Paul Romer has written extensively over the years about his views on the greatest driver of economic growth and improvements in the quality of life: IDEAS. The General Development Initiative (GDI), although still in its infancy, is now a reality. Once upon a time it was nothing more than an idea.
I began teaching development economics in the fall of 2001. I was vaguely familiar with the concept of service-learning and thought it highly relevant for the teaching and study of development. As part of the first course I taught, I asked students to volunteer at a local organization that worked with people suffering from the consequences of living in poverty. My thought was that the only way to truly understand development and poverty alleviation theories was to see them in practice. In addition to working with "the poor" students were required to write a short paper relating their personal experiences to a theoretical construct from class. The most common service provided was tutoring a young person in the local schools and then relating this experience to human capital theories. Students were able to see how their time spent with a young person could potentially be related to that person's future income and well-being. The most common papers used a Solow-Growth framework to discuss the long run implications of investing in a child's human capital.
I continued to use this service component for three years. During that time period students at Washington and Lee gave over 1000 hours of service to our local community. Based on comments from course evaluations - they also gained invaluable insights into what in means to be poor and how theories from our class cuold be used to alleviate the condition. In 2004, I took a semester away from the classroom and thought about how we could expand our local service projects....
to be continued.........
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