape from the sun. I’m inclined to believe them, just because Malawi’s rainfall is so variable that it would pay dividends to understand water here.

The other side of poor rainfall and lots of mangoes is that I’ve started to see, in the words of one of my employees, “kids carrying a shirt full of mangoes, holding up the bottom of their jerseys”. Think about the shirt-carry that I’m sure we all did lots as kids. The kids are taking these green, unripe mangoes home, where they will be boiled and eaten for lunch. A sign of hunger – we are far from the last harvest, which wasn’t a good one. I don’t really think of boiled unripe mangoes as being a food, but you learn something new every day. Now I see kids with mangoes everywhere, even eating them raw, and am reminded of the desperation of the fruit pickers toward the end of The Grapes of Wrath.

*I’ve noticed during this trip that even Malawians who grew up and live in cities still have a broad range of expertise in many agriculture topics. I chalk this up to very limited specialization – people are good at everything but rarely great at any one thing, whereas in America we tend to be awful at nearly everything except our own professions.

Being out in the field has limited my access to newspapers, which is particularly unfortunate in Malawi, where a lot of information still flows through the print media rather than online. I’ve argued previously that Malawi’s newspapers are quite good in many ways: they are concise and seem to me to put more emphasis on  But all media has trouble interfacing with foreign cultures – indeed, America’s usually doesn’t even try, focusing instead on the exciting, violent story of the week – and Malawi’s is no exception. American culture can be particularly baffling, especially our weird sports. I spotted the following gem in the “kids activity section” of last weekend’s edition of The Nation:

 

Which ball is used in American soccer? A soccer ball, of course. The listed answer, number 3, is used in American (a.k.a. gridiron) football, which no one calls soccer. The confusion here is that the author is aware we have our own crazy sport we call “football”, and so, he presumes, we must also call it soccer since that’s another word for football.

The following article is even better, though – tons of Malawians wear second-hand American clothes, and I often wonder if they know what the logos mean. The answer is generally no, but the author of this op-ed takes hypothesizing about the origins of a shirt to an extreme. He spotted a man wearing a “VOTE FOR PEDRO” t-shirt, which became popular in reference to a shirt worn by the title character of Napoleon Dynamite to support his friend’s student government bid.

Semphere supposes that Pedro is a Latin American politician, and uses the anecdote to launch into a discussion of the effects of media on youth, and from there into being a good influence on your child. I’m still holding out the possibility that this is a tongue-in-cheek joke – he does discuss movies for a while – but honestly it’s pretty hilarious either way. On the one hand, Americans are similarly clueless about other cultures (cf. the plethora of half-understood Chinese character tattoos), but on the other, doesn’t The Nation have internet access? How about a Google search?

Anyone with even a passing interest in development has a litany of reasons that diamonds, and especially diamond engagement rings, are downright awful. The most famous of these is the possibility that you may be buying a “blood diamond”, a term which was neutered into the euphemistic “conflict diamond” by the gem industry’s successful PR push on the topic totally selfless and completely ingenuous Kimberley Process scheme.

A related but more subtle point is that the Kimberley Process – which certifies certain gems as “conflict-free” – cannot, in principle, wash the notional blood off of your engagement ring. The problem is that blood diamonds and regular diamonds are near-perfect substitutes for most purposes. Deciding to purchase a Kimberley-certified diamond will tend to raise the price of blood diamonds as well, and hence to incentivize their production.

Another problem with diamonds, as with any easily-capturable natural resource, is that the diamond trade can promote the “resource curse”, wherein a reliance on particular kinds of export can induce corruption and undermine political institutions. And of course there’s the problem of engagement-rings-as-arms-race: to some extent a diamond ring is just a positional good, whose value is determined by its size relative to those of your peers (for women) or peers’ fiancees (for men). In that case we can burn up tons of resources for no gain at all, since everyone else is trying to win the same competition.

But the simplest reason to disdain the diamond engagement ring is that, frankly, it’s kind of silly. We (and by “we” I mean “other Americans besides myself”) pay exorbitant amounts of money for shiny, fairly fragile rocks with no resale value. I had had a passing familiarity with the history of this odd cultural institution, but didn’t know the full story until I came across this thirty-year-old piece from The Atlantic that describes how De Beers invented the concept of the diamond engagement ring, and then used a massive marketing campaign to indoctrinate generations of Americans in the belief that the giving of diamonds is the only legitimate way of proposing marriage. Here’s one of the more telling portions:

In 1951, N. W. Ayer found some resistance to its million-dollar publicity blitz. It noted in its annual strategy review:

The millions of brides and brides-to-be are subjected to at least two important pressures that work against the diamond engagement ring. Among the more prosperous, there is the sophisticated urge to be different as a means of being smart…. the lower-income groups would like to show more for the money than they can find in the diamond they can afford…

To remedy these problems, the advertising agency argued, “It is essential that these pressures be met by the constant publicity to show that only the diamond is everywhere accepted and recognized as the symbol of betrothal.”

The whole thing is interesting – De Beers also worked to shape demand and supply in other nefarious ways. But it is the invention of a preference for diamond engagement rings that I find the most disturbing. Economists tend to take preferences as given – de gustibus non est disputandum – and assume that any distribution of goods that optimally satisfies existing preferences is efficient. The example of diamond engagement rings exposes a deep flaw in that unspoken central principle of economics: what if our preferences are bad? What if powerful companies use their vast resources to invent a preference for somethig that objectively looks like a stupid waste of money and time? What if we blow billions of dollars annually on symbolic crystals to win arms races within our social circles, inadvertently leading to brutal killings and the undermining of foreign governments? Maybe it’s time to rethink whether it’s okay to judge preferences on their merits.

A new piece from the Huffington Post centers around a gallery of photos of some maternal health efforts in Malawi. It’s pretty informative and interesting, and I like that it highlights the successes the country has had in moving toward the Millennium Development Goals. Most coverage of Africa in the rich-country press has missed this kind of success, choosing to focus on the (sexier, better-selling) negative stories. If anything, the pictures seem a little too positive: the clinics I’ve visited in Malawi don’t look nearly as nice as the ones photographed for this story. This might be because the author decided to focus on a couple of clinics in the capital, and there’s probably also an element of the aid organizations mentioned wanting to put a positive spin on things.

The author still leans on the same flawed conventional wisdom about HIV in Africa, though: while listing the country’s challenges he states that “Antiretroviral therapy drugs and HIV education still are not widely available”. While ARV accessibility isn’t great, it’s unclear to me how he got the impression that HIV education is not widely available in the country. As I never tire of pointing how, Malawians are very knowledgeable about HIV prevention and transmission, and actually know more about it than Americans do.

So where did this come from? It might just be repeating something that seems true without bothering to check into it, but my best guess is that he asked about HIV education and people told him what he wanted to hear: either Malawians deferring to an outsider with high status, or NGOs looking to boost support for their efforts.

Regardless, the pictures are fascinating and highlight a drop in infant mortality whose importance can’t be overstated.

Hat tip: Lauren Bowen Fisher

Any outsider who’s visited rural Africa knows that outsiders, especially white folks, are fairly rare in those parts. As I’ve written before, I’m the object of curious stares and the subject of ridiculous rumors whenever I venture out into the set of villages that comprise my catchment area. It’s no surprise, then, that my presence might have an effect on how people respond to my survey.

Data is not the plural of anecdote, however – we need an actual, rigorous study to know that the presence of white folks matters, and especially to measure how exactly people’s behavior changes. What do they do differently? By how much? Jacobus Cilliers of CSAE describes exactly what is needed to answer those questions – along with Oeindrila Dube and Bilal Siddiqi he randomly assigned either a white person or a black person to sit in on an interview. The black person was in fact Sierra Leonese (the experiment was in Sierra Leone), but this experimental person didn’t talk, so that was really up to the subjects to infer from the person’s appearance – as was the presumable guess that the white person was a foreigner and probably British. In the interviews the subjects played the ever-popular dictator game, where one person is given a certain amount of cash and allowed to decide what portion to give to another person. They found that Sierra Leonese people are more generous in the presence of a white person than when all the researchers are black – to the tune of a 20% increase in giving to the other player in the games.

This is a cool idea, and really valuable research – we need to measure these kinds of effects so that we can assess the external validity of our research. Just because we’ve done a valid study for the population and setting chosen doesn’t mean that the results will carry over to the case where, for example, the white NGO representatives aren’t around. But I disagree with some of Jacobus’s advice on what to do to mitigate these outsider effects:

First, your presence in the research significantly undermines the results. You should either be absent when games and surveys are conducted, or randomly vary your presence. The success of impact evaluations could thus be overstated, if respondents “give the right answers” to please the researcher. Moreover, true behavioural change could be short-lived if it is determined by the presence of a “white man”, rather than the actual project.

Let’s start with the last part – our the results of impact evaluations overstated if, say, a white guy, is, for example, sitting in the project minibus writing blog posts while the surveys and interventions are going on? No. Remember that a valid impact evaluation involves randomization – participants are assigned to the treatment or control group strictly by chance, and therefore in expectation differ only in terms of whether they receive the treatment. The results of impact evaluations would be overstated only in the case where outsider effects *only* apply to members of the treatment group. There’s no reason to think that should be true.

Indeed, outsider effects are more likely to attenuate the measured results of an impact evaluation. Suppose that my being around makes people want to appear to be good citizens, and to underreport risky sex – that is, to lie. In the extreme, everyone reports no risky sex at all. If I use self-reported risky sex as my outcome, then I would find no effect of my intervention at all, even if it’s actually working.

What about the first point – does our presence significantly undermine the results of our research? The best we can say is “maybe”. The Cilliers et al. paper is a great first step, but the underlying research project was the dictator game, which is not itself an experiment. If you want to know if impact evaluation results are undermined by an outsider’s presence, you need to do a real RCT of some kind with a treatment and control group, and then do a cross-cutting randomization of whether outsiders are present. This is effectively two RCTs, which can be validly compared – one with with folks around and one without. Then you could see whether the measured effects differ between the variants of the study. Inasmuch as our presence does undermine the results, though, the effect is not to overstate the impact of a given intervention, but to understate it. So maybe we don’t care – lower bounds are very useful for discussing cost-effectiveness.

Now, what can we do about this? I totally agree with one of Cilliers’s suggestions – the best data is likely to come from not being around at all. The other option – to randomly vary one’s presence – is a very bad suggestion. First off, it’s not necessary – if the white guy is around for every village in the sample, then he has no differential effect across the treatment and control groups, and the results remain internally valid. Second, because the white guy’s presence has an effect on the results, randomly varying his presence may decrease the precision of any estimated effects. If the white guy’s presence is random, it will have on average the same effect for the treatment and control groups, so the experiment will remain valid. However, this additional random variation cpuld increase the residual variance of the outcome measure, which is bad for precision. Imagine that your outcome is unprotected sex, and everyone actually has unprotected sex 7 times a week if left to their own devices. The treatment causes them to decrease this to 4 times a week. However, the effect of the azungu being around is to cause everyone to shade down their risk-taking by 3 times per week – reporting 4 times and 1 time respectively. Then you estimate the same treatment effect whether the white guy is always around, never around, or around at random – it doesn’t matter if he’s there, as long as his presence is uncorrelated with the treatment. But the standard errors of the estimated effects are much larger if his presence varies randomly.

To see why, notice that we could replace the white guy actually showing up with a coin flip that randomly decreases people’s answers by 3. “Whitey never around” is a coin with tails on both sides – no answers change. “Whitey always around” is a coin that’s heads on both sides – all the answers change. This is fine! I could take your experimental data and add/subtract any number to all the observations, and the results would be unchanged; the difference between the treatment and control means would be the same. What about the “whitey randomly around” case? That’s a regular coins, one heads side and one tails side. I am literally adding random noise to the experimental data. That’s going to make my measurements less precise, and decrease my statistical power. Now, we can control for this since we know where whitey showed up – but even if we do, it gains us little. It’s also another thing to explain in our analysis. Randomizing whether the white guy is around is not a great idea – unless the goal is to measure the effect of the white guy on the results.

More broadly, let’s not forget that white guy* effects are only one variant of outsider effect. Irrespective of my presence, any survey project in rural africa necessarily involves the arrival of the following novelties in a village: 1) a car – kids love staring at and playing with it; 2) a bunch of folks from other villages, all at once and really well-dressed; 3) a bunch of compensation payments; and 4) people asking about all kinds of weird stuff like sex, whether you can read, and your income. Nothing we can do will eliminate any possible influence this stuff has on our results.

Hat tip: Development Impact

*I’m happy with framing this as being about white men, since, well, that’s me. But development as a field is predominantly female, especially outside of economics, and there are plenty of non-white outsiders working as researchers, NGO employees, and so forth.

I feel it’s necessary to begin here by noting that I have close to zero doubt that climate change is a real thing that will cause real problems in the future, and that we need to take strong and immediate actions (a carbon tax! or maybe cap-and-trade, whichever is more feasible) to do something about it. The fact that I feel the need to say that speaks to the strange position of science in American public life – whether you believe in climate change is a litmus test for what kind of person you are. My position marks me as someone who is pro-gay rights, pro-abortion, and more concerned about universal healthcare than about the federal budget deficit. This is pretty bizarre. It doesn’t seem appropriate to talk about whether you “believe” or “don’t believe” in a particular scientific fact. Do you believe in the precession of the perihelion of Mercury? What about the high likelihood that in a few billion years our sun will become a red giant and destroy the Earth? Or that bees can see in the UV spectrum? The correct answer is that these things are either true or false, and that we can look to the consensus of scientific experts to figure out which is the case. I don’t really get how it makes sense for random laypeople to have strong opinions about facts.

With the odd preamble out of the way, I recently was at a party where I was lucky enough to meet Stephen Carr, a renowned agriculturalist and author and general badass. I had heard of him beforehand (many people have recommended his book, Surprised by Laughter, which is currently on my to-do list), but couldn’t place him until after I had gone home. But as he told me a bit about his background, I started asking him about drought, rainfall and harvests in TA Mwambo, since I spend all day looking at the fields and trees out there and pondering how badly-off the kids are.

Carr made a couple of compelling points. First, he argued, Malawi has a high degree of natural variation in rainfall. There are years when the rains last a really long time, and years when they end early. There is also long-term variation – Lake Chilwa dried up very frequently in the first half of the 20th century, and since then has only done so twice. We can see the evidence for these long-term fluctuations in the level of Lake Malawi; because it has no inflowing rivers, its level reflects rainfall in its catchment area, and so is a good proxy for Malawi’s overall rainfall. Malawi is incidentally in the midst of a very wet period, compared to its historical mean.

He pointed out that all these variations have been happening for a long time, and that it’s totally wrong to ascribe for example the drop in the level of Lake Chilwa to climate change. The problem is that people do make just that connection, all the time. My response was basically “who cares?” – sure, people need to spin their issue to fit the sexy issue of the day in order to get money from donors. That’s been going on forever. But, as Carr pointed out, the spin matters. He noted that a couple of years ago the rains stopped before March*, and the government declared this to be climate change. They took this to mean that it would be a permanent problem, and told everyone to switch to early-maturing maize varieties. Fortunately, nobody listens to this kind of pronouncement and so very few people lost their harvests the next year, when the rains carried on strong through March.

Climate change will cause problems for Malawi – it’s going to make it even hotter here in the hot months, which won’t be good. But the hype around the issue in certain circles may have nasty consequences. This is another reason to push for a carbon tax, and not all these other miscellaneous programs to deal with the issue – the former will work, whereas most of the latter have no meaningful benefits and could do serious harm.

*I may have the precise details wrong here, I’m working from memory – any errors are my own and not Carr’s.

Another entry in my growing list of ways Malawi’s culture trumps what we do in the US. Malawian handshakes are always pretty cool – you start with a typical shake, then release and rotate your hand toward the person to grasp the back of their hand. It feels very legit, especially for a white guy (cool handshakes aren’t really our strong suit).

Cool handshakes are common in the US, though. Malawi really wins out when it comes to shaking hands when your hands are full. In America that leads to an awkward dance of shuffling crap between hands or trying to set stuff down. It is never cool, and usually embarassing for everyone. The Malawian solution is simple and elegant – if there’s stuff in your hands, you simply touch wrists. Moreover, this is a totally standard thing: no one thinks it’s weird or awkward or amusing, it’s just what you do, every time one party’s hands are full. This makes it fundamentally different and better than the American put-stuff-down tango, which feels like a failure and seems lesser than a real handshake.

One thing I try to keep in mind as I come with these ways in which Malawian culture is better than America’s is the feasibility of introducing the change. Usually changing a culture is pretty tough, if not impossible – they tend to evolve slowly due to powerful forces, not suddenly because we demand a change. This one seems really low cost, though. The tough part is getting everyone on the same page to begin with, so that no air of awkwardness builds up around the wrist-bump thing. That could undermine its main advantage.

The selection of Paul Ryan as the Republic vice presidential candidate has stirred up eternal arguments over America’s entitlement programs. This has in turn prompted the standard back-and-forth over whether Social Security constitutes a retirement account system, or is just another federal expenditure. Liberals (and I do consider myself one) tend to vehemently affirm the former and deny the latter. Here’s a recent-ish example from Noah Smith.

I’ve always found this strange – why are we even talking about the government’s unfundeded commitment to Social Security if it’s not a government expenditure? If it’s a system of retirement accounts, then once the federal government pays back what it has borrowed from those accounts, any obligation to pay for Social Security would be over with. At that point, if Social Security revenues (from payroll taxes) were less than its expenditures, it would go bankrupt. A bad outcome for people expecting benefits, but definitely not a fiscal catastrophe for the US. This is consistent with the law on Social Security – in Flemming v. Nestor, the Supreme Court ruled that you have no property rights over expected Social Security payments. Social Security is not savings – you do not own the funds in any legal sense. Congress can decide to stop paying you, or indeed all Social Security beneficiaries.

Now, I do understand what liberals are trying to do here. They think that they need to defend Social Security, and that people won’t like it as much if they think it’s a government program.* But it’s a really popular program – there’s no need for these rhetorical hijinks. I have my reservations about how the Social Security works, but it’s undeniably a vote-winner. Why trip over yourself about how it’s being framed?

And this isn’t a costless strategy. Framing Social Security as an retirement account system allows Republicans to carry on with one of the craziest lies in politics: the claim that over 50% of Americans pay no federal income taxes. That’s true if and only if we pretend that the payroll taxes that nominally fund Social Security and Medicare aren’t income taxes. But what are they, exactly? Are they your money? Yes. That gets taken away from you? Yeah. By the federal government? Yep. And are they mandatory? Totally non-optional. Does the money get spent on whatever the government wants, without regard to the name of the tax? Absolutely. They are taxes, but arguing that Social Security is a savings scheme lets Republicans pretend they aren’t and gain the advantage in the overall fight over entitlements. “See?” they say, “we’re in a death spiral of increasing numbers of listless, no-tax-paying leeches!” This is complete nonsense but since Democrats don’t want to talk about payroll taxes as taxes, no one ever heads it off.

It gets worse: payroll taxes are wildly regressive, too: they are 7.65%** of your income up to around $110,100, then that’s it, you don’t pay any additional payroll tax no matter how much you make. The savings account rhetoric leaves them out of the conversation when we discuss the equity of our tax code. It also means we can’t discuss unlinking benefits from income or removing the cap on payroll taxes, each of which could do a lot to make the Social Security system sustainable. To win a single, unimportant fight about what Social Security “really” is, Democrats have conceded almost the entire war over the size of government.

*Do they really believe the retirement account claim? I’m doubtful – most understand the reasoning above. And smart people all realize this is just quibbling over terminology. As a matter of practical policy, it doesn’t matter what Social Security “really” is.
**In reality they are 15.3% of your income. Half are nominally paid by the employer, but a basic analysis of tax incidence shows that who is supposedly charged the tax doesn’t matter – all that’s important is the relative elasticities of the labor supply and demand curves, and the total amount of the tax.

The shadow of an impending famine hangs over TA Mwambo. According to employees at AGORA and ADMARC, maize prices are reaching record heights on the back of a failed crop last year, and at present it is extremely dry. We’ve been teased by raindrops a couple of times, but they’ve never materialized into actual rain. Conversations about crops always take a detour through grumbling about a lack of action to do something about the impending situation.

Some of the obvious – and misleading – signs of famine in the popular are already here. In some villages half of the children have kwashiorkor; in others they all do. When I saw it, I looked up the causes to see if there’s anything I can do. It’s caused by protein deficiency, so simple multivitamins won’t do the trick. What’s more, although these kids are malnourished, none are wasting away. There’s food to be had, and it’s wrong to even say there isn’t protein. Every village we pass through has tons of livestock running around, and a large proportion of the men in Mwambo work as fishermen. I concede the possibility that the protein-deprived kids all belong to destitute families with no protein source, but a less savory explanation seems more likely: I suspect that many parents are making a choice – maybe a totally reasonable choice – not to give their kids enough protein to prevent kwashiorkor. That might be a way to pay for enough maize to feed the whole family, or it might be a way

What if famine really comes? First, to fix terms, I’m using “famine” in the colloquial sense (which is also the one used by Amartya Sen in his pathbreaking “Poverty and Famines”). It means mass death through starvation. Not a shortage of food, not a really bad shortage of food, not high food prices, not long queues for food. All of those are bad, but none are necessarily equivalent to famine. In the Malawian popular thought, there were famines in 2002 and 2005. From what I’ve heard, these were in fact food shortages – fairly terrifying ones – but I’ve found no evidence of widespread death in those years. In a paper I’m still working on, I have found evidence that the number of surviving children from those years is lower, but haven’t sorted out how much of that is infant mortality versus miscarriage versus delayed fertility. I don’t want to make like of what were no doubt horrible experiences, but as best I can tell there is a big gap between what happened here and for example last year’s famine in Somalia.

The central contribution of Sen’s book is to demonstrate that famines almost never involve a decline in the availability of food. In most cases, famine-struck regions actually export food to other areas. Instead, famines involve people being unable to afford the food they need to survive. Crop failures deprive them of the endowment of food/money they would normally use to survive, while also causing price shifts that make affording food impossible. This isn’t equivalent to the common idea that we have enough food but not the means to transport it to the needy. Mwambo sells tons of rice and maize and other crops which get bought by other Malawians. In a famine, that pattern would continue, using the high-quality tarmac road between Jali and Zomba town.

Many people have trouble believing that claim (that famines have nothing to do with food shortages), and it’s tough to get folks to read Sen’s book just to have their preconceived notions disproven. It’s a great book, which I do recommend highly (it’s pretty readabfle too), but I’ve often thought about how to convince people of its claims in a straightforward way. So here’s a thought experiment: if famine struck TA Mwambo while I was still here, do you think I would starve? Of course not. I would just buy food. Duh.

So if famine does arrive in Mwambo, god forbid, people will starve even while their neighbors sell food to people who live elsewhere in Malawi. If anything that is more horrific than the idea of there being no food around at all. But it also means there’s a simple solution: give people money. Not food, and certainly not surplus food from the US, which we’ve done in the past, but cash.