There is a long tradition in development economics of “village studies,” where economists spend months, if not years, studying, engaging with, and collecting data from a small sample of rural villages. T. Scarlett Epstein (1962) spent several months in the late 1950s studying two villages in South India where she examined the links between the local economy and social structure, comparing a “dry” (arid), and a “wet” (irrigated) village. Her data included a mix of field observations, interviews, and survey data. Her approach to research integrated training in economics and anthropology; as a student of William Arthur Lewis she was deeply interested in patterns of employment, agrarian relations and migration, but as an anthropologist trained in the Manchester School she wanted to probe into the link between caste and social class and how these were affected by agrarian change. Her work on South India is therefore suffused by an interesting mix of qualitative and quantitative data and was widely influential.

Two economic theorists, Christopher Bliss and Nicholas Stern, inspired by Epstein, spent eight months between 1974-75 in the North Indian village of Palanpur to study a series of important questions: the nature of land tenure arrangements, labor and credit markers, risk and uncertainty. They were steeped in theory, but they let their conversations, experiences and observations inform the development of new theoretical models and condition the kinds of survey data they collected. Their book (Bliss and Stern, 1982) and the papers they wrote based on their first round of fieldwork, were followed by a series of repeated visits (primarily by Stern), their students and research collaborators that continues to this day (e.g: Himanshu, Lanjouw and Stern, 2018). Interestingly, while all the researchers involved in the Palanpur project are immersed in the conversations they had in the village, rarely are those conversations reported in their published research which is theoretical and econometric. Their work clearly displays a great deal of cognitive empathy, but it is almost entirely quantitative.

Several good economists cut their teeth on the Palanpur project. Among them is Jean Dreze, whom I think of as one of the most cognitively empathetic economists in the world. He has developed what he calls the “Research for Action” method (Dreze 2017) arguing that “Research can help with arguments and evidence that contribute to more effective action.” To this end he has avoided any funding from the usual places (including my own institution – the World Bank) to avoid any semblance of bias. He lives for much of the time within the poor communities whose perspectives he is trying to represent. And, he has successfully advocated for policies that draw on this bottom-up perspective, most notably the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act which guarantees a minimum of a hundred days of employment for anyone in rural India. Despite all this I have rarely seen him explicitly draw on qualitative data, and yet every statement embodies the interests of poor and marginalized people in India.

In the late 1980s, to systematically explore what economists and anthropologists could learn from each other, Pranab Bardhan organized a pioneering conference that brought them into a “conversation” on measuring economic change in rural India and explore the “tension” between participant-observation and survey methods. Bardhan along with Ashok Rudra (Bardhan and Rudra, 1978) had himself previously engaged in field-based research that established the relational, socially embedded, interlinkages between land, labor and credit markers in rural India. Re-reading the edited volume that emerged from the conference (Bardhan, 1989), the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s (1989) chapter which offers a critique of both anthropology and economics makes some points that resonate well today. He says that even if economists visit the field and engage in participant observation their work tends to be confined to outcomes rather than process, and they tend to collect data that is “distributional” rather than “relational” (in the sense of understanding the relationships between groups). Drawing on his own fieldwork Appadurai argues that forcing fuzzy concepts into survey-based measures can cause mismeasurement and that survey techniques need to be developed that can accommodate “fuzzy and approximate” quantitative responses. But, he also says that anthropologists tend to not care about bias – they tend to study more prosperous villages, focus on optimistic responses, and on respondents who are outliers rather than those 7