318 | Edward Miguel on the Developing Practice of Development Economics

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I don't know if any of you out there are fans of the webcomic Girl Genius. I'm a huge fan of Girl Genius. It's a comic by Phil and Katia Folio, the artists, And it tells a story it's been going on for years now. So if you wanna, like, take a weekend off and catch up if you haven't read it, there's plenty of material there. And a very complicated story with a lot of moving parts, but it's a kind of a steampunk almost medieval setting. So there are dragons and there are swords, but there's also science of a sort, but it's kind of fantasy science. So rather than just ordinary scientists, they have mad scientists called Sparks in the comic, and there's a lot of jokes. It's a it's a mostly humor filled webcomic. One of the characters, a minor character in Girl Genius, is presented as a mad social scientist. Rather than most of the mad scientists who are, you know, building death rays and flying machines. He's experimenting on people. And even within the comic, they say, like, you don't meet a lot of mad social scientists. But at one point, there's a place where the mad social scientist is explaining what a soft hearted guy he is. And as evidence, he says, you know, on Christmas time, I sometimes like to take the children that I'm experimenting on out of their container tanks and give them presents for Christmas. And the other, you know, the mad scientists are portrayed as pretty, devilish people most of the time anyway. The other characters look at him in horror at the idea of children in container tanks and he says, oh, don't worry, not the control group. So the joke, of course, is that if you're a mad social scientist, you have to do experiments on human beings, but then there's other people who you don't experiment on. That's the control group, and you just leave them in their container tanks, even for Christmas. And the reason I'm telling this extended, not especially humorous anecdote, is because it's not completely divorced from the reality of being a social scientist. The methodologies that are accessible to you are just different than those that are accessible to physicists or biologists or chemists, right, where you can literally run trials over and over again changing conditions in whatever ways you want because social scientists have to deal with human beings and human beings actually have some rights. That's certainly not an insuperable barrier. You can do things that, people volunteer for, psychologists do it all the time, but also you can just study what happens in the world. Right? And again, many kinds of science need to do that. If you're an archaeologist or you're a cosmologist for that matter, you're not running experiments over and over again. You don't redo the universe. You just look at …