The laureates' experiments taught the economics profession that randomised trials could work in the field
important question in economics is also the hardest: why do some countries stay poor while others grow rich? In 2015, 10% of the world’s population lived on less than $1.90 per day, down from 36% in 1990. But more than 700m people remain in extreme poverty, and the number grows every day in certain parts of the world, in particular sub-Saharan Africa.
Each such experiment shed a little light on one small part of the “hardest question”. Educational resources—textbooks, say—turned out to do little for learning outcomes. Making pupils healthier improved their attendance, but did not necessarily mean they learned more. The experiments had a larger result, however: they taught the economics profession that randomised trials could work in the field.
By breaking big questions into smaller ones, and tackling each in carefully designed experiments, they overcame some hard epistemological problems. Economists who used cross-country regressions could not easily say whether extra schooling boosted growth or merely occurred alongside it. Field experiments, by contrast, could show not only the link between better teaching and greater learning, but how the connection worked.
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