"Slumdog" Child Actors: Part III

This just in from Entertainment Weekly:

Back in November, when Slumdog Millionaire was just starting to heat up, I interviewed director Danny Boyle for a feature in Entertainment Weekly. At one point, we chatted about the challenge of hiring and directing three small local children who spoke only Hindi. One, Ayush Mahesh Khedekar (who plays the youngest Jamal), comes from a middle-class background, while the other two, Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail (who play the youngest Latika and Salim), are from Mumbai slums similar to those depicted in the film. Boyle mentioned that he and the producers, cognizant of how a movie like Slumdog could change the kids’ lives for the worse if proper care wasn’t taken, had set up a trust fund for Ali and Ismail, accessible only if they enrolled in school -- a first for both of them. “They’d never been to school,” Boyle said. “So they have to stay in school until they’re 18. When they reach 18, and if they’ve passed all their exams, a quite substantial sum of money -- extra money [on top of their salaries] -- will be released to them.”

Boyle wasn’t presenting this in a Look at what a good, moral Westerner I am! See how I take care of the less fortunate! kind of way. Rather, he was explaining a course of action that, to me, seemed logical, responsible, and just. But now, an article printed in Britain's The Telegraph earlier this week has stained those good intentions with accusations of exploitation. In the story, Ali and Ismail’s parents accuse Boyle and producer Christian Colson of stiffing their kids out of a decent wage, alleging that their payment for a year’s work was “less than many Indian domestic servants.” This article comes on the heels of earlier reports that many Indians are taking offense with the title of the movie. Consider the flames of the inevitable Slumdog backlash duly fanned.

The movie’s distributor, Fox Searchlight, as well as Boyle and Colson, all have responded to the Telegraph story with statements, asserting that “For 30 days’ work, the children were paid three times the average local annual adult salary,” and that the families have been given funds to cover “basic living costs, health care, and any other emergencies.” A subsequent Reuters news clip shows the father of one of the kids back-pedaling on the accusations, but is it possible the damage is done? The kids’ lives are now disrupted, with camera crews busting into their classrooms. Moreover, concerned that such public talk of money could make Ali, Ismail, and their families a target for local Mumbai criminals, Searchlight has moved them into private housing. For now, it seems this mess isn’t as out of hand as what happened with The Kite Runner kids in 2007, but how does the situation sit with you, PopWathgers? Who, if anyone, is at fault here? The media for stirring up drama? Searchlight? The Parents? And does the controversy affect how you feel about Slumdog?

So the trust fund is indeed a conditional cash transfer, which strikes me as paternalistic (similar to the strategy Dan and Valli discussed in their comments in the last post). At the same time, I like the fact that the children's families basic needs were addressed. Either way, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during the numerous discussions that must have gone down regarding these payments.

"Slumdog" Child Actors: Part II

So, as it turns out, Hollywood has taken care of the child actors in Slumdog Millionaire. Quoting a quote from a Freakonomics blog post:

Danny Boyle placed the money to be paid to the three lead child actors in a trust that is to be released to them upon their completion of grade school at 16 years of age. The production company has set up for an autorickshaw driver to take the kids to school every day until they are 16 years old.

Upon their completion of grade school? Is this a conditional cash transfer? Is the reason not to pay to children now because of child labor law or paternalism or both? And have the producers met their obligation, if any, to help these kids out of poverty?

Seriously. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Is Hollywood Responsible for "Slumdog" Child Actors?

My sister just sent over an interesting piece about the child actors in "Slumdog Millionaire." As it turns out:

Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, who plays the youngest version of the main character's brother Salim in the film, lives with his parents and siblings in a makeshift plastic tent, pitched on a half-finished government park.

Besides friends and neighbours, he has a big garbage dump and armies of mosquitoes and flies for company.

Ten-year-old Azharuddin's mother says they have been homeless for a while: "We have been squatting on this government park since the time our hutments were demolished over a year ago and despite showing the right documents to the authorities we have not been allotted our room [a one-room tiny flat]."

Rubina Ali - who portrays the youngest version of the leading lady Latika in the film - is playing with Azhar and other children.

Their faces glow in the rays of the fading sunlight. They greet the BBC team with coyness. Ask them to pronounce the film's title and they fumble amid nervous smiles. "Aslum dog minaire," says Rubina. "No," Azhar tries to correct her, with his own incorrect version.

Here is a question I am pondering: do the producers of "Slumdog Millionaire" have a responsibility to help these child actors out of poverty? Especially when that same poverty was used to entertain millions? I'd like to hear your thoughts.

By the way, you should see "Slumdog Millionaire" - it's excellent.

Health in Post-Communist Economies

One of the most striking trends in population health over the last two decades has been the rapid fall in life expectancy at birth in Russia and other post-communist economies in the late 80s through the mid1990s. From the late 1990s onwards, the country rebounded, but still has not recovered to the pre-drop values (in fact, the Russian life expectancy in 2007 is still lower than it was in 1970).

A recent article in the Lancet examines the causes of this notable drop using longitudinal sample of Eastern European and former Soviet Bloc countries and suggests that rapid and ill-planned economic-reform (mass privatization), which lead to equally drastic increases in male unemployment rates, could be responsible for the depressing trends in mortality rates (here is a link to the Lancet version and here is a similarly titled and much longer working paper version). The association between rapid privatization and mortality holds even when the authors control for a variety of other correlated factors (prices, trade liberalization, income, etc). The authors also find that the effect of privatization is lower when more people are engaged in the public space (i.e., more "social capital").

This is an interesting and important question and the authors try to address the robustness of their results to addressing a variety of alternate hypotheses (see, especially, the longer working paper version). However, given data constraints, it is likely difficult to control for shocks that may induce the need for a policy change (for example, economic reform was necessitated by changes country specific trends that would lead to drops in the mortality rate anyway) as well as other pre-existing trends. In addition, the findings with social capital are difficult to interpret since interactions with others and participation in public organization may be correlated with other determinants of mortality or the need to introduce reform itself. A piece on the study in this week's Economist raises some of these concerns, as well (though some of the arguments they make do not seem to be that compelling). in any case, I think researchers have cast an interesting light on an important population health topic and the whole line of inquiry deserves further research attention.

I've come across a spate of other recent research on post-communist economies, as well. Some of the authors on the privatization papers have also written about the effect of another set of structural reforms - in particular, meeting the conditions to receive loans from the International Monetary Fund - on tuberculosis rates. The idea here is that meeting IMF conditionality siphons money from public health and health care to other aspects of the macroeconomy. The findings of this paper suggest that IMF debt and restructuring lead to increases in TB rates in former Soviet Bloc and Eastern European countries, though many of the same concerns I voiced earlier apply to this paper, as well (see especially their meta-analysis of their results - the estimated IMF effect drops as additional controls are added).

Finally, at the American Economic Association conference a few weeks back (more on this in a later post), I saw an interesting presentation on the impacts of parental alcohol use early in childhood on health outcomes later in life (here is a link to the paper). Previous studies on this subject have had difficulty establishing causality, as parental alcohol consumption is a choice and the same tastes and preferences that govern that choice may also influence how they invest in their kids' health. This paper gets around this issue using the discontinuous implementation of a prohibition program. The study thus compares kids born just before the program (and just after) to those born during the program. It also utilizes the fact that prohibition was more strongly enforced in some areas than others.

The author finds strong impacts on health later in adolescence (kids born during probition tend to be taller than their counterparts and report less illnesses). Most interestingly, the prohibition cohort was more likely to receive key vaccinations relative to the controls, suggesting that one mechanism linking parental alcohol use to later health outcomes could be that expenditures on alcohol crowd out expenditure on more productive investments. The biggest threat to validity in this paper is the fact that much of the movement in health outcomes during prohibition appears to be in the areas where the law was less enforced rather than in treatment group.

Summary of Research on Child Development

Last quarter's NBER Reporter has an excellent summary on recent research on the determinants of child health, education and the impacts of investments and various shocks early in life on later health outcomes. The report, by economist Jonathan Gruber, has plenty of links to recent working papers.

This is a must read for anyone interested in aspects of child development or doing research on the subject. For those outside of economics, the summary offers great insight into what economist are doing and, to a lesser extent, how different econometric tools can be used to address the issue of causality. Possessing theoretical and statistical tools in confronting the latter issue is, in my opinion, a huge comparative advantage that economists have in conducting research in these areas.

Finally, and tangentially related to the topic of child development, the Yale Daily News recently covered the controversy on the importance of peer effects in explaining happiness and obesity. This is really the only news article on this I've read so far that does a good job articulating both sides of the argument.

Random Thursdays

1. I was excited to see Richard Jenkins get a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his work in The Visitor. His portrayal of a stuck-in-a-rut development economist who experiences a reawakening through a most unusual and heart-wrenching circumstance was truly one of the best (and least known) performances that I saw all year.

2. However, the Oscars really dropped the ball with some of the Best Picture nominations. The sentimental mess Benjamin Button over the hard-hitting Dark Knight and Gran Torino? Why do these guys get to decide?

3. What is the market value of virginity? See here.

4. The Yale Daily News has a great three-part series on George W. Bush. The first two parts have been pretty interesting so far, portraying the President as far more complex than either liberals or conservatives like to paint him.

Innovation and the NFL

(Ed: Happy New Year, and sorry for the delay in posting. I will revert to my usual rate of blogging shortly)

I just read a great article about Florida phenom Tim Tebow and his probability of success in the NFL. What was different about this piece than say similar ones about Peyton Manning, Reggie Bush, etc, is the sense that Tebow brings a unique and possibly unprecedented skill set to the NFL that may not have been valued in the past but could have enormous returns as the game evolves.

The piece reminds me of a great book a read a few months ago, The Blind Side: The Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis. The book chronicles the story of Ole Miss left tackle Michael Oher, who's rise to prominence from a poor, homeless child in and out of school to potential draft day stud was written in the stars years before his birth, with the exogenous introduction of Lawrence Taylor into the NFL. Taylor was such a special player that his rise to prominence raised the returns to having a freakishly gifted athlete guarding a quarterback's "blind side" (i.e., for right handed QBs, it would the left tackle). The increased returns were reflected in the market value of left tackles: NFL wages was artificially depressed until the early 1990s, when the era of free agency lifted the constraints on wages. At this juncture, the wages of left tackles increased precipitously.

I highly recommend The Blind Side, and not just for the economics.