Friday, January 9, 2009

Super Crunchers: Chapter 3

The following summary was written by Frank Voisin, who regularly writes for Frankly Speaking. Recently, Frank sold four restaurants and returned to school to complete a combined LLB/MBA.

The US Government has been one of the biggest supporters of the randomization approach discussed in Chapter 2, using it to drive many public policy making decisions, reducing partisan politics (it is less politically-sensitive to agree to the results of a randomized test rather than agree to something on principle).

Ayres has many examples, both American and international, that show the powerful and positive effect randomization can have in evaluating policy and government programs.

Conclusion: Governments should be adopting conditional cash transfer programs (conditional on evidence from randomized trials), because they have been proven more effective.

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