Two nights ago, I was asked to give a talk about my trip to Manila. I hadn't realized how traumatized, how emotional it was until I was made to talk about it. I could totally be all detached and serious about it... you know, tell everyone how my findings were oh so important to the world, how the data is so exciting and all that. But I realized that the trip affected me on such a different level, it's hard to explain to the new students, who are all here to pioneer research and be all serious about economics, that I didn't.
If anything, I learned to not take myself, my research, my noble aspirations so seriously. The one thing I learned in field research is that, it's not about me. At all. You see all these big names in economics: Sen, Stiglitz, Safire (hmm they all start with S), Easterly... etc. And you say to yourself, wow! They're so knowledgeable, so intellectual. But I think we ultimately miss the point. Their books, their studies, their research were all derived from the stories they were told.
As crazy as the Philippines trip was, I am happy to be part of their stories. I really am. To have learned everything that I did (data or no data). People are capable of so much more, of living through so much more hardship than we think imaginable. To simply have been able to sit and listen to Mrs P. tell me about her 40 years living in her tiny 5 by 7 foot squatter home outside an old factory, raising 7 kids in it, and then adopting her 8th after all her 7 kids had grown up, because she felt sorry for this little boy who was wandering the streets with no home. She and her husband make less than $6 a day and use that money to feed, clothe and put their 8th child to school.
I could sit here and be an armchair critic of the Philippines all day, and of their economic policies, of their human rights record, or be upset that there are terrorists there. But to sit on Mrs P.'s stool, and listen to her happily telling me about her 40 years of marriage to the same man, proud that her kids are all married and that her adopted son is excelling in school, I could not help but think: we know so little about human nature. So very little. We always equate poverty with misery. Mrs P. and so many other people I spoke to were glaring contradictions. We think, how could anyone want a life like that, want to live like that? A house built over a gutter, made with zinc and cardboard and so little income each day- that's paradise compared to no electricity and toiling over the infertile soil in the province.
Here in the US, we talk about stopping sweatshops, child labor, improving education and quality of life for those in developing countries. We offer our lifestyle as an alternative as a mandate, disregarding their views and their achievements, disregarding also the fact that they have much different resources, views, experiences and expectations of happiness than we do.
And so here I am, wondering how I can possibly take myself so seriously these days? Even if I were to become the leading expert in economics, my field of specialization is tinier than 1/100th of the entire problem in development. I am, perhaps like that frog in the well, who if anything, can only imagine how my little patch of sky can be made bluer.