the Nobel prize. Yet, her cognitively empathetic approach to understanding how communities managed common resources led to deep insights on human behavior that have had a transformative impact on the social sciences. I would venture to argue that she would never have been able to do this work had she had a job in an economics department.

Younger economists are increasingly spending time in the field to collect data and test interventions, and some display a great deal of cognitive empathy in how they approach their work. MR Sharan (2021) has written a marvelous account of ten years of travel in rural areas of the Indian state of Bihar, interacting closely with local activists and trying to understand the inner workings of village government. The book, which is meant for a general audience, is less an ethnography than a memoir but it brings into sharp focus the challenges faced by citizens, particularly those from disadvantaged groups in accessing government programs. This embedded, empathetic approach is apparent, albeit implicitly, in Sharan’s research (Sharan and Kumar, 2021) where he and his co-author Chinmay Kumar analyze data from 100,000 village-level politicians in Bihar to examine the provision of public goods to lower castes. They find that leaders matter – when a lower-level lower caste representative reports to a high-caste representative, lower castes receive poorer access to public goods. However, a grievance redressal system instituted by the government is accessed more by lower-caste representatives to counter this discriminatory provision.

It is clear from this overview of field-oriented economics research, that Srinivasan was partially correct. Participant observation can be an extremely valuable tool for economists and can result in quantitative findings that are cognitively empathetic. It does not however, follow that this is true of all field-based research. Cognitive empathy requires a process of listening and learning from the people one is researching, and reflecting their interests, their insights, and their perspectives in the research through a process of iterative learning. Most work in field work in economics tends to be much more top-down, focused on testing an intervention or conducting an experiment which is not based on bottom-up learning. Similarly, not all qualitative work is empathetic – a great deal of it is unfortunately, perfunctory, and careless; employing delegated teams who summarize information from focus groups that replicate the prior biases of the researcher. In a lot of so-called mixed methods work, qualitative information of this kind primarily serves as means of providing color to “hard” quantitative analysis.

On the other hand, field-oriented economists (including me) seem to collect qualitative information that they do not report, or indeed fully analyze, because the profession does not treat it as data worth writing about. This is a mistake. Narrative insights from the deep, grounded interviews and field visits can greatly enrich and complement econometric work, help contextualize findings – they are not merely “anecdotes.” I turn next to a brief overview of research that analyzes data from narratives - open-ended interviews, transcripts of group meetings, social media posts, and the analysis of newspapers, to demonstrate this point.

# B. <u>Narrative Data</u>

People do not talk in numbers, they talk in words. A survey interview where the respondent is directed to take a vague notion and emerge with a precise numerical response, or pick one of a small set of multiple choices when none might exactly fit what they are thinking, is engaging in an unnatural interaction that can lead to a misinterpretation of what they are trying to communicate. Yet almost all the data analyzed by economists comes from interviews of this kind. If economics is to become more reflexive and learn from the people it is trying to study, it needs get more comfortable with analyzing information from narratives.

A nice example of the value of narrative analysis is the use of the technique of “financial diaries” by a team of authors that included an economist, an anthropologist, a development activist, and an expert in 10