The controversial winners of the #Nobel Prize in Economics.
The poverty of poor economics
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/10/the-poverty-of-poor-economics
Banerjee and Duflo teach at MIT while Kremer is at Harvard. The trio have been at the forefront of pushing the use of randomized control trials (RCTs) in the sub-discipline of economics known as development economics. And partly as the result of their efforts, an ecosystem has developed in which the vampire squids with tentacles of influence across the globe are the “poverty action lab” JPAL, 3ie, and the World Bank’s development impact evaluation group (DIME). The main idea behind their work is that RCTs allow us to know what works and doesn’t work in development because of its “experimental” approach. RCTs are most well-known for their use in medicine and involve the random assignment of interventions into “treatment” and “control” groups. And just like in medicine, so the argument goes, RCTs allow us to know which development pill to swallow because of the rigor associated with the experimental approach. Banerjee and Duflo popularized their work in a 2011 book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.
Even though other Nobel prize awards often attract public controversy (peace and literature come to mind), the economics prize has largely flown under the radar with prize announcements often met with the same shrugging of the shoulders as, for example, the chemistry prize. This year has however been different (and so was the year that Milton Friedman, that high priest of neoliberalism, won).
A broad section of commentary, particularly from the Global South, has puzzled over the Committee’s decision to not only reward an approach that many consider as suffering from serious ethical and methodological problems, but also extol its virtues and supposed benefits for poor people.