Jim Manzi, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, recently wrote an article that contains perhaps the most incisive critique of randomized control trials (RCTs) I've seen so far. RCTs already have a long history in the social sciences within the U.S.
Commenting on a post I wrote last month on randomized control trials (RCTs), Scott Guggenheim, a Lead Social Development Specialist at the World Bank, points out the practical value of this approach:
The Indian Express is reporting that India's Ministry of Human Resource Development is set to launch a $35 laptop:
Looking as stylish as a large i-phone, this $35 “low-cost computing-cum-access device” is a 5/7/9 inch touchscreen gadget packed with internet browsers, PDF reader, video conferencing facilities, open office, sci-lab, media player, remote device management capability, multimedia input-output interface option, and multiple content viewer.
Ziv on the India Development Blog makes the case:
It is less than a week before the Promoting Competitiveness in Latin America and the Caribbean, hosted by the World Bank and the Mexican Ministry of Economy in Mexico City. More than 215 people have registered, including attendees from more than 20 different countries.
Responding to a post on Duncan Green's excellent From Poverty to Power blog, World Bank Chief Economist Justin Lin argues that his proposal for an updated version of industrial policy does not assume exceptional talent on the part of government institutions:
A new World Bank working paper finds that the answer, counterintuitively, is 'yes'. De Rosa et al. look at a large sample of firm-level surveys completed in 2009 and find that:
The WSJ reports on the troubles that seasonal rains have brought to northern India. The federal government had previously bought up large quantities of local wheat and rice, and now has no place to store it, so seasonal rains are washing the rice away or causing it to rot. One New Delhi-based think tank says that the solution is simply to bring in the private sector:
More high quality blogging over at Bill Easterly's Aid Watch. Guest blogger Alanna Shaikh asks what the limits of impact evaluation are:
If we limit all of our development projects to those that have easy metrics for success, we lose a lot of programs, many of which support important things like rule of law. Of course, if they don’t have useful metrics, how do we know those programs are supporting the important goals?
In a recent op-ed in the NYT, professors George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel take a swipe at behavioral economics:
