Here is an excellent blog post from Duncan McNicholl, an aid worker with Engineers without Borders Canada, that explores how photos taken in developing countries can be used to portray people in very different ways depending on the photographer’s intent. The entire post is well worth reading, but in particular this paragraph seems to hit the nail on the head:

The truth is that the development sector, just like any other business, needs revenue to survive.  Too frequently, this quest for funding uses these kind of dehumanizing images to draw pity, charity, and eventually donations from a largely unsuspecting public.  I found it outrageous that such an incomplete and often inaccurate story was being so widely perpetuated by the organizations on the ground – the very ones with the ability and the responsibility to communicate the realities of rural Africa accurately.

Randomized Controlled Trials: Panacea or Mirage? →

afeldman:

In response to MIT economist Esther Duflo’s completely brilliant advocacy of randomized control trials for foreign aid allocation (if you haven’t seen the TED video yet, click the link), James Copestake comments that “I am worried by reports of bright young “randomistas” narrowing the research agenda by selecting issues for research to fit their preferred tool, rather than finding the best tool to fit the most important issues.”

Ahem.

First of all, this doesn’t make any sense. Duflo’s entire goal is to prevent organizations and policymakers from narrowing the development agenda by examining what really works.

Moreover, Copestake’s comment here smacks of sexism. What other “bright young ‘randomistas’” are out there? The only prominent economist I can think of who has really been pushing for similar RC analysis is William Easterly, who is bright but hardly young and incidentally not a female–so I doubt anybody would call him a “randomista.”

Unfortunately, Duflo works in a field that is still dominated by old white men who are not as cute as she is, and apparently this makes her less credible among her peers. Maybe economists ought to be doing double-blind reviews of each others’ research, in which they don’t know who wrote the papers they review until after the fact. I think in Copestake’s case it might be interesting to see.

I’m glad you blogged this — I really enjoyed Duflo’s TED talk. It’s high time development strategies were held to the same scientific standards as other altruistic activities such as medicine or education.

Science progresses by:

1. solving problems by developing novel approaches/technology
2. solving problems unexamined with existing approaches
3. continuously reevaluating solutions to problems

Development as science does not restrict ourselves to utilizing only points 2 and 3, as Copestake seems to suggest. Developing new tools for addressing issues is vital for progress — but these tools must be amenable to scientific measurement. It doesn’t necessarily have to meet the gold standard of randomized double-blind control studies; it just has to provide some decent evidence that the project actually works. After all, if you can’t show that it works then what exactly are you doing out there?