Bryce Steinberg is a development economist, which means she studies how lower-income countries grow into more prosperous ones.

More specifically, she studies how to help people in low-income countries build their “human capital” — a phrase social scientists use to describe things like getting more formal education, more professional training, or improving your health.

As she tells Dan Richards on this episode of Trending Globally, part of the answer is well-understood.

“We have to build the schools, we have to build the clinics, we have to get the roads, get the infrastructure in place so that people can access these things,” Steinberg explains.

However, decades of development policy has made clear that access alone doesn’t solve the problem, and supplying communities with such resources doesn’t necessarily mean people will use them.

Why not?

That’s what Steinberg studies.

On this episode, Richards talks with Steinberg about her research, which seeks to better understand what she calls the “demand-side” of development policy: What makes people actually use the services that are available to them, and how to remove the barriers that stand in their way. They also discuss how development policy has evolved over the last few decades and how, with the dismantling of USAID, it may be poised to change once again.

DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. Bryce Steinberg is a development economist, which means that she studies how lower income countries grow into more prosperous ones.

More specifically, she studies how to help people in low income countries build their, quote, "human capital", a phrase economists use to describe things like getting more formal education, more professional training, or improving your health.

As she put it to me, part of the answer to the question of how to help people invest in those things is pretty well understood.

BRYCE STEINBERG: You want to send your kids to school, but there's no school in the village. You'd like to have a doctor present when you give birth, but there's no clinic where there's a doctor present.

So we have to build the schools. We have to build the clinics. We have to get the roads, getting the infrastructure in place so that people could access these things that we know are really helpful for human welfare and also to make people more productive.

DAN RICHARDS: But it turns out just building the infrastructure and supplying communities with schools and health clinics, it doesn't guarantee that people will use them. It's part of the solution but not all of it.

BRYCE STEINBERG: There's all these little barriers toward what we think of as the demand side, so what makes people want these products and how do we make these products work for people where they are.

DAN RICHARDS: Those little barriers, those are the parts that Bryce studies. And they can add up in some pretty surprising ways. In this episode, I spoke with Bryce about her research, what these little barriers can look like, what studying them can tell us about how to craft successful policy, and what these smaller stories can teach us about the biggest questions in the world of development economics today.

Later in the conversation, we also discuss how the entire topic of international development has changed with the shuttering of USAID and what it might mean for researchers like Bryce, and what it might mean for people in low income countries around the world. Here's our conversation.

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DAN RICHARDS: Bryce Steinberg , thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

BRYCE STEINBERG: Thanks for having me.

DAN RICHARDS: I wanted to start just since I think this word might come up a lot in the conversation, what do economists mean when they use the word development? How is it different from just talking about growth, say?

BRYCE STEINBERG: Yeah, the answer to that question has changed a lot maybe in the last 30 years. So historically, the beginning of the field of development economics was really about growth. It was about why are poor countries poor and what happens that makes some poor countries like Finland or Korea grow very quickly and other countries stagnate.

And then starting in the '90s and early Two Thousands, there was a few people before that. We started to think about microeconomic questions in developing countries.

A few years ago, Michael Kremer and Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee won the Nobel Prize. And Esther and Abhijit wrote a book called Poor Economics. And I think in some ways, that's almost the right label for what modern micro development economics is.

It's more about, how is economics different for people who are living much closer to subsistence? So how are the trade-offs that they have different? How are the decisions that they're making different? How do businesses operate differently in places where education levels are sometimes low?

There's not necessarily access to credit, government institutions don't work as well. So how do we change our typical models to work properly or make predictions, or help us understand places where people are living at much, much closer to subsistence levels.

And I think a lot of it also was a reaction to some of the failures of the macro level policies. We had this idea that it's all about institutions and free markets. And there was a lot of work to get countries to adopt these institutions. And in many cases, it just didn't work very well.

And so there was a frustration in the development economics world about, how do we actually help people living really close to subsistence, living in a lot of poverty? And so I think it was a rejection of these macro level policies. We can't work at the country level. We just have to start thinking about this at the individual level.

DAN RICHARDS: And does that relate to something that you have said drives a lot of your research, which is this idea that a lot of development policy, maybe too much, has been focused on the supply side of development and less on the demand side? So what do you mean by that?

BRYCE STEINBERG: So I think of the supply side as there's this essential problem that people need these things to make them more productive, and they can't access them.

So in order to solve that problem, I think, correctly, 30 years ago, the focus was really on like, we have to build the schools; we have to build the clinics; we have to get the roads, getting the infrastructure in place so that people could access these things that we know are really helpful for human welfare and also to make people more productive.

But then in some ways, there's a curse of the success of that is that there were enormous number of schools built and clinics built. And we went from in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia in many parts of the world, a minority of kids actually being literate and getting through primary school to now a majority of children get through primary and even secondary school.

But you don't get to 100. And so the question becomes, once the primary school is built in the village, maybe you go from 10% enrollment to 70% enrollment. But getting that last 30% becomes really, really hard because now the problem is not just that there's not a school there, it's why are these families still not taking up these resources?

So we see this with all sorts of stuff with vaccines. We'll have a vaccine campaign go out, but people won't take their kid, or they won't take their kid for all four shots that they need.

You'll see this with contraception. So we'll have access to contraception. We'll make free contraception. But women still won't take it up. And then they'll report having all these unwanted pregnancies. And so that becomes a much harder problem to solve, what's the barrier there.

And in different places, in different circumstances, it's different. And so a lot of the focus, I think of researchers, and I think the development policy space is a little bit slower to make this shift is toward what we think of as the demand side, so what makes people want these products and how do we make these products work for people in the context where they are.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, let's look at some examples of research you've done that's tried to answer some of these questions. You recently co-authored a paper looking at some questions around education in certain low income parts of India. And I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about that study, how did you design it and what were the findings.

BRYCE STEINBERG: Yeah. I mean, India is an example of a place where they've built an enormous number of schools since the late Nineteen Nineties. And so again, they went from really low levels of enrollment to pretty high. So now, depending on the measure, 85% to 90% of kids are in school. Fewer of them are going all the time.

But the question is like, how do we reach that last 5% to 15% of kids now that there is a primary school in every village? Actually, I've done a few studies where we've looked at both the costs and benefits side.

So on the benefits side, one of the things we found is that it really does actually take a while for information to diffuse to parents about the returns to education.

So if you're a parent who doesn't have much education, you're maybe a farmer or have a construction job or something like that, it might take you a while to understand what jobs would be available to somebody who has more education, especially when the economy is changing.

So one of the things we did to look at this is there was a big boom in the call centers in India, right after fiber optic cables were laid down. This became a really big industry of businesses would outsource their call centers to India.

And so we actually looked at where these call centers had gotten built, and we looked at the schools that were located, really, really close to those call centers. And we found that enrollment went up in those schools after the call centers were founded, and particularly in English language instruction.

DAN RICHARDS: Why is that?

BRYCE STEINBERG: We actually did a little survey around some of these call centers, and we found even within a couple of kilometers of the call center, people who were closer to the call center were more likely to say that that's a job they would want their child to have.

They knew more about the requirements of the jobs. Oh, you do need to have at least secondary school, and you needed English fluency because they were talking on the phone to customers in America, but you don't need a driver's license or something like that.

And so they just seemed really tuned in to these exact jobs that were right near them. It was interesting because economists often have these models of very seamless information transition. Something happens and everybody knows all of a sudden, but that's not how people find things out, especially in the pre-internet days.

And so in that case, we saw this gradual shift toward the new economy, where education was becoming more and more valuable, but it was gradual. It took a while. It had to filter out through people's actual contacts. Did you somebody who worked there? Did your friend's cousin get a job there? There were these really, really localized effects.

DAN RICHARDS: In other words, one barrier that can keep kids from attending school is if their parents are not aware of the economic benefits of formal schooling. Another barrier that Bryce found was the cost of attending school itself, but not the cost you might be thinking of.

BRYCE STEINBERG: So schooling is free in India, both at the primary and now at secondary school level as well. But in economics, we always like to talk about opportunity costs. So what else would these kids be doing with their time?

And so in particularly rural farming households, the thing that they would be doing with their time is helping out on the farm or helping out with domestic work. So a lot of the girls, especially, are taking care of siblings. They're making dinner; they're cleaning house; they're helping plant rice.

But when they're in school, they can't help out on the farm. And that's actually pretty costly for the parents. And so what we found, which was counterintuitive to many development economists, was that in years where there were droughts, so there's not much to be done and incomes go down a lot.

We actually saw increases in school attendance and enrollment, and test scores would go up during these droughts, which we tend to think of as a bad shock, a bad year. And usually, we just associate higher income, higher education.

But in this case, good rainfall years meant that the opportunity cost of those kids time is higher because there's planting to be done. There's weeding to be done. There's a lot more to be done on the farm. And so it was this funny thing where in the good years, the test scores were going down. And in the bad years, the test scores were going up.

So just thinking about this opportunity cost piece was missing from our typical thought about the cost of schooling. We were like, it's free, so there's no more cost for households.

DAN RICHARDS: Not to put you on the spot for creating all social welfare policy, but I feel like that really complicates then how to think about what type of policy solutions would people make with this information.

You want people to make more money, but you also want people to go to school. And as you're saying in these particular instances, they're inversely related. So how would one address that?

BRYCE STEINBERG: Yeah, I mean, this is why everyone hates economists because we're always interested in these downstream unintended consequences of really well-meaning policies.

I think one answer is just more broadly, always thinking about price effects. So economists often think about what we call income effects and price effects. And so if you increase somebody's wages, their income is going up. But you're also changing the price of their time.

DAN RICHARDS: But their time is more valuable now. So they're going to do different.

BRYCE STEINBERG: Exactly. So there's a huge program now it's called the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. So they call it NREGS generally for short. And what it is basically the government guarantees a certain number of days of paid work for rural households.

And the idea is it's supposed to be income support. It's a welfare program, but they do it through work because they want it to go to families that are really needy. And so they make you actually show up and work. And it was very successful at getting money out into these rural communities.

But what we found was when that program rolled out, there was an increase in dropout amongst adolescents from school because now there was more work to be done. So either the adolescents were working themselves for this program, or more likely, all mom is now working for NREGS because so she can earn wages out doing these programs.

And then somebody has to make dinner. Somebody has to watch the younger children. And so the daughter now has to substitute at home for the mom. They were thinking about incentivizing the adults to work in the household. But you were also incentivizing the kids to work. And so that wasn't great.

There are other kinds of programs, particularly in Latin America, they've become very popular, is what we call conditional cash transfers. But instead of conditioning them on work, instead of saying, we're going to pay if you work, the conditions are your kid has to be enrolled in school. Your kid has to have their vaccine schedule totally filled out. And if you do x, y, and z, then you'll get your cash transfer.

And so those were designed to have these price effects in mind to change the incentives to the parents while increasing the income. So for the NREGS program, I mean, we think it was very successful at getting money out to rural households. And so I certainly wouldn't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But in that paper we talk about, could you combine a conditional cash transfer with the NREGS program. Could you think about things like childcare for women working in this so that adolescent girls didn't have to pick up the slack there, things like that.

So just being aware that these price effects matter can tweak how you design these programs and really make them work for families without having these necessarily these negative consequences.

DAN RICHARDS: It almost sounds more like we maybe talk about education today in parts of the United States where it's about making sure kids have access to health care or meals that help them get to school, because again, the schools have largely been built. Do you see anything in that? Is it part of a trajectory we've already seen in school in places like the United States?

BRYCE STEINBERG: Definitely, definitely. In the United States, what do we talk about with education? We talk about dropout rates, how do we get kids to want to stay in school? Can we give them information? Do they need mentoring? Do they need rides to school? Do they need all these little pieces to make it work?

Sometimes people think about this as a last mile problem. The solution for the first 80% or 90% is actually pretty universal. You build a school. You pay teachers have a curriculum. You have books at the school.

But that last 10% is often very, very individual. It's really heterogeneous and different contexts for different students. It's really, really hard. The thing that got you from 10% enrollment to 70% or 80% is not the same thing that's going to get you from 80 to 100 or 90 to 100.

DAN RICHARDS: Another example of this last mile type problem that you look at is how to improve speaking of college attendance and graduation in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

And before we get into some of the actual questions you dove into, I wonder if you could just describe a little bit for listeners how college education has changed in these places. A lot of your studies focus in Zambia, correct? How has college changed in that area over the last few decades?

And then for a long time university education was just the elites. So if you're in a world where primary school enrollment is really low, there aren't those schools out in the rural areas.

DAN RICHARDS: Back in the Nineteen Sixties, '70s.

BRYCE STEINBERG: Exactly. Then the only kids who are going to be ready for college or interested in college are going to be the children of the elites. And so development policy wasn't really worried about university education because it was something that was for rich people in the country, basically.

And I think correctly, they were worried about primary school. They were worried about secondary school. But now one of my collaborators on this likes to say, the free primary school kids are all grown up.

And so we've shifted to need more university education. So there's both more kids who are ready to go to university. And there's also more need for these careers that you need tertiary education to go to. And so there has been a big expansion in the number of colleges and universities in most sub-Saharan African countries, Zambia included.

But development policy and development researchers have not really caught up to this being the next frontier. And so we know very, very little about who these students are, how they're getting through college, and how you make university education work in what's still an incredibly low resourced context. So that's what we're trying to figure out now. And we're very much in the process of trying to answer those questions.

DAN RICHARDS: One thing you've looked at a lot is how to keep especially women attending college and what are the barriers that push women to drop out of college.

So a recent study of yours has looked at one key issue, which is early pregnancy and preventing early pregnancy, which in college age people around the world interrupts college, and looking at how to increase contraceptive use among college students. So what have you found in that research?

BRYCE STEINBERG: Yeah. So we were interested in trying to understand what drives dropout. I'm an economist, so I love data. And so at first we thought, oh, we'll just go look at the data. How many dropouts are there?

But it turns out that universities that I've worked with, they don't even have the data to tell you how many dropouts there are. They don't even know. They're not tracking people.

DAN RICHARDS: And so very different from, I imagine, Brown University or if you're trying to learn about a college in the United States.

BRYCE STEINBERG: Exactly, exactly. And so we had to start from scratch and really try and find these things out ourselves. And we started really learning just by talking to people about what was going on. And we just kept hearing about pregnancy over and over and over again.

So in Zambia, the median age of first birth is 19, which means that 50% of women have given birth by the time that they're 19. So if you start thinking about college, you see how that starts to complicate things. Having your first kid at 19 versus 24 can make a huge difference in the trajectory of a woman's life.

And so in sub-Saharan Africa, there's been this big push for increases in access to contraception. Again, this supply side type intervention. Let's just get them to clinics. Let's make them free.

But across Africa, many, many campaigns that have tried to increase access to contraception have found that it really, really hard to do. And this is a case where actually the supply side didn't get us from 10 to 80 or 90. It was 10 to 20 or 30.

And one of the reasons we thought this university population was so interesting is that these women did not want to be pregnant. We talked to them. We asked them every way we could. We did surveys of big samples of these women.

And we asked them about hormonal contraceptive use. And consistent with everything else we knew, there was something like 5% of women were using hormonal contraception. I mean, that number at Brown would be 60% probably.

DAN RICHARDS: So why is that? If they don't want kids, and there's the supply why--

BRYCE STEINBERG: Yeah. I mean, you can get contraceptives for free at the university campus. So this was our question. What's going on here? What is this? Because this didn't even feel like a last mile. It felt like a last 50 miles.

And so we did a lot of-- this is some somewhat less common for economists to do. But we did a lot of qualitative work. We went and talked to people at focus groups. We talked to anybody who would talk to us.

And the thing that came up over and over and over again was this very, very specific myth that hormonal contraceptives will make you infertile later in life. So if you take them now, they'll prevent pregnancy.

But later on, when you want to have kids, you might not be able to. And so we designed an information treatment to try to combat this myth really specifically. We had women come in who had used contraception and then subsequently had children, and we had them literally just show pictures of their kids and talk about their experience. And we did some experiential learning things.

And then on top of that, we provided women with vouchers to go to this clinic. So what the vouchers did was they paid women to go in the door of the clinic, and we paid them like $4 or so.

All you have to do is go in the door. You can leave if you want, but we figure once you're right there, the cost is zero of getting a pack of pills or a shot or something.

And so we recruited a big sample. We did a randomized control trial. And we had one group where we had this information treatment and the vouchers. Another group just got the vouchers.

And what we found was that the voucher was pretty good at getting people to walk in the door of the clinic, but most of the women who didn't have the information just walked right back out. And we found that only this information treatment actually increased the usage of contraception over time. And it's something like tripled it over the course of those six months.

And we actually found even though we only followed them for six months, we did see almost a 70% reduction in pregnancies in that group.

And again, this is a context where these pregnancies are really costly. So either they're resulting in births, which can really derail these women's education or abortions, which in this context are often very unsafe.

And so we found that this one little myth seemed to be driving a lot of the reluctance to take up contraceptives amongst this population of women for whom it was really, really valuable.

And so this is a case where the barrier to tertiary education was not at all where we thought it was. We had to really search for and talk to people and really try to figure out what do these women see as the thing that is keeping them from taking up this university education.

BRYCE STEINBERG: So this example at the University of Zambia and then your example, looking at schooling take up in India, these are just two examples of these types of demand issues. But I feel like they point to the wide variety of ways you might have to address the demand side of a development policy.

Is it fair to say that it's just a little bit more complicated than some of those bigger supply issues? It seems like there are just so many different things that could be stopping people at that last mile, as opposed to building a school which could look similar across the world?

BRYCE STEINBERG: Yeah, exactly. And I think this becomes the difficulty with policy, because you still want to come out with an answer that can tell you something about policy in a more universal sense.

So it's great to say, OK, these specific girls at the University of Zambia are having this exact problem, and it's great to solve that problem for them. But ultimately, we want to learn about what's keeping women across sub-Saharan Africa from taking up contraception or women across sub-Saharan Africa from finishing tertiary education.

And so that's always a balance of trying to figure out who can we draw lessons from from this context. And so that's sometimes in the eye of the beholder. But in this contraceptive myth, this specific issue of contraception and infertility is really pervasive across sub-Saharan Africa.

And I think there's actually a study in Burkina Faso where they did a radio campaign that addressed what they thought of as a series of demand side issues around contraception.

One of them was this myth about infertility. There were other ones about side effects and other things. And they found that having that radio campaign did increase contraceptive take up in the places where they broadcast these messages and decreased fertility as well, unwanted pregnancies in those areas in Burkina Faso. So that'd be interesting to have follow on studies in broader populations or even at the secondary school level.

DAN RICHARDS: It also feels like this particular example is asking questions that are relevant in lots of public health debates around the world right now, too, which is just combating misinformation.

BRYCE STEINBERG: Yeah, especially with preventative health care, people don't want to take things when they're not sick. And so vaccines, contraception, preventative health often is the biggest hurdle in terms of misinformation. So agreed.

And I think economists often, again, we think of information as one thing. But what we found in this study, too, was the way you deliver the information really matters. Who's giving it, exactly what they're saying can really matter in terms of whether people believe you, whether they remember, whether they change their behavior.

I teach PhD level development economics, and usually we always say information treatments don't work because most information treatments are like, here's a pamphlet of statistics about the efficacy of vaccines or something. But I think targeted specific behavioral interventions can work to change people's beliefs and then change their behavior.

DAN RICHARDS: So these different types of interventions on the demand side, it seems they often have to be really customized and context specific. But if you could give a broad piece of advice to people who work in development policy, is there some universal advice that you think people would benefit from hearing based on the work you've done?

BRYCE STEINBERG: So one piece on the schooling side, I think that's come out of my work a lot, is that the opportunity cost of schooling is the cost of schooling now that it's free. And almost every government in the world is interested in increasing educational attainment.

And so when you think about how your policies might affect whether kids are more likely or less likely to be in school, thinking about the opportunity cost channel really matters.

I think more broadly, we in development economics or often in development policy are often really guilty of this line of thinking where we say, this thing is good for you; why don't you want it? And we don't always listen to people about why they don't want these things. Maybe it's inconvenient.

I was a part of projects in graduate school where we were really pushing water chlorination. So in rural areas where there's not piped water, one of the ways that works really well is you collect your water, and then you put a couple drops of chlorine in it. And you let it sit, and then that will kill most of the bacteria in the water. And then it prevents cholera and all these other terrible diseases.

People hate chlorine because it's very hard to actually put the right amount of chlorine into the water. It's very easy to make it just taste like pool water, and it hurts your throat. And it's very unpleasant to drink.

But you don't know that until you talk to people who are using it because you do it under lab conditions where you have 20 gallons to two drops, and you do the thing exactly perfectly.

But in their house maybe they only have an eight gallon jug, and so there's no way to get the concentration. So I think just listening to people about what these issues can really help us understand what kinds of policies would drive them.

DAN RICHARDS: I want to ask a few questions before we end just on how either your thinking or just the landscape of development economics has changed or might be likely to change given the huge changes we've seen to US foreign aid under the Trump administration.

USAID was dismantled and the vast majority of its contracts have been terminated with non-governmental organizations around the world, many of which are involved in development policy. And I guess, first off, as you see it, what do you think are the real effects likely to be of this scale of change?

BRYCE STEINBERG: I think they're going to be enormous. I mean, I don't any of us for sure, but there are immediate effects where USAID was providing. There's a nutritional support. So there's this thing called Plumpy'Nut that almost everybody who's worked in development knows what it is.

It's basically peanut butter with vitamins supplemented into it. So it's a really great way to reduce malnutrition because it's really caloric. It's dense. It's portable. And a lot of you can put a lot of vitamins in it because it's very fatty and vitamins are fat soluble.

And so USAID was giving out Plumpy'Nut all over places with high levels of famine in South Sudan, places where kids were really facing stunting malnutrition or even starvation, same with antiretroviral treatment. So there's all these things that we're actively saving and improving people's lives. They're just going to go away. They've already gone away.

And then there's all this downstream stuff about support for governments in setting up systems that work, monitoring. This stuff is not very glamorous, but USAID and other big organizations help governments to collect data, for instance, are these programs working? What do people need?

And USAID was so interwoven into the NGO landscape that a lot of the NGOs operated on this, like grant model, where they were getting different grants from different places. But much of their funding was coming in one way or another from USAID.

And so even their activities that are not directly USAID funded are often getting shut down because they can't afford to pay their staff, or they can't pay their rent, cetera. And so I think going to be all these downstream consequences that dismantle a lot of the progress that we've made in the last 30 years.

So when I've talked about, OK, we've gotten through the supply side, now we need to get to the demand side, it's not clear that we're not going to backslide on a lot of this, and we're not going to be talking in five years about how going back to just needing clinics and nurses and teachers and school infrastructure, that we won't be worried about who wants schooling because there won't be schooling to be taken up. So how exactly that's going to play out and then trickle down effects of that are going to be difficult to see over time.

DAN RICHARDS: When we're talking about development policies and USAID's involvement in them, would USAID give money to liberal governments to help governments with policies or was it all through NGOs that then worked with governments?

BRYCE STEINBERG: Both. It's USAID but also the World Bank and DFID from the UK. So a lot of the government programs, I actually didn't even this, always were often funded. At the end of the day, the money was coming in some way from foreign aid.

So you would ask the minister of education, well, how do you pay for this new program to increase school attendance? And it was like, oh, it comes from this budget that's part of this project inside the government. But then it turns out that was funded in part by a large grant from the World Bank.

The money would trickle through governments a lot, also through NGOs as well. But sometimes it was a sub-entity of a sub-entity where the money was originally coming from USAID, especially for welfare type programs.

DAN RICHARDS: So with foreign aid, it's not just like, oh, well, it's a shame these NGOs that provide health care or whatever are going to close, but the government programs are still going to be run. Those are also going to be threatened by this.

BRYCE STEINBERG: Yeah, definitely.

DAN RICHARDS: Would it be safe to say it could be the beginning of a new era in development policy?

BRYCE STEINBERG: Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting experiment. I mean, there are economists who would tell you that there's been over dependence on foreign aid and that maybe we're giving too much aid, and we're not helping these governments figure out a way to be sustainable, to support these systems through taxation of on their own people.

But it's really tough to see how that gets done until the growth happens. So in Zambia, for instance, they have a loan program for students. And the idea was, OK, well we give you your tuition money now and then you pay it back through the tax system.

But they actually don't have the infrastructure to make people pay it back. And so their repayment rates are like 30% or something. And so, eventually that kind of system can work but in the meantime, you need a lot of cash infusion to get that first.

Even if the repayment worked perfectly, you'd need a lot of cash infusion to get the first crop of students through. So there's a contingency of people who think this push is going to make governments figure it out, but I just worry that the resources aren't there and a lot of people are going to suffer in the meantime.

And so I hope we're not in a new era where we have to go back to square one and start thinking about children are dying of malnutrition. How do we get calories to people? But I don't know.

DAN RICHARDS: Have these changes had any effect on how you're thinking about the types of questions you're most interested in asking as a development economist?

BRYCE STEINBERG: Yeah, I mean, there's a pragmatic answer and a philosophical answer. So the pragmatic piece is, even the research infrastructure has decreased a lot. So we work with an NGO called IPA, Innovations for Poverty Action. And they run evaluations for academics but also for governments and NGOs cetera.

And so they had a thriving office of 15 employees or something as of a year ago. And now they're down to two staff in Zambia, the two staff that work for our project because basically everything else was funded, in one way or another, through the US government.

So the mechanical way in which we actually just collect data and run these experiments and the kind of infrastructure that exists for learning about development policy is really taking a big hit.

The other question I think about, what are we training students to do also? So I teach development economics, and many of my students might go on to be researchers, but they might also go on to work in policy or try and help guide thinking about what kinds of policies might work or which ones might not.

And I think that losing USAID means that look where the development aid is coming from, it's going to be really different. And now it's increasingly coming from individual, extremely wealthy people's foundations.

So now it's going to matter a lot whether Mark Zuckerberg thinks this is a good idea or not. So you have a different audience to convince than the US government.

And it means continuity for development programs is going to go down because a lot of the USAID stuff was funded in a very long-term sense. And some of these foundations tend to be a little bit more short-sighted or something. They want to fund something now and then next year, somebody has a whim that they're interested in something else.

And so thinking about how to train students for this new landscape, how do we evaluate development policy in this new landscape, I think is a challenge. And I haven't figured out what that's going to mean yet, but it's something I'm thinking about.

DAN RICHARDS: Absolutely, no. And I think that's a whole other podcast episode too, how that type of infrastructure will change research. But thank you for coming on the show.

BRYCE STEINBERG: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards, with production assistance from Eric Emma. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield with additional music from the Blue Dot Sessions.

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