First time in years that I paid attention to the Nobel Prize in economics. It's interesting how divisive it is. I don't think this article does a very good job criticizing the program, it's full...
First time in years that I paid attention to the Nobel Prize in economics. It's interesting how divisive it is. I don't think this article does a very good job criticizing the program, it's full of snarky, emotionally charged statements that brush over the issues too quickly. Where it says "There are some superficial rationalizations for this sort of thing" it's a bit ironic how it doesn't even mention what it's talking about. Meanwhile I do think these types of experiments are held in the West, numerous recent universal basic income experiments come to mind.
The simplest concrete criticism I recently read made an analogy that went something like this (I assume the chosen examples were better): Your doctor tells you you have cancer but the medicine to treat it has very little scientific evidence of working, meanwhile he also has a pill that treats your headaches reliably. Will you drop the cancer therapy and happily spend all your money on the headache cure? So applied to financial aid, research like this might overfit on projects that are easy to solve while more complex, maybe long-term issues that do not show easily testable results are downplayed.
First time in years that I paid attention to the Nobel Prize in economics. It's interesting how divisive it is. I don't think this article does a very good job criticizing the program, it's full of snarky, emotionally charged statements that brush over the issues too quickly. Where it says "There are some superficial rationalizations for this sort of thing" it's a bit ironic how it doesn't even mention what it's talking about. Meanwhile I do think these types of experiments are held in the West, numerous recent universal basic income experiments come to mind.
The simplest concrete criticism I recently read made an analogy that went something like this (I assume the chosen examples were better): Your doctor tells you you have cancer but the medicine to treat it has very little scientific evidence of working, meanwhile he also has a pill that treats your headaches reliably. Will you drop the cancer therapy and happily spend all your money on the headache cure? So applied to financial aid, research like this might overfit on projects that are easy to solve while more complex, maybe long-term issues that do not show easily testable results are downplayed.