David McKenzie's blog

·         Roving Bandit on the new Cochrane review on the impact of slum upgrading.

Many people are aware of the concept of a “placebo effect” in medicine and of the idea of a Hawthorne effect – in both cases the concern is that merely being treated can cause the treatment group in an intervention to change their behavior, regardless of what the treatment actually is.

·         Is evidence-based policy too devoid of politics? – Oxfam’s blog discussion and superb rejoinder from DFID’s Chris Witty and Stefan Dercon on the case for evidence-based work.

·         A new paper in Science looks at the impacts of China’s one-child policy on personality, finding people born after the introduction of the policy were, not only less trusting, less trustworthy, and more pessimistic, but also less competitive, less conscientious, and more risk-averse. See this coverage in the The Scientist.

In the spirit of learning from failure, we thought we’d start the New Year by discussing lessons from a series of attempts to implement randomized experiments that ultimately were not implemented. There is ongoing discussion about the need for a trial registry to ensure that all studies that are undertaken end up being reported on.