When I started college, I started reading harder books. I noticed something no one had told me about: Only some of them made sense. In some cases (e.g., Theory of the Leisure Class), there was a general statement I could understand and examples that clearly supported it. In other cases (e.g., Freud), I had difficulty understanding what was being said. I stopped reading the puzzling stuff.
I thought of this experience when, thanks to Marginal Revolution, I read Michael Clemens’s comments on how the Millennium Village project should be evaluated. This makes sense, I thought. His points are clear and he has evidence for them. (I wish he hadn’t used the words scientific and scientifically, which confuse me, but that’s minor.)Â In contrast, when Jeffrey Sachs explains the absence of comparison villages like this:
he [Sachs] does not like the idea of going into a village, subjecting poor people to a battery of questions and then leaving them empty-handed.
I’m confused. In grad school I learned that a good way to test for causality in an experiment is to test different dosages of the treatment; if the treatment has an effect, different dosages should have different effects. (And the two groups will be more alike than a treated group and an untreated group.) Other villages could have been given small amounts of aid in return for cooperation.
The whole Millennium Village Project reminds me of a 7th-grade science-class demonstration I mentioned earlier. Our teacher, Mr. Tanguay, put a bunch of ingredients (water, sodium, calcium, etc.) mimicking the composition of the human body into a big graduated cylinder. This is what the human body is made of, he said. When we put them all together let’s see if we get life. The final ingredient he added caused the whole thing to swirl around for a little while but needless to say there was no life.
The easy way to create life is to connect new ingredients with existing life. (As I do when I make kombucha and kefir.) Likewise, the easy way to create new economic life is to connect dead economies with existing economic life. It can be as simple as people in poor villages moving to cities, as is happening in China. No one is paying them to move. To pump money into this or that poor Chinese village could easily delay the migration — which is why the long-term effects of the Millennium Village Project could easily be negative.
And speaking of books that make no sense, I once had a girlfriend whose favorite book was Memories, Dreams, Reflections/i>, by Carl Jung. I tried reading it, but I never made it past the half-way point. It seemed like the most unbelievable collection of pretentious, pseudo-profound codswallop. But a small part of me had some doubt — perhaps I was just too stupid to understand the depths of Jung’s thinking. Thus, many years later, it was gratifying for me to read the following book review of a biography of Jung:
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Jung was a preternaturally unclear writer and thinker: he would never say anything clearly when obfuscation would do. Whether this was from lack of talent or an unconscious appreciation that clarity led to the possibility of contradiction and even refutation, no one can say…
What was Jung’s lasting legacy? He founded a small and on the whole harmless esoteric psychotherapeutic cult. His doctrines will never attract large numbers of people because his writings and teachings are diffuse, contradictory, and overloaded with erudition that partakes more of pedantry than of scholarship. […]
To read Jung is to enter a world more of connotation than of denotation, of meanings hinted at rather than expressed forthrightly. To extract a definite opinion from Jung is like trying to catch an eel with soapy hands, or trap steam with a butterfly net. His esoteric erudition is formidable: it is difficult to refute a man who will not say what he means, but backs whatever he means up with a plethora of references to fourteenth-century texts. Actually, Jung was grossly superstitious, had no idea what a logical argument was, and was capable of believing the purest nonsense.
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