Why Economists Don’t Listen: Tales From an Anthropology Spy in Economics

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Why Economists Don’t Listen<br>Tales From an Anthropology Spy in Economics

In Development Magazine and Vijayendra Rao<br>Aug 20, 2026

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This post is also available on the In Development website.<br>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.<br>We were a few minutes in when the door slammed open. One woman’s husband stormed into the room, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out, shouting that lunch wasn’t cooked and she was wasting her time with us.<br>To receive new posts and support In Development, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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I was a young economist then, with a freshly minted PhD. My questionnaire had no item for what I had just seen. We had not come to study domestic violence; we had come to collect evidence on more prosaic questions of how sociocultural and economic systems shape marriage markets and living standards.<br>This is a vague enough remit that, in principle, almost anything should have qualified as relevant; it should have been easy to retool and collect more data that accurately reflected women’s lives. But the survey we had brought with us — with all its inherent assumptions — was calibrated to register what could be measured cleanly and not much else. Our disciplinary training was not fit for purpose.<br>It took us a week of staying in that village, drinking buttermilk and coffee, sitting through many silences, before one of the women finally opened up and said: “You have become our friends and we can’t lie to you anymore. We feel like we are in jail. Our husbands beat us all the time. They spend the family money on alcohol. No one helps.”<br>That was new information. We rewrote our questionnaire on the spot, added items on wife-beating, which resulted in a mixed-methods analysis of domestic violence and one of the first economics papers on the subject in a developing country.

Vijayendra Rao (in blue shirt) with team in rural Karnataka, 1993. © Vijayendra Rao<br>I have thought about that week for more than 30 years. Not because the story is unusual — anyone who has done serious fieldwork has a version of it — but because of what it taught me about my own discipline. I am an economist, and economics is well known for its rigor, its emphasis on quantitative methods — and its distance from its subjects. Economics tends to focus on the measurable, which can exclude what is important; if it cannot be included in a survey module, it is not worth studying. But life is about more than survey modules, and the wall between economist and subject is not a methodological convenience. It is the central problem with the discipline.<br>I have spent my career as a kind of spy — an economist smuggling anthropology’s methods across the wall. I have written the careful academic version of this argument. What follows is the version I would talk about over a drink.<br>How We Got Here

Things did not start this way. In the late 19th century, Charles Booth, a shipping magnate turned amateur sociologist, took it upon himself to find out how the poor of London actually lived. He spent 17 years on the job. His team gathered information on 4 million Londoners: school inspectors, factory owners, clergymen, policemen and many more. They did surveys, but they also did much more: they took notes, they did open-ended interviews, they made color-coded maps. Booth used both numbers and stories because his question — what does poverty look like in London? — demanded both. He and his team stitched all of it into 17 volumes of “Life and Labour of the People in London,” showing, block by block, who was wealthy and who was destitute and who was somewhere in between. This integration of both story and data shaped economic and social policy in Britain for a generation.<br>Over the 20th century, that integration came apart. Economics, in its push for scientific status, narrowed itself to the analysis of quantitative data. Cultural anthropology split off into the ethnographic tradition — some of it deeply insightful, and some of it consumed by critique and navel-gazing. Sociology fragmented into many parts and a spiral of internal arguments over methods. Psychology went experimental. Political science was increasingly influenced by economics both in theory and method but retained an openness towards mixing qualitative and quantitative methods. By the 1980s, the disciplines distinguished themselves from one another mainly by what they refused to look at.<br>In economics, there were a few attempts to bridge this gap that did not have much of an impact. Back in 1984,...