There was an interesting interview with Dean Karlan from Innovations for Poverty Action on PBS. Some excerpts:
Dean Karlan: I divide my thinking into short-run and long-run. For the long-run, I want to invest. I want to think about how we get better information, better evidence [for what we give], because we need to help future children, not just today’s children. In fact, there are many more children in the future than today so I put more money into the long-run. And for that, I support Innovations for Poverty Action which is doing research to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
But, I also do care about the short-run. So I also look at some of the things that we do have strong evidence on — where there have been really good tests to show that an idea works, and here’s a charity that’s doing it, so let’s support it.
This year there are three charities that stood out in the work that I was doing with my family, trying to think through what to support. One is called Trickle Up, which works a lot in West Africa and Latin America. A second is Seva Mandir which does work in India.
And a third is Evidence Action, an organization just started a year ago that is strictly committed to scaling up ideas that have been shown to work using randomized trials. They are doing two things right now. One is a de-worming program. This is a school-based de-worming program. De-worming, as in children who have intestinal worms, which gives them a distended belly and makes them lethargic and sick and not able to go to school. Taking a pill has been shown not only to improve their school attendance, but 10 years later, improve their income.
A second is a chlorine dispenser. . .
There are also some interesting findings on savings and crop insurance instruments that they discuss:
So, the striking insight was that it’s not that people weren’t credit constrained, but they were very risk-constrained, and there was a lot of under-investment going on simply because of risk. And this suggests that a scaled-up micro-insurance product that helps people absorb rainfall risk would be a very successful thing.
The host seems convinced at the end, and decided to donate 10% to Dean’s suggested charities.
There was an interesting interview with Dean Karlan from Innovations for Poverty Action on PBS. Some excerpts:
There are also some interesting findings on savings and crop insurance instruments that they discuss:
The host seems convinced at the end, and decided to donate 10% to Dean’s suggested charities.