Nobel Rebels in Disguise — Assessing the Rise and Rule of the Randomistas

ABSTRACT

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer were awarded the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their pioneering of randomized control trials (RCTs) to find reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. This article unpacks the laureates’ theoretical and methodological approach to development economics in order to evaluate to what extent their approach signifies a break from broader trends in the field. In particular, it investigates the role RCTs have played in both generating knowledge about development interventions and in shaping development policy debates more broadly. Finally, the article argues that despite their rebellious and radical façade, the randomista enterprise has led to a more exclusive development economics, while at the same time failing to improve our ability to fight poverty.

KEYWORDS:

• RCTs
• methodology
• economic development
• evidence-based policy
• Nobel Prize

JEL CODES:

• B30
• B31
• B41
• C90
• O10

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the comments of the anonymous referees for their helpful feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) website: www.povertyactionlab.org/about-j-pal [accessed May 25, 2020].

2 The term ‘randomistas’, referring to scholars who conduct RCTs, was initially meant as a critique when Angus Deaton (2007) first used it. However, it has since become a common term used to describe researchers who rely heavily on RCTs, even among randomistas themselves.

3 ‘Abhijit Banerjee’ https://www.povertyactionlab.org/person/banerjee. Accessed July 5th 2020.

4 ‘Ban names high-level panel to map out “bold” vision for future global development efforts’ UN News, July 31st, 2012. Available here: https://news.un.org/en/story/2012/07/416752-ban-names-high-level-panel-map-out-bold-vision-future-global-development [accessed July 5th 2020]

5 Michael Kremer — Interview. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2020. Tue. 7 Jul 2020. Accessed July 5th, 2020. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2019/kremer/interview.

6 MacArthur Foundation — Michael Robert Kremer. Accessed July 5th, 2020. https://www.macfound.org/fellows/556/.

7 Harvard Kennedy School — Faculty Profiles — Michael Kremer. Accessed July 5th, 2020. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/michael-kremer.

8 Precision Agriculture for Development: https://precisionag.org/ [accessed July 5th 2020].

9 As of July 2020, the team consisted of Amrita Ahuja, Susan Athey, Arthur Baker, Owen Barder, Juan Camilo Castillo, Rachel Glennerster, Michael Kremer, Scott Kominers, Jean Lee, Jonathan Levin, Christopher Snyder, Alex Tabarrok, Brandon Tan, Duc Tran and Witold Wiecek. Overview of the project is available here: www.acceleratinght.org [accessed July 5th 2020].

10 ‘Harvard at a Glance — Nobel Laureates’. Full list available at: https://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance/honors/nobel-laureates [accessed July 5th 2020].

11 This stands in contrast to a realist position, where ‘theorising is impossible in the absence of both the abstract and the particular, and as such is not an activity separate from understanding’ (Surendran and Kumar 2020, p. 2).

12 Many have criticized the plumber analogy for being somewhat misleading. For example, Rao (2020, p. 2) points out that ‘the plumber is not incentivized by the pressures of academic publishing’. See also Akram-Lodhi (2020).

13 This influential report by CGD (2006, p. 3) captures this sentiment: ‘No responsible physician would consider prescribing medications without properly evaluating their impact or potential side effects. Yet in social development programs, where large sums of money are spent to modify population behaviors, change economic livelihoods, and potentially alter cultures or family structure, no such standard has been adopted.’ Furthermore, randomistas consistently use medical vocabulary when discussing development problems, such as referring to aid projects as ‘treatments’.

14 J-Pal’s former Director, Rachel Glennerster’s (2013) view that RCTs simply ‘provide independent or objective results … . Because …  the results of a randomized evaluation are what they are. … [T]here is relatively little flexibility for the evaluator to run the analysis in different ways to generate the outcome they want to see.’ This sentiment has been repeated over and over by randomistas. For example, Banerjee et al. (2007b, p. 115) argues that evidence from RCTs ‘is simple to interpret. The beauty of randomized evaluations is that the results are what they are’.

15 Furthermore, the circumstances needed to even evaluate whether experiments may have external validity are often inadequately reported (Peters, Langbein, and Roberts 2018).

16 It was World Bank president George Woods (1963–1968) who laid the foundation for a large influence of economists within the Bank (Donovan 2018). As President, he established the Bank’s Economics Department and the key position of Chief Economist, and the number of economists increased by 25 per cent under his leadership. By 1991, 80 per cent of senior staff in the Policy, Research and External Affairs departments had training in Economics or Finance (Woods 2000).

17 On the political economy of strategic ignorance, see Gross and McGoey (2015) and McGoey (2019).

18 This is true for the uptakes of many methodologies that resonate with a particular way of seeing the world. There have, for example, been a series of critiques of the World Bank’s measure of poverty and inequality because they conform to the narrative of globalization being inclusive (Wade 2002; Reddy and Pogge 2010; Hickel 2017; Human Rights Council 2020).

19 ‘Innovation for Poverty Action — What Do We Mean By Impact?’ Accessed July 5th, 2020. www.poverty-action.org/impact/what-do-we-mean-impact.

20 Oliver, Lorenc, and Innvær (2014) contend that such claims are themselves unsupported by evidence.

21 The specific argument on the demoralizing effects of an extended quarantine was based on a randomized experiment on extending deployment in the armed forces.

22 For a comprehensive critique of this Special Issue, see Bédécarrats, Guérin, and Roubaud (2020b). For a critique of earlier RCTs on microcredit (as well as studies using other methods), see Duvendack et al. (2011).

23 60 per cent of the impacts at 1 per cent significance come from the Moroccan RCT, although it represents just 12 per cent of the total number of estimated impacts. Moreover, a replication by Bédécarrats et al. (2019) found flaws in the Moroccan RCT that cast doubts on the whole study and lowers the number of significant impacts even further.

24 There has also been important work on how the promotion of microfinance intersects with forced labor and cycles of debt bondage in India (see Morgan and Olsen 2015).

25 Kabeer (2020a) finds similar problems with Duflo’s (2012) generalizations about women’s employment in the service industry in India based on a few RCTs of IT-related jobs in Mumbai and Business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs in the outskirts of Delhi. For Kabeer, Duflo’s conclusions stand in contrast to the broader trend in the country, which shows little evidence of rise in service sector jobs for women.

26 Randomistas in the Global North often seem to misunderstand the constraints scholars in the Global South face and, perhaps not surprising given their cognitive frames, attribute them to individual inadequacies. For example, in her piece on the laureates, Bandiera (2019; emphasis added) writes that ‘bringing academics to the field has exposed a large number of locals to research ideas, and, most importantly, to the idea of research’. This suggests that scholarship in the Global South is constrained primarily lack of knowledge about research rather than structural problems that have led to underfunding of public universities (see e.g., Federici, Caffentzis, and Alidou 2000).

27 Note that economics is currently the least interdisciplinary of the social sciences (Fourcade, Etienne, and Algan 2015).

28 For a related critique of inclusion and diversity in higher education, see Ahmed (2012).

29 Indeed, it has long been recognized by anthropologists that reducing global issues such as poverty to a technical problem tends to come at a human cost (Ferguson 1994).