AidGrade

This summer, I have the pleasure of interning at AidGrade, a marvelous non-profit startup run by developmental economist Eva Vivalt. The organization's goal is gathering all of the available impact analyses on different developmental aid programs - things like giving out insecticide treated bed nets or water sanitation. AidGrade then conduct meta-analyses, which are attempts to combine results from multiple papers to get a better perspective of what works and what doesn't work.

I first became involved with AidGrade last summer when I helped Eva with a kickstarter for a book on  ten meta-analyses of different aid programs. I helped find all the pertinent articles for the different topics, and later I helped gather the data that was in the papers. The project was meaningful, interesting, and gave me some valuable research experience. Eva published her book and went on to turn the project into the AidGrade organization. When I heard that AidGrade was looking for interns this summer, I applied and was happy to come aboard.

So far, I've been doing a lot of the same things for the organization as I did when we were working on the kickstarter book, but later on I might get to become more involved with communication and writing about findings. Eva was recently interviewd by the blog 80000 hours about AidGrade, and the interview contains all sorts of interesting information about the group and her inspiration for starting it. One interesting part of the interview was the discussion of the roles of developmental economics and meta-analyses in the wider economics sphere. As Eva states, neither is considered a "sexy" topic these days. Many of the hot shot economists are drawn to very mathematically rigorous areas of microeconomics or the politically controversial realms of macroeconomics. As for meta-analyses, most ambitious academic economists are concerned primarily with producing novel research rather than synthesizing old results.

Needless to say, the economic issues of development need intelligent researchers to investigate them as well! It is fascinating and baffling that even though we have the technology necessary to allow people to be very productive and enjoy high standards of living, much of the world lives in abject poverty. Then there's the whole question of how to encourage people to give, where people should give, and how to convince policy makers to stop being stupid. Eva touches on all of these topics in the very interesting interview, and more at her blog.

I'm not sure if I want to go into developmental economics, at this point I'm still trying to get a sense for what the different fields of economics are like, or even if I want to go to economics graduate school. I am very happy to be at AidGrade so that I can learn all about developmental economics, especially since it's a field that tends to get marginalized. If you want to learn more about developmental economics in general, I recommend buying Eva's book that I linked to above or watching through some of Marginal Revolution University's lessons developmental economics.