The Most Underrated Skill in Research
Moms sometimes deliver the most vicious burns. A few years ago I was telling my mom about a friend who not only appeared on Jeopardy but won his first day. I marveled at how he managed to acquire the knowledge base to compete. “We’re about the same age. How did he learn so many things that I didn’t?” My mom responded, “Well, he probably didn’t spend his childhood rereading Harry Potter a million times.”
Burns hurt the worst when there is something to feed them, and in this case my mom had a point. As a kid, Harry Potter cast Wingardium Leviosa on my diminishing marginal returns, lifting them so that each read was enjoyable. I certainly wasn’t a non-fiction reader. Not until I read Freakonomics, and even then I didn’t immediately shift my consumption.
Today I realize that the most underrated skill in research is reading.
When I started my research career, I was a research assistant for another professor. My job was to write Stata code to clean data and run regressions. This professor always had a handful of projects running at the same time, so I never had a day where I didn’t have a coding task. In my mind, research was coding.
When I went to graduate school, I maintained this mentality. If I was not collecting, preparing, or analyzing data, I must be wasting my time. There were subtle cues that reinforced this idea. As I walked to my office, every day I would pass one professor’s open door, and every time I could see Stata open on his monitor. When we would talk in classes, it was always about results, rarely about the literature. Indeed, the topic would shift every week, from international trade to microcredit to household decision making, but the discussion was predictable: what was the identification strategy and what were their results?
Another bias I had towards working on data was that there was a tangible outcome. At the end of the day, I had results. Something I could show people. If I spent the day reading, I didn’t have anything to show for it. So, for years, I over-invested in analysis while under-investing in context. I got enough for what I needed without diving deep enough to make more profound connections.
As a student, you are a lot like Harry Potter during a rainy Quidditch game, your glasses fogging up, making it impossible to track what’s important. Let me be your Hermione and cast a charm to keep the glasses clear: master the basics of econometrics and coding, but also pick a topic and dive deep into the literature.
Today, reading is one of my most productive research activities. It feeds me new research ideas. It helps me evaluate other people’s research. How can you evaluate whether a model about economic growth in Latin America is accurate if you have no understanding of Latin American history?
Last week I said the best skill in research is discernment. How can you develop discernment without context?
Maybe you are worried about where you should acquire depth. “If I invest now, I might be reading about the wrong thing.” Here’s my advice: think about something that interests you and ask yourself whether it would be worth spending 6 months becoming an expert on it. This could be a broad topic, like the effect of international trade on economic development, or it could be super narrow, like the history of Colombia from 1850 to 1950. But I guarantee if you immerse yourself for just 6 months, you’ll emerge with deeper insights and a better idea of how to learn.
Gangs in El Salvador
The other day I mentioned to my YouTube audience a well-known fact about gangs. Neighborhoods with gangs tend to be poorer than neighborhoods without gangs. Then I asked what causes this. Do gangs thrive in poor neighborhoods (poverty creates gangs)? Or do gangs make their neighborhoods poorer (gangs create poverty)?
The truth is that causality can work both ways. But I wanted to highlight some fascinating research in El Salvador that should make us reconsider the devastating effect gangs have on their neighborhoods. They are way more detrimental than I thought.
Head over to Market Power on YouTube if you’re interested in hearing the full story.
Sri Lanka’s Organic Mistake
One lesson throughout the Harry Potter books is that the government is staffed by incompetent bureaucrats and that the world would be much better if run by professors. As a completely unbiased observer, I agree. And that view is easy to reinforce when governments continually flaunt their incompetence.
Earlier this year, Sri Lanka’s government banned the use of chemical fertilizers in agriculture. They were going organic. But farmers use fertilizer for a reason: it boosts their production, and there is demand for that crop. Without fertilizer, Sri Lanka’s crop is expected to fall in half. And prices are not expected to double. Sri Lanka is in an economic crisis.
Unfortunately, these kind of policies happen all the time. It reminds me of China’s Four Pest campaign. Sparrows eat grain, so Mao’s government decided it could increase grain output by eliminating a pest. At first glance, this makes sense. After all, we use pesticides to keep bugs away from our agriculture.
But Mao’s China drove the sparrows to extinction. In just one year. And sparrows don’t just eat grain--they eat bugs. The next year locusts descended on the Chinese crops, contributing to major famine. They needed to import sparrows from the Soviet Union to try and restore balance.
Let’s learn from overzealous government policy. Dumbledore never would have made that mistake.