I have been contacted by journalists at times as a “critic” of RCTs. This worries me. My wife, who is a wise woman, has been encouraging me to stop writing and talking about RCTs because I will be seen as a cranky old kook who doesn’t “get it” and doesn’t have anything better to do than nit pick about the work of others.
This blog post is just to clarify that I am “for” things and spend most of my time and research and writing promoting those things. In a sports metaphor, I try and spend most of time playing “offence”–but at times, unfortunately, the best offence is a good defense and in a game like chess, you cannot just pursue your own strategy or you can end up checkmated.
Overall what I am actively “for” has been pretty constant. What I am “for” is that more and more people on the planet have the same opportunities that I have had and the same access to prosperity and safety and security and order and decent schools that I had growing up in the USA in the 1970s as a child of middle class white parents. The expansion of opportunities for people to live a life of their choosing is how I think of the “development” agenda. And, as an economist, I am more about what can be done at the system level to shape the choices people have rather than imagining that I know better and should nudge people about the choices they make.
I regard the “national development” as an instrumental path to raising human wellbeing. National development is a four-fold transformation of countries to have (i) a more productive economy, (ii) a more capable state, (iii) a more responsive polity, and (iv) a more equal treatment of all citizens.
Here are four agendas in research and practice that I have been actively working on (and writing papers about) over the last 20 years or so.
Rapid and sustained growth in broad based labor productivity. I could say “economic growth” but this often raises hackles needlessly as people assume that “economic growth” must always mean “GDP” as currently measured. Like all professional economists I know: (i) don’t regard GDP as a direct measure of wellbeing at all, (ii) acknowledge the many limitations of GDP in measuring and valuing “true” economic output (and in keeping track of “wealth”) and (iii) am more than happy to put more weight on the gains in income/consumption of poorer people than richer people. But, at the same time, GDP per capita turns out to be a handy and available proxy.
Rapid and sustained economic growth is empirically necessary and empirically sufficient for achieving nearly all goals in improving human material wellbeing (including (i) the reduction of standard measures of poverty, (ii) any aggregate of the basics of material wellbeing (e.g. health, education, water and sanitation, child malnutrition), and (iii) (together with state capability) broad based indicators of human wellbeing, including (but not limited to) measures like the Social Progress Index that are exclusively based on non-money metric measures of wellbeing.
Higher levels of state capability. In addition to growth, a second transformation is having high state capability, which I define as having public sector organizations capable of effective implementation of the laws, regulations, policies, programs and projects that advance the legitimate goals of these organizations. In common sense terms this is having police forces that create order and security, education systems that equip kids with the skills and knowledge and capabilities they need, tax agencies that collect taxes without corruption, agencies that produce reliable infrastructure services (e.g. water, power, roads), etc. (And this definition does not resolve any particular “public vs private” debate as the “make vs buy” question of whether the direct producers of services should be public or private organizations does not imply there is no need for “state capability” as contracting out to or regulation of private providers requires state capability).
In “National Development Delivers” I show that both growth and state capability are strongly associated with cross-national human wellbeing measures and the strength of the relationship differs with (i) level of income (growth is more important at lower levels of income than at high levels), (ii) how “basic” the indicator is, with economic growth more important for more basic to wellbeing, and (iii) state capability is more important the more important effective collective action is to achieving good outcomes (e.g. the more it is a “public good”)).
The Building State Capability project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for International Development points a useful way forward on this agenda.
Effective education for all. I spent the last 8 years as the Research Director of RISE (Research on Improving Systems of Education) (the project recently ended, as planned, on March 41, 2023). This is part of a larger agenda built around the twin ideas that (i) while countries have been very successful at expanding schooling many countries have very low (and in many cases declining) levels of learning per year of schooling so “schooling” goals are being met while the true “education” objectives of schools are far from being achieved and (ii) accelerating progress in learning is going to require not just “project” tweaks inside “business as usual” but pretty thorough-going “system” reform.
Labor mobility. Given that “national development” doesn’t always happen and even when it happens it often takes a long time, this means that today (and into the foreseeable future) there will be large gaps in the productivity of the same individuals across places and hence there are, at the margin, massive income gains to allowing people to move from low productivity places to high productivity places. I am currently working to promote “more and better” pathways for people to move to opportunity via LaMP (Labor Mobility Partnerships).
I am not arguing these are the only aspects of development that are pressing or needed, there are lots of huge and important elements of the national development agenda that I have not been actively working on (e.g. infrastructure, energy, agriculture, urbanization, gender, law and order/policing, climate change, etc.). Mine are just the four that through my contingent life/professional trajectory I have ended up working on through a some combination of interest, opportunity, and an assessment these topics were “important, neglected, tractable.” And these have kept me very busy and productive as over the last 20 years or so I have written (mostly with co-authors) books, journal articles, papers, blogs, policy briefs on these topics.
Playing defense. That said, in order to promote the national development agenda (both broadly and in the specific domains in which I was active) I have played some defense. From my point of view, a major problem with development organizations and funding is that over the last 30 years or so there have been constant efforts to “define development down“, that is, shift the agenda away from “national development” (that sees the challenge as equal opportunity for people across the planet and hence has expansive, long-term, ambitious goals) to “kinky development” (here) that looks to narrow development to “charity work” by advocating just “low bar” goals in a few sectors (here). Development funding (both official and philanthropic) from the “North” or “West” (neither of which are of course geographically literal as the “North” includes Australia and the “West” includes Japan) has had a tendency, driven by their own domestic politics and needs, not the concerns in developing countries (here ), to shy away from the hard slog of the four-fold transformations and instead look to fund specific (often cocooned from systems and implemented by NGOs to bypass states) project “interventions” that are “effective” and “attributable.” So I have written papers (and blogs and speeches and etc.) arguing: (i) that “dollar a day” poverty is an obscenely low standard (here and here) and “dollar a day” (or other penurious poverty goals) cannot be goals around which a countries can build its development agenda (here); (ii) the Millennium Development Goal for “completing primary school” while ignoring any measure of learning of skills or capabilities was misguided (here and here–and then everywhere in RISE); (iii) that “kinky development” was not a development agenda that met the legitimate and pressing goals and ambitions of the governments and people in “the South” (here and here).
I think it is obvious to most observers that “national development” is the big agenda and “kinky development” is the small agenda. Moreover, it is also pretty clear that even within the “kinky development” agenda the kind of evidence that the “randomista” movement can, even in principle, generate is just one (small?) part of promoting and implementing effective progress even within that limited kinky agenda. So, while this (faith based) movement has been a relatively important part of academic development economics in the West, it is, at best, literally a footnote to the actual development experience.
As a thought experiment, the 13 developing countries with populations over 90 million people, which together account for over three quarters of the developing world population, are: China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Mexico, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Egypt, Vietnam, DR Congo. Each of these countries has an interesting, often turbulent, recent economic history, some with amazing success at improving the material wellbeing of their populations, some with mixed results, some catastrophic. Ask yourself: would it be plausible to write a recent history of each these countries, and even a recent economic history, or even of their recent “development” experience without any mention of RCTs or the generation of “rigorous evidence” about specific interventions?
I am for national development, which has an array of important elements within it. Over recent years I have (mostly) been doing research and working on four topics: economic growth, state capability, basic education, and labor mobility. As part of being a proponent of national development and of key issues within that, I have played some defense against the temptations of “kinky development” and, within that, spent some quite small amount of my time trying to play down expectations for what the very visible and very popular randomista agenda could really deliver in practice, on a number of fronts (here and here and here). But this does not make me a “critic”–much less an “enemy” or “opponent” of RCTs–this just makes me a consistent proponent of the effective promotion of national development as a pathway to higher human wellbeing.