 I'm happy to be here. I feel somewhat defensive because I don't have a PowerPoint and I don't have data and I don't have graphs to show which will deflect from the lack of a message but I'll give it a go. I thought I would use this opportunity to and I think as the chair reflected that we were asked to talk about specific experiences with multidisciplinary and what I will do is give you a very specific case study of work that I have done and it's completed now but the evolution of that work from if you like an area of study and it's in the area of labor regulation and thinking about labor markets and rigidity and flexibility of labor markets and I'll come back to that to deliberate use of the phrase and how the work that we did over a period of about three years evolved from being I think fairly technical and narrow using the toolbox of economists to one that I think became far more multidisciplinary in nature and in orientation but perhaps before I do that just to give you a short story about why ensuring that you draw on information and sources of information from a diverse set of experiences and a diverse set of skills is can have tangible consequences and it's in funny enough it's in the area of funeral insurance in South Africa the bottom end of the income distribution insurance companies make their money of you and I on short-term insurance but they also make their money off selling funeral insurance in particular in South Africa and one of the larger companies in South Africa that sells funeral insurance then took this model which is a model based on marketing funeral insurance sending out the insurance providers the sales reps and so on to townships and and selling funeral insurance they took that model and they they tried it in Kenya and it failed dismally and the reason was that they didn't firstly they did they did they did the investment numbers so they relied on actuarial research to inform you know price points and you know amortization rates and so on and so they come up with products and so on but of course nobody ever spoke to a sociologist or an anthropologist and if they did they would have known that the attitudes towards death are fundamentally different in South Africa relative to Kenya in South Africa we speak about death the joke is your grandmom or granddad will say make sure there's chicken at my funeral you know I don't want the neighbors to think that I don't have decent food at my funeral but in Kenya you don't talk about death death is is something that is a taboo subject in West Africa it's it's it's less taboo so in that sense if they had if the insurance company had actually done they done their job and actually spoke to people across a variety of disciplines not just actuaries they would have come to a different conclusion but anyway I think that's a really fun example of how multi-disciplinarity can have real consequences so back to my example of a very specific case study of labor regulation if you want if one looks at the literature in South Africa sort of post 94 post apartheid 95 to 2000 there's a very clear and even just on the cusp of democracy there's a very clear dominance in the literature and and here I am biased in the way that I'm talking about the literature because it is I'll come back to that later is the literature that I predominantly read and I think we have to it's a bit like joining a support group right we have to admit that we read predominantly the literature in our field and that's just one of those things but the labor regulation debate can be summarized in the following way earnings functions were run by Moabu and Schultz and Peter Moll and a whole lot of other well-known people and the earnings functions show that the union wage premium was incredibly high 100% in some cases Moabu and Schultz found and so with that notion on that coefficient the deduction was made in the literature that you've got incredibly strong trade unions and therefore right and therefore this was the this was the reach into policy which in a country where you've got 25% unemployment rate is not an inconsequentials reach right that because of these high coefficients on the union dummy you had a highly rigid or a highly inflexible labor market and this debate raged on for at least five to ten years I think we even had and Kruger who was chief economist I think for the IMF at the time listening to these presentations and then her conclusion was well clearly unemployment exists in South Africa because unions are too strong and because wages are too high because of strong unions and that was that was the end of the debate for her right so that's where if you like economic imperialism in terms of the research left us with if we look back now fundamentally unsatisfying results fundamentally narrow view of the world so and I was good it was I was going through this last night and thinking about well how did how did we go to the next step well it was a light bulb moment right that I had together with a labor lawyer and the light bulb moment went as follows when I the labor lawyers very well known at least to to South Africans in the audience he was one of the architects of our constitution you know globally famous constitution that we have a halting cheetah and and I was sitting across the table from halting and I was regaling the story of where the research is in terms of rigidity and flexibility and he said well firstly I don't understand these terms of rigidity and flexibility they seem very rhetorical right so that was that was a whole separate discussion but he said to me what do you mean unions are too powerful I don't understand that he said do you know that enshrined in our constitution is the right to collective action so how well if you if you believe that there's a right to collective action and most most democratic countries have that there's a right to collective action therefore how do you interpret as a lawyer he says to me the fact that unions are too powerful he just didn't understand that and of course he then went on to to explain to me little of which I understood why the different pieces of the legislation in the Labor Relations Act that we had and in the Constitution meant that we had a far less rigid in my view or inflexible labor market right that the coefficient on the union dummy would suggest and so out of that conversation in fact began a two year journey with two other Halton himself and then the second labor lawyer in which we tried right I'm not sure if we succeeded but we tried really hard to bring the notions of the economics of trade union power and so on together with how one measures or how one understands labor regulation from a legal context so what this project then eventually delivered if you like was the attempt to recalibrate our understanding of labor market regulation to move it away from firstly this notion that you can take a coefficient or a set of coefficients and assume that that describes rigidity or flexibility in the labor market now so I'm just watching the time I don't want to we will help tremendously right and again in the labor regulatory field but I think it's true for other fields we are hopped tremendously by the release almost at the same time of the doing business survey published by the World Bank and so the World Bank's doing business survey as you know you know calculate of estimates or collects information from different countries on a variety of the ease of doing business indicated so the time it takes to get a firm registered the time it takes for customs to release your commodities that you've tried importing to the country and so on but included in the first few and they've removed it which I don't understand so if anybody can explain that to me we wonderful the World Bank officially can't explain why they've removed it but in the indicators they had a labor market module and the labor market module was not anything to do with the Union wage premium but it was to do with the legislative environment within the country so what they did was to go into a country go to a literally a law firm and ask the legal firm to explain the hiring clauses the firing clauses the cost of the cost of retrenchments and so on that the legislation specified so immediately we open up our debate and our understanding of labor regulation away from an earnings function towards the regulatory environment and why this conversation became good it became productive was that I was able to sit with the lawyers and say well do you agree with these pieces of the legislation that the doing business survey is collecting information on there would say yes and of course what the doing business survey does most of you have probably used it is it starts doing what economists like which is to measure and rank things so we were able to then look at rankings so if for example just if you were retrenched the law may say that the your retrenchment package would be the equivalent of one week worth of wages for every year that you worked but some pieces of legislation different countries will say well you'll get a year's worth of wages for every year that you've worked and so you were able to then generate these rankings out of that what what we out of the sort of the doing business survey we were able to then produce a far more nuanced assessment of South Africa's labor regulatory environment so the closing off of that research was to show that we actually were in terms of the labor regulatory environment and the legislation smack bang in the middle of other middle-income country estimates so we looked like Brazil we looked like Malaysia in terms of our labor regulatory environment really for a country context fundamentally important in opening up the debate I think in making people think well actually it's not the legislation but it went further then we then we then had to deal with the problem that when you spoke to whether it's the World Economic Forum and so on when you spoke to business leaders the perception surveys from business leaders was no the problem with South Africa in terms of FDI or domestic investment is that labor markets are labor laws are too strict but yet our research showed based on the doing business survey that it wasn't that strict that's where the lawyers became useful they said the legislation is not a sufficient right it's a necessary this is the economist speak that's necessary but not sufficient condition for establishing over regulation or under regulation so you see how the language of use also changed rigidity and flexibilities a problematic language and so what we found was that it was when the judges interpreted the law right you had a very particular interpretation in South Africa that the lawyers agree was infused with the notion that if you if you had to interpret the law which said what an unfair dismissal that's a subjective notion unfair dismissal training of the judges particularly in labor law meant that most of them saw this as the bad employer the evil capitalist and I'm overstating it and the poor worker and so the notion of justice was infused with the idea that it was in fact a power relationship between a weak worker and a strong employer and so out of the labor law which which was in terms of pure measurement actually not overregulated or overly flexible only rigid you actually got interpretations of the law that tended to be biased towards workers that's that was what the evidence showed from the lawyers so in a sense for me just to conclude with some lessons the the the the the case of doing work on labor regulation in South Africa we've sort of continued with it but I don't think we've spent enough time actually talking to audiences about about why one needs to think about bringing economics and law together but for me at least personally and I think for my colleagues in law it was a really really useful and fruitful experience so just five generic lessons maybe they won't be the only lessons of course and they may be the wrong ones but for me the five that were really important the first is language does matter I mean it it was astounding to me how I think I think economists are far too blunt economists don't understand the importance so when you know when I went wading in about rigidity and flexibility I mean we spent the first half an hour talking about those terms what do you mean by rigid and flexible so I think that's a really really important lesson at least in in this particular context and and the notion of union power what do you mean by union power for a lawyer union power is a good thing because it's reflected reflects democratic rights that's what you want right so it's the second lesson is read the complementary literature not just in economics so and I'm exhibit a right and I think all of us as I said at the beginning would admit to reading the literature that we most familiar with in that literature is the literature we we took as grad students or the course that we ended up taking so but but it is important to to read in the in in an area that's outside of your silo I must there's a warning level with that I mean the law stuff is impossible to understand for me it's just you know so I spent hours trying to understand it but it's incredibly difficult so so that's why collegial interaction is important so if you work with colleagues in the field it actually and that's my third lesson if you like it it retains a certain balance of power this may be a bit controversial right so I think it is important to be able to interact with colleagues where you have far less knowledge with than them in that particular area health and economics is a really good example right law and economics and so that sort of evenness in the balance of power is important final two lessons is I do think that I think Rachel alluded to it at the beginning is that I think there are limits to collaboration across disciplines I don't think you know we don't have to be cheerleaders all the time I think we have to accept that in certain context there's there's a value add to collaboration but in other contexts I can teach physicists very little about the laws of gravity right so there's no need to collaborate and then the final thing is I think speaking as economists I think we we we tend to be too too focused on measurement and well let me restate that I think measurement is good and it's important but it's not the only thing and we tend to lose interest in stories that are told store really interesting contextual stories economic history stories cultural stories that are told about the experiences of of individuals and households and their livelihoods and I think that's a really important lesson for economists okay