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Dimitri (right) with his co-founder, Sachin
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“Economics is still in its early
stages of development. When you go into an economics course, you should go in
with a sense that this is a discipline that will change a lot in the next few
years. Be anti-disciplinary. Do not let intellectual boundaries confine you.”
May 27th 2014 –
Beijing, China and Kigali, Rwanda
Tell
us a little about yourself – where did you grow up? What brought you to the
path of studying economics?
I’m
half-Greek, half-Dutch, and my parents always moved around. I chose to move
around too, living in France, India, Angola, the US, Kenya, Rwanda, Malawi …I
studied economics because I lived for a long time in Africa, and I really
wanted to move back. I wanted to be involved in economic development.
I went to
the Kennedy School to do the MPA in International Development. After that, I
worked for the World Bank in Washington, and then in Kenya. I was getting
frustrated with the whole set-up - I didn’t think it was the right place for a
young person to be.
Why did you feel the World Bank was not
the right place to be?
From a personal perspective, it was the work model itself. I felt the projects
we were doing were not designed to fit the needs of the country itself.
Economists from Washington would fly in and design a research project. Then
they’d sell it to the local government. So we ended up with very large, very
technical projects, based on little local context, and for which there was not
much local ownership.
In Africa,
the consultancy you get tends to be like that: fly-in, fly-out. We wanted to
replace that model, and start research companies immersed in developing countries, which is why we
started Laterite in Rwanda.
You mentioned that there was a “mismatch
of people and projects.” What do you mean by this?
The World Bank
has fantastic people - very committed, hard-working, who believe in what
they're doing. But for operational roles – managing, let's say, a couple of large
scale projects – they have economics PhDs with little operational and practical
work experience outside the World Bank or academia.
So the mismatch comes from not
understanding the local context, and thus focusing on tasks that exercise the
skills one has, rather than tasks that exercise the skills the local project
needs?
I think so,
yes. What the World Bankers bring is logical design. On paper it makes sense -
but in practice things are different, and what the country needs might be
different.
To me this sounds like one of
the general problems with economics teaching: on paper it all looks coherent,
but in practice we may need very different tools!
For
yourself personally, what were the highs and lows of your Economics education?
One of the
highs was definitely discovering all the possibilities of statistics and data
analysis. I had a great professor, Alberto Abadie, who tries out all sorts of
new program evaluation techniques and has come up with some fantastic ideas and
tools – to give you one example, "synthetic controls". Another prof,
Cesar Hidalgo, was looking into how to use network analysis and applying it to
economics through exports networks.
All of this
innovative data analysis fascinates me – and goes much beyond the linear
regression framework that bugs economics research today.
The low? Definitely
theory. So long as you understand the basic dynamics of a system, it felt very
unhelpful for anyone’s career to study the amount of theory we did at Harvard.
It felt both disconnected from reality and also at times misleading.
In what way do you think it was
misleading?
A lot of
what’s out there right now is very interesting – RCTs, Duflo and Banerjee’s
work – but just applying, say, game theory, or some microeconomic models, will
never really work in a local context. We barely use any theoretical models learnt
from economic theory in our work.
What is the alternative – what
do you use instead?
Data and
empirical evidence. A lot of the tools we have are for post-event analysis:
RCTs and evaluations after the fact. There are very few tools that have been
developed for pre-event analysis or project design. We need to find better ways
of testing why certain types of interventions are likely to work or not ahead
of time, and do that in a very rigorous way. This could be through games or
specially designed surveys, that happen on a large scale before projects and
policies are rolled out.
This reminds me of the
“participatory econometrics” movement – see
http://www.cultureandpublicaction.org/bijupdf/EPW_ParticipatoryEconmetrics.pdf
Economists have tried to make economics a scientific discipline, with formulae
and models, but at the end of the day, we know that few of these models really
work, and they have very little evidence-base or real-world application. So I
applaud the movement to Rethink!
Inspiration.
What two thinkers, artists, creators, come to mind when you think of those who
have inspired you or helped you along your way?
My top two are two professors: Cesar Hidalgo, at MIT. He’s a physicist by
profession, and through studying physics became a master of network analysis –
from natural, biological networks, to mobile phone networks, export goods
networks. He’s been doing all this with tools completely unknown to the economics
profession. What I admire is how anti-disciplinary
he is; how he rejects disciplinary boundaries, and takes things from various
fields. (http://chidalgo.com/ - https://twitter.com/cesifoti)
And very personally, Alberto Abadie. He helped me a lot along the way, giving
me advice. I took from him the idea that you don’t need to work with real data,
per se; you can work with synthetic data, with as much predictive value as real
data.
Recommend
one book we should read in the next half-year.
I’m very inspired by network theory, and how to apply it to economics. The book
that introduced me to this was Linked, by Albert-László Barabási.
And
one piece of music to listen to.
I spent five years of my life in Mali, which
is the place I’ve stayed the longest. I absolutely love Malian music – it’s a
world in itself. I’d recommend the song Amana Quai, by Vieux Farka Touré (the
son of Ali Farka Touré): http://www.last.fm/music/Vieux+Farka+Tour%C3%A9/_/Amana+Quai
If you could have a wish-list of 3 items, or 3 words, for the future of your
project, what would they be, and why?
Grounded – in the local context. It
affects how you ask questions, how you communicate, how you contribute without
duplicating existing effort.
Anti-disciplinary – meaning, beyond
disciplines. Not being stuck to one discipline, and working with people from
many disciplines.
Human – principled in what we think
is right. Sticking to what we believe in. Doing good.
What
advice would you give to other young economists, and Rethinkers in general,
starting out on their journey?
My sense is that economics is still in its early stages of development. When
you go into an economics course, you should go in with a sense that this is a
discipline that will change a lot in the next few years. I think this change
will be brought by changes in data: new visualisations, big data analysis, new
methods borrowed from other disciplines. And also, don’t neglect network theory
– learn about it and how it might apply to some of the problems you want to
solve.
Go in open-minded, and embrace all the new techniques! Try and master data. The
empirics will make a huge difference to the discipline.
We’re
setting up the Laterite Lab, where our team members do research together, and
eventually we want to develop this into a more sort of formal lab, where we
have people from different disciplines trying out new tools. We are currently
recruiting new researchers: please get in contact via
http://www.laterite-africa.com/.
