- Another reason to justify random selection – Michael Schulson in Aeon “there are plenty of situations when random chance really is your best option. And those situations might be far more prevalent in our modern lives than we generally admit.” An interesting discussion drawing on anthropology of how different cultures have introduced randomness into decision-making, with the advantage being that it stops you using bad reasons for making decisions. “we might want to come to terms with the reality of our situation, which is that our lives are dominated by uncertainty, biases, subjective judgments and the vagaries of chance”
- Maitreesh Ghatak reviews Jean Dreze’s new book “Sense and Solidarity - Jholawala Economics for Everyone”. See also this twitter thread by Abhijeet Singh on whether Dreze is underappreciated in development economics.
- In a new Finance & PSD Impact note, Xavi Gine and co-authors report on lab experiments on how to best disclose information on financial products to low-income consumers in Peru and Mexico. “The probability of choosing the cheapest loan increases from 42 percent using the marketing materials currently provided by financial institutions to 65 percent using the simplified key fact statement “
- Congrats to Betsy Levy Paluck on being selected as a MacArthur Fellow (aka Genius Grant winner). NPR’s Goats and Soda blog has a nice profile and interview about her work in Rwanda (and elsewhere); the New Yorker also has a good discussion of her work on how norms change.
- In VoxDev, Meredith Startz summarizes her work on why Nigerian importers travel to China to trade face-to-face
- On the IGL blog, Jeremy Shapiro and Chaning Jang discuss an RCT they ran testing whether workshops of high quality tools and training can help furniture manufacturers in Kenya – and how all didn’t go as planned.
- Finally, XKCD on the evidence for evidence-based policy:
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