I’ve been following this debate for a while now… Though I tend to agree that deworming is certainly not the most impactful, and probably not the optimal option for EA investments, I’m still puzzled here: What are you proposing, especifically? I mean, what determinate project, with measurable goals, would you propose that someone invest on—which is not already being well funded by international organizations, banks, governments or think tanks? My point is that I don’t think anyone in the EA community disagrees about the importance of economic development—particularly so-called randomistas such as Duflo and Banerjee. I certainly don’t—but I have been baffled with how little the field has gained in certainty, despite having way more data, since Nurkse v. Hirschman debates on the “balanced growth theory.” I think the problem is that people are not convinced about where is the low-hanging fruit here—or that there’s a clear path to take that will actually yield more overall marginal utility.
Notice that the “smell test” does not answer those questions; and though I’m quite hopeful there might be an optimal answer for development economics, I’m also skeptical Pritchett’s test actually makes the right question—which, for me, sounds a bit like criticizing a training program for sedentary persons, based on an athlete’s routine. And when I think about it, the one “X thing” that developed countries clearly seem to have more is that they are geographically similar and close to each other—except for small nations with outlier trajectories in very peculiarly strategical positions, such as Taiwan, Brunei or Singapore.
The main thing I am proposing is quite weak—I am proposing that there be some public discussion of the arguments. Hauke and I published our piece summarising Pritchett’s argument two years ago. It is the second most upvoted post in EA Forum history, which suggests that lots of people in the community found the post persuasive. On the face of it, Lant is worth taking seriously: he has a PhD in economics from MIT, has been a professor of development at Harvard and Oxford, and worked at the World Bank for 15 years. He has been defending economic growth and criticising the RCT-led approach to economics for at least 7 years. Some of the most prominent economists in the world (Rodrik, Acemoglu, Deaton, Cowen, Caplan) have endorsed similar conclusions. In spite of this, no-one in the EA community has ever published a response to these arguments.
The initial thing Hauke and I proposed was that “A ~4 person-year research effort will find donation opportunities working on economic growth in LMICs which are substantially better than GiveWell’s top charities from a current generation human welfare-focused point of view.” I would have tried to put this to the test when I was at Founders Pledge if I knew we would move sufficient funds to that area to make it worthwhile. I got two members of the team to explore the question of whether growth increased life satisfaction (here), which was one main piece of pushback we got to our post in the comments.
Turning to the object-level, I take it that you are making two arguments here - (1) scepticism about growth economics, (2) neglectedness. I have several responses.
It is not possible to sustain the position that we know how to make policy-led improvements to economic welfare in the US, but not in Kenya. If we know enough about the effects of macroeconomic stabilisation and housing reform in the US, then we can also know enough about their effects in Kenya. Indeed, both of these reforms would, in my view, bring large economic benefits in many low and middle-income countries. With housing reform, there are credible estimates that this would give an enormous boost to GDP in rich countries. It would be amazing if there were one of only two things we know about how to boost GDP anywhere in the world, and they both happen to be in the US.
If you read about the actual policies in place in many poor countries, it is just difficult to be sceptical that changes would bring increases in GDP. For example, Indian farmers are forced to sell their products to state middlemen at a guaranteed minimum price. According to Wikipedia, foreign supermarkets are banned in many Indian states. The time taken to start a business ranges from 1 day in New Zealand to 230 in Venezuela. The list of such obviously bad policies is literally almost endless.
The experience of the world since 1950 makes it extremely unlikely that we don’t know anything about growth. Economists and states were prominently trying to increase development from 1950, and development did in fact increase. Indeed, there was more progress on all subjective and objective measures of wellbeing than all prior human history combined. It might be true that this was an enormous coincidence, but at the very least someone actually needs to sit down and explain why it was.
If we truly don’t know anything about growth economics, the value of information from further research must be enormous. For this not to be the case, one would have to hold that we don’t know anything about growth and also that, in expectation, we can’t know anything it. This seems to me to equate to the view that we can’t know anything about social science—surely anything you might want to know about social science would have an effect on GDP?
Suppose you were a philanthropist with the opportunity to influence policy in Rwanda in 1994. Would you focus on encouraging them to do some RCTs of social programmes, or would you try as hard as possible to get them to do whatever it is that they did that led to sustained economic growth in Rwanda of 9% since 1995? We are in an analogous case with respect to all developing countries. I don’t think it would ever be the right move to take the RCT option.
Suppose you were trying to increase economic welfare in your own country. What would you do? If you browse the manifesto of any political party, literally none of the policies will be testable by RCTs. If I was looking at something to work for to improve economic welfare in my own country, I would look to advocate for things like immigration, housing reform, road pricing, ending agricultural subsidies, advocacy for tax credits, land value taxation etc. None of these can be tested by RCTs. I don’t understand why the RCT-led approach is the right one in developing countries but not in rich countries.
If our knowledge of growth is incomplete, I don’t think it helps that a substantial chunk of the economics profession (>30%?) have started to work on RCT-evaluable things, which do not attempt to make a non-trivial dent on GDP per capita.
A side-point on Banerjee and Duflo. In their book they do seem to come out in favour of degrowth as a solution to climate change. “Mitigation through better technologies may not do the trick; people’s consumption will need to fall. We may have to be content not only with cleaner cars but also with smaller cars, or no cars at all.” Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems, 01 edition (Penguin, 2019), chap. 6
Neglectedness
US policy is also not neglected. In fact, I would guess that US policy (land use reform, macroeconomic policy) is much more crowded than Kenyan economic policy. If the neglectedness argument works for Kenya, it works for the US as well
My former colleagues Stephen and Aidan discuss the neglectedness argument here. No-one has yet engaged with these arguments.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll have to answer it… it was supposed to be short, I really didn’t have the time, but then I started enjoying it. But I have a TL;DR. TL;DR: I guess we’re not understanding each other very well, as you seem to be responding to other people (unfortunately, because I’m a big fan). I don’t see why you categorize me as a skeptic. I think we actually agree (i) RCT shouldn’t be the main path for dev-eco researchers, and (ii) there should be more research focused on developing countries. But: (iii) development economics is more complex than you make it look like, (iv) I keep the discussion on dev-eco research apart from the discussion on which cause areas to choose. Also, please, take a charitable look at my answer to your point (5)… but I don’t see how you can talk about Rwanda’s growth after 94 without talking about genocide and war.
It is the second most upvoted post in EA Forum history, which suggests that lots of people in the community found the post persuasive
Congrats 😉 on the other hand, like many people who commented on the subject, I upvoted your post back then, but I don’t find your case against randomistas so persuasive; I don’t upvote only posts I agree with – but if this is sending the wrong signals, perhaps I should start down-voting more.
he has a PhD in economics from MIT, has been a professor of development at Harvard and Oxford, and worked at the World Bank for 15 years
Actually, I think your constant emphasis on Pritchett (as if the argument for dev-eco depended on him) is one of the weakest points of the post.
Some of the most prominent economists in the world (Rodrik, Acemoglu, Deaton, Cowen, Caplan) have endorsed similar conclusions.
Also, five economists who disagree a lot about how development can be achieved. For instance, Acemoglu emphasizes the role of culture and institutions (but I think Melissa Dell research makes an even better case for this), but then Hausmann, Pritchett and Rodrik (2004) say, in the same article, that “Political-regime changes” and “economic reform” are “significant predictors of growth acceleration,” even though “the vast majority of growth accelerations are unrelated to standard determinants such as political change and economic reform, and most instances of economic reform do not produce growth accelerations.”
Also, Rodrik (my favorite one among them) claimed globalization (with free capital flows), national sovereignty and democracy are incompatible, defended an industrial policy approach to growth for a while, but admitted, in an interview with Tyler Cowen in 2015 (I recommend it), that the window for policies based on East Asia growth is likely gone; also in the same interview, he predicted Brazil would return to growing faster than India again – which didn’t happen (I mean, it’s sad for me, a Brazilian, to here it today).
In spite of this, no-one in the EA community has ever published a response to these arguments
I’m not sure what’s the problem here and what sort of response you’re expecting. But as mentioned before, you also received a lot of comments, many of them discussing some of your main points; and you cite Founder’s Pledge analysis of the area, which concludes (very persuasively, in my opinion) that “We’re not continuing this project because we think identifying funding opportunities would be too costly for us and for the organisations under consideration.”
Perhaps you’re victims of your own success, since searching for “randomista” in the EA Forum mostly leads to references to your post – but it shows people are actually taking it into account; I think it might provide some sort of middle ground between short-term and longterm causes). But, yeah, the only thing that seems as deep as your original post is K. Sarek’s long summary of Ogden’s “RCTs in Development Economics.”
However, I must add that I think EA is more often identified with randomista economics by outsiders – precisely because RCTs in economics provide a useful rhetorical advice to distinguish EA from other approaches to philanthropy.
Turning to the object-level, I take it that you are making two arguments here - (1) scepticism about growth economics, (2) neglectedness. I have several responses.
I’m sorry, but calling my position scepticism is getting too close to a strawman – an unfortunately common move among us philosophers, as if it’s impossible to engage with someone without putting a tag on them. For instance, you don’t call someone who says “people disagree about cancer” a skeptic. I explicitly said economic development is very important, and I don’t deny we know a lot about it, nor that people should research it (quite the opposite); I’m just claiming that arriving to specific recommendations on growth, at the required scale, is way harder than you make it look like (particularly if we restrict the discussion to a small sample of economists, in a limited period of time). If I’m skeptical about anything, it is that we will figure out something like a feasible way to, e.g., make Haiti grow like Botswana did, or even to ensure the latter keeps its current trajectory for decades.
Also, I suspect there’s a widespread Dunning-Kruger effect in discussions about economics, where experts usually express themselves with way less confidence than the average amateur. So, I’m not saying we’re in the dark here – actually, we are more likely being obfuscated by too much noisy light. Thus, sorry, but I think your “replies to skepticism” are answering the wrong man (unfortunately, I’d like it to be me, as I’m a big fan of your work), and I’m afraid we’re not quite understanding each other.
On the other hand, I feel compelled to answer in full, as you do provide me with some examples I can target:
It is not possible to sustain the position that we know how to make policy-led improvements to economic welfare in the US, but not in Kenya
Actually, I don’t see why this is impossible.
We may know how to improve A’s health (because she’s kinda healthy, or has a well-known condition), but not B’s – because he has a very peculiar condition, or because you never studied a non-WASP person like B, or because he has diabetes + allergies + cancer + covid-19 etc. and anything we do has a significant risk of causing harm (because of, e.g., noise). Nothing here implies that we only know “one of two things about how to boost” health – actually, precisely because we know a lot about health we can recognize we’re uncertain.
Actually, development economists often consider it quite obvious that the advice you would give to poor countries (such as “improve capital formation”) is quite different from what you would focus on with rich countries (“get back to investing on innovation, lest others will leave you behind”).
Again, if most of our research is about developed countries and mostly focus on their trajectories (“see what developed /OECD countries have done more”), we’re very likely neglecting risks of selection bias and path dependencies. I can’t stress this enough: instead of thinking about Kenya in terms of what I know from US, I’d start studying why Cape Verde and Mauritius (hmmm… bad example: small insular nations), or Botswana and Gabon are better (in terms of HDI) than Kenya.
However, I must remark: I think we actually agree economic researchers should focus more on developing countries, right?
2) For example, Indian farmers are forced to sell their products to state middlemen at a guaranteed minimum price. According to Wikipedia, foreign supermarkets are banned in many Indian states. The time taken to start a business ranges from 1 day in New Zealand to 230 in Venezuela.
I agree these examples show problems that could be fixed with simple recommendations from economics. Do you think there’s any initiative which is likely to lead to these intended outcomes? What do you think its cost-effectiveness could be? I’d gladly know more about it.
But notice they’re very different issues, and they’re more like symptoms than causes of the underlying conditions affecting these nations. I don’t think the problem here is anything like a lack of economic literacy, or advocacy for the right economic policies – it’s more things like inadequate equilibria.
3) The experience of the world since 1950 makes it extremely unlikely that we don’t know anything about growth. Economists and states were prominently trying to increase development from 1950, and development did in fact increase. Indeed, there was more progress on all subjective and objective measures of wellbeing than all prior human history combined. It might be true that this was an enormous coincidence, but at the very least someone actually needs to sit down and explain why it was.
I think this remark is surprising, because it totally ignores my point on the Nurkse v. Hirschman debate, which is my very example of how these discussions are still unsettled. And even now, we still don’t really know, e.g, what kickstarted the Industrial Revolution in England, but we do know economists back then were wrong about many things – even though economies have increased exponentially since then.
4) I don’t think there’s any point in answering (4), as it seems premised on the accusation of broad skepticism. I agree that finding out, e.g., how to make everyone grow like Botswana would be huge. Except that perhaps you’re framing the problem in a way that underestimates the costs of obtaining new information here. Again, development economics has been a hot topic for a long time.
5) Suppose you were a philanthropist with the opportunity to influence policy in Rwanda in 1994. Would you focus on encouraging them to do some RCTs of social programmes, or would you try as hard as possible to get them to do whatever it is that they did that led to sustained economic growth in Rwanda of 9% since 1995?
I’d first try to avoid another Rwandan genocideand the following Congo Wars, which are among the worst things that have happened in the world in the last 30 years. Seriously.
My point is not the rhetorical effect of “how could you forget that?”, but that any explanation of Rwanda’s growth after 1994 that fails to take it into account is likely flawed. WorldBank’s overview of the country refers it explicitly, for instance.
6) I will answer this separately. It’ll take longer, and, unfortunately, I’m not paid to do this – quite the opposite, perhaps.
7) If our knowledge of growth is incomplete, I don’t think it helps that a substantial chunk of the economics profession (>30%?) have started to work on RCT-evaluable things, which do not attempt to make a non-trivial dent on GDP per capita.
Well, this is the debate I actually want to have – and I guess you do, too. Dufflo and Banerjee response to this would be (in my interpretation from Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems) that we know more about how to make progress in this area (RCT), and that researchers can learn useful stuff with that (which might provide positive feedback loops); besides, we already had, and will keep having, public policies that will need to be oriented by research.
They have a point, but I agree with you (as I said before) this is likely not the best approach to development – as it is more about redistributing resources than creating them (i.e., growth), and it still leaves a huge blank in our theory of dev-eco. But this is about the roads economic researchers are trailing, not about EA recommendations.
8) This scared me a bit, too. But you have to read into the whole context. They’re emphasizing the need to change consumption patterns (particularly in developed countries), because energy-efficiency programmes failed to deliver results, and so recognizing there’s a trade-off here (and pending towards lowering emissions). They are not against growth. But I got scared: what if Cowen’s “Crusonia plants” are getting harder to find?
Neglectedness
I’d like to see someone investigate it more thoroughly. I agree US policy is not neglected. But I guess neglectedness is more about opportunity costs: how much do you expect the counterfactual effect of more input on this area to be? What will it add? Will it crowd-in or crowd-out additional investment?
(You know, this is analogous to a very controversial point on the role of the State in dev-eco since at least Nurkse: will a state intervention here crowd-out or crowd-in private investments?)
Finally, summarising my point: some of the best minds in economics are already taking dev-eco seriously, funded by governments and wealthy organizations, and things are still quite uncertain when it comes to feasible particular recommendations – as my future answer concerning my own country (I’ll see what I can say, despite a small but positive risk of suffering future persecution—sorry, but paranoia is starting to spread around) might exemplify. But I agree with you that sending 30% of economic researchers to do RCTs on things like transfers is likely a wrong move.
Thanks for engaging with me so deeply on this. To avoid misunderstandings, the comments about my desire for a debate were not meant as a criticism of you. I suppose I am a bit disappointed that no-one from GiveWell or Open Philanthropy has responded to Lant’s arguments. When I mentioned the upvotes mine and Hauke’s post got, I wasn’t trying to blow my own horn (much as I like doing that), I was just trying to say that there is at least a case to answer. But two years on, no-one has engaged with the post. A lot is at stake here—I think we’re leaving an awful lot of value on the table.
It seems I misunderstood your stance from your first comment. I’m not sure I’ve got time to respond to the new comment in full but will try if I find time.
Hey, I really appreciate this discussion! I wanted to jump in on one point. You note that the Founders Pledge follow-up to the original growth post (which I co-wrote) concluded that it would be too costly to continue the research to identify funding opportunities. I just wanted to note that taht was the case that because of how FP’s funding model works. FP staff don’t directly control the pledged funds—the members make the final decision over where to donate, and can take or leave the recommendations.
Since policy orgs are difficult to evaluate, I was quite worried that we would take a lot of time to conduct these evaluations and then our members wouldn’t end up donating to the recommendations. This would not be a concern for evaluators that have direct control over some funds. They can guarantee funding to organizations they’re evaluating that reach some bar, making it worth it (in expectation) for the organizations to spend some time engaging.
I’ve been following this debate for a while now… Though I tend to agree that deworming is certainly not the most impactful, and probably not the optimal option for EA investments, I’m still puzzled here: What are you proposing, especifically? I mean, what determinate project, with measurable goals, would you propose that someone invest on—which is not already being well funded by international organizations, banks, governments or think tanks?
My point is that I don’t think anyone in the EA community disagrees about the importance of economic development—particularly so-called randomistas such as Duflo and Banerjee. I certainly don’t—but I have been baffled with how little the field has gained in certainty, despite having way more data, since Nurkse v. Hirschman debates on the “balanced growth theory.” I think the problem is that people are not convinced about where is the low-hanging fruit here—or that there’s a clear path to take that will actually yield more overall marginal utility.
Notice that the “smell test” does not answer those questions; and though I’m quite hopeful there might be an optimal answer for development economics, I’m also skeptical Pritchett’s test actually makes the right question—which, for me, sounds a bit like criticizing a training program for sedentary persons, based on an athlete’s routine. And when I think about it, the one “X thing” that developed countries clearly seem to have more is that they are geographically similar and close to each other—except for small nations with outlier trajectories in very peculiarly strategical positions, such as Taiwan, Brunei or Singapore.
Hi there
On your first question—what am I proposing?
The main thing I am proposing is quite weak—I am proposing that there be some public discussion of the arguments. Hauke and I published our piece summarising Pritchett’s argument two years ago. It is the second most upvoted post in EA Forum history, which suggests that lots of people in the community found the post persuasive. On the face of it, Lant is worth taking seriously: he has a PhD in economics from MIT, has been a professor of development at Harvard and Oxford, and worked at the World Bank for 15 years. He has been defending economic growth and criticising the RCT-led approach to economics for at least 7 years. Some of the most prominent economists in the world (Rodrik, Acemoglu, Deaton, Cowen, Caplan) have endorsed similar conclusions. In spite of this, no-one in the EA community has ever published a response to these arguments.
The initial thing Hauke and I proposed was that “A ~4 person-year research effort will find donation opportunities working on economic growth in LMICs which are substantially better than GiveWell’s top charities from a current generation human welfare-focused point of view.” I would have tried to put this to the test when I was at Founders Pledge if I knew we would move sufficient funds to that area to make it worthwhile. I got two members of the team to explore the question of whether growth increased life satisfaction (here), which was one main piece of pushback we got to our post in the comments.
Turning to the object-level, I take it that you are making two arguments here - (1) scepticism about growth economics, (2) neglectedness. I have several responses.
It is not possible to sustain the position that we know how to make policy-led improvements to economic welfare in the US, but not in Kenya. If we know enough about the effects of macroeconomic stabilisation and housing reform in the US, then we can also know enough about their effects in Kenya. Indeed, both of these reforms would, in my view, bring large economic benefits in many low and middle-income countries. With housing reform, there are credible estimates that this would give an enormous boost to GDP in rich countries. It would be amazing if there were one of only two things we know about how to boost GDP anywhere in the world, and they both happen to be in the US.
If you read about the actual policies in place in many poor countries, it is just difficult to be sceptical that changes would bring increases in GDP. For example, Indian farmers are forced to sell their products to state middlemen at a guaranteed minimum price. According to Wikipedia, foreign supermarkets are banned in many Indian states. The time taken to start a business ranges from 1 day in New Zealand to 230 in Venezuela. The list of such obviously bad policies is literally almost endless.
The experience of the world since 1950 makes it extremely unlikely that we don’t know anything about growth. Economists and states were prominently trying to increase development from 1950, and development did in fact increase. Indeed, there was more progress on all subjective and objective measures of wellbeing than all prior human history combined. It might be true that this was an enormous coincidence, but at the very least someone actually needs to sit down and explain why it was.
If we truly don’t know anything about growth economics, the value of information from further research must be enormous. For this not to be the case, one would have to hold that we don’t know anything about growth and also that, in expectation, we can’t know anything it. This seems to me to equate to the view that we can’t know anything about social science—surely anything you might want to know about social science would have an effect on GDP?
Suppose you were a philanthropist with the opportunity to influence policy in Rwanda in 1994. Would you focus on encouraging them to do some RCTs of social programmes, or would you try as hard as possible to get them to do whatever it is that they did that led to sustained economic growth in Rwanda of 9% since 1995? We are in an analogous case with respect to all developing countries. I don’t think it would ever be the right move to take the RCT option.
Suppose you were trying to increase economic welfare in your own country. What would you do? If you browse the manifesto of any political party, literally none of the policies will be testable by RCTs. If I was looking at something to work for to improve economic welfare in my own country, I would look to advocate for things like immigration, housing reform, road pricing, ending agricultural subsidies, advocacy for tax credits, land value taxation etc. None of these can be tested by RCTs. I don’t understand why the RCT-led approach is the right one in developing countries but not in rich countries.
If our knowledge of growth is incomplete, I don’t think it helps that a substantial chunk of the economics profession (>30%?) have started to work on RCT-evaluable things, which do not attempt to make a non-trivial dent on GDP per capita.
A side-point on Banerjee and Duflo. In their book they do seem to come out in favour of degrowth as a solution to climate change. “Mitigation through better technologies may not do the trick; people’s consumption will need to fall. We may have to be content not only with cleaner cars but also with smaller cars, or no cars at all.” Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems, 01 edition (Penguin, 2019), chap. 6
Neglectedness
US policy is also not neglected. In fact, I would guess that US policy (land use reform, macroeconomic policy) is much more crowded than Kenyan economic policy. If the neglectedness argument works for Kenya, it works for the US as well
My former colleagues Stephen and Aidan discuss the neglectedness argument here. No-one has yet engaged with these arguments.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll have to answer it… it was supposed to be short, I really didn’t have the time, but then I started enjoying it. But I have a TL;DR.
TL;DR: I guess we’re not understanding each other very well, as you seem to be responding to other people (unfortunately, because I’m a big fan). I don’t see why you categorize me as a skeptic. I think we actually agree (i) RCT shouldn’t be the main path for dev-eco researchers, and (ii) there should be more research focused on developing countries. But: (iii) development economics is more complex than you make it look like, (iv) I keep the discussion on dev-eco research apart from the discussion on which cause areas to choose. Also, please, take a charitable look at my answer to your point (5)… but I don’t see how you can talk about Rwanda’s growth after 94 without talking about genocide and war.
Congrats 😉 on the other hand, like many people who commented on the subject, I upvoted your post back then, but I don’t find your case against randomistas so persuasive; I don’t upvote only posts I agree with – but if this is sending the wrong signals, perhaps I should start down-voting more.
he has a PhD in economics from MIT, has been a professor of development at Harvard and Oxford, and worked at the World Bank for 15 years
Actually, I think your constant emphasis on Pritchett (as if the argument for dev-eco depended on him) is one of the weakest points of the post.
Also, five economists who disagree a lot about how development can be achieved. For instance, Acemoglu emphasizes the role of culture and institutions (but I think Melissa Dell research makes an even better case for this), but then Hausmann, Pritchett and Rodrik (2004) say, in the same article, that “Political-regime changes” and “economic reform” are “significant predictors of growth acceleration,” even though “the vast majority of growth accelerations are unrelated to standard determinants such as political change and economic reform, and most instances of economic reform do not produce growth accelerations.”
Also, Rodrik (my favorite one among them) claimed globalization (with free capital flows), national sovereignty and democracy are incompatible, defended an industrial policy approach to growth for a while, but admitted, in an interview with Tyler Cowen in 2015 (I recommend it), that the window for policies based on East Asia growth is likely gone; also in the same interview, he predicted Brazil would return to growing faster than India again – which didn’t happen (I mean, it’s sad for me, a Brazilian, to here it today).
I’m not sure what’s the problem here and what sort of response you’re expecting. But as mentioned before, you also received a lot of comments, many of them discussing some of your main points; and you cite Founder’s Pledge analysis of the area, which concludes (very persuasively, in my opinion) that “We’re not continuing this project because we think identifying funding opportunities would be too costly for us and for the organisations under consideration.”
Perhaps you’re victims of your own success, since searching for “randomista” in the EA Forum mostly leads to references to your post – but it shows people are actually taking it into account; I think it might provide some sort of middle ground between short-term and longterm causes). But, yeah, the only thing that seems as deep as your original post is K. Sarek’s long summary of Ogden’s “RCTs in Development Economics.”
However, I must add that I think EA is more often identified with randomista economics by outsiders – precisely because RCTs in economics provide a useful rhetorical advice to distinguish EA from other approaches to philanthropy.
I’m sorry, but calling my position scepticism is getting too close to a strawman – an unfortunately common move among us philosophers, as if it’s impossible to engage with someone without putting a tag on them. For instance, you don’t call someone who says “people disagree about cancer” a skeptic. I explicitly said economic development is very important, and I don’t deny we know a lot about it, nor that people should research it (quite the opposite); I’m just claiming that arriving to specific recommendations on growth, at the required scale, is way harder than you make it look like (particularly if we restrict the discussion to a small sample of economists, in a limited period of time). If I’m skeptical about anything, it is that we will figure out something like a feasible way to, e.g., make Haiti grow like Botswana did, or even to ensure the latter keeps its current trajectory for decades.
Also, I suspect there’s a widespread Dunning-Kruger effect in discussions about economics, where experts usually express themselves with way less confidence than the average amateur. So, I’m not saying we’re in the dark here – actually, we are more likely being obfuscated by too much noisy light. Thus, sorry, but I think your “replies to skepticism” are answering the wrong man (unfortunately, I’d like it to be me, as I’m a big fan of your work), and I’m afraid we’re not quite understanding each other.
On the other hand, I feel compelled to answer in full, as you do provide me with some examples I can target:
Actually, I don’t see why this is impossible.
We may know how to improve A’s health (because she’s kinda healthy, or has a well-known condition), but not B’s – because he has a very peculiar condition, or because you never studied a non-WASP person like B, or because he has diabetes + allergies + cancer + covid-19 etc. and anything we do has a significant risk of causing harm (because of, e.g., noise). Nothing here implies that we only know “one of two things about how to boost” health – actually, precisely because we know a lot about health we can recognize we’re uncertain.
Actually, development economists often consider it quite obvious that the advice you would give to poor countries (such as “improve capital formation”) is quite different from what you would focus on with rich countries (“get back to investing on innovation, lest others will leave you behind”).
Again, if most of our research is about developed countries and mostly focus on their trajectories (“see what developed /OECD countries have done more”), we’re very likely neglecting risks of selection bias and path dependencies. I can’t stress this enough: instead of thinking about Kenya in terms of what I know from US, I’d start studying why Cape Verde and Mauritius (hmmm… bad example: small insular nations), or Botswana and Gabon are better (in terms of HDI) than Kenya.
However, I must remark: I think we actually agree economic researchers should focus more on developing countries, right?
I agree these examples show problems that could be fixed with simple recommendations from economics. Do you think there’s any initiative which is likely to lead to these intended outcomes? What do you think its cost-effectiveness could be? I’d gladly know more about it.
But notice they’re very different issues, and they’re more like symptoms than causes of the underlying conditions affecting these nations. I don’t think the problem here is anything like a lack of economic literacy, or advocacy for the right economic policies – it’s more things like inadequate equilibria.
I think this remark is surprising, because it totally ignores my point on the Nurkse v. Hirschman debate, which is my very example of how these discussions are still unsettled. And even now, we still don’t really know, e.g, what kickstarted the Industrial Revolution in England, but we do know economists back then were wrong about many things – even though economies have increased exponentially since then.
4) I don’t think there’s any point in answering (4), as it seems premised on the accusation of broad skepticism. I agree that finding out, e.g., how to make everyone grow like Botswana would be huge. Except that perhaps you’re framing the problem in a way that underestimates the costs of obtaining new information here. Again, development economics has been a hot topic for a long time.
I’d first try to avoid another Rwandan genocide and the following Congo Wars, which are among the worst things that have happened in the world in the last 30 years. Seriously.
My point is not the rhetorical effect of “how could you forget that?”, but that any explanation of Rwanda’s growth after 1994 that fails to take it into account is likely flawed. WorldBank’s overview of the country refers it explicitly, for instance.
6) I will answer this separately. It’ll take longer, and, unfortunately, I’m not paid to do this – quite the opposite, perhaps.
Well, this is the debate I actually want to have – and I guess you do, too. Dufflo and Banerjee response to this would be (in my interpretation from Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems) that we know more about how to make progress in this area (RCT), and that researchers can learn useful stuff with that (which might provide positive feedback loops); besides, we already had, and will keep having, public policies that will need to be oriented by research.
They have a point, but I agree with you (as I said before) this is likely not the best approach to development – as it is more about redistributing resources than creating them (i.e., growth), and it still leaves a huge blank in our theory of dev-eco. But this is about the roads economic researchers are trailing, not about EA recommendations.
8) This scared me a bit, too. But you have to read into the whole context. They’re emphasizing the need to change consumption patterns (particularly in developed countries), because energy-efficiency programmes failed to deliver results, and so recognizing there’s a trade-off here (and pending towards lowering emissions). They are not against growth. But I got scared: what if Cowen’s “Crusonia plants” are getting harder to find?
Neglectedness
I’d like to see someone investigate it more thoroughly. I agree US policy is not neglected. But I guess neglectedness is more about opportunity costs: how much do you expect the counterfactual effect of more input on this area to be? What will it add? Will it crowd-in or crowd-out additional investment?
(You know, this is analogous to a very controversial point on the role of the State in dev-eco since at least Nurkse: will a state intervention here crowd-out or crowd-in private investments?)
Finally, summarising my point: some of the best minds in economics are already taking dev-eco seriously, funded by governments and wealthy organizations, and things are still quite uncertain when it comes to feasible particular recommendations – as my future answer concerning my own country (I’ll see what I can say, despite a small but positive risk of suffering future persecution—sorry, but paranoia is starting to spread around) might exemplify. But I agree with you that sending 30% of economic researchers to do RCTs on things like transfers is likely a wrong move.
Thanks for engaging with me so deeply on this. To avoid misunderstandings, the comments about my desire for a debate were not meant as a criticism of you. I suppose I am a bit disappointed that no-one from GiveWell or Open Philanthropy has responded to Lant’s arguments. When I mentioned the upvotes mine and Hauke’s post got, I wasn’t trying to blow my own horn (much as I like doing that), I was just trying to say that there is at least a case to answer. But two years on, no-one has engaged with the post. A lot is at stake here—I think we’re leaving an awful lot of value on the table.
It seems I misunderstood your stance from your first comment. I’m not sure I’ve got time to respond to the new comment in full but will try if I find time.
Hey, I really appreciate this discussion! I wanted to jump in on one point. You note that the Founders Pledge follow-up to the original growth post (which I co-wrote) concluded that it would be too costly to continue the research to identify funding opportunities. I just wanted to note that taht was the case that because of how FP’s funding model works. FP staff don’t directly control the pledged funds—the members make the final decision over where to donate, and can take or leave the recommendations.
Since policy orgs are difficult to evaluate, I was quite worried that we would take a lot of time to conduct these evaluations and then our members wouldn’t end up donating to the recommendations. This would not be a concern for evaluators that have direct control over some funds. They can guarantee funding to organizations they’re evaluating that reach some bar, making it worth it (in expectation) for the organizations to spend some time engaging.
Off topic, but I didn’t realise you’d left Founders Pledge. May I ask what you’re up to now?