On November 18th, 2010, I talked about an article (CLICK HERE) titled "The Poverty Lab" published in The New Yorker that lauded the work of MIT professor Esther Duflo. The article wrote that Ms. Duflo "runs field experiments that measure different ways to save the world, " which she compares to various scientific experiments that take place in the field of medicine every day.
A similar experiment is about to be implemented in NYC. The experiment is applying same methodology applied by Ms. Duflo, to study the effectiveness of a program to prevent homelessness. The New York Times reports (CLICK HERE) that "half of the test subjects — people who are behind on rent and in danger of being evicted — are being denied assistance from the program for two years, with researchers tracking them to see if they end up homeless."
I did wonder about the ethical issues with the involvement of human subjects in the experiments conducted by Ms. Duflo in India. However, I quickly dismissed them when I read that the experiments had to be approved by MIT's ethical board. Well, the NYT article (which quotes Ms. Duflo) reports that the experiment planned for NYC is receiving some resistance and "some public officials and legal aid groups have denounced the study as unethical and cruel, and have called on the city to stop the study and to grant help to all the test subjects who had been denied assistance."
Is there a double standard with the ethical level applied to the West vs. the East/South?
Umm yes...but I am not sure it is necessarily a West vs East/South thing but rather simply a distance thing. Peter Singer addresses this issue in this book "A life you can save". People often times feel more ethically bound to people they can physically see, it causes a negative effect on us to see others suffering whereas if the people suffering are far away then it is much easier to dismiss their pains.
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