r/EffectiveAltruism • u/turing-math-labs • 4d ago

What do effective altruists think of development economics?

I'm organizing a reading group to facilitate collaborations on development economics, focusing on economic models of poorer countries. Please let me know if you're interested; here are some references we are using. What do effective altruists generally think about this topic, i.e. which approaches to development economics are most popular in the EA community? We learnt about economic using the theory of Nash equilibria, but these aren't widely used by our development economics professors at MIT/Harvard/Columbia. Thanks!

(1) https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.21.1.141 "The Economic Lives of the Poor", Prof. Banerjee & Duflo
(2) https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w3100/w3100.pdf "The McKibbin-Sachs general equilibrium model: theory and specification"

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u/Utilitarismo 4d ago

You may be interested in some things like the Atlas of Economic Complexity which includes suggested economic strategies for each country & things like the easiest next products for a country to grow into.

https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/566/market-share

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u/turing-math-labs 3d ago

Thanks so much! Harvard's Growth Lab (lead. by Prof. Haussmann) is fascinating, we'll have a closer look at their papers.
https://growthlab.hks.harvard.edu/about/

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u/Utilitarismo 4d ago

There is this playlist with a lot of economic development content

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6o_VzcvXJGVgCd_eIWbuxRgVOI8B2Y02&si=gclSzUKLPeJOmjoj

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u/turing-math-labs 3d ago

We're more interested in papers by Nobel Laureates, they are more useful for experts in the field (eg. PhDs @ MIT/Harvard). Do you enjoy reading them? Here's an example.
https://web.stanford.edu/class/msande311/arrow-debreu.pdf