Spent an interesting couple of days in Paris with the chapter authors of a proposed book on RCTs, mostly with those amenable to the correct technical claims but skeptical of the outlandish claims that have been made. One of the authors is using the Gartner Hype Cycle as the organizing frame, thinking maybe we are headed to a relatively high “productivity plateau” after peak hype.
My paper argues that the RCT are not the disease but a symptom. The disease is the shift of focus from “national development” to “kinky development” or from doing and promoting developing to just trying to use limited, targeted programs to mitigate the worst consequences of the lack of development. It is pretty obvious that if one is asking questions about how countries successfully complete the four-fold transformation of development (productive economies, responsive polities, capable administration, and equalized social relations) the parts of that agenda for which RCTs can, even in principle, provide reliable (much less “rigorous”) guidance is tiny. It is only when one creates the illusion that “development” is about low-bar, sector specific targets that one can even imagine the design of “programmatic” interventions is at all central (and even then it is highly dubious). So RCTs are the research fad as a handmaiden of the larger shift to the kinky among North/Western agencies, which itself is a political shift due to their politics, having little or nothing to do with the facts of development or the interests of developing countries.
Attached is a very early draft of my chapter, will be substantially revised.