teaching development economics

Jeffrey Sachs makes an interesting comment about how economics is taught to students. This is an excerpt from a recent interview found
here

Emphasis added in the article is mine.

The End of Poverty: An Interview with Jeffrey Sachs
Interviewed By Onnesha Roychoudhuri

MJ: Now you suggest in your book that we need to assess ailing economies just as doctors assess patients. You call it "clinical economics." Does the current academic curriculum for development economics provide a sufficient framework for educating people to ensure that the MDGs will be achieved by future economists?

JS: No it doesn't. I realized 10 or 15 years ago that the students in economics departments write dissertations about countries that they never stepped foot in because their advisor gives them a database from Nigeria or Kenya or some place else, and they do their thesis that way. That's like becoming a doctor without ever seeing a patient. We don't do case studies. We don't train students to understand the differences across countries. There are a tremendous number of loose generalizations made all the time

Similarly, people aren't trained in the practical experiences of being operational. Sometimes people say, "We teach academic things, we don't teach operational things." But, frankly, to do development right, you have to do something that's more like going through medical school and having a clinical hospital where you actually learn about different cases, and do case analyses. When something goes wrong, you study it. There are what are called "M&M rounds" in hospitals—morbidity and mortality rounds. When something doesn't work, when a patient dies or doesn't get better, the doctors get together to discuss the case. We don't do that in academic economics. For me, the field is not properly organized right now to really take on these challenges adequately and I'm hoping that the field will become more like a clinical science.