Exploring big ideas in development economics: an interview with Ranil Dissanayake

By Probably Good @ 2024-09-06T13:11 (+39)

This is a linkpost to https://probablygood.org/interviews/ranil-dissanayake/

This interview is a cross-post from Probably Good’s new Career Journeys series. 

“No one will ever complain that you write too well… I look back at stuff I wrote 20 years ago and cringe now. But if I didn’t write it, I would still be bad. You’re not learning unless you’re doing it.”

How does someone break into the field of development economics? And what does working in the field actually look like? Ranil Dissanayake is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. His career journey spans several countries and unique experiences – including over 15 years working in international development policy-making. Along the way, he’s realized the importance of writing often, sharing ideas often, and talking with people of all sorts of backgrounds. We recently chatted about his path to his current role, day-to-day work, and advice for people starting out – edited below for clarity and brevity.

What did you want to do when you were younger? And how did your ambitions change over time?

I went to university pretty young, at 17. As a teenager, I wanted to be a filmmaker. I was mad about movies and watched them all day. I didn’t want to pursue film straight out of school, though, because I didn’t think I had anything interesting to say yet. My vague medium-term plan was to get a degree then try to go to film school in New York. 

I decided to study history and economics because I had this amazing teacher for these subjects. They weren’t my best, but they were definitely my favorite. I applied and got into my top choice, Oxford, which had a joint honors program in both economics and history. Throughout my first couple of years there, I really enjoyed the academic side of things, but filmmaking was still my side gig. I was entering screenplay competitions and making short films. 

In my third and final year, I did a course in development economics. I’d always been interested in the subject—in part because I’m from Sri Lanka and was born in Hong Kong in 1981. If you were born in Hong Kong in 1981, you know something about development. There was a period of incredibly rapid change and increases in wealth. One side of my family was middle-class professionals, but my other side came from a tiny village without electricity and running water. I’d go to see my family in Sri Lanka every year and the dissonance between life there and my life in Hong Kong (with its high rise buildings and new shopping malls) was striking. 

When I did this one course in development economics, I realized, ‘Wow, there’s a whole discipline for thinking about this stuff.’ At the time, it was still seen as a niche subject. This was before randomized control trials and before the field had its revolution. It wasn’t the sort of thing mainstream economists did, but I just found it all so engaging. 

After I finished my degree, I still felt too young to do anything interesting in filmmaking. I decided to do a master’s in development economics at SOAS in London, which had a totally different style of economics than Oxford. (I think it’s a good idea for people to do their degrees at different places). Again, I just loved the course and everything I was learning. I lived somewhat of an unusual life for a 20 year old. I would go to my lectures, then get drinks with my classmates from around the world and we’d talk about what it was like where we were from. It was such an interesting experience.

What happened after the master’s degree?

At that point, I decided development economics could be a good alternative career for me. I cared about it innately. It resonated with my personal background. But it was (and still is) hard to break into the field. I sort of lucked into doing a short-term contract with the UK Home Office. My role didn’t have to do with development (I was working on race equality and policing), but I discovered I really liked working for the government. 

When my contract ended, I worked for a quality auditor for the health service in the UK. It was terrible. The organization was poorly run, I had too much responsibility for my level of knowledge, and I hated it from the day I started the job. Thankfully, I had also applied for the ODI fellowship. It’s an incredibly unique program where you spend two years working for the government of a developing country and getting paid the local government salary. I was invited for an interview for the fellowship, then accepted the position, and left my health service job within six months.

For my fellowship, I was posted in Malawi for two years. I ended up staying for four because I had such fantastic bosses. They were both so dedicated to their work. You could see that the system was terrible, there was such little support, and the pay was quite bad. But for various reasons, it was this rare period of time where you could get a lot done. Everything was done quite poorly, and we could actually make it better. It took me about five months to win my bosses’ trust and be given the flexibility, but once that happened, the job was so interesting and fun. I really felt like I was doing something. I was only 23, I didn’t have a girlfriend or family responsibilities, and I really just threw myself into the work. Ever since then, every job I’ve done has been a development job. 

Where did you go from there and how did it lead you to your current role? 

The first half of my career was focused on very practical, technical advice. It was all rooted in economics, but I was working on questions like: Can we collect and report this information under budget? And does this help us make slightly better decisions? The IMF wants to do this—is it really a good idea? What analysis can we do and who should we talk to?

After my four years of doing this sort of work in Malawi, I went to Zanzibar for a couple of years. I thought I could really change things because it is such a small place and I knew everyone. I quickly discovered it didn’t work like that and found it very difficult to get anything done. I was funded by the UN to work for the government there, but I couldn’t in good conscience take a ridiculously high UN salary when I wasn’t making a difference. I knew I wasn’t doing anything useful. I just couldn’t do it.

The next inflection point in my career was at DFID (UK’s Department of International Development). I applied there after my time in Zanzibar and got the job. I had a great boss who liked people who thought creatively and had ideas. It was unusual, but he just kind of let me run. So I wrote this paper on how we were approaching job creation all wrong. Being new to the civil service in the UK, I didn’t have a sense of how things went. DFID had just hired a new chief economist, Stefan Decon, and I decided to email him the draft of my paper and ask what he thought.

To my incredible surprise, he not only read it, he invited me to his office. We spent over an hour talking about the paper and talking about development more broadly. That was a life changing moment. We got on well, he liked the way I thought, and I loved working with him. For the rest of my time at DFID, I was working for him or with him in some way. I would run ideas by him and he would constantly throw things my way. One time, I wrote some critique in a private email, and Stefan forwarded it to Paul Niehaus (a prominent economist and founder of GiveDirectly) just to see how I’d respond to Paul’s rebuttal. I’ve never had somebody trust my intellect like that. I’ve had lots of supportive people, but no one had ever told me, “There’s no reason you can’t argue with Paul Niehaus—just do it.”

That whole experience shaped so much for me. It gave me the confidence to throw ideas out, to be wrong, and then be less wrong. When Stefan left DFID, I still wanted to maintain our relationship. I went part-time and completed a doctorate at Oxford with him as my supervisor—which was something I had never planned to do. After the doctorate, I felt like I kind of ran out of road at DFID, and I applied for my current role at the Center for Global Development (CGD).

That’s basically my whole career path, but to sum it up, the big turning points were:

• Having a great teacher for history and economics (I think every development economist should have a lot of training in both).
• Taking a wonderful development economics course in undergrad.
• The good luck of being in the right place at the right time in Malawi. 
• Then the luck of having overlap with Stefan at DFID.

What does a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development actually do?

I think you get a different answer from every senior fellow. The original vision for the Center for Global Development was to hire 10-12 brilliant people with ideas, give them a salary, and let them write and think about whatever they want. Over time, CGD has become more of a program-based organization where people focus on specific areas. There is still a lot of intellectual freedom, but to some extent, your work is shaped by what topics the donors want you to think about. It may be fairly vague, like ‘write a paper on the best way to do climate mitigation with aid money.’ There’s no restriction on what I could say within this topic.

We’re all still bound by our grants, but there’s a couple of us that work on several programs across areas. Over the last couple years, for example, I’ve written about gender, UK development policy, climate change mitigation, antimicrobial resistance, finance and market-shaping, and a lot on innovation and climate.

What does your day-to-day look like?

Every day either begins or ends with my taking or picking up my son from his nursery. Those are the bookends, but in the middle, it’s all quite varied. 

A large portion of my time is spent writing. Some of the papers I work on are research papers. If I was in my office, you’d see my whiteboard behind me with regressions and equations written all over it. Then some of the papers I work on are short policy papers—so figuring out how to get an idea operationalized. And then some of the papers are more big idea think-pieces. A lot of what I end up doing is prioritization. I always have more stuff to do than I can do with my time, and sometimes that means putting the more interesting paper aside.

Another big chunk of my time is data work. It’s looking at the numbers and trying to understand what’s going on. For the research papers, I’m trying to see the shape of all the raw data. It’s like being an academic in that sense—you have a research plan and figure out how everything fits together. This probably takes up most of my time.

The other big part of my job is talking to people. I try to talk to as many people as I can, as often as I can, about all sorts of things. Most of the interesting things I’ve done at CGD come from conversations with people. For example, the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) paper came from listening to my colleagues, Anthony McDonnell and Katherine Klemperer, talk about AMR in a meeting and asking them about it after.

Talking to people has been really important for finding ideas. Stefan did this a lot at DFID. He would talk to anybody he thought had an interesting idea—completely blind to their discipline, their grade, their importance, or anything like that. He would talk to them until he absolutely had to leave the room. He was always late for meetings for this, but I loved it. It was so empowering as a junior staffer to have someone senior (and brilliant) who actually wanted to listen to you. I try to replicate this and talk to as many people as I can. Some of the best ideas I’ve had come from talking to someone in their first years, just starting out. 

What part of your work do you feel most fulfilled by?

I love the actual writing part, but I can’t force it. I tend to spend a lot of my day staring aimlessly into space, flicking through interesting articles on the internet, or looking at Twitter. Then, when the spirit moves me, I write. A lot of people abide by rules like, “always write three hours in the morning with no distractions,” or “write two hundred words even if they’re terrible.” I’m not like that. When the spirit moves me, I’ll write for four straight hours and finish two papers. Then I might go a week without having one of those moments. Many jobs require people to go through the motions of things. I hate that. Long before flexible working was popular, I never cared if the people I managed were in the office or when they were online. My approach is just do the things you need to do and be around enough so that you can talk with and learn from people. 

I think talking to people is probably the most important and fulfilling part of my job. I’m only in the office twice a week, but I’m quite good at noting if someone says something interesting in a meeting then asking them for a chat. I try to have a coffee with a colleague every week. I think it’s a really good discipline to hold yourself to. If you just do your job all day, what you think about will be quite narrow. You need the mental flexibility to think about new things. 

It’s great to be constantly talking with smart people, even if they’re smart in a totally different way from you. CGD is packed with people who have different life experiences than me that have done all sorts of interesting things. A lot of my colleagues aren’t economists—they’re from all sorts of fields. I talk with a lot of social anthropologists, for instance, because they think about things very differently and challenge how I see problems.

Outside of your direct job experience, what experiences or skills do you think were especially helpful in getting to where you are today?

As soon as I went to Malawi, I started a blog to write my reflections on politics, economics, etc. It got a reasonably wide read. A lot of (often) young people starting blogs at that time went on to have quite impressive careers—people like Chris Blattman, Kate Cronin-Furman and Amanda Taub. In Zanzibar, when it was challenging to get things done, I spent a lot of time reading and writing. Matt Collin and I started a blog called Aid Thoughts, and lots of people started reading and commenting on our stuff.

Starting a blog was really helpful in three big ways. First, it was a great experience intellectually. Every time I had an idea, I just wrote it up. Most of these ideas go nowhere, but I got a lot better at having the confidence to put my ideas out. Second, it improved my writing a ton and helped me sort through what’s good and what’s not. Third, it really helped my career because people knew who I was. When I was in orientation at DFID, several people came up to me and said they read my blog. 

Once I got to DFID, I continued writing my personal thoughts in a weekly email roundup. Every Friday, I’d summarize a few interesting things I’d read and send it to my immediate team. It was quite private and personal (my team was only five people), so I’d be quite opinionated and political, which isn’t normal if you’re in the civil service. 

One day, I copied Stefan in an email because I’d written something he was interested in. Then he just forwarded it to the entire organization. My Friday roundup email list went from 10 people to 150, then 200 people. Eventually, all sorts of people I admired and respected were on the mailing list—a lot of them were working at CGD. So when I decided to move on from my job at DFID, CGD was the obvious place. Everybody at CGG already knew me through my writing, which is not normal because I’ve been a policy economist for most of my life. I wasn’t an academic. Usually, you know about people who have been publishing in academic journals, but people knew me from this weekly email. That’s one unexpected thing that (unintentionally) turned out to be a big career booster.

Do you have any other advice you’d give to someone just starting out in development economics or wanting to get into it?

No one will ever complain that you write too well. Invest in all your communication skills to an extreme degree. Try to write all the time, even if it’s just yourself. A lot of smart people at CGD send me an idea and I always tell them to just write it up. Publish it somewhere, even if it’s your personal blog. I look back at stuff I wrote 20 years ago and cringe now. But if I didn’t write it, I would still be bad. You’re not learning unless you’re doing it. And also, talk to everybody. Have all sorts of conversations about things you’re genuinely interested in. You can’t fake the interest. Find things you actually want to talk about and talk about them with people. 

From my very first day at DFID, I agreed to every speaking opportunity that was presented to me—whether a presentation or an informal talk. Obviously, your ideas get better when you present them. You get feedback. You see what works and what doesn’t land. I also teach seminars and lectures and agree with the Richard Feynman approach—that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Everybody thinks slightly differently. Every time you’re teaching someone, you have to reach for slightly different metaphors and come up with an intuitive way they can understand it. The more you do this, the better you are at communicating your ideas. If you want a job like mine—which is to write about complicated ideas and convince people who hold power to put money behind them—you need to be able to explain things simply, quickly, and compellingly.

The last thing I’d say is read widely. You learn a lot about development economics from unusual sources. My bookshelf has various behavioral stuff, lots of history and memoir, lots of anthropology, and lots of fiction. But you can learn a lot about things from reading all sorts of disciplines. 

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