Today marks Berk’s last official day at the World Bank after starting here in 2001 (and being a summer intern in 1993). In honor of him, now living in New Zealand, we thought about titling this post “I’ll say goodbye (even though I’m blue)” by the NZ band The Exponents, but it’s not a complete goodbye so we turned to another great NZ band, Crowded House, for inspiration instead.
Berk in 2001 testing whether in-kind transfers improve animal welfare
If you are reading this blog, it is due to Berk. He brought up the idea to David back in 2011, wondering of whether there was a space for a research-oriented blog in the development economist space that dealt with a lot of the issues around methods, measurement, and research that don’t otherwise necessarily get taught or discussed. They roped in Markus and Jed as fellow co-founders and -- like all great marathon runners -- started off way too fast and optimistically, each blogging once a week at the start of Development Impact.
Fast forward 14 years later and Berk has now written 232 posts. In the last couple of years he pivoted to a “dress for the job you want” approach with 3 posts a year, something we hope he may continue doing over the next few years. This is why this post is a “it’s a celebration, and not a complete farewell” post.
Since some of our newer readers may have been in elementary school when he started blogging on DI, here is a small taste of some highlights of Berk’s blogging over the years.:
· He makes you think, even when you disagree with him: Berk’s very first post on April 7, 2011 on whether there was an unmet need for birth control gathered a fantastic set of comments, including a follow-up post by Lant Pritchett. Berk later blogged with the note that Lant paid him the great compliment by once telling Berk “Thanks for the comments. As usual they are all very smart and well-informed and I disagree with most.”
· He helped sort through the noise and the hype: Berk provided more balanced looks on papers and debates that often had strong reactions without people really reading the papers carefully. He jumped into the worm wars and discussions around replication efforts, fact-checked the NY Times on the potential of Universal Basic Income, called funders of the millennium villages project to task, and sorted through the hype around cash transfers. His careful deep dives into papers such as this post on a double blind experiment with cowpeas, the multi-country evaluation of ultra-poor programs, and the Give Directly evaluations are the explainers we wish we could find for every buzzworthy paper out there.
· He talked about multiple aspects of the research publication process with novel ideas: in addition to lamenting long publication lags, discussing PAPs and registered reports, and issues with long-term fade-out not getting covered by media as much as the initial hype around cash studies, he talked about how he started signing his referee reports. To this day, one of his most popular posts remains an early piece he wrote simply titled “working papers are not working”, with the memorable description “Working papers are the research equivalent of sweatshirts with pizza stains on them, but we wear them on our first date with our audience”. He also talked more generally about issues of professional conduct, such as whether it is ok to blog about the work of a grad student, and behaving better at seminars, especially men.
· He’s been our love, sex and marriage columnist: early on he lamented that you can’t randomize (not) getting married among school-age girls in sub-Saharan Africa. He had more luck using adaptive experiments to randomize advice on contraception, talked about how to ask people sensitive questions about sex, and wasn’t afraid to start a blog post with the opening line “I was circumcised in the hospital as a very young infant.”
· The guy loves talking about spillovers: he discussed negative psychological spillovers of cash transfers, many different types of spillovers of cash transfers in Give Directly evaluations, designing experiments to measure spillovers, power calculations with spillovers, defining different types of spillovers, and more… We will definitely miss the positive spillovers we all had from having him around.
So what’s next for Berk? He will be an Honorary Associate Professor with the Centre for International Health at the University of Otāgo in Dunedin, New Zealand, and an affiliate of Stanford GSB’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab. You can continue to follow his research on his webpage. For those who don’t know, Berk is an excellent vegan cook, and his webpage promises recipes to come. In 2016 he wrote “When I showed some sympathy for this statement while focusing more on making tortillas, she was resistant: it was clear she did not want to give up on regression models”.
Well, we don’t want to see him give up on regression models either. Don’t Dream it Over Berk, and you may think you are done
But you’ll never see the end of the road
While you’re travelling with me
…Hey now, hey now
Don’t dream it’s over
Hey now, hey now
When the world comes in
They come, they come
To build a wall between us
We know they won’t win
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