Karthik Tadepalli in Asterisk:
To many people, “development economics” is synonymous with the randomized controlled trial: randomly assigning some group of people to an intervention, like cash transfers or malaria protection nets, in order to tell if it really makes the recipients better off. RCTs have revolutionized development economics and international aid policy. The RCT pioneers Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, and the chief economist of USAID, Dean Karlan, is a prominent RCT advocate. RCTs are influential because they are a powerful tool to cut through uncertainty and preconceptions. For example, international development practitioners long believed that providing textbooks in underfunded schools would help students learn more: but an RCT in Kenya showed that most students did not benefit from getting textbooks, primarily because they were already learning very little in school. RCTs can help us identify what works. Yet nearly everyone who thinks about development has, at some point, had a crisis of faith.
Skeptics argue that RCTs distort the focus of policymakers toward technocratic questions that lend themselves to studies of limited scope, and away from the hard problems that are ultimately more important. After all, aren’t RCT-driven solutions just Band-Aids over the fundamental reality that poor countries are poor? Shouldn’t we spend our time and money focusing on how to bring economic growth and prosperity to countries, rather than tinkering with partial solutions for a tiny number of people?
This argument is appealing, but it faces difficulties when the rubber meets the road. What would it look like to adopt a “growth strategy” for doing good?
More here.
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