Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders | Conversations with Tyler

Hello everyone, welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today the guest is Michael Kremer, recent Nobel laureate in economics. Michael, welcome.

Thanks.

Obviously you're famous as an economist, but I'd like to start with the notion of Michael Kremer as founder. In my notes I have it that you founded at least 5 nonprofits with a 6th to come. What is it about founding that for you is so enjoyable?

Oh, that's, um, I do like doing that. And, you know, I guess it's great to feel like you're having an impact on people's lives. And I think that some of the things that I've founded have gone on to have that impact. Yeah, that's very exciting. And it's obviously also an intellectual challenge to think about how to put things together and how to grow a team and get something moving.

But what comparative advantage of yours is it using? So a lot of economists will produce ideas and let other people do all the founding, right? So what is it that you bring to founding that's special to you?

So, you know, I think one of the things, as— I think there's a lot of relationship between the experimental method and the things that are needed to help found organizations. And I think that's something that I think there's historically in economics, you know, many of us have seen research as something that's divorced from doing things in the real world, and in some cases, even antithetical to it. I think that's really different in many other fields. You know, if you look at— nobody thinks it's strange that people who are in computer science go on to found firms, or that people who are researchers in biology go on sometimes to found firms. Obviously, the plenty of people in computer science or in biology who aren't interested in that. But people don't think it's strange that there's some people in those fields who do. And I think we're now getting to a time in economics where— I don't think I'm unique in this. I think many economics researchers, researchers in development economics in particular, have gone on to found organizations. And those have had real impact. So let me— I could explain a little bit more about— I don't think this is exclusively tied to development economics and to the experimental method, but I could explain a little bit more about why I think the experimental method and contemporary development economics research does have a natural affinity for that.

That I get, why you have a natural affinity. So if I think about your O-ring model, as you know, that predicts— the less productive people in an organization, in a way, drag down the productivity of the more productive people. Now, you're one of the most productive people. You might think, according to O-ring theory, you know, maybe you should found with Abhijit and Esther, but not with anyone else, right? There's not a certain kind of comparative advantage in that model. So, how do you think about the economics of you as founder? What— how should I model that?

Well, you know, I think that I'll just give an example. I guess the most recent thing that I've been involved in founding— co-founding— was an organization called Precision Agriculture for Development. And what that organization does is it works on mobile phone-based agricultural extension. At least, that's where it started. Now broadening out. And that's something that requires— we use tools from experimental economics, we do A/B tests, we use ideas from behavioral economics. So, it's using a lot of tools from economics, but it also takes a bunch of many other skills to found things and to operate an organization. So, I don't think it's a matter of there's other people being less skilled. I think it's a matter of people being skilled in different areas.

Do you think you will ever found a for-profit in developing economies?

I don't have any plans to, but I don't know. I don't always have plans in advance, so who knows.

And what's the first organization you founded or co-founded?

The first organization was an organization called WorldTeach, which placed volunteers. I spent a year teaching secondary school in Kenya, and after teaching in Kenya, when I was living in Kenya, I'd be asked to teach in schools frequently. And it was, uh, there were at that particular time, I think situations really changed, there was a lot of demand for for teachers. And there were lots of people in the US who are interested in volunteering. So it seemed there was a role for something to match them together. So that organization— that was one organization. But I've more recently— I guess a lot of people who found NGOs often go on— or found organizations— sometimes go on to be funders. People go from being founders of for-profit nonprofit tech firms to being VCs. And, you know, one organization I've been involved in for 10 years now is Development Innovation Ventures, which is part of the U.S. Agency for International Development. And what USAID does is— sorry, what Development Innovation Ventures does is it helps invest in innovations for development. Sometimes those are nonprofit organizations, sometimes they're for-profit, sometimes they're started by development economics researchers. Sometimes they're started by others. And one of the reasons why I think— why I was saying that I don't think this is something unique to me is that when we look at our track record, we see quite a few— I think a really strong record of success. And a lot of that is development economics researchers.

Now, your current work on advanced market commitment. Why do you think that advanced market commitment is more politically popular than patent buyouts?

Right, um, so maybe it's useful for me to give a little bit of background on this. I had written an academic article many years ago proposing a particular way to— that the public sector could— the government could buy out patents and then put the to put the intellectual property in the public domain. And the idea is this would provide a way of rewarding innovators without some of the distortions that accompany monopolies. And, you know, I think I liked the idea academically, but it didn't really go anywhere politically. And, you know, the idea was, I was thinking very much about pharmaceuticals. I think— this is speculation, but I think the pharmaceutical firms are very— they're obviously very attached to the current system of intellectual property. And I think they felt that— they may have felt that if they sold their patents and put them in the public domain, that would weaken the legitimacy of that system, or it was just very different than what they were used to, whereas the idea of selling their products wasn't so much. And so you can avoid some of the distortions of monopoly. One of the key distortions of monopoly is that when the price is high, when there's monopoly pricing, less of this gets sold. When less of this gets sold, that's harmful for many products. But in the case of pharmaceuticals, that can be that can be very harmful to human health. So the approach was commit in advance to buy the efficient quantity at the— and for some products, in particular vaccines, it's fairly easy to know roughly what the efficient quantity is in advance. So commit to buy that in advance. And then that can get to the— both create incentive for vaccine development and the efficient quantity to be to be purchased. In the case of many childhood vaccines, the efficient quantity is enough to vaccinate pretty much the entire birth cohort. Obviously, in practice, you can't reach quite everybody. So that idea was— that idea did turn out to be politically acceptable. And a number of countries, together with the Gates Foundation, pledged $1.5 billion to— finance the purchase of a vaccine against the disease called pneumococcus. But in particular, there was already a vaccine for the strains of pneumococcus that were common in the developed world. But no firm had yet developed a vaccine against the strains of pneumococcus that were common in the developing world. So they pledged that if firms did develop that, they would purchase it, or they would help finance the purchase. And that led to 3 different pneumococcus vaccines have now been developed against the strains that are common in the developing world. And 700,000— hundreds of millions of people have been vaccinated. And 700,000 lives are estimated to have been saved by those pneumococcus vaccines. So I think that's a tremendous example of a success. I would actually— often when we think about founding, we think about founding organizations. That wasn't the case of founding an organization. But it was a case where a lot of issues had to be thought through, the economics issues, but many other issues as well. And the policy took— or I don't want to say the policy took off, really. Policy was adopted in the case of pneumococcus. And then there's been additional work to try to use this in other other settings as well, and a few other examples.

So the political economy and legitimacy issues aside, is the main micro difference between patent buyouts and advanced market commitment simply price versus quantity uncertainty, or is there some other kind of strategic behavior that might make advanced market commitment better? How do you think about that trade-off? Let's say you didn't know what was the quantity that you needed.

Yeah, so I think it's very hard to— I think it's very very hard to use advanced market commitments for innovations that you don't even know that you need ahead of time. So in the case of, let's say, malaria vaccine, we can say, look, we know we need a malaria vaccine. And you can— you could potentially say we have a process, FDA trials or the European equivalents or others, for deciding when something has passed that goal. So then you can use an advanced market commitment. If you think about the opposite case, let's say the Post-it note, you know, we didn't know we needed the Post-it note until it was developed. So it's very hard to have an advanced market commitment or a prize or something like that to incentivize the development of innovations that we never knew we needed until they were invented. And so I personally think it would be worth seeing if we could explore patent buyouts as well. I think that there's a different— they're a different tool for encouraging innovation that's worth considering.

Do you think your ideas on advanced market commitment can improve, say, how military procurement is done today, or do you view that as another example of advanced market commitment? Is there something special to doing something in very limited doses? So malaria vaccine, COVID-19 vaccine, there's a sort of hit-and-run approach. You enter, you leave. It's hard for outside parties to game the system very much. But if you do it over decades, there's Eisenhower's military-industrial complex and the big mess that you get, right, with high costs, a lot of overruns. Is that AMC or is that somehow people not heeding your work?

Oh, so I would say— okay, so I— let me break that into pieces. So, you know, I think one question that you raised is, oh, if you do this over time, maybe people learn to game the system. I think that could be true, but I also think that the system designers will learn over time how to do it. And I think that's one big insight from the experimental method that, you know, it's not just the experimental method, but we've sort of rediscovered it there, which is something that every founder, every innovator knows, which is it's not a one-time event. You've gotta, you need a continual cycle of testing, adapting, and, you know, coming up with a new version, et cetera. So I think there are a lot of details in how you implement an advanced market commitment. I don't wanna claim that, you know, everything that the pneumococcus advanced market commitment got everything right. I think it probably could be improved over time. So hopefully, there'll be learning on both sides of the table. On this issue of the political economy, let me— without going to the military example, let me say one thing that I am concerned about with advanced market commitments, which is I think there's a tendency So when Rachel Glennerster and I wrote a book on advanced market commitments proposing the idea, we focused on malaria. We then set up— I was involved in co-chairing a working group at the Center for Global Development. That working group recommended both a technologically distant target like malaria and a technologically closer target, pneumococcus. What the political system went with was that technologically closer target, pneumococcus. And I think that partly is due to political economy reasons. The politicians want a quick win. The bureaucrats want a quick win. And their firms or other entities that are going to be pushing the things that they think they've got a technological advantage on, they're technologically close. So I think that is an issue. And I think, personally, I think it would be, in terms of the economics, I think it would make sense to really try a technologically distant product. I think some of the— I think there's some advantages of advanced market commitments for technologically distant products. So that's the political economy issue that I would say is— I don't want to claim it's the only one, but that's the one that's most prominent for me.

Is there something you would nominate that's specific? So solar-powered space stations, a trip to Mars, or What do you want to do?

Yeah, well, look, I would love to have, say, a malaria vaccine, I think would be a great example. I think there are— let me give you another example. And look, I'm going to give examples that are from the world of development economics. But I completely agree with you. These could be used in many other settings as well. So a lot of people in developing countries cook with— a small fire in their house. And that creates incredible indoor air pollution. And that's estimated to kill millions of people a year. It also produces not just carbon emissions, but some things that are— some chemicals are actually much worse for global warming than that per unit of volume. And there have been efforts to develop cleaner stoves. And that— now, those haven't gone that far, in part because they haven't found something that consumers want to use. So I think that's actually a great case for an advanced market commitment, because part of the idea of an advanced market commitment is you have to meet certain technological thresholds, but you also need to get customers willing to put up something. So we could say, look, if somebody produced a cleaner stove. And if consumers were willing to pay $10 for it, then there could be an additional $20 or $30 worth of subsidy, for example. I mean, details would have to be thought out. But that would be another example. But sure, just so— we could have things to reduce recidivism rates. We could have programs to address educational challenges. Whole host of areas in high-income countries or in the United States where we could really— there are technological challenges that for whatever reason are not attracting quite the level of effort that tech companies are putting into other fields. And if we want more innovation, we could promise to reward that.

If you think the market risk premium is off, for very large investments for biomedical research. Do you think the same is true for smaller investments? You know, what are the micro foundations of what goes wrong with the market risk premium on biomedical investment? Does it plague all venture capital firms for biomedical ideas or just the big stuff because it's a liquidity issue? And so for vaccines, we need advanced market commitment, but for ordinary investments, venture capital will work just fine. What's your view?

Oh, there may be issues around risk. That's not necessarily where I would go first in terms of the market failures associated with vaccines. The first market failure associated with vaccines is just a straight communicable disease. If we thought about individuals buying vaccines on their own, when I take a vaccine, that benefits— well, would benefit you if you were closer nearby. But indirectly, it even benefits you because I don't infect somebody, they don't infect somebody. Eventually that they don't infect you.

You could subsidize only the buyers, right? You could have vaccine vouchers, let the production side take care of itself, and capture the externality that way. But presumably, there's something wrong with the generation mechanism.

So it turns out there's a whole host of distortions here. So we do subsidize vaccines. Governments do a lot of the purchasing. But governments are— I think then there's a commitment problem, at least in some countries. Governments aren't necessarily going to pay the full social value of the vaccine. They may pay less than that. And if that's the case, then firms might not be adequately incentivized— they may be incentivized, but maybe not adequately incentivized to produce the good. If we think about something like malaria, for example, there are many different governments involved, many— for example, many small African countries. No one of those countries has an incentive to say, well, let's let's pay a price that would generate the socially appropriate incentives to develop a malaria vaccine. So there's a global public good problem there in addition to everything else. So there's quite a few distortions in vaccine markets. I think that in general, however, we don't think that monopolists capture— or innovators capture that much of the value. It's a fairly small fraction. People have estimated the social rate of return to private investment in R&D often estimate numbers like 70%. So I don't think it's limited to vaccines. That might be an extreme case. But I would actually be in favor of trying to boost R&D incentives in a wide variety of fields, not just some of the ones that we've mentioned so far.

I've seen estimates. They're actually from one of the groups you founded that a deworming pill could cost as little as $0.50 a year per person in many parts of Africa. So why isn't deworming done much more?

Oh, I've actually been very— you could say the glass is half full. You could say the glass— or half empty. You could say it's half full. Or you could say it's almost 3/4 full. I think it's about 3/4 full. So when I first got involved in deworming, it was testing a small NGO program. We found phenomenal effects of that. So the original work found education, health gains, and education gains. Now we've found, we've tracked people over 20 years, and we're seeing people have better standard of living. They're earning more. Following the early results, we presented the results to the government of Kenya, to the World Bank. Kenya scaled this up nationally. Then in part with assistance from the World Bank, primarily just in conveying some of that information, Indian states started doing it. And then the national government of India took this on. So they're reaching— a little bit hard to know the exact numbers, but probably 150 million people a year. Many other countries are doing this as well. So it's actually quite widely adopted.

But there's still a massive residual, right? What's your best explanatory theory of why the residual isn't smaller? It would seem to be a vote winner. African countries fiscally are in much better shape than they used to be. They're more democratic. Public health looks much better. The response to COVID-19 has probably been better than many people expected. Say in Senegal, possibly in Kenya. So why not do deworming more?

So, you know, I think that there is— the people who have worms are pretty poor people. The richer people are less likely to have worms within a given society. Richer people are probably more politically influential. There's also something about, you know, if worms are they gradually build up in your body. And one worm is not going to do that much damage. The problem is when you've got lots of worms in your body. And even there, it's going to take time. So it's not— I've had malaria. I don't think I've had worms. I hope I haven't. When you have malaria, you feel terrible. And you go from feeling fine to feeling terrible. And then you take the medicine, you feel great afterwards. With worms, it's much more like a chronic thing. And when you expel the worms from your body, that's sort of gross. And so I don't think even at the individual level do you have quite the demand that would be commensurate with the scale of the problem. That's sort of a behavioral economics explanation. So I think there are political issues. And then I think there are behavioral issues. I would actually say that— a huge, huge issue. This sounds very boring, but this falls between the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education. You know, the, the, the— and each one of them has different priorities. You know, the Ministry of Health is going to be— they're worried about delivering things through clinics. They're worried about HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, as they should be. Ministry of Education thinks, you know, our job is to they're worried about teacher strikes. So it's very easy for something that falls between— either to fall between the cracks or be the victim of turf wars. And it sounds too small to be— how can that really get in the way? But I think anybody who spent time working in governments understands those things can very easily get in the way. In some ways, it's surprising. How much progress has been made. But I do— I'm actually— here's one way the political economy works in favor. You mentioned democracy. I think that's a factor. I think when you've got— I actually find— I don't want to be necessarily a big fan of politicians, but in some ways politicians hear how much this costs, and they think they can affect that many people for that small amount of money and they're like, hey, I want to get on that, you know, maybe I could, you know, this is something I can claim as an achievement. So, um, I, you know, I— we saw that in Kenya, we saw that in India.

If I think of Michael Kremer on the issue of economic growth, I see at least three stands— strands, rather. The first is the very famous population paper. There's a kind of increasing returns with market size. The second is your, I think, 1993 JME paper with Larry Summers, "Good Policy or Good Luck?" where growth rates vary a great amount and a lot of that is due to luck or positive real shocks. And then there's the work on education, which would seem to imply growth is pretty stable over time because human capital doesn't change that rapidly. The current Michael Kremer of 2020, sort of, how do you put that all together and think about growth in the best possible model? Where do you stand now?

So I've actually— so one insight is from the study of growth is a fundamental driver of growth in the long run is technological change. And so I think one thing that we economists should be thinking about more is what are the institutions to increase the rate of technological change and to try to direct it to human needs. And that's one of the reasons why I've been excited about advanced market commitments, patent buyouts. I think we've got a set of institutions primarily intellectual property institutions, but also research funding institutions. And those, I think we should be experimenting and trying new approaches to this and trying to improve things over time. So I would say that would be one key message about economic growth. Another paper that I'm working on recently with Jack Willis and Yang Yu —looks at something that— so when I was in graduate school in the '90s, I studied economic growth. Robert Barro was my advisor. One of the things I learned is that there's not unconditional convergence. Poor countries— some models predict poor countries would catch up to rich countries. And maybe they do if you condition on— if you take countries that have similar policies or similar human capital. But overall, poor countries don't catch up. Well, I was teaching my class, my development economics class a few years ago, and thought, well, I better update my slides. And we looked at that again. And that's totally changed. Actually, since the— this was something that was after the '90s, this pattern changed. Now poor countries are catching up to rich countries. And it's not just driven— this isn't just a matter of India and China. Or this is a broad-based phenomenon. So I think that's something that I think is very exciting and very encouraging. In a world where within certain countries, there's been increases in inequality, if you look at a global level, there's also been this tremendous lifting of people out of poverty. And I think that's very exciting.

But don't you find it puzzling that the global economy is really much larger than 40 or 50 years ago, but total factor productivity or measured rates of innovation seem to be down. Uh, the pharmaceutical pipeline, at least pre-COVID, is commonly described as drying up or slowing down, and yet there's so many more consumers out there for drugs. Does this in some way invalidate or raise doubts about increasing returns to scale theories, that maybe market size doesn't matter very much?

So my, you know, the view that I took in my paper in the '90s on this was very much, you know, follow— you know, I was a near contemporary of Chad Jones. And I think Chad's fundamental insight, you know, there are— and let me put it technically first. Chad, what's the production function for new technologies? Clearly having existing technologies helps you invent new technologies. So having calculus helps you invent spacecraft or aircraft. But on the other hand, it's not clear that it helps you— that you— that improvement in existing technologies helps you one for one in developing new technologies. In some sense, it's getting harder and harder to invent new technologies. And Chad's work at the time showed that, and more recent work that Chad has done. So we're facing a— in that world, we're facing— the task of technological advance is getting harder and harder over time. We see that at the macro level, see that at the micro level. We see that in the increasing size of teams needed to develop new innovations. The task ahead of us is getting harder. That means that there's a race between the total resources that are going into innovation and the increasing difficulty of the task. So you have those two forces operating against each other. I have no doubt that the increasing size of the market and the fact that there are now many people who are contributing to technological change is helping us. But the issue is we've got a harder and harder task ahead of us.

But if there's some constraint out there limiting the benefits from larger market size, what is indeed the constraint you would wish to target? So you're Michael Cramer, you're put in charge of everything, and you can target the constraint that's slowing down growth. What's the first thing you look at?

So yeah, if you— so the first thing I would look at is the thing that we have the most control over, which is the institutions we use to try to advance technology. And so if you believe Chad, and you know, I I do. There's just something fundamental about the technology, about the progress of technology, which means that it's getting harder over time to have a constant growth rate of technology. We invent more technology, but we don't increase the growth rate over time. And that's just something inherent about technology. Obviously, that could change. It could be that when we get AI working well enough, we actually get to an incredibly virtuous cycle and, you know, we head off to a singularity where, um, you know, the AI gets smarter and smarter over time. So there's nothing— we don't know whether that's a fundamental constraint, but if that's— whether that's a constraint or not, there's not much we can do about it. But what we can do is we can think about the myriad institutions. We talked about IP institutions. There's also research funding questions. Should we be funding research the way we do, or should we be saying 'Look, it's not a matter of writing a grant proposal. You know, after— once you're 5 years past the PhD, we're going to fund you based on what you've accomplished, not based on your grant proposal.' That's a, you know, one example. I have no idea what the question is— what the answer is to that. Should we have— you know, should the committees be different size than they are now? Should they be— should we say that we're going to fund something as long as somebody really likes it, rather than take the average of the committee view? When we're thinking about government grants. There's a bunch of questions about what the optimal way to do research funding is. And I think we should be experimenting with this, trying to learn more about how do we set up institutions to— you know, there's questions about research publication process to try— that's the thing that we can control. And I think that should be a priority for anybody who cares about economic growth.

Let's say the current Michael Kramer sets up another high school in Kenya. What is it that you would do that the current high schools in Kenya are not doing? What would you change?

You're in charge. Right. So I think we've, you know, the— I think we've learned a lot in education research in recent years. So one thing that we saw in Kenya but was also seen in India and many other places is that it's very easy for kids to fall behind the curriculum. Curricula in developing countries tend to be set at a fairly high level, similar to what you would see in developed countries. However, kids are facing all sorts of disadvantages, and there are all sorts of problems in the way the system works. There's often high teacher absence. Kids are sick. Kids don't have the preparation at home often. So kids can fall behind the curriculum. But whereas we've had the slogan in the US of No Child Left Behind, in developing country education systems focus on kids at the top of the distribution. So what's been found is if you can set up— and there are a whole variety of different ways to do this— either remedial education systems or some technology-aided systems that are adaptive that go to where the kid is. Seen huge gains from this in India, and we're starting to see adoption of this in, in in Africa as well. And that can have a very big impact at quite low cost. Another thing is, I think it's called structured pedagogy, which is just providing very detailed lesson plans for teachers. And that can be done in a variety of ways. And we're seeing big effects from that as well. So the good news here, as in a lot of development, is we if we try a variety of things and if we think about it using theory and using the tools of economics and tools of other disciplines, we can really make progress.

Does it work just to pay the students for better grades?

So, I've— I'm— you know, my understanding— I'm not an expert on that type of work, let me give you two contrasting results. So I think some of Roland Fryer's work on that, if I remember right, was in the US, wasn't so encouraging. But I'll tell you one thing that I think I am reasonably excited about. So I'd done some work with Rebecca Thornton and Willa Friedman and Ted Miguel on scholarships. Where— so in a lot of developing countries, you have to pay something to go, at least to go to secondary school, if not primary school. Even primary school, it's officially free, but there are often fees. So there was a program in Kenya that said if kids did well up at 6th grade, their fees would be covered for 7th and 8th grade. And these were in poor schools, so you know this was going to poor kids. So what we saw was obviously there's a direct benefit of allowing kids, more kids to go on to higher grades of school, but we also saw that kids were putting in more effort in response to this, and not just the kids at the top of the distribution but throughout the distribution. It also looked like teachers were putting in more effort as well because they, they were motivated to try and help their students do better. So I think having some sort of MERIT Scholarship Program is something that, you know, I don't want— look, there are some flaws in our paper. I don't want to claim we should have— I don't know whether we should scale up. Maybe we should because it doesn't seem— saying that kids who do well in school can go on to the next level of education doesn't seem that controversial. So maybe we should scale it up. I don't want to claim the evidence is totally definitive on it. We could test this more, learn about how to make it work. But I think this is the type of program that also deserves you know, should be part of a system, probably should be part of a system and certainly deserves more testing.

One strand of your work concerns peer effects. There's your paper on the Hajj and its influence on college roommates, your paper on alcohol use. So if peer effects are so strong in the United States, again, say in high school, how should we restructure how we treat honors classes? Should we have more of them, fewer of them? What's the right way to think about what you might call intellectual segregation in this country?

Yeah, it's a great question, great question, um, and I, uh, I don't want to claim that I've, um, I, I, I don't know the answer to the question, but I think we should try and find out. Let me just— I believe there have been some results. I'm not, not super familiar with those, um, with the papers, but I believe there's been very positive results from peer mentoring programs. I believe that some results in Italy very recently from this. So if you can create incentives for students to help each other out, that can be very positive. Now that does require sort of changing— this does not seem to be a problem in most developing country education systems I know. But certainly, the US can have a— system where it's not cool to do well in school and can have a culture like that, or not cool to do too well in school. I don't see that in Kenya, or I don't hear about that in India. But thinking about how can we set up a system of incentives and rewards to try to address that is a really interesting question. So I have two— so despite saying this isn't even a problem in Kenya, Two students, Ronak Jain and Brandon Tan, who have some, I think, very exciting— they're very preliminary, so I don't want to— you know, I don't want to— more work needs to be done on this, but they have some very exciting results for Kenya suggesting that— you were talking about it's paying kids to do well as individuals. So they've been trying something at the level of the classroom as a whole where they reward the classroom as a whole for doing well.. And you can imagine that can create— possibly create a culture in the class as a whole where you want each other to do well. And their initial results on this are actually extremely promising.

Here's a few questions from outside of economics. Ugali is arguably the Kenyan national dish. Does it taste good?

No, not to my taste. There are Kenyan dishes that do. There's a mixture of corn and beans that I like. And then there's— I have had ugali that was delicious in fancy restaurants in Nairobi that Isaac Mbiti took me to. But in general, it's a little bland. Yeah.

Why doesn't Harvard Square have food as good as that you can get in Kenya? A lot of purchasing power, obviously high level of education. But it's terrible.

Yeah, I think there's something about— I don't know if this is the case, but I think transient populations that turn over a lot may be associated with worse quality food, but I'm not sure.

Out of Africa, the movie, do you like it? Is it any good?

Oh, gosh. So long ago since I saw it. I don't remember it. Yeah, I don't remember the movie at all.

What's the ideal Kenya trip? Say I come to you. I say, Michael, I'm going to Kenya. I have 2 weeks. Obviously safari, but what else should I do?

So the great thing about— yes, I'm very happy to be a tourism ambassador for Kenya. It's really a great country to visit. So if you're into mountains, there's Mount Kenya. There's the coast. There is— but I think for— I think you're totally right that obviously the top thing for Americans would be a safari because you can get mountains and you can get beaches other places. The coast of Kenya, it's not just the beaches. It's the Swahili culture that's a very interesting blend of cultures there. But I think game parks have to be very high on the agenda for people. And Nairobi right now is a cosmopolitan, exciting city. It's a happening place in a way that it— I didn't feel that way about it in the late '80s or early '90s. But now, it's a very exciting place to be. And if you talk about where you can get good food, you can get good food of a lot of different types. In Nairobi, so I wouldn't— Not Harvard Square.

No. What's interesting about reading James Joyce?

Yeah, I was just rereading Dubliners recently. The—

It's also about development economics. It is, it is, it is.

It's about a place that was a colony and trying to get out of that situation and with, you know, people living very constricted lives. And, you know, I guess, look, I don't want to claim this is the most interesting thing about reading that, but it's a I was talking about Nairobi being a happening place. Well, I was in Ireland recently. That's a happening place as well. It's not the Dublin of Dubliners anymore. And I guess I would say this is— if I think about— I was talking about convergence recently. The world is— things are really improving in a lot of the world. It can be very easy to forget that in a time of COVID a time of all the other problems that we're having right now. But people are freer, and people are leading more exciting, more open, less constrained lives. What's your favorite novel? Um, you know, I don't know whether it's a novel, but maybe The Odyssey.

Why The Odyssey?

There are so many, so many rich archetypical stories in there, um, and, you know, the, um, and, um, you know, I, it's hard for me to say why. I just, uh, I just, you know, when I've gone back to it, I, I, you know, I, I really enjoy it.

So it's again a comparative development tale, right? Autarky doesn't work. War is bad for economic growth, don't take too many drugs. Okay, good point, good point.

I hadn't thought of it that way, but yes.

Literature as a whole arguably makes one believe more in what would sometimes be called a cultural backwardness theory of economic underdevelopment. So there's something in Dubliners about the perspectives people have on situations. They're remarkably local. And they're keen and they're perceptive and they're highly emotional. But the arc at which people make comparisons typically is a very small circle. And Ireland, when it joins the EU and even before then, is changing that, I think.

Yeah, yeah, um, it's a great, um, yeah, it's a, it's a great point. I You know, if you think about— so I actually, as an undergraduate, I didn't study economics. I did a program called social studies. We read Weber, among other people. Weber talked about the role of culture in influencing economics. There was a lot of modern development economics was a reaction to that and perhaps a warranted reaction because I think a lot of Weber himself, obviously very sophisticated, maybe wrong, but very sophisticated, not simplistic. —but there was a lot of simplistic analysis of Confucian societies will never grow, or Hindu societies will— the Hindu rate of growth is inherently low. So people were making clearly statements that were just wrong, turned out to be wrong. But even before that, economists said, look, We don't need to— the founding of development, modern development economics, was that people are poor but rational. And we can use the same tools of economics to analyze people in low-income countries as high-income countries. And that was— I think there's a lot to be said for that. But I think what we've realized with behavioral economics is that people in high-income countries are not completely rational either. And there are certain patterns in the way that they're not rational. Now, those things can play out differently in low-income countries and high-income countries just due to different institutions. But what you're suggesting is something much stronger than that, that there can be certain ways of thinking embodied in culture. And I think those are interesting ideas. And people like Nathan Nun or Alberto Alesina are doing very exciting work on culture and economics. I think we need to learn— we have a lot more to learn about how far we can take that, and— but I think it's a— I think there's exciting work going on in that area. We have to be careful, but— and avoid some of the simplistic approaches of the past. And I also think, just come back to this point about convergence, you know, one of the things that a lot of the work on economic history and on culture in particular has emphasized just how long-lasting things are. Whether societies use the plow thousands of years ago affects society today. That's the claim. And I'm very open to those ideas. But what we've also seen is low-income countries really catching up remarkably quickly to higher-income countries. And that suggests that, you know, we shouldn't take, uh, looking into talking about culture as indicating that there's no possibility, uh, for development or for change. There's, there's clearly that possibility. We've seen it country after country.

In your own intellectual development, what did you learn from your mom?

You know, my mother was, um, My mother wrote about literature on the Holocaust, and, um, you know, one thing that, one thing that I think that brings out is that when there are issues that we can do something about, you know, we need to do something about them. We, we shouldn't, uh, we shouldn't wait. And, um, and obviously there were people who did things that very great cost to themselves in that situation. And they're doing— right now in COVID, are doing things, are risking their lives to help people get through the COVID crisis. I work on international development. That's at least in part because I feel like there's— we have— this is something that at actually fairly low cost to ourselves, we can help address these problems. The case of deworming. This is something that costs 50 cents a year to address. And I think this is— I guess those values did influence me.

At this point in your career, why move to University of Chicago, as you're doing this fall, basically as we speak?

Right. No, I'm speaking to you from Chicago. They let you into your office? I'm in my office. That's remarkable.

I didn't know that was allowed.

Yeah, no, no, we can— we have to go through certain precautions, but I'm speaking to you from my new office at the University of Chicago. Chicago obviously has a wonderful tradition in economics. One of the things that I was very excited about was I talked to President Zimmer here of the university, the president of the University of Chicago. And I was excited about— you talked about experience as a founder. And I've talked about technological change and the need for technological change, for changes in technology, by which I don't mean gadgets. But I don't just mean gadgets. I mean institutional change, innovation in policies as well. And I think what we've seen is there's a lot of potential to generate that. University of Chicago made a big commitment to development economics in general. And I hope we'll be hiring more people over time. And certainly the slots will be there for that. And to create a development innovation lab, which I think will use the tools of economics to create practical innovations that can improve people's lives. And to work closely with partners to develop and refine and iterate on those innovations. So that they can be scaled up. And I think what we've seen, what I've been seeing in my own research, what's true with a lot of research of J-PAL, Poverty Action Lab at MIT, and what I've seen in the USAID's Development Innovation Ventures is, when you're investing in that type of technology, it's not that, anytime you're investing in innovation, most innovations don't succeed, they don't take off.. But you get a few. If you're a venture capitalist and you invest in a Google or Facebook, it's fine if a lot of your other investments don't work. And I think it's same thing in investing in development innovation. And when we did an analysis of the rate of return, we tried to get a lower bound on the rate of return for the early investments that development innovation ventures at USAID made. And we're getting a 5-to-1 lower bound, and it's super conservative lower bound. I think we'll have a much higher rate in our next iteration of this. And, you know, that's looking— just to be clear what a lower bound this is, you know, we invested in— we had 41 innovations in our early portfolio. We looked at the— we couldn't quantify the benefits for all of them, but there were— we found 4 of them that reached, you know, of the 9 or 10 that reached over 1 million users. We could quantify the benefits for 4. If you take the benefits of those 4 and set them against the cost of our investments in all 41, the ratio is 5 to 1. And so I think— and that's already, and I think that that will grow over time. So I just think there's a huge, huge reward to investing in innovation. There's also a scientific reward. And University of Chicago is making a big commitment in that area. And that's what— big part of why I came here.

So you were tempted by the ability to found a new institution? Yeah, in part, yes.

That was a, that was a huge motivation for me, and I'm very excited about it.

And what is it you think that you, as someone who studied organizations, know about managing institutions that maybe just regular managers would not know?

So You know, there's— I think that if you're working in modern development economics, in particular if you're using the experimental approach, you know, some of the things that economists— the stereotype of economists is not paying attention to— you're forced to pay attention to. So let me give you a few examples. You know, one of the— part of the reason why I originally got into doing experiments was to isolate causal impact, to disentangle, you know, is it really— is it a particular program is it the program that's causing something or a particular intervention, or is it something else? And I think experiments are very good for that. But when you're doing experiments, you're typically working on a— you've got— you're typically working on a concrete problem because that's what organizations— they're doing the experiment because they want to solve that problem. And you have to get to know the people who work in that institution. You also have to get to know the ultimate customer. You know, one of the things that business books will tell you is know your customer. And that means, you know, Yes, you want to learn the statistics on the customers, but you also want to talk to the customers. And so development economists will go— typically go— if it's an education program they're studying, they'll talk to kids, they'll talk to the teachers, they'll talk to the school principals. You get in the habit of doing that, and that's very useful for thinking about— for, I think, for innovation more broadly. Another thing is, as a researcher, you— and this would be true for any type of researcher— but, you know, you're presenting your research in seminars and you're getting feedback on it, you're getting criticism on it, and you're going back and revising things. I think that's actually very useful for management. One of the problems that managers can have is, you know, you can convince yourself— and I think this might be particularly true in development— you can convince yourself that what you're doing is the right way to do things, the only way to do things,— it's very useful to— and you may not get feedback otherwise because in research you do. And I think that's a, you know, great thing about academics. The— I think one thing about the development— modern development economics and experimental economics is that it's iterative. So, you try one thing, then either the same researchers or other researchers try to improve on it again. And it's a constant cycle. That's, again, something that management books will tell you is very important. So I think there are a bunch— you also get used to working with people. You have to raise money. You have to work with NGOs or governments or firms to talk to them about randomizing. So there's a whole bunch of skills that actually are applicable beyond just, you know, writing a paper. So, you know, if I think about— if you think about, you know, GiveDirectly, that's an organization that, you know, it's a very successful NGO but founded by development economists, Paul Niehaus, and— but there are many, many others who are doing things like this. And I think it's— I think, again, in many other fields, this wouldn't seem like a strange combination of being a researcher and also being a founder.

Final question: when it comes to advanced market commitment, what is the very next thing you will be doing?

So I'm doing a lot of work on the problem of COVID and some of this work is with people who are involved in the pneumococcus advanced market commitment— Chris Snyder, Jing Lei, others. But we're also working with some other industrial organization economists, for example, Susan Athey. And when we think about this problem, I think the problem of getting a COVID vaccine is different in some important ways. And that's something, again, something that economics and being close to research and theory will tell you. So I think it's— you know, just to be clear, I'm not— so, you know, sometimes people have a stereotype of experimentation as opposed to theory. I think they're strongest when they're linked. So what we've— well, we've said— we've— there's a number of different things we've suggested, but one of them is that— and is— and this is, uh, you know, very much, uh, with your colleague Alex Tabarrok. Is a very simple one is the world economy is losing $500 billion every month due to COVID. And that means that it's worth investing a lot in trying to develop a COVID vaccine, even though there's a pretty high risk of failure. And it's also worth getting lots of shots on goal. Now, for a variety of reasons, which I could go into, the private returns from building out a to build a very large factory for vaccine before we know whether the vaccine is going to work, before testing is complete, are much less than the social returns. I think in this particular case, you probably want to— it probably makes sense for governments to offer to cover— you probably want a mix of push incentives and pull incentives, some reward for success, but also just some upfront financing for building those factories ahead of time.. And that's what we've been arguing for. And a bunch of countries are doing things like that. So the US, Operation Warp Speed, but many other countries are putting in orders for vaccine even ahead of the time the vaccine has been proven to work. So obviously, risk involved, but it's very much a risk worth taking. There are other lessons that are coming out of the industrial organization of this. Like, it's very important to invest in supply chain capacity, not just in the— production of the ultimate vaccine. We might want to consider ways to get some of the early information from the trials out so that we can use it even before the trial is finished. We can use it to invest optimally in manufacturing. So a lot of insights from studying the economics of this. And that's obviously a critically important problem. And policymakers seem, again, You know, you could say, is the glass half full or half empty? I would say the glass is at least partially full. I'd like policymakers to be investing more in this, but they are starting to invest, and they are starting to do these contracts well in advance of availability with the vaccine.

Michael Kramer, thank you very much. Great, thank you.