Economist Esther Duflo has won this year’s John Bates Clark Medal. The following paragraph in her bio caught my attention.
Duflo has been a leader in using randomized field experiments to address important questions concerning public policy in developing countries. In one series of papers, she and various coauthors study the impact of female political leadership on local government spending and attitudes toward women by examining a policy that required one-third of India’s villages, selected at random in each election cycle, to choose a woman as council head. She finds, for example, that villages forced to choose female council heads shift local government spending away from education and towards drinking water and (in some areas) roads. Another series of papers measures the effects of various randomized educational interventions, such as the introduction of teacher aids (local women with some secondary education but no formal teacher training), a computer-assisted math program, reductions in pupil-teacher ratios, ability grouping, various forms of monitoring and incentives to reduce teacher absenteeism, and programs designed to encourage community participation. For example, in work with Abhijit Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, Rachel Glennerster, and Stuti Khemani, she investigates the effects of three randomly assigned programs targeting community participation. The first informed villagers about opportunities to participate in school governance and monitoring committees, the second trained villagers to use a testing tool, and the third organized literate villagers to hold remedial reading classes for illiterate children. The study concludes that the interventions had no impact on community involvement in the schools, no impact on teacher effort, and no impact on students’ achievement in school.
For the record and much to my shame I have never taken a single economics class. I do not have enough knowledge or authority to evaluate the work of Duflo. But “how to improve results in some area of society” is of interest to me. Especially if that area is education. Often we look at some area of society that could be doing better. We need to do something! And after spending time and money we pat ourselves on the back for caring and for having done something.
Even though it did not make any difference.
When my wife worked at a school for troubled youth in Dryden New York there was a professor from Cornell who spent a year working with the students to help improve their self-image and thereby improve their behavior and their academic performance. At the end of the year he had to admit that his best efforts did not make any discernible difference. Good theory and best intentions are not always enough. This is something most good conservatives understand.
My intent is not to criticize or mock those who attempt to intervene in such situations. Or to suggest we should never attempt to do something. Only that I found it interesting that a top economics professor looked at a nation’s best efforts to improve something and found that it did not work.
So what does work?
H/T Greg Mankiw
