Doing Economics

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 Writing Papers
3 Giving Talks
4 Navigating Peer Review
5 Finding Funding
6 Doing Service
7 Advising Students
8 Conclusion
References
Index

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Preface
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” the woman said in a pensive voice. “Everything is blowing up
around us, but there are still those who care about a broken lock, and others who are
dutiful enough to try to fix it . . . But maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe working
on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the
world is falling apart.”
—Haruki Murakami, Men without Women
This book came into being because of the pandemic.
In 2018, well before the words “COVID-19” and “coronavirus,” or even
the word “pandemic” became part of our everyday language, I went to
Rome for an event at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations. One evening over drinks, my colleague Sara Savastano suggested I
should assemble some of the material I had written on my blog since 2010
into a manual for her staff. As the new director of the International Fund for
Agricultural Development’s (IFAD) Research and Impact Assessment
(RIA) division, Sara oversaw the work of a team of economists whose job it
was to evaluate the impact of IFAD’s projects. When she started in that
position, she had found the quality of the papers produced by the RIA staff
to fall short of what it could have been, and so she had made it one of her
goals to improve the papers written by the economists in her shop.
Following that conversation, IFAD hired me as a consultant to write a
document on how to write impact evaluation papers. I delivered that how-to
manual to them in early 2020.
Although I had always planned to turn that manual into a working paper,
little did I know at the time that it would turn into what would ultimately
get me through annus horribilis 2020. Indeed, in the early days of the
COVID-19 lockdowns, I realized that if I was going to maintain my sanity,
I would need to work on something that was different from my usual
responsibilities—and different from my new “job” as half-time
homeschooling teacher.
It was then that I realized that the how-to I had written for IFAD could
work nicely as a book chapter, and that I had similar thoughts to share on

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other aspects of doing economics. In April 2020, I pitched the idea of this
book to a number of presses. By the end of June, most of them had
responded favorably and invited me to submit a formal proposal. At the end
of August, I signed a contract with MIT Press.
As I write these lines in late fall 2020, we are headed into what looks like
a difficult winter of lockdowns due to rising COVID-19 infection rates. But
if I have learned one thing over the last year, it is that the obstacle is the
way, as Ryan Holiday put it (Holiday 2014), and that “working on the little
things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the
world is falling apart.”

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