Those studies, largely performed in the 1970s and ’80s, used data to discuss how land tenure (say, sharecropping) affects farm productivity, how different types of labor relations in agriculture affect wages and employment of poor workers, how interlocking land-labor-credit relations with the landlord-employer-creditor trap workers in poverty, and how security of ownership rights affects productivity and investment. These studies also explored the role of credit arrangements in risk pooling and how land inequality hinders resolution of conflicts in the management of village commons—forests, fisheries, irrigation water, grazing lands, etc. All of this research concerned the livelihoods of the majority of poor people working in agriculture and related occupations. Yet the new development economics fighting global poverty finds no use for it.

I think what he meant to say was that these older studies showed how poor people were fucked, and the new RCT approach doesn’t really care much for that distasteful idea. Nobody who studies RCTs says “Why don’t we just take Chris Hughes’ money away, right now?”  They say, “If we ask Chris Hughes very nicely, and entertain him with data, maybe he’ll give us some.”  I wonder if Hughes is even aware that he is “giving” his millions to poor Kenyans while Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s wealthiest man and current ICC-indicted President, rakes it back in?

via Boston Review — Pranab Bardhan: Little, Big.