The Economist as Plumber

By Esther Duflo. 2017

197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As economists increasingly help governments design new policies and regulations, they take on an added responsibility to engage with the details of policy making and, in doing so, to adopt the mindset of a plumber. Plumbers try to predict as well as possible what may work in the real world, mindful that tinkering and adjusting will be necessary since our models gives us very little theoretical guidance on what (and how) details will matter. This essay argues that economists should seriously engage with plumbing, in the interest of both society and our discipline.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9763f79d1c3659705bf15f884d979485970b841

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In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

Education in Africa: What Are We Learning? (2020, unknown): “As Duflo (2017) writes, “our models give us very little theoretical guidance on what (and how) details will matter.””
Taking State-Capacity Research to the Field: Insights from Collaborations with Tax Authorities (2019, unknown): “(2011), Ariel (2012), Del Carpio (2013), Fellner et al. (2013), Ortega and Sanguinetti (2013), Harju et al.”
From Proof of Concept to Scalable Policies: Challenges and Solutions, with an Application (2017, background): “Randomized controlled trials consistently find low impact of microcredit on beneficiaries (for a recent review, see Banerjee, Karlan, and Zinman 2015).”