"The Poverty Lab"-- Part Deux!

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?

"The Poverty Lab"

I was reading "The Poverty Lab" published by The New Yorker, May 17, 2010 about Esther Duflo, "a thirty-seven-year-old professor of development economics" at MIT, and thought that I should share the article with you. I could not get a hold of the article online, however, I have managed to get the video of her talk at Ted (see below). According to the article Ms. Duflo "runs field experiments that measure different ways to save the world." She compares her work to various scientific experiments that take place in the field of medicine everyday. She calls these experiments "a very robust and very simple tool" which help reduce statistical noise and allows us to "connect cause and effect."