Few Updates

I must have been either very busy or very lazy (most likely the latter) lately that I don't serve anything in the Cafe or realize that a truly excellent and readable book on development economics has been around since April 2011. The title is More Than Good Intentions by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel.

I just read the Introduction, but because I need to work on something else now -- like reading Karlan's article on Observing Unobservables -- , I'll be back soon for more review. I may also write about the current state of economics education in our universities which share a theme with a report on how (the plan for filming) James Bond in the country was turned down by those in power due to some deep ignorance.

In the meantime, we will play jazz in this cafe. This time, Fall by Miles Davis Quintet (youtube).

In Defense of Mall

So my two professors went to Manila this summer. One of them was amazed on how cool the malls over there, and the other offered an interesting interpretation: it's in many ways a form of private government.

Here is the reason.

Operating such huge (and usually integrated with business and residential complex) mall needs sophisticated technology and management. And it has to be efficient. With thousands of human resources involved as well as state of the art logistic, it needs high skills and knowledge to run the complex.

Now enter the common explanation for under-development in developing countries: lack of skills and "modern" culture.

These malls show that these line of reasoning doesn't add up. The businesspersons running the mall can deliver not only private goods (you know, from branded bags to broccoli to two bedrooms apartment) but also public goods, like open to public parks, between-the-shops-aisles for window shopping, or the water fountain dancing New York New York (to the dismay of barista Aco).

They are like government -- while the real government is busy doing something else. And the key is, I think, incentives that works, and it is profit motive.

I think it's a right observation. The mushrooming malls as well as those clustering real estates somehow also shows that government has failed, and, to some extent, private actors stepped in. And the blaming for lack of "modern culture" among the people seems to be unfounded.

And The Medal Goes To

Esther Duflo of MIT. She obviously very well deserves for the medal indeed. Congratulation.

Your barista Ape, her fellow randomista, will probably serve you a review on what Prof. Duflo has done and brought her to the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal.

On Good Coffee, Jazz, and Economic Data

Let us discuss those things this Cafe loves to talk about.

First, coffee. Finally New York City took their coffee seriously. This is actually a problem for almost all of American cities, that is, low per capita good coffee places. Come on, if you think Illy is the best coffee you can get, then you're in a serious need for better taste caffeine.

Unlike their counterparts in Europe, America needs much more good coffee -- and bread, I must add.

Second, jazz. Brad Mehldau is about to issue a new album, Highway Rider (HT: Sisil). It looks promising and you can listen to some of the sample here. Mr. Mehldau is one of Cafe Salemba's favorites for contemporary jazz --along with Joshua Redman and Branford Marsalis, to mention some. Of course we also listen to Vampire Weekend and Arctic Monkey, while on Lady Gaga, there's been a wide disagreement amongst us.

In this new album, apparently Mr. Mehldau is back to his old style as in Largo album. He seems indeed really good in expressing the melancholy of journey in life.

Third, economic data. Google launched visualization of the World Development Indicators subset (HT: Tyler Cowen). Any serious development economist must have been familiar with this data set at one point or another. The visualization is fun too. You can now see how good (or bad) Indonesia is, relative to other countries, using a real data --not an appeal to emotion.

Rethinking Yunus

I used to think that M. Yunus' work on Grameen Bank tells that, contrary to common belief, lending to the poor outside regular banking system can be profitable, because they are equally good, if not better, in repaying their debts than the non-poor.

But I don't understand why, when his idea has been seriously taken by people that really want to make profit by lending to small and poor investors, the microfinance, he was fumed and pointed them as moneylenders, the bad guys he wants to get rid of.

I read this in Tim Harford's article (HT: Marginal Revolution) that summarizes the debate on whether it is appropriate to actually make money and adopts profit maximizing value in microfinance, or should it be left as non profit motive. This, I think, an important topics and we'd be in a better situation should this be read and discussed by anyone seriously involved in microfinance frenzy in the country.

Tim wrote:

There is nothing intrinsically sinful about pawnbroking or intrinsically virtuous about microloans: what matters is the effect on the clients. And to our discredit, we don't really know what that effect is. There have been only two serious cost-benefit analyses - and they've produced a split decision as to whether, given the subsidies involved, microfinance delivered value for donor dollars.

Dean Karlan, a microfinance economist at Yale, is frustrated by this lack of serious research into what works. He also thinks Yunus's talk of "the moneylender's thinking" is unhelpful. "If you're trying to make the world a better place but you're not, that's bad. If you're trying to make profits and don't care about people, but make them better off anyway, that's good," he says.

Thus we don't really know, empirically, whether microfinance initiatives helps the poor. Which brings me into a question to friends advocating microfinance that might read this posting: do we have empirical evidence on the impact of microfinance to, say, poverty in Indonesia?

Also it is interesting to discuss two buzzwords that oftentimes brought in to argue the superiority of Grameen-like microfinance: the peer control, or group liability, and the role of women as debtor, because:

Already, solidly held beliefs about microfinance have been shaken. The "group liability" system, in which a group of borrowers guarantee one another's loans, is still supposed by many to be the secret behind Grameen Bank's low default rates. But a randomised trial in the Philippines conducted by Karlan and a World Bank economist, Xavier Gine, found that group liability was discouraging new customers without improving repayment rates. Grameen itself quietly dropped group liability some time ago.

Another sacred cow of microfinance is that women make best use of the money - the Grameen Bank says 97 per cent of its borrowers are women. But another randomised trial, conducted in Sri Lanka by a team of researchers including David McKenzie of the World Bank, found that male borrowers seemed to make a far higher return on their capital. As with the ZaFinCo study, it's just one experiment in one country.

Anyone in the business or aware of the issue, please feel free to jump in and join the fray.

Is Our Middle Class The Grabbing Hands, Too?

So I find that at municipal level, the larger size of middle class, those who live in urban area or are at least ever educated in high-school, contrary to the idea that they are the strong pressure group in favor to clean governance, is associated with lower, yes, lower bureaucracy's governance quality.

I decided to call Philips, my favorite political scientist (and avid LP collector), to consult this result. After hearing my brief explanation, he just laughed and said, " they are probably the bad guys themselves".

Maybe so. Any other idea?

Old Policies Don't Simply Die

In an interesting paper of The Political Economy of Controls: American Sugar, by Anne Krueger, the closing paragraph reads:

"...at the very least, economists advocating government intervention in markets would be well advised to recognize that the measures they advocate will, once enacted, have a life --including supporters-- of its own.."

I think this is why the series of measures introduced by well intended Indonesian economists decades ago --rice price stabilization and import restriction, fuel subsidies, to name a few --, are still fiercely defended by many supporters regardless their irrelevancy to the current situation.

How to Publish in AER and JPE: Think Like Detective (Among Many Other Things, Of Course)

While Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson try to save the world, I am, in fact, enjoying the funny lyrics of two albums of The Smiths, The Queen is Dead and Louder than Bombs, and reading Fisman and Miguel's Economic Gangsters. It's a brand new popular book on the development economics of corruption that uses creative sherlock-holmes-like approach. In particular, I find two chapters on Suharto Inc and the diplomat's parking tickets in New York interesting.

Observing the ups and downs of Suharto-linked listed companies in Jakarta Stock Exchange when there was rumor on then the President's health in 1996, they estimate that the value of political connection was around 25 percent of such companies' market value. It's a big number, by the way, because even when Apple introduced the new technological breakthrough of iPhone in 2006, its share's price was up merely by 8 percent.

It was such a simple way to estimate the value of being close to a dictator, but with the approach that nobody haven't thought about it before, and by that it managed to get published in the most prestigious American Economic Review journal. Actually the paper (read here, in pdf) is more interesting than the chapter on the book.

On diplomatic parking tickets chapter, the conclusion might sound like stating the obvious, that is, in corruption, both norms, or values, and legal enforcement, matter. But the real catch is really the fact that you can relate, of all things, parking violation in New York to reveal the nature of corruption. You can read the academic journal underlying that chapter, that will be published in another prestigious Journal of Political Economy, here (in pdf).

Oh by the way, between 1997 and 2002, Indonesian UN diplomats were in the 24th ranking (out of 149 countries) with 36.5 tickets per diplomat.

Dismal science, again

Constrained by work, I was unable to attend a roundtable discussion co-hosted by Kompas and Lingkar Muda Indonesia a few weeks ago. I forgot the exact topic -- it was something to celebrate the national awakening.

Through an old friend who attended the forum, I learned that my article three years ago was cited by another friend of mine. Not in a positive way, however, although neither did he directly criticize the facts I quoted in the article. Rather, he criticized the article for being too pessimistic (know what, education doesn't matter for growth!). Young people, he argued, aren't supposed to be that pessimistic. Well, this reminds me on how economist was tagged dismal science.

I wasn't there to clarify the main message of my article. These are what I would have said:

1. If we define 'level of education' as 'share of population who complete a certain level of schooling (be it primary, secondary or tertiary), then, controlling for other factors, it couldn't explain the variations of growth across countries since the 1960. Some countries grew without big increases in education, but some countries failed to grow despite big increases in schooling rate.
2. I didn't argue that education is not important (depends on how we define it). Nor did I argue that per capita economic growth is the only outcome variable we should see.
3. We need to understand more on how education works in improving welfare. Increasing education level is not just about expanding the budget, but also how to make each Rupiah spent more effective.
4. Also, be aware that increased level of education may increase inequality, at least in the short-run.

On being a 'pessimistic, young economist,' well, your honor and respectful jury, do you think I am guilty as charged?

Economic Growth As We Know It

Like Arya Gaduh, I also haven't yet got time to read a new report on growth by The Commission on Growth and Development. But it seems that problem of growth and development economics now resurface in public discussion, thanks to the books of Sachs, Easterly, and Collier.

After some years of detour to more exotic agendas and plans for the developing world such as Millenium Development Goals and Bono-type of Aid; economic growth, the most crucial element for developing countries, yet hard to understand, is back

It was an ambitious research, probably to the scale of another report on global warming by Nicholas Stern. So it is surely worth to read the whole report. But for the time being, let use the interview to its chief, Michael Spence, from the Foreign Policy, to catch a glimpse on what's inside the report.

He said that:

This report is really more about a framework. How do the growth dynamics work, and what kind of policies tend to support it? When you get to the country level, it has to get very specific and depends entirely on history and the initial conditions and things like that

I am actually rather surprised with this kind of stating-the-obvious argument. In an earlier posting, I wrote that we already pretty much had an idea what make a good espresso economic growth, and as the Report's summary for Asia says:

These nine high-growth countries all share common characteristics: engagement with the global economy, macroeconomic stability, high rates of saving and investment, the market allocation of resources, and credible and capable governments.

But each characteristic is, alas, minutely variable. And it is not really clear to me the degree of importance of each variable: say, the market allocation or capable government?

The better question, I guess, is not how to find recipes for sustainable growth, but how to get into a turnaround from a low growth trap to an accelerating pace of growth, the focal points in which a country then could orchestrate themselves into those desirable characteristics --hopefully without curtailing democracy.

Usually such turnaround doesn't come from much grandiose scheme, but a small but critical reform.

HT: Arya Gaduh

Soap operas are not always bad

We've heard many bad things about TV programs. From inducing violent behavior to promoting mysticism or obscenity. Recently, the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission blew their whistle to a famous reality show because 1) the hosts consistently throw sarcastic jokes, and 2) it starts at Maghrib prayer time with limited commercial break, so it doesn't give time for Muslims to perform their prayer (yeah, right!).

A recent work by Robert Jensen and Emily Oster shows that exposure to TV programs may have a positive impact on attitudes toward women in India. Using fixed-effects panel data regression during a period when cable TV services was rapidly expanding in rural India, they found "significant increases in reported autonomy, decreases in the reported acceptability of beating and decreases in reported son preference... [and also] increases in female school enrollment and decreases in fertility (primarily via increased birth spacing)." In terms of indicators, school enrollment and fertility are obviously observable. The other three are behavioral indicators. One can't observe it directly but will have to rely on the reported data.

The Survey on Aging in Rural India (SARI) data, which the paper is relying on, does have the information. On women's autonomy, the survey asked if the female respondents needed permission from their husbands to go to the market or visit friends/relatives. There is another question on who makes some important decision in the household, which deals with household decision making. On perceptions regarding domestic violence, the survey asked whether female respondents think that a husband is justified to beat his wife if if he suspects her of being unfaithful; if her natal family does not give expected money, jewelry or other things; if she shows disrespect for him; if she leaves the home without telling him; if she neglects the children; or if she doesn't cook food properly. Then, preference over gender of the children is measured by the question "Would you like your next child to be a boy, a girl or it doesn't matter?"

Although the authors did not specifically test which/what kind of TV programs are more effective, they mentioned that soap operas are the most popular ones among the rural women.
So, soaps could be the agent of change, then... Bukan begitu, Estella? Jangan tanya padaku, Esposito...

Bias and Romanticism

Aco wrote in the Diskusi Ekonomi (in Bahasa Indonesia) why rice import policy, which have larger number of gainers than losers, could not get thru. He proposed three possible answers: the gainers fail to coordinate its political power (the Olsonian logic of collective action), pure ignorance, and stubborn ideological stance.

The logic of collective action may be able to explain import ban, but not export restriction, because we find that regardless the number of net gainers or losers, people seem not to like the idea of international free trade. Import no, export also no. This is a symptom of an anti foreign bias (Caplan, 2007). For many of us, anything foreign is bad, dangerous, and threatening, including trade with foreigners.

Moreover, there seems to be a reverse-orientalism sentiment, that is, everything but western value is better. This observation is supported by the fact that conspiracy theory sells very well -not only to the illiterates but also the educated.

On ideological bias, there also seems a romanticism on peasantry. Paul Collier, the writer of excellent The Bottom Billion, wrote here (and read the whole discussion on food crisis, too):

Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies.

and, indeed that:

In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them.

But developing country like us can not afford it. We don't have such luxury. So when we come up using public resources to develop the agriculture revitalization program, are we speaking the same language for large scale commercial agriculture?

Are we ready to give up the idyllic view of a small plot land owner peasantry for a large scale industry and see a transformation from myriad small peasant landowners class to become waged farmers working in a handful large scale agroindustrial companies?

The Making of Good Espresso --and Economic Growth

What is a good shot of Espresso? Here is the standard.

The ideal espresso (according to the Instituto Nazionale Espresso Italiano) is a 25ml beverage extracted from around 7g of finely ground coffee, using water at a temperature of 88C, passing through the grains at a pressure of 9 bar. See, dead easy. It should be thick-textured, having emulsified many of the oils, retain most of the volatile aromas and flavours of the bean and be capped with a thick colloidal foam layer - "crema" - reddish, creamy and flecked.

It's taken from a nice writing in The Guardian on 'the God-shot'--the nickname for a perfect home espresso. That article, somehow, reminds me the pursuit of, well, economic growth. We have pretty much had a good idea what espresso economic growth is, and a good deal on the mechanics. At least theoretically.

We know how seductive the crema economic growth is, too, that in Robert Lucas' words in 1988: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.

Yet, when it comes into policy making, the problem is:

Each one of those factors is minutely variable, potentially causing thinness, bitterness, under- or overextraction or - the ultimate humiliation - a thin or patchy crema.

Of Leader and Grassroots Participation

Here is the teaser:

“...found big changes in growth when autocratic leaders die in office—both positive and negative, but no substantial change when democratic leaders died in office......(T)hat individual leaders can play crucial roles in shaping the growth of nations,”

and (in Indonesia)

“increasing government audits reduced missing expenditures, as measured by discrepancies between official project costs and an independent engineer’s estimate of costs, by eight percentage points. By contrast, increasing grassroots participation in monitoring had little average impact…. Overall, the results suggest that traditional top-down monitoring can play an important role in reducing corruption.”

Who do you think found that (rather unpopular) evidence?

Yes, it's Ben Olken, one of the rising stars in economics.

Alas, No Easy Answer

Ap, in his reply to Ben of Indonesia Anonymus, wonders:

"What's interesting was how it (US, my word) overtook Europe only less than two centuries....(w)hat's interesting was why the Europeans who conquered the world, not vice versa (or why not the Chinese)"

It's an elusive quest indeed to explain what was going on --let alone, what will be going on next. But here is some thoughts on institution, based on my limited reading.

Why China and Middle East before Europe? Geography, said Jared Diamond.

Why Europe got industrial revolution? Culture, said David Landes. Culture embedded in evolutionary biology (or demography), argued Gregory Clark. And perhaps economic institutions (a.k.a private property right and market), said Acemoglu et.al (in pdf).

Why US and later Asian Tigers? The same Acemoglu's economic institutions.

Who's next and why? We don't know (Rodrik and Easterly position).

Do you have any idea?

(Another) Natural Resource Curse

Dede of Ekonomi dan Politik di Indonesia (in Bahasa Indonesia) raised an interesting issue on the paradox between natural resource richness and low economic growth --or more technically called natural resource curse. He basically said that it is actually no wonder that countries like Indonesia, with its abundant natural resource, don't perform remarkably well in comparison to countries with limited resource for two reasons: First, the Dutch disease, real exchange rate appreciation makes producing tradable goods less attractive (Sachs and Warner, 1995). Second, weak institution as natural resources rich countries are more prone to corruption (Mehlum, Moene, Torvik, 2006).

Suppose, then, that we can get rid of those problems, are we now free from the spell? Alas, not that fast.

Hausmann and Klinger of Harvard (2007), --hat tip to undercover economist Tim Harford--, introduced the idea of economic space of production network (the proximity amongst products). In that space they spotted densed (manufacturing) and sparsed area (natural resource based products). Look at the paper for more detail of products.

And yes, they found that country with good economic performance tend to export products in densed (closely related products) space. Why? The flexiblity of country's acummulated capabilities to be redeployed across products, hence greater gain from trade.

It leads you to a very interesting situation: What to produce, and specialize in, matters and relying on exporting natural resource based products might be inherently a disadvantage. But it is costly for natural resource rich countries to redeploy production capabilties and to move into the centre of dynamic world production network.

At home, it also intuitively tells why after the crisis that brought back Indonesian revealed competitive comparative advantage to more natural resource based products, the country's export performance remains weak. Probably, we are now no longer that close to the most dynamic locus on global production network.

Does Giffen behavior exist in reality?

Update: somehow I forgot that the Giffen thing has been discussed by Aco, more than a year ago. It was in September 2006, just when I arrived back in Jakarta. Maybe that's why I forgot to refer to it.

In every college-level microeconomics textbook, there is always a discussion on a special circumstance when the demand curve is upward-sloping: the Giffen good. Theoretically, the situation arises when the income effect outweighs the substitution effect under a price change.

A good can be a Giffen one if it is a basic commodity that makes up a large portion of a poor's income. The term was named after Sir Robert Giffen, a Victorian-era British economist, who argued that potatoes during the Irish potato famine fit this bill for the starving Irish:

Since potatoes already made up the bulk of their diet and consumed most of their income, as prices rose due to the potato shortages, what little discretionary money they had for meat and other food disappeared. No longer left with enough for even morsels of meat, the peasants desperately threw their remaining pennies back at the potato vendors for a few more spuds, thus driving prices of the scarce commodity up still further (a summary from The Nation).

If it's still hard for you to imagine the situation, consider Dani Rodrik's opposite illustration when the price declines instead of increases:

Imagine a very poor household who spend a very large part of its income on some subsistence commodity such as rice. Now suppose that the price of rice goes down for some reason. How does the household alter its pattern of consumption? One response is to increase consumption of rice at the expense of other things because rice is now cheaper. This is the standard substitution effect that ensures demand curves are downward sloping. But another is that the household's overall purchasing power--its real income--has increased and therefore the family may choose to consume things, such as meat, that richer families tend to consume. If this decrease in demand for rice outweighs the substitution effect, we have a Giffen good. Put differently, the lower price of rice allows the family to satisfy its nutritional needs by a tastier combination of products, one that relies less on rice and more on meat.

The question is, does a Giffen good exist in reality? No one is quite sure. Even Sir Giffen's argument was based on speculation instead of empirical evidence.

A recent paper by Harvard's Nolan Miller and Robert Jensen (was at Harvard, now at Brown; I happened to took their classes) claimed to be the 'first, rigorous empirical evidence of the existence of Giffen behavior. ' (Note: The authors preferred to use the term 'Giffen behavior' instead of 'Giffen good' since, as they wrote, "it is not the good that is Giffen, but the consumers’ behavior").

They ran a field experiment in the Hunan and Gansu provinces of China, in which they randomly subsidized households’ primary dietary staple (rice in Hunan and wheat flour in Gansu). As the prices of staples are cheaper, they observed a strong evidence of Giffen behavior with respect to rice in the Hunan province. They also found a less clear evidence of Giffen behavior in Gansu with respect to wheat.

They have an interesting way to begin the conclusion section in the paper:

It is ironic that despite a long search, in sometimes unusual settings, we found examples in the most widely consumed foods for the most populous nation in the history of humanity.

Moonlighting

In my 'spare time' (don't ask me to define it, please), I contributed a two-part article on why some countries are rich while the other are poor in a blog maintained by our colleagues. This is the first part, and here's the second.

The Prambanan irony

Last week, Sjamsu and I were on an official trip to Jogjakarta (we also met Ujang there). We had a chance to visit the Hindu temple of Prambanan, and watched the famous Ramayana dance. (Honestly, I think the plot is very ugly! Read my comment here).

During a non-so-important dinner conversation, we discussed one interesting irony. By 850 A.D., the highly civilized 'nenek moyang bangsa Indonesia' had already built such great building (as well as the more famous Borobudur temple). But we knew that it was the Europeans who later came and colonized the country. Why was it not the other way around? The same thing also applies to the great Egyptians, Babylons, Persians, or Indians.

Yes, colonialism was bad. Yes, before those Europeans came, the Makassars have sailed to Australia and built a colony in Madagascar (while the Chinese had done it earlier by ruling the East Asian water). But regardless of our moral philosophy, it was the European's renaissance and colonialism that set the history of the world today.

To explain the irony - if we consider the level of technology at that time, building temples like Prambanan was made possible by a massive resource (especially human) mobilization. That was possible if and only if you had an autocratic government. We won't have Prambanans and pyramids under democracy.

Moreover, if you a despotic leader whose power made almost everything possible by mobilizing resources, there is little or no incentives to educate your people. In fact, you don't want your people to be educated; you'd want knowledge to be a monopoly of the elite.

On the other hand, the end of state/church monopoly over many aspects of human activity in the middle age Europe had paved the way for scientific revolution. For better or worse, that was the reason why we can build Prambanan, but it was the Europeans who set our history.

Our ancestors were economists!

According to Jared Diamond in his seminal Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), history of human civilization, hence economic development, began when our ancestors started producing food and create food surplus. That is, to grow crops instead of gathering wild berries, or domesticate animals instead of hunting them. The most interesting question is, as always, why.

Formerly, all people on earth were hunter-gatheres. Why did any of them adopt food production at all? ... From our modern perspective, all these questions at first seem silly, because the drawbacks of being a hunter-gatherer appear so obvious. ... In reality ... most peasant farmers and herders ... aren't necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers ... they may spend more rather than few hours per day at work ... less well nourished, suffered from more serious disease, and died on the average at a younger age than the hunter-gatherers they replaced. (pp.104-5).

But why did the switch take place, nevertheless? Here is my favourite part of the book:

... food production and hunting-gathering [are] alternative strategies competing with each other. ... Hence, we must ask: what were the factors that tipped the competitive advantage away from the former and toward the latter? (p.109).

According to Diamond, there are some possible factors (pp110-11):

1. Declining availability of wild foods, making hunter-gatherers lifetyle less rewarding.
2. Conversely, domesticable wild plants were getting more available (due to both accidental discovery and genetic mutation), making steps leading to plant domestication more rewarding.
3. Cumulative development of technologies for collecting, processing, and storing wild food, on which food production would eventually depend.
4. The two-way causal link between human population density and food production, creating greater needs for food production.

If you are an econ student, and you are nerdy enough, you would think of a two-axis diagram with food producing on one axis, and hunting-gathering on the other. The you can think of a standard, convex isoquant curve that represents the choice over the two production mode. The other curve is an 'isocost' which slope represents the relative price of those two modes. The four factors describe by Diamond can be illustrated by changing the slope of the isocost (cheaper relative cost of producing food over hunting-gathering). As the result, the equilibrium also moved along the isoquant. (Note that it took thousand of years for the slope to change).

Well, before there were philosophers, politicians, lawyers or priests, apparently our ancestors were... economists!

If you'd like to discuss more about the book, please do tell Rara!