Esther Duflo, a development economist at MIT, recently won the John Bates Clark Medal – which is basically means the economics field is saying “You’re brilliant, doing amazing work, but not quite wrinkly enough to win win the Nobel. Please stick around for 20 more years and Sweden will be calling.”
Duflo’s work is all about figuring out what sort of aid programs work and what don’t, so that our aid efforts end up actually helping the poor – basically, she’s taking development work out of the dark age, “we think using leeches to rebalance the humors will help” era of thinking and into an era where scientifically rigorous experiments will let us know what actually does work. In the video above (from the wonderful TED) she explains the sort of work she does, and the results from some of her studies – for instance, in one experiment in Udaipur, India she was able to figure out a way to increase full child immunization six fold for only pennies per child. It’s a very understandable and clear talk, and I highly encourage you to give it 15 minutes of your time.
Development economics is a field very near and dear to my heart, since I think we all have a duty to help the absolute poor around the world (but not by giving money to beggars). Moreover, as I’ve written before, it’s critically important to help out in ways that are effective – not just the ways that make us, the donors, feel good. Yes, starting your own charity to help the poor back home (something I see and read about many NRIs doing) makes you feel good (and heck, I’d like to have a charity named after me: the “Jaclyn Chaudhuri Foundation for Malaria”, I’d call it). And, yeah, you’re probably doing some good – but not as much as you could be doing. It’s much better for you to donate your money directly to existing organizations which can leverage your money into their existing – and proven effective – programs. For a list of such programs, both in the US and internationally, I encourage you to visit Givewell.net, an organization which has done all the hard work of figuring out what programs are doing the best job at making real and measured progress at improving people’s lives.
5. May 2010 at 10:41 am
THAT is truly amazing … amazing really. Givewell is a breath of fresh air. What’s NEAT is to read their “mistakes” page … they sound like good people!
Thx for sharing, J.
5. May 2010 at 4:30 pm
Wow! who knew a degree in economics could be socially beneficial? (smile – not really). I find that people are usually on the extremes: won’t trust an org so will keep it or just give to any org who will make them feel better about giving and less guilty for having so much and soon the ppl can feel indignant vendication that “they have given,” regardless of whether their gift is really “helping.”
12. May 2010 at 1:40 pm
*wink* Economists get a bad rap – partially because of misconceptions, partially because a lot of socially-clueless people are drawn to the field, and partially because some of the rap is deserved – there’s plenty of bad economics out there if you look. But mostly it’s just eggheads being eggheads or smart people really trying to do good.
(These remarks do not include macroeconomists.)
6. May 2010 at 11:27 pm
neato- thanks for the link. I’m going to pass it on to my friends.
11. May 2010 at 9:26 pm
Liberals will always help the poor — by redistributing other people’s money.
When it comes to donating their own money to private charities, they are all like Joe Biden — that cheap jerk who, despite being a millionaire, donated roughly $4000 to charity.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/conservatives_more_liberal_giv.html
12. May 2010 at 1:24 pm
The problem with sort of article is that the little bullet points lack enough context to be meaningful – in particular, just discussing giving to “charity”, as if all charitable giving is equal. If you give money to your church – which, as a nonprofit, is counted as charitable giving – that’s all fine and dandy. Your choice & all that. But I would consider $100 given to a church as less valuable than $10 given to a targeted aid program in a developed nation. The key is how people are donating their time & money. That may be in the book, but it’s not in the article.
Also, there’s the question of where the data used is from & how it is collected. Aditya and I do a fair amount of donating that we don’t keep track of or claim on our tax returns, for instance.
12. May 2010 at 3:52 pm
There are many studies demonstrating that even after excluding money donated to churches non-liberals come at the top.
And I am no Christian. Atheist here. However, I do think that donating $100 to a church will be more useful than spending it on crack, like many liberals do.
12. May 2010 at 4:59 pm
If you have links to those studies, I’d be interested in reading them (seriously). I have a standing rule, however, to not believe any research paper of a social science-y type without first doing a thorough look through it, unless I’m finding it via a source I trust (i.e. an acquaintance who studies the subject & has already vetted it, or a source like NBER). Having read through (and written) my share of economic papers, I know how easy it is to hide the stink of bad data or research methods.
Depending on the church in question, I think crack might be a better choice. Or at least pot.
14. May 2010 at 6:33 pm
So social science is bunk. And you majored in bunk science. And you smoke pot. Bad girl!
14. May 2010 at 8:28 pm
Nope, nope, and nope. (Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that last one. Just my personal choice.)
12. May 2010 at 1:12 pm
As a follow-up… for the other side of things (not exactly an anti-randomized trials position, but a pointing out of its limitations) try reading From Poverty to Power’s discussion of Duflo’s talk.
14. May 2010 at 11:45 am
Let each one of us donate 1/4 of our income to serve the deserving needy.
Income = Save+Spend+Invest+Serve
(How much money has been spent on wars world wide?!!!)
If the people of world are friendly with each other, much money will be saved. This can be spent on people.
23. May 2010 at 1:46 pm
My first difficulty with justifying donating to churches as truly giving to charity is that churches offer services to the giver. We plan to financially contribute to whatever religious institutions we attend regularly, not out of fear that God will look negatively on us if we don’t, but because we would be benefiting from the church/temple/center’s services and would feel responsible for bearing the burden of these services, particularly if we are better off than many other members. When I pay dues to a club from which I benefit, I would not think of it as charity…I don’t consider contributing to schools and police through taxes charity, either (not sure how I would feel about donating to NPR, which I enjoy regularly). This thought process all comes before thinking about how much charitable work is actually done in the local and global community by the church itself, which varies wildly.
And, being in a social science as well, I fully agree that it is much too easy to do shoddy experiments or misrepresent data to trust a finding from an anonymous source. It’s true of every science, but in hard sciences, at least a meter is always a meter! Social science research can be done very well, but leaves a lot more responsibility to the scientist.
Back to the original topic: This video was fantastic! We enjoyed it heartily.