Nobel Laureates Aim Too Low on Global Poverty
The argument of this article is strange.
The "randomista" revolution essentially states that we know (or knew) very little about what actually work to foster development and that RCTs are the best tool we have to obtain this knowledge. Macro-scale policies are important, but we have no tool to evaluate their effects appropriately.
The article essentially says that this approach is wrong because we know that some macro-scale policies will have a much bigger impact than all those micro interventions. In this case, reducing barriers to immigration.
But we do not know that, that's the whole point of doing RCTs in the first place.
You can make an argument that we should spend less time focusing on micro scale interventions and more on macro-scale interventions because the former will never have a large impact and thus the best way to foster development is finding which macro intervention work.
However saying that focusing on the micro scale is useless because we _already_ know about some macro intervention that work better than the micro ones is unfounded. The evidence on macro intervention is much, much weaker than the evidence from RCTs.
It's worth pointing out that economics is a fake "Nobel" prize, funded not by the Alfred Nobel foundation, but by a Swedish bank trying to cash in on the name recognition.
Economics is almost entirely ideology accompanied by linear regression, and should be ignored or at least laughed at by numerate people.
Immigration is an easy win for significantly reducing global poverty.
In a classic Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? Michael Clemens argues that it would be a win-win-win scenario to open up our borders.
The problem with focusing on big questions in economics is that it is very difficult to produce convincing evidence. Humanity is complicated and it is impossible to control for unobservables in cross country studies.
The Nobel winners see this and decided to focus on smaller, provable questions instead. I'm not saying RCTs are perfect, but they are much better than a lot of the snake oil that still comes out of the discipline. We need more of them, not less.
(Archive link for those who prefer non-broken web experiences)
I know that hacker news usually stays away from paywalled articles - do enough people have subscriptions to WSJ that this isn't an issue here?
The human race has gone downhill since the 60s. No more Apollos Or Manhattans projects. This is just another example of the last 70 years culture. Taboos, abstractions, political correctness, pessimism and escapism are the symptoms of a sad era.