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"I've got morons on my team."

Mitt Romney
Minor Deity
Picture of Piano*Dad
posted
and the Nobel Prize.

I found this old New Yorker article (2010) floating around the Internet today.

It's about Esther Duflo and her Poverty Lab. The article came out around the time she got the John Bates Clark medal as the best economist under age 40. This is astonishingly good journalism that introduces you to personalities, and to the strengths and limitations of various economic methods (like RCTs). Note that the article talks about her, Banerjee, and Kremer. Very prescient they are at the New Yorker!

The Poverty Lab

This Nobel is the fruit of many years work perfecting Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) in economics.

Here is a money quote about her attitude toward research. This is the attitude I try to get my students to understand. They often have their conclusions first, driven by their passionate feelings and sense of justice.

quote:
One of my great assets of being in this business, or maybe I’ve developed it over time, is I don’t have many opinions to start with,” she told me. “I have one opinion — one should evaluate things — which is strongly held.


Randomization isn't perfect, and the article includes a strong statement of its weaknesses:

Here is a critique of RCT's from Princeton's Angus Deaton...

quote:
Not everyone is persuaded. Among the critics of j-pal’s work, the best known is Angus Deaton, the Princeton economist. Despite his admiration for Duflo, Deaton has become increasingly wary of the fashion for randomization—to the point where, at the end of 2008, he found himself giving a high-profile lecture in London that began with two photographs on a PowerPoint slide. One showed someone floating beneath an open parachute; in the other, a person appeared to be jumping out of a plane without a parachute. The first photo was marked “Esther Duflo,” the second “Abhijit Banerjee.” The point was this: Do we need to test the idea that parachutes are useful to people who jump out of planes? Deaton’s tone came as a surprise to some. Joshua Angrist, Duflo’s former adviser, recently wondered if “someone put sand in Angus’s toothpaste.”

Deaton’s lecture, and a subsequent paper, made two main arguments. One: Randomized trials are more difficult than they look, and “experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority.” Two: Even if your data are perfect, how can you generalize from the information? Does the policy that works in India work in Brazil? Does the approach that works for a hundred people work when applied to ten million people? This is the problem of “external validity.” As soon as you leave behind the particular context of the experiment, then any wider economic point you might like to make derives from inference, which is only as good as the thinking—the theory—behind it.

 
Posts: 12513 | Location: Williamsburg, VA | Registered: 19 July 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Serial origamist
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Don't have the wherewithal to read the article at the moment, so I apologize if it covered this point:

quote:
As soon as you leave behind the particular context of the experiment, then any wider economic point you might like to make derives from inference, which is only as good as the thinking—the theory—behind it.


That reminds me of the observation I heard on the radio a while back that most medical research and trials subjects are middle-age white males. The results frequently do not translate to people who are not middle-age white males.


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Posts: 30030 | Registered: 27 April 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
"I've got morons on my team."

Mitt Romney
Minor Deity
Picture of Piano*Dad
posted Hide Post
That is indeed one example of an "external validity" issue. But just saying "your study lacks external validity" isn't a killer critique.
 
Posts: 12513 | Location: Williamsburg, VA | Registered: 19 July 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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