Summer, some updates, some reflections

29 episodes down! (Well, 30 if you include a repost via the Africa Urban Lab).

I’m not sure why I committed to a weekly schedule. It has certainly made my life hectic, but overall I’m glad I did. However, given some recent trips / general busy-ness, I have run out of steam. So, I’m taking a month or so off to build the pipeline back up, and I’ll be back with more episodes in August.

Thanks to the team at Talk Normal Productions, and my co-hosts Kartik, Deena, and Kurtis, as well as Michelle, for all of their help.

I’m excited to finish off the current series on Evidence, and also cover new topics. Energy is the series I’d like to do next, and I’ll certainly return to AI and growth related topics in the future. But also very open to suggestions, on people, stories, and new topics. Hit me up at ohanney@cepr.org, or comment here, if you have thoughts.

I have really enjoyed the process of starting and running this podcast. But to be honest, I still can’t quite figure out if it’s worth continuing - I’m leaning yes, but not fully convinced at this moment in time. It’s relatively cheap financially, but expensive time/energy wise. Originally I had planned to do this for half a year, at which point I imagined I’d know if it was a keeper. But building an audience takes time, commitment, and a consistent schedule. Blowing up quickly is not really a realistic goal if you’re trying to build the right way, even if we’ve taken some liberties with our thumbnails. So I’ll decide at the end of the year.

Whilst it’s easy to get disillusioned when comparing your own ‘numbers’ against the content you see online, in reality those mask a much bigger ecosystem of success, even if it hasn’t ‘popped’ and reached most peoples’ feeds. Plus, numbers matter less for VoxDev than the specific people we reach, and how useful they find the episode. Scrolling through my subscribers on Substack, there are many cool, senior people who I respect and admire, which I’d like to think is a good sign.

The modal Ideas in Development podcast now does about the same as our VoxDevTalks series by Tim Philips, which is about/just over 1000 listeners across platforms. Though that doesn’t reflect the episodes which get a lot of traction, which depends on the mysterious YouTube algorithm, where some Ideas in Development episodes have organically gotten over 60,000 views (see this recent episode on Ethiopia for example). We also experimented with boosting certain content, which led some videos to do really well, like Deena and I’s episode on AI in Africa with Rose Mutiso, which has almost 300,000 views, almost exclusively from countries in Africa. But boosted views are less ‘real’ than organic ones, so the Ethiopia growth episode probably comes in as our most actually-listened to episode thus far.

In terms of my personal favourites, which is hard as I (along with my co-hosts) picked every guest, so they are already screened on being interesting and knowledgeable:

• Vietnam’s economy: The remarkable story of the last 50 years Madame Pham Chi Lan was so generous with her time, and it was a privilege to sit down and talk for so long with someone who has seen Vietnam’s transformation first hand over the last 50 years.

• The perfect city? Ed Glaeser just churns out insights, it felt like every other sentence contained a new thought, history, or topic I could read an entire long-form article about.

• Is the industrial revolution a good comparison for AI? This was a fun exercise with Bruno Caprettini, and I learned a lot about British history (it was probably in my head somewhere, but it’s been a while since I visited Ironbridge as a ten year old).

• Bill McRaith on building factories from 1990s China to present day Ethiopia, being pitched by governments, and the future of the apparel industry - a different perspective to the one we normally hear in development, full of interesting titbits.

Another surprise has been how well the Substack has done. It has over 1100 subscribers, and the write ups of episodes now routinely get over 1000 reads, about doubling the reach of the average podcast’s content and key takeaways. These are relatively easy for me to do, as I can feed the super long podcast transcript, with a good prompt and examples, into Claude, and get an average first draft, which then requires about an hour of editing. My workflow makes this relatively smooth, as I have to watch the episode back anyways (often twice!), so I can judge whether Claude did a good job at summarising from the transcript, or whether the draft needs sections adding or removing, as well as the general adjustments for tone and meaning that are always required (at least for now).

For the next month or so, as well as listening back to every episode and liking/commenting on them all, of course, I’ll leave you with the following.

• My interview in the FT last week (such a cool/lovely experience, thanks to Sarah O’Connor and John Burn-Murdoch for having me on). We talked about Nan Ransohoff’s recent piece on the third wave of American philanthropy, my own piece (there is no randomising a technological revolution), and much more! I ended by calling for the economic research teams currently being built out within Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind to actually hire some development economists - though much more needs to be done beyond that short term fix if we are to better understand AI’s impacts on development, and help governments to navigate these uncertain times. (Sorry, subscription required, my guest link has run out).

• At VoxDev, Economics Unpacked is back today for our second series, seven videos on important topics in development. Our first episode is (imho) a banger, 150 years of growth in China in under 10 minutes. We are playing around with the format and scope of these explainer videos, so feedback welcome!

• And In Development is back this week, the next Issue (Issue 2) is full of really interesting articles, so make sure to subscribe.

So, lots to keep you busy, see you in August :)