Rationally Speaking #175 - Chris Blattman on "Do sweatshops reduce poverty?"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2017

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode explores the economics and ethics of low-paying factories (which some might call "sweatshops") in Ethiopia. Do they make their workers better off, relative to those people's outside options? Professor Chris Blattman has run some well-designed randomized controlled trials exploring this question, and he discusses what surprised him and how he's updated his views from his research. Julia and Chris also discuss an innovative program to reduce crime in Liberia using cognitive behavioral therapy.

Transcript

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1:00.1	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
1:05.6	I'm your host, Julia Galef, and with me is today's guest, Professor Chris Blatman.
1:11.7	Chris is a development economist at Harris Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and I'm a big fan of his blog, Chrisblatman.com. It's got a lot of thoughtful essays as well as some of the
1:17.2	best link roundups that I've found. I've been wanting to have Chris on the show for a while,
1:22.1	but the most recent impetus that spurred me to reach out to him for this episode is a paper of his that came
1:28.8	out a few months ago that was sort of well designed with interesting results investigating the
1:34.6	question of what are the effects of factories that we might call sweatshops on the workers
1:40.8	who work there in other countries. So, Chris, welcome to the show.
1:45.1	Thanks for having me.
1:46.8	So I sort of gave my colloquial stab at the question that your paper was addressing,
1:52.3	but why don't you kick things off by giving us the more precise articulation of the question
1:56.7	you were investigating?
1:59.2	Sure.
2:00.1	So I guess I spent a lot of my time working on anti-poverty programs.
2:06.4	I've worked mostly in sub-sastern Africa and some in Latin America and a little bit elsewhere.
2:10.5	And I look at a lot of government and NGO programs that are trying to reduce poverty by generating
2:20.4	jobs or some sort of social transfer.
2:24.6	And these have been largely successful, but I guess I always had this suspicion that
	...

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