Why Economists Don’t Listen Tales From an Anthropology Spy in Economics In Development Magazine and Vijayendra Rao Aug 20, 2026

https://indevelopmentmag.substack.com/p/why-economists-dont-listen-tales? In 1993, I was sitting on a mud floor with a small group of women in a village in Karnataka, trying to start a conversation about their lives. I had a survey for them to answer: heavy on questions that required numerical answers about consumption and family structure — who lived in the household, how old they were, what they had eaten, what the roof was made of. This is standard stuff in development economics.