Loomnie

From keith Hart:

The anthropology of finance has flourished in the last decade or so. The doyen of this field is Bill Maurer who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, particularly new and experimental financial and currency forms and their legal implications. He is the author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. One focus of his research is on the shifting regulatory landscape of the offshore Caribbean; and on the cultural implications of new forms of electronic money and payment systems and regulation of mobile phone-enabled payment systems. Maurer has recently been engaged in a series of collaborations with industrial and design professionals who work on the development of new digital and mobile phone-enabled money transfer and savings systems. This led to the founding of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. By exploring people’s creative uses of money beyond its traditional functions, he hopes to provoke deeper reflection on the multiple meanings of money. Maurer recommends a sceptical, pragmatic approach to money and is thus more interested in what people can do with money than what it means to them. Like Jane Guyer (Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa), he believes that anthropologists have bought too easily into the liberal economists’ idea of money as a means of exchange rather than as a means of payment.

It has now become almost commonplace for anthropologists to work in financial centres. Ellen Hertz (The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market ) was prescient in carrying out field research on the Shanghai stock market. Caitlin Zaloom (Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London) focused on how financial traders adjusted to new information technology. Both of these studies, however, are quite traditional in their focus, being concerned with the traders’ local practices and point of view, even if their business is global at another level. Karen Ho goes further by linking her ethnography to a broader analysis of political economy. Based on interviews with employees of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other great finance houses, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street explicitly engages with larger distributional questions, such as those involved in the system of granting bank employees large bonuses.

Here is a column I wrote shortly after reading karen Ho’s book.

Imagine how gratifying it is for me to wake up this morning and find this post by Edward Caar through a Twitter link:

What brings me to today’s post is the new piece on hunger in Foreign Policy by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.  On one hand, this is great news – good to see development rising to the fore in an outlet like Foreign Policy.  I also largely agree with their conclusions – that the poverty trap/governance debate in development is oversimplified, that food security outcomes are not explicable through a single theory, etc.  On the other hand, from the perspective of a qualitative researcher looking at development, there is nothing new in this article.  Indeed, the implicit premise of the article is galling: When they argue that to address poverty, “In practical terms, that meant we’d have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives,” the implication is that nobody has been doing this.  But what of the tens of thousands of anthropologists, geographers and sociologists (as well as representatives of other cool, hybridized fields like new cultural historians and ethnoarchaeologists).  Hell, what of the Peace Corps?

Whether intentional or not, this article wipes the qualitative research slate clean, allowing the authors to present their work in a methodological and intellectual vacuum.  This is the first of my problems with this article – not so much with its findings, but with its appearance of method.  While I am sure that there is more to their research than presented in the article, the way their piece is structured, the case studies look like evidence/data for a new framing of food security.  They are not – they are illustrations of the larger conceptual points that Banerjee and Duflo are making.  I am sure that Banerjee and Duflo know this, but the reader does not – instead, most readers will think this represents some sort of qualitative research, or a mixed method approach that takes “hard numbers” and mixes it in with the loose suppositions that Banerjee and Duflo offer by way of explanation for the “surprising” outcomes they present.  But loose supposition is not qualitative research – at best, it is journalism. Bad journalism. My work, and the work of many, many colleagues, is based on rigorous methods of observation and analysis that produce validatable data on social phenomena.  The work that led to Delivering Development and many of my refereed publications took nearly two years of on-the-ground observation and interviewing, including follow-ups, focus groups and even the use of archaeology and remotely-sensed data on land use to cross-check and validate both my data and my analyses.

You really should read the whole thing.

As one who has a Masters degree in Development Studies but who chose to do a PhD in anthropology because I found that development research is all too often dealing with quantitave, “generalisable” data, and who has concluded said PhD, I find it really interesting that the RCT movement in economics seem to be taking credit, in the media and in policy circles, for what ethnographers – anthropologists, rural sociologists, historians, human geographers – have been saying all along. This is that things are a lot more complicated than people want to think, that it is extremely difficult to find a generalisable explanation, and that at the end of the day, what leads one to better understanding of issues is attention to personal stories, and an attempt to tease out how those stories are linked to larger structures, like local politics, regional politics, the economic structures, colonisation, culture etc. etc. One cannot arrive at this sort of understanding without spending time trying to understand the interaction between all these elements. Now that economists have discovered qualitative research it seems as if it were never there, as if there aren’t people who have been pointing to the importance of understanding nuances and personal stories.

I have deliberately refrained from commenting on RCT in economics because I wanted to read some of the texts, but since Edward Carr took thoughts out of my head I thought I would quote him and call attention to the fact that these kinds of studies have been going on for a long while. If economists are not aware of that (I think some of them are) it is their fault for not looking at other social sciences.

My copy of Karlan’s book is in the post to me, and I look forward to reading it. I doubt that I will learn anything new from it, but I feel it is important, as an economic anthropologist, to know what economists are doing. I wish economists would extend the same courtesy to other disciplines whose works often overlap with theirs.

And on RCT itself, check out the link that my brother, a medical doctor and researcher, sent me. It is a Lancet article titled “A philosopher’s view of the long road from RCTs to effectiveness”. Remember, RCT has been in medical and pharmacological research for a while.

PS, I promised a while ago to blog a list of must read economic anthropology books. I should get to it pretty soon.

Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

Joseph E. Stiglitz. “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%”. Vanity Fair.

It is difficult to carve out any part of the piece because it is a discussion of a post by Russ Roberts, but let’s try this:

Whenever you hear the term ‘Darwinian’ from anyone other than historians of science, assume the crash position; it’s going to get real ugly. There’s a lot here to correct (but we like helping!). First, evolutionary biologists do predict past states: whenever we reconstruct evolutionary histories (phylogenies), we reconstruct the ancestral past states. And if we have molecular data, we can often attach a rough estimate of time to those states. We certainly can get the order in which events occurred estimated reliably.

And:

But where Roberts goes off the rails is his statement that economists try to predict specifics and that’s impossible to do. I personally wouldn’t blame an economist who didn’t get the timing exactly right on the collapse of Big Shitpile. But what was disturbing was that very few economists–or at least those that interacted with the public–were saying that the combination of rapidly rising housing prices, high personal debt and stagnating wages were a disaster waiting to happen. Contrast that with how evolutionary biologists approached the problem of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Bruce Levin and Frank Stewart published the first population genetics treatment of the evolution of resistance. In 1977.

Read it in full here.

By the way, once a week, Russ Roberts interviews an economist on economic issues, historical and contemporary. The interviews are normally interesting, even if one does not agree with some of the points that are raised. I made my Anthropology of Capitalism students listen to his discussion of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments with Dan Klein, and the class discussion that followed was very interesting.

At the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law at the University of Aberdeen

Website: www.abdn.ac.uk/cisrul

The inter-disciplinary Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL) at the University of Aberdeen will offer two or more PhD studentships starting 2011-12. We welcome applicants from anthropology, cultural and literary studies, history, legal theory and socio-legal studies, philosophy, politics, religious studies, sociology and theology. The studentships will include full fees and may include partial maintenance.

Please note that applicants must have completed or be close to completing a postgraduate Masters degree.

Deadline for full consideration of applications for the 2010-11 studentships is 30 March.

The Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law aims to produce conversation across the social sciences and humanities on key concepts of the modern polity. Citizenship, civil society and rule of law are three such key concepts, all three of some pedigree but enjoying a new lease of life, prescribed by bodies such as IMF and United Nations, championed by social movements, and debated in the media and in academic research. We are also interested in related concepts such as democracy, human rights, multiculturalism and pluralism, as well as in the question of religion including how ‘religious’ is distinguished from ‘secular’.

Please visit www.abdn.ac.uk/cisrul for a description of the Centre’s mission, staff and activities, and for information about how to apply for the PhD studentships.

After the defense

On 11.01.10, I had a public defense of my dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. The questions were firm but fair, and I came away with a nice grade (yes, German Ph.D. dissertations are graded).

Thanks to everybody who in one way or another made writing the dissertation less of a pain than I am sure it would have been.

In her latest column, Gillian Tett draws attention to the research of Anne Jefferson, an anthropologist who is studying how mortgage foreclosures are unfolding in the United States. This caught my attention:

In the past century, American culture has developed a well-entrenched, commonly shared national narrative to explain and justify success – the myth of the “American dream”. But, observes Jefferson, while “the American dream narrative explains upward mobility … we have fewer cultural narratives to help us understand and cope with downward mobility”. Thus, widespread foreclosures pose a “narrative challenge”; there is no single, commonly agreed national way to explain these events. Different groups are fighting to control the story.

The column is here.

Ronald Coase, the economist who theorised the reason for the existence of firms, turns 100 today. The Economist’s Schumpeter column has this really nice piece about him:

His central insight was that firms exist because going to the market all the time can impose heavy transaction costs. You need to hire workers, negotiate prices and enforce contracts, to name but three time-consuming activities. A firm is essentially a device for creating long-term contracts when short-term contracts are too bothersome. But if markets are so inefficient, why don’t firms go on getting bigger for ever? Mr Coase also pointed out that these little planned societies impose transaction costs of their own, which tend to rise as they grow bigger. The proper balance between hierarchies and markets is constantly recalibrated by the forces of competition: entrepreneurs may choose to lower transaction costs by forming firms but giant firms eventually become sluggish and uncompetitive.

Of course, things are not that neat (read the rest of the article) but his central ideas in ‘The Nature of the Firm’ (1937) survive in the work of New Institutional Economists, with transaction cost remaining central to much of their theorising.

From Joshua Keating of FP:

Taken together, the moral of these studies could be that colonalism isn’t great for a country’s future political and economic wellbeing, but if a country is going to be colonized, they’re better off with the British than the French.

Of course, the ideal would be not to be colonised at all. Having said that, let me add this: one cannot overstate the advantage of having English and not French as the national language. It opens a wider world of possibilities. I am thinking of migration, studying abroad, outsourcing, etc.

No less a thinker than Adam Smith suggested that the division of labor in society was dependent upon the existence of markets, or, as he puts it, upon man’s “propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another.” This phrase was later to yield the concept of the Economic Man. In retrospect it can be said that no misreading of the past ever proved more prophetic of the future. For while up to Adam Smith’s time that propensity had hardly shown up on a considerable scale in the life of any observed community, and had remained, at best, a subordinate feature of economic life, a hundred years later an industrial system was in full swing over the major part of the planet which, practically and theoretically, implied that the human race was swayed in all its economic activities, if not also in its political intellectual, and spiritual pursuits, by that one particular propensity. Herbert Spencer, in the second half of the nineteenth century, could without more than a cursory acquaintance with economics, equate the principle of the division of labor with barter and exchange, and another fifty years later, Ludwig von Mises and Walter Lippmann could repeat the same fallacy. By that time there was no need for argument. A host of writers on political economy, social history, political philosophy, and general sociology had followed in Smith’s wake and established his paradigm of the bartering savage as an axiom of their respective sciences. In point of fact, Adam Smith’s suggestions about the economic psychology of early man were as false as Rousseau’s were on the political psychology of the savage. Division of labor, a phenomenon as old as society, springs from differences inherent in the facts of sex, geography, and individual endowment; and the alleged propensity of man to barter, truck, and exchange is almost entirely apocryphal. While history and ethnography know of various kinds of economies, most of them comprising the institution of markets they know of no economy prior to our own, even approximately controlled and regulated by markets. This will become abundantly clear from a bird’s-eye view of the history of economic systems and of markets, presented separately. The role played by markets in the internal economy of the various countries it will appear, was insignificant up to recent times and the changeover to an economy dominated by the market pattern will stand out all the more clearly.

In The Great Transformation, pages 43&44.