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This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

economist.com

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Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#71

Post by pergadad »

notafraudster wrote: post #5

Esther Duflo is the most obviously deserving Nobel Prize in Economics pick in decades. Major substantive contributions to development economics coupled with being absolutely the vanguard of the credibility revolution. The article seems to motivate criticism of RCTs in only the barest manner: "what of external validity?" No shit, Sherlock, which is why the credibility revolution also argues for frequent and cross-cont…

I find the article and your comment somewhat disturbing. We really get into an ethics field here and I very much hope that they have ethical review panels as psychology or sociology have been using for decades.

But that aside, what I find disturbing is the economic couching of basic human questions: do you need economic long-term effects that can be proven to provide deworming to poor children? Is that what we have arrived at - wellbeing is not even a concern. A fictional economic greater good is the measure of success, the health and comfort of poor people is not?

I'd say there is really a need for soul-searching among economists - to rethink why capitalism has brought so much property but also leaves so many people in poverty, and why it has taken such radical forms that in the richest country on earth thousands starve and tens of thousands die of treatable medical issues - and millions more in a global view.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#73

Post by newyankee »

inception44 wrote: post #63
notafraudster wrote: post #5

Esther Duflo is the most obviously deserving Nobel Prize in Economics pick in decades. Major substantive contributions to development economics coupled with being absolutely the vanguard of the credibility revolution. The article seems to motivate criticism of RCTs in only the barest manner: "what of external validity?" No shit, Sherlock, which is why the credibility revolution also argues for frequent and cross-cont…

Abhijit Banerjee was her doctoral advisor. He tutored her not the other way around. If you get any chance to read their famous book Poor Economics, you will find almost 70% RCTs were conducted in India. Classical Indian bias.

do you mean anti-Indian or pro-Indian ?

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#74

Post by newyankee »

thegranderson wrote: post #31

Though I know the Nobel is focused on theoretical contribution, I found this discussion interesting: https://andrewbatson.com/2019/10/25/who-deserves-the-nobel-f... The editorial Batson is reacting to (by Yao Yang) makes the point that the largest economic development project that lifted the vast majority of people out of poverty over the past 20 years was orchestrated by China, and the RCTs/small scale interventions…

At the end of the day RCT and other experiments will help us with allocating of the pie but not growing the pie itself.

e.g.India with a comparable population to China can only distribute so much with a 2.7 T $ economy compared to China with a 12 T $ economy.

I definitely feel that at least a few Chinese policymakers deserve the Nobel prize for actually lifting people out of poverty. You can debate their methods but i think most people from Western schools of thought come with an inherent bias thinking what worked for them over so many decades would've similarly worked for China which is not really true. This has to do with cultural difference, huge population and many other numerous reasons.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#75

Post by Gimpei »

RCTs aren't perfect. There's a bunch of problems with them, generalizability being just one. But you know what's even worse? Everything else.

Big questions are great and I'd be all for focusing on them if we were capable of coming up with reasonable answers. But all we've managed are DSGE models and they're about as useful as reading the lines in goat livers.

I'll take the RCTs thank you and with a side natural experiments. Duflo is the most significant economist of my lifetime. Thanks to her economics has some basis for calling itself a science.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#76

Post by sfink »

pergadad wrote: post #71
notafraudster wrote: post #5

Esther Duflo is the most obviously deserving Nobel Prize in Economics pick in decades. Major substantive contributions to development economics coupled with being absolutely the vanguard of the credibility revolution. The article seems to motivate criticism of RCTs in only the barest manner: "what of external validity?" No shit, Sherlock, which is why the credibility revolution also argues for frequent and cross-cont…

I find the article and your comment somewhat disturbing. We really get into an ethics field here and I very much hope that they have ethical review panels as psychology or sociology have been using for decades. But that aside, what I find disturbing is the economic couching of basic human questions: do you need economic long-term effects that can be proven to provide deworming to poor children? Is that what we have a…

I'm guessing you have a situation where vast numbers of people are not getting some treatment, you choose a manageable small subset to study, and only treat half of those. What's wrong with that? The alternative is not treating everybody in the continent, it's studying something else and treating nobody. Why would a researcher have the money and resources to treat everyone? (It does seem fair to offer the treatment to everyone involved in your trial after it's over.)

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#77

Post by benjaminclark »

pergadad wrote: post #71
notafraudster wrote: post #5

Esther Duflo is the most obviously deserving Nobel Prize in Economics pick in decades. Major substantive contributions to development economics coupled with being absolutely the vanguard of the credibility revolution. The article seems to motivate criticism of RCTs in only the barest manner: "what of external validity?" No shit, Sherlock, which is why the credibility revolution also argues for frequent and cross-cont…

I find the article and your comment somewhat disturbing. We really get into an ethics field here and I very much hope that they have ethical review panels as psychology or sociology have been using for decades. But that aside, what I find disturbing is the economic couching of basic human questions: do you need economic long-term effects that can be proven to provide deworming to poor children? Is that what we have a…

I don't think this is a fair interpretation of the poster above or Duflo & Banerjee's work. It is an unfortunate, but nevertheless true, statement that in the world today, we don't have an allocation of resources which allows for the most basic healthcare for all children. Let alone a broader set of healthcare services, free education, clear water, preventing malnutrition etc.

Those who want to make practical improvements quickly with those limited funds available (from developing country governments, foreign aid, charity, etc.) need to make effective use of those funds. I don't think it is a stretch to say it is a moral obligation to make sure those funds are put to good use.

Doing RCTs is quite key to identifying the most effective approaches whether the goal is lives saved/$, incremental years of education/$, malaria cases reduced/$, etc. With that data, you can direct funds to the most efficient cause in any given area.

Duflo & Banerjee are quite modest about any judgement on whether the focus should be on improving quantity or quality of life and how one should measure quality of life. Their books are quite clear that one's one view of preferences doesn't necessarily line up with those who you are trying to help.

And one last point, yes, of course, their work would go through ethics review panels. Basically anything with human subjects does and their work would obviously qualify.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#78

Post by samvher »

billfruit wrote: post #62
notafraudster wrote: post #5

Esther Duflo is the most obviously deserving Nobel Prize in Economics pick in decades. Major substantive contributions to development economics coupled with being absolutely the vanguard of the credibility revolution. The article seems to motivate criticism of RCTs in only the barest manner: "what of external validity?" No shit, Sherlock, which is why the credibility revolution also argues for frequent and cross-cont…

I am in general skeptical that statistical experiments will give use much insight into complex behavior. I think building theoritical models is the better approach to study complex systems, since then we will can explain why a certain behaviour shall manifest. Do astrophysicists use controlled trials to study the universe?

Those models aren't worth much if you don't test them, so these efforts will have to go hand in hand. The way it tends to go now is RCT -> try to explain findings by hypothesizing about mechanisms -> think about an RCT that can test this hypothesis -> repeat. It's a slow and expensive process and not always successful, but I would say that it's progress.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#79

Post by samvher »

harry8 wrote: post #34
notafraudster wrote: post #5

Esther Duflo is the most obviously deserving Nobel Prize in Economics pick in decades. Major substantive contributions to development economics coupled with being absolutely the vanguard of the credibility revolution. The article seems to motivate criticism of RCTs in only the barest manner: "what of external validity?" No shit, Sherlock, which is why the credibility revolution also argues for frequent and cross-cont…

Study with Esther now! https://www.edx.org/bio/esther-duflo Amazing I can type that. The net ain't all bad.

They offer a "MicroMasters" on EdX [0] basically covering a lot of this RCT work. I can recommend it (I've completed it), I work as a data scientist and have learnt quite some new statistics tricks (and a lot about causal estimation) from some of the courses.

[0] https://micromasters.mit.edu/dedp/

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#80

Post by mikorym »

I'm sorry, but is this really news or what is it? Criticism against RCTs are in biological sciences too. I don't see how criticism against RCTs is news. Is it that the prize winners are just being more scientific about RCT and getting headwind? Is it that mentioning the Nobel is always news?

In the Ebola vaccine trial, they did away with the control groups the moment they realised that the vaccine was effective, sacrificing their nice full statistical analysis for (in this case sensible) common sense. So there are always exceptions to RCTs and there are always cases where they are not the suitable method from the outset.

Is the point of the article that economists are not rigorous enough and that Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer try to be more rigorous, bringing RCTs into economics where they are traditionally more in the biological sciences?

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