## Notes from 06 April 2026 [[2026-04-05|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2026-04-07|Next note →]] [Found this paper](https://ericnrobertson.github.io/files/jmp.pdf) on [[The Abundance and Growth Blog]]'s reading list. Robertson exploits a natural experiment in 19th-century British India: future colonial bureaucrats at Haileybury College were taught economics by Malthus until his sudden death in 1834, when he was replaced by Richard Jones, who held opposing views on poverty and state intervention. Tracking both cohorts across their careers, Robertson shows that Malthus-trained officials were ~30% less likely to grant tax relief during droughts and significantly less likely to open public works or distribute aid. The effects were strongest among lower-performing students and among senior officials with more discretion — i.e., the people with less independent judgment and the people with more power. It caught my attention that although Robertson frames this as "economic ideas", it's really about ideological exposure during formative training. Today this is harder to extrapolate — information channels have multiplied, so legacy institutions like formal training programs probably carry less relative weight in shaping views than they once did. But in closed career systems like Brazil's or Germany's, where professionals spend decades in the same organization and eventually assume leadership, the cumulative effect of internal training content still matters enormously. We have very little evidence on this, and it connects directly to the [[Cognitive Diversity|cognitive diversity]] conversation: civil service training should expose people to competing frameworks about how the state works. ---