This report presents the results from a survey of international development (IDEV) professors in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The survey focused on personal ethics, course content, effective altruism, and some disciplinary matters. The survey was first emailed to about 2500 people on April 27th, 2022 and the survey closed May 31, 2022. More details about the sampling frame are available in a separate document. In total, 351 people took the survey.
This report presents the key results with minimal adornment or discussion.
Most of the respondents did not know enough about effective altruism to discuss it with a friend.
Familiar with EA | Canada | United States | United Kingdom |
---|---|---|---|
Yes | 12 | 50 | 25 |
No | 60 | 121 | 83 |
Most respondents had not read key EA books or heard of major EA organizations (organization names were written out in full in the survey). This includes books by Peter Singer, who I believe has high name recognition in this community (I didn’t test this with a question). GiveWell was recognized the most, with 116 people claiming to have heard of the organization.
I asked two questions about factual information at the intersection of effective altruism and international development. The first question came from this paper and asked:
“Some charities that help the world’s poorest people are more cost-effective than others. Cost-effectiveness (in this example here) is measured by the number of lives saved. A more cost-effective charity can save more lives than a less cost-effective charity can save with the same amount of money.
Among all the charities that help the world’s poorest people:
How many times more cost-effective do you believe Charity A is in comparison to Charity B?”
I created the second question, which asked respondents to:
“Consider a charity whose programs are among the most cost-effective ways of saving the lives of children. In other words, thinking across all charities that currently exist, this one can save a child’s life for the smallest amount of money.
Roughly what do you think is the minimum amount of money that you would have to donate to this charity in order to expect that your money has saved the life of one child?”
The results are shown below, with the answers split by people who said that were or were not familiar enough with EA to discuss it with a friend. I show both the median answer to each question, and the share of people who picked answers that were within a factor of 10 lower or higher than the most likely true answers.
Familiar with EA | Q1 median | 10x < Answer < 1000x | Q2 median | $500 < Answer < 50k | n |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Yes | 4x | 0.26 | 72.5 USD | 0.22 | 87 |
No | 3x | 0.14 | 58.5 USD | 0.13 | 264 |
Currently, the best guess as to the correct answer to the charity question is on the order of 100x (see also). The cost to save a life is ball-parked by GiveWell at between 3000 and 5000 USD (see also). Lower credible estimates go as low as 530 USD for seasonal malaria chemoprevention. I am unaware of any credible estimate that is on the order of 50 USD.
The median respondent answered question 1 with a large under-estimation, an giving an answer that is typical of the public at large (see also). Most respondents gave answers under 10x. Respondents familiar with EA were about twice as likely to be within an order of magnitude of the most likely answer.
A similar situation held for the second question. The median respondent picked an answer of around 50 USD and most respondents gave a response that was less than 500 USD, which is approximately an order of magnitude under the best current guess. Respondents familiar with EA selected higher answers, but again their answers were still quite far from GiveWell’s estimate.
It should not be surprising that professors give answers that are similar to the public at large, as professors are experts in their research niches and most people in international development do not study these questions.
The last question I asked on this theme was which topics a professor would devote at least 30 minutes of class time to in an introduction to international development course. The topics of EA and moral philosophy were the least likely to be covered, by a large margin.
While most IDEV profs are not familiar with effective altruism, they tend to hold beliefs that are naturally quite compatible with effective altruism. For example, almost 80% either strongly agree or agree that “From a moral perspective, people should care about the well-being of all human beings on the planet equally; they should not favour the well-being of people who are especially close to them either physically or emotionally”.
The vast majority also agree that “when considering whether or not to devote time or money to a cause, one should think not merely about whether one will do good but also about how much good one will do.”
Most professors gave to charity in the past year.
Donated to charity in past year | n |
---|---|
Yes | 318 |
No | 26 |
Don't know / refuse to answer | 7 |
Of those that donated to charity in the past year, most of them donated at least once to a charity that works primarily in a low or middle income country.
Donated to charity in L/MIC | n |
---|---|
Yes | 255 |
No | 61 |
Never donated anywhere / refused to answer | 35 |
When asked to select all factors that influenced which charities they chose to donate to, respondents overwhelmingly said that they selected charities based on personal connection to the cause.
A similar pattern emerges when respondents are asked to select the most important single factor influencing their largest charity donation in the past year, with personal connections dominating the decision.
One possible interpretation of the above charity results is that most IDEV professors give to charities in the countries where they have done research or policy work. These are low or middle-income countries, and by giving to charities whey they have personal connections they end up giving to charities working in poorer parts of the world.
Finally, I asked a a few questions about what drives people to choose research topics and some questions about personal impact and aid. When IDEV professors choose what topics to research their first priority is selecting interesting problems but a close second is choosing problems that they think can do in the world. There is a large gap between these top two factors and the bottom two factors of thinking the topic could be placed in a prestigious journal and ease of grant funding.
IDEV professors express optimism about their impact on the world and about the impact of their country’s aid on people in low-income countries. They also believe that researching and teaching IDEV content is important because the knowledge about IDEV helps people to do good.
This section reports results from questions asked only of the 87 respondents (out of 351) who said that they knew enough about EA to discuss it with a friend. First, I asked a simple feeling thermometer question, where 0 means one feels as cold and negative as possible towards EA and 100 is as warm and positive as possible. Indifference is thus 50.
Fifty (indifference) was the largest single response category (21 respondents gave of answer of exactly 50), and most respondents scattered around 50 with a small tilt towards the warmer end of the range.
I also asked the professors who knew about EA if they thought the distribution of effort (among EAs focused on near-term global well-being) was optimally divided between micro and macro issues. I defined micro issues as those that are relatively easy to evaluate and theorize about, like the effects of distributing anti-malarial bed nets. Macro issues, like promoting economic growth in lower income countries, were harder to evaluate and theorize about but potentially much higher impact conditional on success. This micro/macro distinction maps quite well onto “structural change” concerns sometimes raised in EA circles.
The professors felt that EA focuses too much on micro issues and not enough on macro issues, with the optimal division of effort being something like a 50/50 split.
It has always seemed to me that students come into international development programs with high motivation to do things in the world to help the worst off among us, but very many graduate with diminished ambitions. This has always struck me as a sad waste of potential, but it was unclear to me if these concerns were felt more widely (or even if they were a general issue).
To evaluate this, one first needs to understand if students come into IDEV with a high motivation to help the global poor. It seems that they do, especially in graduate programs.
The next step is to see if these effects fade over time. I asked questions about this in two ways. The first approach asks the professors whether or not the first-year or graduating students that they encounter are either too optimistic or pessimistic about their ability to do things that can help the world’s poorest people. I show the results below, with separate plots for each country and for professors who primarily teach undergraduate and graduate students.
Students uniformly are thought to start off too optimistic. By the time they graduate the level of optimism has shrunk considerably and most professors think that their graduation students’ evaluation about their ability to help the world’s poorest is calibrated about right. It is perhaps noting that in Canada only the level of pessimism is also thought to appreciably increase as undergraduate students move through IDEV programs.
I also asked professors about whether they were more likely to encounter graduating students who felt paralyzed by critiques of development or students that are naive and unable to reflect critically on development. When given these choices, professors reported that paralyzing pessimism was more common than naive optimism, though in graduate programs especially many professors reported that neither outcome was at all likely. As above, Canada stands out as producing especially pessimistic graduates.
The final set of questions (aside from demographics) was about the importance of various research outputs. I phrased this question as asking about how important some intellectual outputs were at the time of the tenure decision (or its equivalent).
The above figure (based on a similar question from a TRIP survey) shows that book chapters and policy reports are heavily discounted as research outputs relative to disciplinary journals. This, however, is not the case for “top” development studies journals, which are generally given equal weight to top disciplinary journals and for a subset of respondents are worth more.
This of course raises the question of which journals are “top” development studies journals. In the survey I asked respondents to simply list “the three journals that publish articles with the greatest influence on the way development studies scholars think about international development. These can include disciplinary or interdisciplinary journals. The order of your entries is unimportant” (again this wording came from a TRIP survey). The results are below (showing all journals listed 10 or more times).
Journal | Number of entries |
---|---|
World Development | 187 |
Development And Change | 73 |
Journal Of Development Studies | 57 |
Journal Of Development Economics | 56 |
Third World Quarterly | 44 |
American Economic Review | 16 |
Journal Of International Development | 15 |
Development In Practice | 13 |
Journal Of Peasant Studies | 13 |
Studies In Comparative International Development | 12 |
Development Policy Review | 11 |
The most prominent result is the extent to which World Development stands out from the pack. After comes the more critical Development and Change, followed by the top economics subfield journal Journal of Development Economics and the more generalist development studies Journal Of Development Studies. There was a fairly long tail of journals that did not make the table. 115 journals were listed fewer than 10 times, though collectively these made up only 30 percent of the total number of entries.
The final section reports on the demographic characteristics of the sample. It is hard to know if the sample was representative of the population of interest without ground-truth data on the population. It’s probably cavalier to view this as telling us something about IDEV professors in general rather than simply something about my sample.
Income of birthplace | Canada | United States | United Kingdom |
---|---|---|---|
High income | 55 | 135 | 76 |
Middle income | 14 | 19 | 22 |
Low income | 3 | 17 | 10 |
Most IDEV professors were born in high-income countries and men somewhat outnumber women.
Gender | Canada | United States | United Kingdom |
---|---|---|---|
Woman | 28 | 69 | 49 |
Man | 43 | 100 | 59 |
My gender identity is not listed above | 1 | 1 | 0 |
Choose not to respond | 0 | 1 | 0 |
In Canada and the US, the most common educational background of IDEV professors is first political science and then economics The educational background of IDEV professors in the UK is more dispersed.
Academic discipline | Canada | United States | United Kingdom |
---|---|---|---|
Anthropology | 4 | 13 | 6 |
Economics | 11 | 47 | 16 |
Geography | 7 | 8 | 14 |
History | 2 | 2 | 2 |
Linguistics and languages | 0 | 1 | 0 |
Philosophy | 1 | 0 | 1 |
Political science | 24 | 59 | 17 |
Psychology | 0 | 1 | 1 |
Public Policy or Public Administration | 0 | 3 | 0 |
Sociology | 3 | 12 | 2 |
Other | 10 | 21 | 25 |
International Development Studies | 10 | 4 | 23 |
Nothing selected | 0 | 0 | 1 |
Most of the professors in the sample are either tenured or tenure-track.
Academic rank | Canada | United States | United Kingdom |
---|---|---|---|
Emeritus | 2 | 4 | 3 |
Full professor (or equivalent) | 21 | 71 | 31 |
Associate professor (or equivalent) | 23 | 57 | 35 |
Assistant professor (or equivalent) | 19 | 25 | 24 |
Visiting faculty or on an annual contract | 2 | 5 | 3 |
Post-Doctoral Fellow | 1 | 1 | 4 |
Adjunct professor | 4 | 3 | 1 |
Other | 0 | 5 | 7 |
There is a reasonable spread of respondents by country across graduate and undergraduate teaching levels. Canadian professors lean towards undergraduate teaching and UK professors lean towards graduate.
Level of most IDEV teaching | Canada | United States | United Kingdom |
---|---|---|---|
undergraduate | 48 | 94 | 24 |
graduate | 21 | 68 | 77 |
I do not teach international development content | 3 | 9 | 7 |
Statistical research methods are the most common in the United States, followed by qualitative (but not interpretive or ethnographic) methods. This latter category is first in the UK and Canada.
Research method | Canada | United States | United Kingdom |
---|---|---|---|
Interpretive or ethnographic | 19 | 32 | 28 |
Qualitative, but not interpretive or ethnographic | 37 | 48 | 44 |
Statistical | 10 | 62 | 17 |
Formal modeling (game theory) | 1 | 4 | 2 |
Legal or ethical analysis | 3 | 6 | 2 |
None of these approximately describe my most recent work | 2 | 19 | 15 |
Finally, in Canada and the UK most of the professors in my sample are based in interdisciplinary departments or schools. In the US disciplinary departments are more common.
University affiliation | Canada | United States | United Kingdom |
---|---|---|---|
Disciplinary department (economics, political science, etc) | 17 | 86 | 29 |
Interdisciplinary department or school (policy school, IDEV school, etc) | 52 | 81 | 73 |
Other | 3 | 4 | 4 |
Nothing selected | 0 | 0 | 2 |