RD has moved in an entirely different direction. Instead of replicating this success, it asks: among interventions that we can test with RCTs, what is most impactful? In the wake of the period with by far the greatest progress in human welfare of all time, this change in strategy is difficult to justify.
I think one possible explanation (I’ve not heard this anywhere explicitly; it’s just me making things up.) that I find moderately persuasive is:
Development RCTs rose to prominence in the wake of the ‘“lost decades” in Latin America and the “transition depression” in some (not all) former Soviet dominated countries’. These failures and the broader (perceived) failures of the Washington Consensus provoked a crisis of confidence in economic policy prescriptions. In particular, large-scale economic theory is hard to make accountable to empirical evidence. RCTs shore up this epistemic weakness—they allow economists to test their theories against reality and build up more certain knowledge which can perhaps eventually be applied to big questions of national development. Without RCTs, economic prescriptions are much more reliant on theory (even non-RCT causal inference from empirical data is more theory-laden) and it doesn’t seem great to cut out (almost) one whole category of evidence. (See What randomization can and cannot do for a good discussion of the interplay of theory and RCTs.)
I think epistemics is plausibly a crux for in the randomista vs big national development debate.
Note that RCTs are still a minority in published academic research. I think Pritchett’s criticism is that NGOs have been dominated by randomistas; eg, even the International Growth Centre does a lot of RCTs, instead of following his preferred growth diagnostics approach.
I think one possible explanation (I’ve not heard this anywhere explicitly; it’s just me making things up.) that I find moderately persuasive is:
Development RCTs rose to prominence in the wake of the ‘“lost decades” in Latin America and the “transition depression” in some (not all) former Soviet dominated countries’. These failures and the broader (perceived) failures of the Washington Consensus provoked a crisis of confidence in economic policy prescriptions. In particular, large-scale economic theory is hard to make accountable to empirical evidence. RCTs shore up this epistemic weakness—they allow economists to test their theories against reality and build up more certain knowledge which can perhaps eventually be applied to big questions of national development. Without RCTs, economic prescriptions are much more reliant on theory (even non-RCT causal inference from empirical data is more theory-laden) and it doesn’t seem great to cut out (almost) one whole category of evidence. (See What randomization can and cannot do for a good discussion of the interplay of theory and RCTs.)
I think epistemics is plausibly a crux for in the randomista vs big national development debate.
Note that RCTs are still a minority in published academic research. I think Pritchett’s criticism is that NGOs have been dominated by randomistas; eg, even the International Growth Centre does a lot of RCTs, instead of following his preferred growth diagnostics approach.