The Problem of Economics - Aggregating Knowledge of the Use of Resources

As a discipline, economics strives to understand how decentralized forms of knowledge (of preferences, of production costs, etc.) are aggregated by economic systems and institutions to advance productive use of resources. Indeed, as Hayek wrote (1945):

"knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus…  a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know.”

A serious examination of this statement, however, must acknowledge that such knowledge is never static or homogenous across diverse contexts and that it comes into being through careful processes of observation, inquiry, and dialogue - often mediated by formal and informal systems of education. Rather than assume these as background processes, my research explores how these ingredients come together, through education, in the economic and social interactions of place-based communities – i.e., in economies characteristic of many developing societies.

To date, I have developed expertise in using the tools of applied econometrics, within the field of development economics, to advance insights into the ways in which communities produce and aggregate knowledge for economic purposes. I have over ten years of field-research experience in sub-Saharan Africa, where I have implemented a handful of randomized controlled trials (RCT), and recent experience in the Colombian context digitizing historical data to harmonize with large-scale administrative datasets. I study the ways in which processes of education and learning, social interactions, and community/village agencies advance dialogue with the purpose of aggregating knowledge of the best use of resources in communities. As such, much of my work also falls in the subfields of the economics of education, behavioral economics, social economics and community development. The place-based nature of the economic systems I study means that agricultural processes, including choices of agricultural technologies, are often central features of my empirical work.

The integrated role of each of these subfields in my work is a reflection of the complex challenges facing modern communities in developing societies, challenges which increasingly require broader participation and dialogue in articulating and advancing along new development paths. For example, problems related to the burgeoning youth population in sub-Saharan Africa, the slow process of agricultural transformation and decay of agricultural resources, the failure of education systems to prepare young people, the failure of the economy to absorb unemployed youth, and the imperative of climate adaptation require closer examination of how knowledge is produced and aggregated to advance processes of development.

My Path

To advance on this research path, I made several  non-traditional choices at critical moments in my career. After earning a PhD from Cornell in 2018, I applied and was awarded an NSF postdoc fellowship at MIT to advance the project I describe in the next paragraph. The fellowship allowed me to choose to stay in Uganda during the Covid pandemic, where I explored innovative and participatory approaches to research with my host village. In 2021 I accepted a position at the Development Innovations Lab at the University of Chicago to continue building my agenda with PI status granted by a U.S. university, while maintaining a presence in Uganda to grow partnerships, including with the government. These partnerships have advanced plans to scale a transformational approach to teacher training and projects that could inform new models of community governance. These are advancing in partnership with key Ugandan academics, government partners and graduate students in the U.S. and Uganda with support from my joint appointment with Makerere University. Such partnerships have recently extended to Colombia, South America due to a novel program for rural secondary education implemented in that context from the 1980s through the 2000s.

A Summary of the Research Agenda

A cornerstone of my research agenda is a paper titled “Learning to Teach by Learning to Learn." The project explores a novel approach to teacher training at a moment when educational systems across the world struggle to develop basic skills, such as literacy and numeracy, in their students. My co-authors and I leverage an RCT to find very large and cost-effective impacts of the training on a range of learning outcomes - including basic skills and extending to critical thinking, scientific capacity, and creativity - and social outcomes - such as change in gender attitudes, decrease in grade repetition rates, and improved relationships among teachers. The program increases the pass rate of a high-stakes primary exit exam by 50% (24 percentage points) and learning effects are in the order of 0.5 to 0.8 standard deviations for many outcomes. The program works by training teachers to applying scientific processes of investigation to processes relevant to community life, including their own teaching practices. It is among the most cost-effective education programs studied to date.

The potential of the data collected through this project to understand the downstream effects of the program over six years is nowhere close to being exhausted. I have tracked students from primary schools into secondary schools, to their homes in their villages, linking teachers, students, households, schools, and communities to one another across datasets. Several ongoing projects are hoping to investigate how: new approaches teachers take in school can affect perceptions of and actions surrounding local economic opportunities; how the approach reshapes attitudes towards gender norms, extending to changes in student attitudes and learning outcomes as well as interactions with parents and community members. A new RCT in secondary schools was launched in 2021-22 with the aim of unpacking core features of the model by which teachers learn to adapt their pedagogy and advance processes of organizational learning through dialogue with administrators in their schools. The Ministry of Education and Sports in Uganda is helping advance a study of how different approaches to program implementation can increase the effects we observe in the initial study at scale.

The above projects explore the mechanisms by which education interventions create conditions that allow communities to aggregate knowledge of the best use of resources through dialogue and investigation. The approach, however, is general enough to extend to additional sectors of the economy. For example, a new project explores whether knowledge of the reasons, or mechanisms, driving the effectiveness of new technologies differentially affect adoption relative to traditional demonstrations where often only the effect of a technology (independent of context) is communicated to farmers. A community governance project is under way to develop a novel internship program at Makerere University to allocate interns to parishes who will advance processes of community research to support governance. The program leverages a curriculum I am developing that trains students to support local governments through data collection, analysis, and dialogue facilitation. The program and related study is developing in close collaboration with colleagues at Makerere University and Uganda’s National Planning Authority. The aim is to study whether data-informed approaches to local governance can improve development outcomes through Uganda’s Parish Development Model.

These are but a few examples that demonstrate how the emergent agenda is organized around a common question of inquiry summarized as “what educational approaches, institutions and social structures enable local populations to aggregate knowledge of the best use of their resources?” Each paper makes an incremental step towards advancing insights into this question.

Knowledge Co-Generation and Policy

The integrated nature of the processes of knowledge co-generation embedded in the above projects leads to natural pathways towards influencing policy discourse. For example, Ugandan policy makers in the field of education are actively concerned with the imminent problem of supporting meaningful and gainful employment for its large youth populations. As a result, they have produced a revised competency-based secondary school curriculum, but they have yet to see positive effects of this curriculum because of an inability to equip teachers to teach it effectively. In 2022, J-PAL awarded the project with funds to explore scale-up approaches wtih the Ministry of Education. Together with my implementing partner, we decided that a more effective means of generating buy-in was to give high-level policy makers a taste of the training program themselves as well as exposure to some of the trained teachers through classroom visits. We hosted a five-day seminar where this approach gave rise to sustained conversations on means of scaling the approach to teacher training nationally. The resulting buy-in of the approach means that researchers, implementers and policy-makers have all taken ownership over the process of finding ways of improving teaching quality through effective and evidence-informed programs. More recently, these same policy-makers participated in an intra-continental workshop of organizations that use the same curriculum as the one in my study across the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi and Zambia where weexplored how this approach to teacher training could be extended to other African contexts.

Role as Educator

These projects cannot be impelmented without the support of a growing international team. To grow the team of researchers in Uganda, I have taught multiple workshops on Causal Inference and the tools of Applied Econometrics. Some students of these workshops are now interns and RAs on my projects and advancing towards co-authorship. Additionally, I have been informally mentoring a group of graduate students in North America who are interested in pursuing research within the agenda I describe above. We meet on a weekly basis and many of these students are now both co-authors with myself and each other on various projects. My pedagogical approach is very closely informed by my research. In this approach the teacher does not merely transfer content to students, but also sees each individual as colleagues who can assist one another to advance each others' understanding of the world.