The 2019 Nobel celebrates the economist as technocrat; Podcast: Communist China dunks on NBA; Robert Doar on poverty in America
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Experimenting with the poor: The 2019 Nobel celebrates the economist as technocrat
By Victor V. Claar • October 16, 2019
Illustration of the 2019 Laureates in Economic Sciences - Image Copyright Nobel Media 2019. Illustration: Niklas Elmehed. ([link removed] )
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in economics for their revolutionary work in which they conducted their own field experiments on poor people to find out which policies work as expected and which don’t. Economists are quite divided on this year’s prize. The more free-market-minded ones are frustrated that economists are again celebrating the economist-as-technocrat. And the others, the technocrats, think this work represents one more step toward “solving poverty.” But it seems we are always about to solve poverty. Rather than wait around for natural experiments, the laureates identified otherwise similar villages or otherwise similar schools and then treated one as the experimental group and the other as the control. They gave one school more textbooks than the other. They fed meals to the children in one school and didn’t in the other. Or they charged families in one village a higher price for a vaccine than in another. And then they assessed the (unexpected and counterintuitive) results.
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Acton Line podcast: Communist China dunks on NBA; Robert Doar on poverty in America
October 16, 2019
Lebron James on the court during the NBA's 2019 China Games ([link removed] )
On October 4, Daryl Morey, manager of the Houston Rockets, posted a tweet that included the words “Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong.” Afterwards, China severed several partnerships they had with the Rockets in retaliation, leading Morey to delete his tweet and apologize for it and also prompting NBA commissioner Adam Silver to issue a statement declaring that the NBA does not regulate the speech of its players. Since then, however, the NBA has made attempts to appease China. So what’s the current state of the NBA’s relationship with China and does the NBA have a moral responsibility to denounce China? Micah Watson, professor of political science at Calvin University, joins Acton staff to discuss. Afterwards, Robert Doar, president and Morgridge scholar at AEI, comes onto the show to speak about effective solutions to poverty in America and shares how he came to be deeply interested in battling poverty. He begins by recalling the career of his late father John Doar who did heroic work in the U.S. Justice Department fighting racial discrimination and working for voting rights during the 1960s and '70s.
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