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Oliver Kim

@oliverwkim

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Development economist. Research Fellow at @open_phil . PhD @berkeleyecon , AB @harvard . Views my own.

Berkeley, CA
Joined November 2009
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
Happy birthday to Albert Hirschman, who would be 106 today. Hirschman—anti-fascist, resistance hero, later a development economist—may be the most interesting person to ever take up the profession. 🧵 and blog post on his remarkable life and work. 1/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
2 years
How to pick a setting for your Econ research project
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
Happy birthday to Albert Hirschman, who would be 109 today. Hirschman—anti-fascist, resistance hero, later a development economist—may be the most interesting person to ever take up the profession. 🧵 and blog post on his remarkable life and work.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
THREAD: On the role of bad social science in the Vietnam War—and how not understanding local conditions, and thinking through endogeneity (yes, endogeneity) can lead to policy conclusions with tragic, deadly consequences.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
1 month
🚨New WP Alert🚨 @JenKuanWang and I analyze Taiwan's 1950s land reform, long seen as central to its economic takeoff—and to the East Asian Miracle. By digitizing archival data, we bring new causal evidence to the table. What we find is surprising!
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
11 months
🚀JMP alert🚀 My paper w @FergJoel applies machine learning to 1970s-80s satellite imagery to revisit one of the 🇨🇳 Chinese Miracle's first major reforms, the Household Responsibility System—the end of collective socialist agriculture. What we found was quite surprising. 🧵
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Oliver Kim
3 years
🧵: At historical growth rates, it will take >2,000 years for 🇸🇳 Senegal to catch up to 🇫🇷 France's 2019 GDP p.c. How long will it take for developing countries reach rich world income levels? I've built a quick tool to simulate growth scenarios: . 1/N
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
Hirschman had fought fascism in four countries, earning two graduate degrees along the way. He was still just 25 years old. 11/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
🧵 of interesting tidbits (updated as I find them) from Joanne Meyerowitz's "A War on Global Poverty", which I highly recommend for any economist interested in the history of development and foreign aid: (1/?)
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
12 days
An oft-ignored factor behind Korea's growth miracle: "The Korean total of $6 billion in US economic grants and loans, 1946-1978, compares to $6.89 billion for all of Africa, and $14.89 billion for all of Latin America." — Jung En Woo's Race to the Swift
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
7 months
This is a crazy chart—most African countries have registered **negative** agricultural TFP growth over the last decade. (From new VoxDevLit article by Suri and Udry)
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
2 months
Forgot to share this earlier, but I'm now qualified to respond to in-flight emergencies. My gratitude goes out to my PhD committee— @tedmiguel , @JonSteinsson , @B_Eichengreen , & Ben Faber—for their steadfast support of my (at-times unconventional) research
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
For more info, I recommend Adelmans’s wonderful bio, Worldly Philosopher, on which this thread is based. For Hirschman’s own work, his Hiding Hand essay is a great start—he remains a joy to read in the original. ( ). HBD to a thoroughly admirable man. Fin
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Oliver Kim
3 years
The key point is not that Mitchell’s statistics were shoddy, but that he was too ignorant of reality to know. There will always be a market for bad ideas, and politicians looking for post-hoc scientism as cover. As academics, we must do better at not providing it for them. FIN.
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Oliver Kim
4 years
It’s estimated that, w Hirschman’s help, Fry’s group saved over 2000 people—including Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and Marcel Duchamp. 9/
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Oliver Kim
9 months
Man have I got the JMP for you
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@arpitrage
Arpit Gupta
9 months
The economic takeoffs in China and (now increasingly) India are among the most economically consequential things to ever happen, affect a third of humanity, and there are bizarrely few top econ papers about it?
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Oliver Kim
6 months
In my post, I go into greater detail on Hirschman’s ideas, and their relation to modern development economics. His approach of “petite idées”, informed by empirical observation, seems the model for a clear-eyed way of thinking about development.
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Oliver Kim
4 years
In my post, I go into greater detail on Hirschman’s ideas, and their relation to modern development economics. His approach of “petite idées”, informed by empirical observation, seems the model for a clear-eyed way of thinking about development. 17/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
7 months
🧵: On the role of bad social science in the Vietnam War—and how not understanding local conditions, and thinking through endogeneity (yes, endogeneity) can lead to policy conclusions with tragic, deadly consequences. More, and a link to my new newsletter post below:
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 months
Seeing Like A State is one of those rare social science books that permanently reconfigures how you see the world. RIP James Scott.
@GerardoMunck
Gerardo L. Munck
3 months
𝗝𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗖. 𝗦𝗰𝗼𝘁𝘁 passed away on July 19. He was a political scientist and specialist in Southeast Asia. He was a dissident within Political Science. Yet his books opened up lines of research on central issues, such as the exercise of power and resistance to power.👇
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
At Berkeley, he met Sarah Chapiro, another Jewish emigre, in Berkeley’s I-House cafeteria. They married soon after. When America went to war in 1941, Hirschman enlisted, and served on the Italian front (his 3rd army in 5 yrs). 12/
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Oliver Kim
2 years
Only 6% of economists move to a higher-ranked school than their PhD—the lowest % of all social sciences, third-last among all fields after Classics & Religious Studies(!) (from the excellent new Wapman et al Nature article on US PhD production)
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
Colombia proved a crucial turning pt for Hirschman. As a development economist, Hirschman became unusual for his time in doing extensive fieldwork. In part due to his “non-traditional” bkgd, he developed a wry literary style that poked fun at sweeping mathematical models. 15/
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Oliver Kim
4 years
After 3mo on the front lines, Hirschman went to Italy, to join his sister Ursula. He became involved in the anti-Mussolini underground, carrying messages in a false-bottomed suitcase. Somehow he also found the time to finish his doctorate in economics! 6/
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Oliver Kim
2 months
Excited to announce that I will be starting today as a Research Fellow at Open Philanthropy, working on investigating cause areas in global health and development!
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Oliver Kim
3 years
Prospects for an African industrial revolution? Fascinating table of manuf. unit labor costs relative to China by continent, from Naidoo and Ndikumana 2020. As of 2015, they estimate that African ULCs are on par w China; South Asian ULCs 62%(!) lower.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
This tendency, Paul Krugman has argued, pushed Hirschman’s ideas out of the mainstream of economics. And it’s also why I think his ideas are ripe for a comeback. 16/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
Only when the Vichy police started asking q about Hirschman himself did he make his discreet exit. Hirschman hiked across the Pyrenees, made his way to Lisbon, and boarded a ship to America—where he would soon start a research fellowship at UC Berkeley. 10/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Hirschman rushed to Spain. He enlisted in the POUM, a Trotskyist militia which George Orwell later joined. Hirschman likely fought at the Battle of Monte Pelado, a costly defeat for the Fascists. 5/
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Oliver Kim
4 years
Hirschman was born in Berlin in 1916 to a Jewish family. He was just a teenager when he became involved as an activist in the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was confronting Hitler’s rising Nazi Party in the streets. 2/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
After the war, Hirschman helped work on the Marshall Plan and European reconstruction, till suspicion of his wartime leftism pushed him out of DC. Almost on a lark, he took an offer w the World Bank to go to Colombia—beginning his long+fruitful connection to development. 14/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
It’s estimated that, w Hirschman’s help, Fry’s group saved over 2000 people—including Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and Marcel Duchamp. (The 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic—which I haven't yet seen—covers Hirschman's remarkable work w Fry.)
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Oliver Kim
1 year
If they gave Econ Nobels to practitioners of economics, not just researchers, who would deserve the prize? Some picks, in rough order of importance for human welfare: - Wan Li, for Chinese rural reform - Manmohan Singh - Mario Draghi, for "whatever it takes"
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
Hirschman had fought fascism in four countries, earning two graduate degrees along the way. He was still just 25 years old.
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Oliver Kim
3 years
Modern economists can recognize this as a classic example of endogeneity--in this case, reverse causality. Sansom likened it to "observing that all who had the flu had been visited by doctors, [& concluding] that the doctors caused the flu." 11/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
Hirschman had by all accounts a “quiet” war—save at the end, when he was picked to interpret at the very first Allied War Crimes trial, for German Gen Anton Dostler. Newspapers report the interpreter’s face turning pale when he translated the death sentence. 13/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
There he met Varian Fry, an American trying to organize an underground to rescue Jews from occupied France. Hirschman soon became Fry’s right hand man, forging passports and scouting routes thru the Pyrenees. 8/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
Singapore is known worldwide for two things: its fabulous wealth and its authoritarian party-state. Less well-known is how one UN-appointed Western advisor had a hand in creating both. My 🌐 latest post 🌐 explores Albert Winsemius's legacy in Singapore:
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
He enrolled at HEC, one of France’s top business schools, but found the accounting work dull. He won a fellowship to study at LSE, where he studied under Hayek and Lionel Robbins—an early sign of his anti ideological streak. 4/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
When Hitler took dictatorial control after the Reichstag fire, Hirschman and his cell of young activists took to the streets, passing flyers, urging resistance. But after several of his friends were arrested, a 17yo Hirschman was forced to flee to Paris. 3/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
5 months
Are African Prices Too High? My latest for Global Developments.
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Oliver Kim
6 months
This tendency, Paul Krugman has argued, pushed Hirschman’s ideas out of the mainstream of economics. And it’s also why I think his ideas are ripe for a comeback.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 years
Resurgent antisemitism sent him back to France, where he joined the French Army, and was trained up just in time for them to surrender. As a natural target for the Nazis, Hirschman adopted a false identity and joined the thousands of refugees fleeing south to Marseilles. 7/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
11 months
We leave research on these causes for future work. Our methods can also be applied anywhere in the world, from 1978 on, to measure agri. productivity—a new frontier for economic history. Looking fwd to your comments. PDF: My site:
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Oliver Kim
2 years
Latest in HirschmanWatch: Albert Hirschman (left) will be portrayed in Netflix’s new series Transatlantic, on Varian Fry’s underground network which rescued several thousand Jews and refugees from Nazi-occupied France. Biggest star turn for an economist since A Beautiful Mind?
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
Colombia proved a crucial turning pt for Hirschman. As a development economist, Hirschman became unusual for his time in doing extensive fieldwork. In part due to his “non-traditional” background, he developed a wry literary style that poked fun at sweeping mathematical models.
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Oliver Kim
2 years
I've just updated the Research Tips page on my website, with new advice on 3rd and 4th years of the economics PhD. Hope this is helpful, or at least mildly amusing:
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
11 months
If you'd asked us at the start—did ending collective farming boost agricultural yields? Our prior would have unequivocally been yes. But we simply can't see the evidence from space. This finding deeply challenges our conventional understanding of the origins of China's miracle.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
At Berkeley, he met Sarah Chapiro, another Jewish emigre, in Berkeley’s I-House cafeteria. They married soon after. When America went to war in 1941, Hirschman enlisted, and served on the Italian front (his 3rd army in 5 years).
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Hirschman rushed to Spain. He enlisted in the POUM, a Trotskyist militia which George Orwell later joined. Hirschman likely fought at the Battle of Monte Pelado, a costly defeat for the Fascists.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
Unfortunately, as is often the case, bad research won the policy debate. RAND’s official history notes how Washington was eager to accept Mitchell’s results, despite the rebuttals, as a substitute for the hard work of actual reform. 12/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
After 3mo on the front lines, Hirschman went to Italy, to join his sister Ursula. He became involved in the anti-Mussolini underground, carrying messages in a false-bottomed suitcase. Somehow he also found the time to finish his doctorate in economics!
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
After the war, Hirschman helped work on the Marshall Plan and European reconstruction, till suspicion of his wartime leftism pushed him out of DC. Almost on a lark, he took an offer w the World Bank to go to Colombia—beginning his long+fruitful connection to development.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
He enrolled at HEC, one of France’s top business schools, but found the accounting work dull. He won a fellowship to study at LSE, where he studied under Hayek and Lionel Robbins—an early sign of his anti ideological streak.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
Hirschman was born in Berlin in 1915 to a Jewish family. He was just a teenager when he became involved as an activist in the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was confronting Hitler’s rising Nazi Party in the streets.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
Cost curve of world oil production, 2030. From a pure data graphics standpoint, a remarkable amount of information about the world condensed in a single chart. - from Erickson et al (2020) in Nature: Matters Arising.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
Only when the Vichy police started asking q about Hirschman himself did he make his discreet exit. Hirschman hiked across the Pyrenees, made his way to Lisbon, and boarded a ship to America—where he would soon start a research fellowship at UC Berkeley.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
Other RAND economists were skeptical of the study. Tony Russo, who had just returned from VN & seen rural conditions, wrote a scathing critique of the methodology. Russo was later fired. (His friend Daniel Ellsberg tried to reverse the decision, but failed.)
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
In Samson's view, Mitchell's story was exactly reversed! Areas with higher land equality precisely because they had been controlled by the insurgents, while areas with high inequality were more likely to be controlled by the govt because the govt didn't do land reform! 10/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
Even in a highly neoclassical model, lower US life expectancy + high inequality + low leisure erode most of the income differences between the US and Europe.
@ernietedeschi
Ernie Tedeschi
6 months
Europe is generally speaking a nice place & America can learn a lot from them. And it is true that inequality is higher in the US. But Europeans consistently overweight how much inequality drives US-EU average growth & income differences. *Median* US incomes are much higher too.
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Oliver Kim
3 years
Of course, clear-eyed, ground-level observers of Vietnam had been crying out for meaningful land reform for years. (Even clearer-eyed ones were asking why the US was there at all.) 14/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
There he met Varian Fry, an American organizing an underground to rescue Jews from occupied France. Hirschman soon became Fry’s right hand man, forging passports and scouting routes through the Pyrenees.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
2 years
TIL deforestation was a major contributor to Korea's 19th century economic decline (which led to its eventual colonization) Institutional failures led to rampant deforestation -> worsening floods -> fall in agricultural productivity
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
In his report, Mitchell ran a province-level regression of S Vietnamese govt control on local land inequality as of 1960, and 5 other "independent" variables. He found a positive relation. Mitchell's conclusion? That redistribution would encourage more insurgency. 5/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
Excited to read (and hopefully review) this!
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
The latest evidence on this is that in rich countries from 1870-2015, housing has actually been the best-performing asset class, with a real return of 7%, beating stocks. You also need to include the rental yield, not just price appreciation. from Jordà et al (2019)
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@Duderichy
the Rich
6 months
from 1896 to 1996 average return on investment in housing was 0.06% annual!!! 0.06%!!!! 6% total over 100 years!!! TOTAL
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
Hirschman had by all accounts a “quiet” war—save at the end, when he was picked to interpret at the very first Allied War Crimes trial, for German Gen Anton Dostler. Newspapers report the interpreter’s face turning pale when he translated the death sentence.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
Resurgent antisemitism sent him back to France, where he joined the French Army, and was trained up just in time for them to surrender. As a natural target for the Nazis, Hirschman adopted a false identity and joined the thousands of refugees fleeing south to Marseilles.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
1 month
Agriculture was likely still central to TW's growth story—but our paper shows that land reform can't be the main cause. But LR is not just about efficiency! Without it, the KMT regime may not have survived. The political economy remains central—but largely unanswerable thru
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
When Hitler took dictatorial control after the Reichstag fire, Hirschman and his cell of young activists took to the streets, passing flyers, urging resistance. But after several of his friends were arrested, a 17yo Hirschman was forced to flee to Paris.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
While the politicians + generals debated, a star young economist at the RAND Corporation, Edward Mitchell, turned to analyze the land reform question. Mitchell had never been to Vietnam. 4/
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Oliver Kim
11 months
There are ways of reconciling our findings w the literature. Our satellite model still finds that *aggregate* yields rose in the 1980s. A price liberalization, in 1979, may have been the cause. It's also possible labor productivity rose—but we can't see labor from space.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
Robert L. Sansom, a Rhodes Scholar, wrote another incisive rebuttal. From his field research, Sansom knew how much the land reform implemented by the Viet Cong, and before them the Viet Minh, had done to reduce inequality in the areas under their control. 9/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
1 month
After the 1950s reform, rice yields in 🇹🇼 rose by 40%. The longstanding view—seen in Joe Studwell's excellent How Asia Works—is that land reform boosted productivity, launching 🇹🇼's extraordinary takeoff. We test this theory by digitizing township-level data for the first time.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
Land reform wasn't tried again until 1970, with some success--until the North's invasion in 1975 brought the experiment to a halt. But in the intervening yrs from 1966-70, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had been killed. One wonders what might have been. 13/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
1 month
And yet Taiwan's rice yields went up ~40% in the 1950s. Why? Our null results suggests that other technical changes—increases in fertilizer, the introduction of high-yield varieties (spread through state agricultural extension services)—were more important.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
1 year
Rare but illuminating example of ideas in economic development directly shifting policy -- Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi discovering Alice Amsden's research on South Korea leads to a new Ethiopian industrial policy. (from Tom Lavers's "Ethiopia’s ‘Developmental State’", p.151)
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
S Vietnam had tried land reform in 1956, but it had been hijacked by local landlords, and very little was redistributed. Meanwhile, the Viet Cong enacted land reform in the areas under their control—and attracted 1000s of recruits in the process. 3/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
4 months
In 2022, New York's metro area (population 20 million) had a higher GDP than all of Sub-Saharan Africa (pop 1.2 billion).
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
11 months
We use these satellite features to train a random forest to predict rice + wheat yields in nearby Asian countries. We show that our satellite-based models can accurately predict yields—and, notably, can precisely pick up the effects of weather shocks in China.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
In 1967, 🇺🇸 was mired in the Vietnam War. The corrupt South Vietnamese regime was doing little for its people: in 1966, 42% of farmers were landless peasants. To help the war effort, 🇺🇸 policymakers considered land reform—redistributing land from landlords to peasants. 2/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
"The ideal province from the [pov of govt] control," Mitchell wrote, "is one in which... few peasants operate their own land... and no land redistribution has taken place." His report was covered by the NYT, and eventually published in "World Politics". 6/
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
8 months
Academic seminars (with apologies to xkcd)
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
7 months
The key point is not that Mitchell’s statistics were shoddy, but that he was too ignorant of reality to know. There will always be a market for bad ideas, and politicians looking for post-hoc scientism as cover. As academics, we must not provide it for them.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
1 month
Land reform also had unexpected effects on industrialization! By boosting yields, phase 2 increased the retention of workers in agriculture + shrank the share in manufacturing. But by creating farms too small to support households, 3 pushed labor—mostly women—into factory work.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
11 months
With our satellite data, we use 2 causal designs. #1 : we look at the HRS's provincial rollout. Our satellites can peer right at the border between provinces that reform earlier and later, and control for fixed characteristics of these places. We see no effect on grain yields.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
11 months
Using methods from remote sensing + env science, we measure plant cover in the 1970s-80s directly from space. Healthy plants reflect a higher ratio of infrared to visible radiation, letting us track crops throughout their growing cycle.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
8 months
✨Announcing my new Development newsletter✨ Today's post: 950 million people will move to Africa's cities by 2050—and the market isn't building enough homes. Public housing should be part of the solution. Examples from Hong Kong, Singapore, & Ethiopia:
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 days
Out today — I'm in @TheAtlantic 's Good on Paper podcast with @JerusalemDemsas , talking about East Asian development and Taiwanese land reform (based on work w @JenKuanWang )!
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@SamarthGuptaMA
Samarth Gupta
6 days
Awesome paper by @oliverwkim and great interview with @JerusalemDemsas
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
11 months
But Chinese statistics, particularly from the pre-reform era, are notoriously unreliable. Few output statistics are available at the sub-provincial level, making precise causal identification difficult, limiting prior research. Enter historical satellites.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
Hirschman is back!!!
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
1 month
Phase 2 did significantly boost yields, but the effect explains just 1/6 of the 1950-61 increase in rice yields. We find no statistical evidence that phase 3—the famous "land to the tiller" reform boosted rice yields at all.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
A neat feature is you can simulate how long it will take if a country grows at rates seen in the 🇩🇪, 🇯🇵, 🇨🇳 economic miracles. Even at a spectacular 🇨🇳 Chinese rate of growth (7%/year), the 🇨🇩 D.R. Congo will take 64 years to reach current incomes in the 🇺🇸 USA. 2/N
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
1 month
Why did phase 2 and 3 differ so much? 2 freed tenant farmers from obligations to plant sugar, letting them to plant an extra crop of rice, boosting overall yields. 3, on the other hand, didn't change crop constraints—and may have made farms too small to be economically viable.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
9 months
@berkeleyside @MingweiSamuel @IDoTheThinking Do you all have a Venmo? Would be great to chip in if you guys are paying for these out of pocket
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
1 month
We focus on the latter 2 phases of Taiwan's land reform. Phase 2 redistributed public lands, formerly held largely by Japanese sugar companies. Phase 3 broke up larger private estates and gave them to tenants. Together, 2 + 3 redistributed 24% of Taiwan's arable land.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
6 months
Anyone else lay awake at night thinking about the time Alan Blinder surveyed a representative sample of US firms about their marginal cost curves and 40% picked MC curves that were downward sloping? Yeah haha me too
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
7 months
Modern economists can recognize this as a classic example of endogeneity--in this case, reverse causality. Sansom likened it to "observing that all who had the flu had been visited by doctors, [& concluding] that the doctors caused the flu."
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
11 months
#2 : We use unofficial gazetteer data (generously shared by Almond et al 2019) on the HRS's rollout across counties. If you think provincial borders are "weird", we can look at the mean yields of counties who decollectivized earlier vs later. We see no effect on grain yields.
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@oliverwkim
Oliver Kim
3 years
Fascinating result. Don’t have a great intuition for how large a 1% Gini decrease is — please chime in if you do — but as a benchmark Brazil’s Bolsa Familia is estimated to have reduced Gini by 1-1.5%: .
@JustinSandefur
Justin Sandefur
3 years
"Reducing each country’s Gini index by 1% per year has a larger impact on global poverty than increasing each country’s annual growth 1 percentage point above forecasts."
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