Tag Archives: Economics

What do RCTs reveal about causality? The insight critique contested the proposition that RCTs had revealed significant new facts or provided new understanding of development processes … But closer inspection reveals that they most often merely provide a validation of common sense. Whereas at times randomization seemed to reveal something surprising … in other instances it simply told us what had been long expected … One such finding—that providing...

Les limites de la méthode Duflo Comme le note Martin Ravallion, «pour le J-PAL, les expérimentations randomisées ne sont pas simplement au summum du menu des méthodes autorisées, rien d’autre n’est au menu.» Il serait regrettable que le tsunami expérimental auquel on assiste aujourd’hui en économie du développement emporte avec lui des méthodes éprouvées en sciences sociales et fasse fi de décennies de travaux consacrées à ces questions, sous prétexte que...

They spend the next 45 minutes arguing about Stata vs. R. (In honor of the new Jack Ryan season) Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Dave Evans offers a short PhD in Michael Kremer’s work, with quick summaries of 100+ of his papers. But being a Nobel-winning researcher is only one of his jobs. He’s founded, or been instrumental in, more than one non-profit, and in USAID DIV. As a friend told me this morning, most people who know him from just one facet of his life...

Paul Krugman — finally — admits he was wrong! Paul Krugman has never suffered fools gladly. The Nobel Prize-winning economist rose to international fame—and a coveted space on the New York Times op-ed page—by lacerating his intellectual opponents in the most withering way. In a series of books and articles beginning in the 1990s, Krugman branded just about everybody who questioned the rapid pace of globalization a fool who didn’t understand economics very...

Frey & Osborne on the future of employment In 2013 the economist Carl Frey and the ML coder Michael Osborne, both at Oxford, published the working paper, ‘The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?’. The headline finding of the paper was that in the near future 47 per cent of total US employment was at high risk of displacement by AI and robotics, and 33 per cent at low risk … In 2015, responding to Frey and Osborne, the Bank...

‘Nobel prize’ winners fail to explain real causes of poverty  [embedded content]

Few volumes in contemporary economics have been more lauded, and have summarised a zeitgeist, as much as Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics … The implicit premise of the book is that interventions that work in one place can be expected to work in another. This presumes not only that the results of such “micro” interventions are substantially independent of the “macro” context, but also that a focus on such interventions, as opposed to those which reshape that...

Är randomisering verkligen svaret på nationalekonomins alla frågor? Med årets ‘Nobelpris’ i ekonomi har fokus i den internationella ekonomidebatten kommit att handla mycket om hypen kring randomiseringsdesign i modern samhällsvetenskap. Detta är bra och ett ypperligt tillfälle att också ventilera några kritiska synpunkter — här med utgångspunkt från ett kapitel i boken Nationalekonomins frågor (2017) där effektutvärderingar inom samhällsvetenskaplig...

A couple of years ago, Chicago economics überpriest Thomas Sargent gave a graduation speech at UC Berkeley, giving the grads “a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches”: 1. Many things that are desirable are not feasible. 2. Individuals and communities face trade-offs. 3. Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts, and their preferences than you do. 4. Everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help. That...

Unpacking the ‘Nobel prize’ in economics In a 2017 speech, Duflo famously likened economists to plumbers. In her view the role of an economist is to solve real world problems in specific situations. This is a dangerous assertion, as it suggests that the “plumbing” the randomistas are doing is purely technical, and not guided by theory or values. However, the randomistas’ approach to economics is not objective, value-neutral, nor pragmatic, but rather,...