The editorial Batson is reacting to (by Yao Yang) makes the point that the largest economic development project that lifted the vast majority of people out of poverty over the past 20 years was orchestrated by China, and the RCTs/small scale interventions that Duflo et. al. won the Nobel for had no role or relevance there. He focuses more on the policies guided by the "classic" development economists like Solow which emphasize domestic savings and investment.
Batson's post delves into who in China actually was responsible for the economic policy changes that created that development.
Personally, I welcome the the addition of RCTs to the economic research toolkit. For too long, economics has wrapped itself up in a mathematically complex knot that bears no resemblance to the real world. Behavioral economics has started to crack that by applying common sense, though too often they have dramatically overextrapolated their hard-to-replicate results.
Hopefully economists can see RCT as a tool which can be used where appropriate, rather than an entirely new paradigm that much be applied to everything (as they did with highly mathematical economics).
At the end of the day RCT and other experiments will help us with allocating of the pie but not growing the pie itself.
e.g.India with a comparable population to China can only distribute so much with a 2.7 T $ economy compared to China with a 12 T $ economy.
I definitely feel that at least a few Chinese policymakers deserve the Nobel prize for actually lifting people out of poverty. You can debate their methods but i think most people from Western schools of thought come with an inherent bias thinking what worked for them over so many decades would've similarly worked for China which is not really true. This has to do with cultural difference, huge population and many other numerous reasons.
China has also not suffered a Japan style economic crash, even though The Economist has regularly predicted it would happen since the early 90s. Even though this is an economic anomaly that has to do with a very large percentage of the earth's population, somehow this development has escaped triggering any serious curiosity in western economics circles.
This lack of serious inquiry in the face of enormous empirical evidence that contradicts theory is what makes Economics a dying field.
> The prize, awarded in early October, recognised the laureates’ efforts to use randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to answer social-science questions.
The editorial Batson is reacting to (by Yao Yang) makes the point that the largest economic development project that lifted the vast majority of people out of poverty over the past 20 years was orchestrated by China, and the RCTs/small scale interventions that Duflo et. al. won the Nobel for had no role or relevance there. He focuses more on the policies guided by the "classic" development economists like Solow which emphasize domestic savings and investment.
Batson's post delves into who in China actually was responsible for the economic policy changes that created that development.
Personally, I welcome the the addition of RCTs to the economic research toolkit. For too long, economics has wrapped itself up in a mathematically complex knot that bears no resemblance to the real world. Behavioral economics has started to crack that by applying common sense, though too often they have dramatically overextrapolated their hard-to-replicate results.
Hopefully economists can see RCT as a tool which can be used where appropriate, rather than an entirely new paradigm that much be applied to everything (as they did with highly mathematical economics).