The State Department just announced a massive $1.4 billion for faith- and community-based health service delivery in more than 20 countries: $850m to a faith-based NGO consortium led by World Vision and $570m to governments to fund such clinics. A few of the consortium’s NGOs had previously received huge awards, awards canceled when USAID was dismantled. Much remains unknown (to the taxpaying public) as to what exactly this $1.4 billion, awarded noncompetitively, will fund. The announcement boldly claims that “by leveraging faith-based and community-run hospitals and clinics, the Department of State is strengthening health service delivery that prevents illness, saves lives, and ensures a path toward self-reliance.” But evidence to support this claim is nowhere to be found in their announcement.

The phrase “faith-based development” refers to the religiosity of those delivering a service. It should not refer to the donor having “faith” the recipient will deliver impact for the American taxpayer. Particularly when this “faith” comes merely because they pray to the same God with the same fervor.

Five more specific thoughts to share.

1. Where is the evidence that this strategy will deliver impact?

This award to World Vision and their Christian-faith-based partners aims to strengthen more than 2,500 hospitals, clinics and community hubs across 17 countries and to train and pay more than 30,000 community health workers. But counting outputs is trivial. The critical question is will these funds be spent efficiently in order to improve the lives of those served by these hospitals, clinics, and community health workers? On that, crickets.

The announcement is strikingly devoid of reference to using evidence to guide what to fund. Instead, it emphasizes “overhead” ratios. Overhead ratios are simple and popular to track but glaringly empty of what matters: impact. Lowering costs sometimes worsens cost-effectiveness. Yes, all else equal, more money spent on overhead is bad. But all else is rarely equal. Overhead pays for some things that actually matter. Like auditors to prevent fraud, training to be at the cutting edge of service delivery approaches, managers to deliver programs well, and evidence gatherers to learn whether something is actually working or not and how to make it work better.

I’m reminded of a Freakonomics post I wrote 15 years ago, where I looked up the administrative and fundraising ratios of US charities reviewed by GiveWell. GiveWell’s highest-rated charities actually had higher overhead than their lower-rated charities (note: they only rated charities that were in the zone of top charity status). Sometimes a bit of extra money to be thoughtful and careful about what you are doing actually generates higher impact per dollar.

I am happy to see this money going out to provide critical health services and help people. And I know that World Vision has done careful evaluations of some of their work (see point #2).

But the announcement is bald. Not a hair of meaningful evidence. Why? What is the evidence of impact for the interventions or partners to be funded? The State Department has expressed a preference to “pay for results”. And many others in development support that, when appropriate… indeed the idea is not partisan at all. Seems praying to the right God is an acceptable substitute for accountability. Hence the unintended double entendre.

2. World Vision can generate, and use, evidence.

Faith-based organizations can produce rigorous evidence, and some have delivered real impact. In fact, I have ongoing work with one of the consortium members in the Philippines (see here for my prior work evaluating the religious aspect of their program).

World Vision in particular has innovated, tested, and scaled what works, at least on some occasions. In Ethiopia, World Vision led a program funded by USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance that was evaluated by a randomized evaluation. They produced a huge volume of lessons about what worked, what did not, and why, and have converted those lessons into continued, scaled work in Ethiopia. And others are learning from their lessons in other parts of the world, thus increasing their impact and cost-effectiveness.

(Side note: Intriguingly, that effort was a large partnership with many non-faith-based partners. Should we infer that World Vision chose the best partners they could find, and when doing so the answer was not always faith-based organizations? Turns out affirmative action for your own religion may imply taking an expected quality hit.)

World Vision recently even tested supervised local facilitators versus government health extension workers in a randomized trial across 222 villages and 3,477 participants screened for moderate depression. It is NGO versus government rather than faith versus secular, but nonetheless an important test and the kind of “learning” that is essential for development (unfortunately, I’ve heard rumors from multiple sources with direct access that the word “learning” is verboten by State Department leadership... the upside of writing on Substack, and not being a formal journalist, is that I can repeat rumors!). What did World Vision learn? Both improved mental health in the short run relative to control, but were not statistically significantly different from each other on the overall mental health index. And unfortunately by twelve months the effects were gone relative to the control group. Which is the whole point: without a control group this program would have looked like an unambiguous triumph, because everyone got better. Kudos to World Vision for measuring carefully and being transparent about what they have learned. Not everything works, but the biggest failure is not learning and then merely repeating.

Huge but: World Vision is a huge organization. Having some strong evidence-based programs is great, but the mere presence of a few does not indicate systematic adherence to using and generating credible evidence of impact. When I reflect on my own career, I’m fully aware that some of my research delivered more knowledge than others (a collection of some of my failures here). What proportion of World Vision programs are strong, evidence-based programs? How do they compare with other similar NGOs? What about delivery through governments, to help countries become self-reliant as per the America First Global Health Strategy (see point #5 below)?

Without evidence of impact to justify their decision, the State Department is taking a “leap of faith” (yes, I’m back to the double entendre) with taxpayer dollars.

3. Why the Circle of Hope faith-based Community Post (CP) service delivery method? Does “faith” make the CPs effective, or could it be a “two-letter acronym” effect?

From what I hear, much of this effort is designed to mimic the Circle of Hope community post model in Zambia. “Mimic” got me excited, if indeed it is mimicking something with evidence of impact.

Unfortunately, the only reference I found is a 2025 medRxiv preprint written by Gibstar Makangila of Circle of Hope along with Francesca Merico and Susan Hillis. The program installed Community Posts (CPs) to provide HIV services. The CP model has three components, which include a long list of the kinds of things PEPFAR did under USAID, and includes faith-based community leaders as part of the process. The preprint does not provide rigorous evidence of impact of the program as a whole, but even more critically it provides zero path to learning the impact of the faith-based aspect of the program. As a recognized PEPFAR Solution, overall this is ostensibly an evidence-based approach. But the evidence on the faith aspect is sorely lacking. For all we know, the program would work better, be more cost-effective, without the faith aspect. The research never set out to examine this; the State Department simply took it on faith that faith was the secret sauce. Yet analytically, one could just as easily have inferred that two-letter acronyms are the key!

Isolating the effect of the religion component is not an easy undertaking, and there is hardly a ton of evidence on this. Theories abound in both directions, and if we are going to rest billions of dollars on it, shouldn’t we know a bit more about how it affects the delivery and efficacy of programs? How does it affect who is reached and how they are impacted?

4. I thought affirmative action was the new no-no. Is this “faith”-based development or “Christian”-based development? Oh, I forgot, affirmative action is ok when it favors your own type. Silly me.

Enough said.

5. If the goal is stronger local government, why route funding around it?

This one is critical, and counter to the State Department’s own stated goals in the America First Global Health Strategy (AFGHS) and the announcement of this award.

Strengthening low-income governments is perhaps the most exciting aspect of the new AFGHS. It would be great to see the State Department take that charge head-on. Use these funds to strengthen the government health system. Help them deliver the most cost-effective and equitable services to their constituents. That is the journey to self-reliance. Feeding into a system that requires continued support is exactly what this administration claimed to be against.

This is not an easy issue. In an informative meta-analysis of 635 papers evaluating development programs, Eva Vivalt (2020) found that government-implemented programs show smaller effects on average than NGO-implemented ones. Does this justify funding NGOs here? No. Instead, it should be a call to action to work harder to help improve state capacity. An “average” result is not an “always” result, and we ought to improve how governments deliver services rather than give up on them and fund side programs into eternity.

The question is not only which system delivers more today. It is what can work best in the long run.

Giving $1.4 billion to faith-based charities seems like a far leap away from helping local governments towards the path of self-reliance.

Bottom line, let faith motivate your contractor if you wish. But let’s not let faith be a substitute for evidence.

When The Economist’s Zanny Minton Beddoes asked Elon Musk whether any child in Africa had died because DOGE abruptly closed USAID, he interrupted with a single word: “Zero.”

Pressed on whether children in Africa might have died because lifesaving assistance stopped before replacement systems were in place, he argued that other organizations—the Gates Foundation, MacKenzie Scott, and thousands of NGOs—could have stepped in: “They are capable of acting very quickly,” he said, “and if they didn’t, I would say they’re equally responsible.”

The effects of the cuts were in fact visible on the ground, but also large enough to see from space. Researchers tracked satellite nighttime lights around 1,374 former USAID project sites in 50 African countries. The places that had depended most on that money dimmed relative to the rest, and the share of people living in food crises rose. Musk might have noticed, had he known anybody with access to a satellite company.

Experts estimate the death toll may be over one million lives annually, but whether it is zero, ten, or ten thousand, Musk’s defense rests on a morally bankrupt premise: that one is absolved of responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of one’s actions so long as someone else could, in principle, come along afterward and clean up the mess. Grant him the impossible, that not one person died, and the moral reasoning is still wrong.

Could USAID have been better? Of course. Even its most ardent supporters had a zillion ideas for improving it. I did not join as Chief Economist because I saw a bastion of efficient awardmaking. I joined because I wanted to help make it better. And when I arrived I found plenty of people inside with the talent and drive to do exactly that, alongside the expected administrative, bureaucratic, and political obstacles that made it hard (but not impossible) to do.

But the flaw in Musk’s argument runs well past USAID. And is fairly shocking to me that this needs saying on an issue of such global importance.

Three fatal flaws with the Musk School of Philosophy.

First, responsibility for creating a foreseeable risk to others is not erased by the possibility that someone else might eliminate it.

Suppose I shove someone into a river. If a passerby could have jumped in to save them, does that erase my responsibility for pushing?

Suppose I lock the exits of a burning building while people are trying to escape. Am I blameless because firefighters could, in theory, arrive later even though I never called them, never told them which exits I locked, never checked whether they were minutes away or an hour away, and gave them no help finding the building or opening the doors?

Suppose I remove every stop sign from an intersection. If vigilant drivers avoid a collision through extraordinary care and sheer luck, do I bear no responsibility for creating the danger?

Reverse the direction and the absurdity is plainer still. Musk would surely reject the claim that he deserves no credit for Tesla because someone else could have built a successful electric-car company, or for SpaceX because another entrepreneur would eventually have made rockets reusable. He is, reasonably, proud of building those companies. Hypothetical substitutes do not erase responsibility for extraordinary achievements. They do not erase it for extraordinary harms, either.

The second problem with Musk’s moral argument is subtler. Suppose the Gates Foundation or Mackenzie Scott did fill the holes. The cost to society from slashing USAID would not disappear. It would simply move.

Every dollar Gates and Scott spend replacing a canceled vaccination program is a dollar they cannot spend on malaria, tuberculosis, or childhood nutrition. Economists have a name for this: opportunity cost. Resources are finite. Philanthropic budgets are finite. Skilled personnel are finite. Every emergency dollar plugging one hole leaves another hole unplugged. Foundations exist to fund what governments will not, not to serve as insurers of last resort whenever a government abandons commitments it already made. Musk’s own “charitable” foundation, notably, does not appear eager to play that role either.

So even if every interrupted program had been perfectly replaced, which it plainly was not, the world would still be worse off because scarce resources were pulled away from problems that otherwise would have been solved.

The third flaw is deeply, and tragically, ironic. His entire defense turns on the behavior of others. We are asked to judge his decision not by what he did but by what everyone else might do in response. So think through that for a moment.

The Musk School of Philosophy works only if nobody else adopts it. It requires everyone else to be more generous, more responsible, and more willing to sacrifice their own priorities to repair the consequences of his choices. If everyone follows Musk’s moral “leadership”, then by construction nobody is left to be the generous sap to counterbalance Musk. The German philosopher Kant argued that an ethical rule must be one you could rationally will everyone to follow. This one fails that test spectacularly.

I keep thinking about parenting, something Musk has some experience at (certainly if measured by sample size). When my children were young, my wife and I would sit down with them and decide which nonprofits our family would support and why. They also knew roughly how many insecticide-treated bed nets the price of a luxury watch would buy, because they understood the concept of opportunity costs.

A moral system that depends on nobody copying you is not much of a moral system. I never imagined teaching my children the opposite lesson: if you make a mess, responsibility belongs to whoever eventually cleans it up. A household run on that principle would be a pigsty. A society run on it would be far worse.

None of this requires defending every USAID program. Governments should scrutinize spending. Programs should be measured. Ineffective ones should end and effective ones should expand. Those are legitimate arguments.

They are entirely different from claiming that the foreseeable consequences of dismantling lifesaving programs overnight stop being your responsibility because someone else might come along and clean up after you.

While the USAID debate will fade, the Musk School of Philosophy should be loudly and forever rejected. What he calls proof of his innocence is really evidence of other people’s decency. Let’s not confuse the two.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has taken on a larger role in US international food assistance since the shuttering of USAID. Earlier this year, USDA issued a call for proposals to provide emergency food assistance in the form of US grown and produced agricultural commodities. USDA is poised to do more, recently releasing a Request For Information (RFI) for non-emergency Title II Food for Peace (FFP) programs and promising to learn from past programs to “ensure assistance has the greatest impact.”

If designed and implemented well, these programs can help bridge the gap between emergency food needs and longer-term food security and resilience. Why does “resilience” matter? Not only does it indicate a deeper success for its own sake, but it means lowering the call on the US taxpayer in the future to keep pouring money into short-run-but-not-longlasting programs. The administration speaks of wanting to stop waste—programming for resilience is just that… it is about stopping the waste before it happens!

In a new piece published at the Center for Global Development, we offer lessons from our work at USAID’s Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) advising on the design of USAID’s non-emergency FFP programs. We focus on the Graduation Approach as an example of how to apply cost-effectiveness evidence to activity design and to demonstrate the potentially dramatic payoffs of doing so: our 2024 OCE analysis estimated that implementing the evidence-based graduation approach for three new or redesigned FFP programs would have generated between $11 million - $26 million in additional household consumption for program participants at no additional cost. That’s a staggering impact for recipients and thus, the American taxpayer.

USDA should seize this opportunity to maximize the impact of these programs by following the evidence and focusing on cost-effectiveness.

To those who will cry foul about our focus on evidence in the face of larger issues with today’s international food assistance policies: I too am concerned about the mismatch between recipient countries and food insecurity, the myriad issues associated with in-kind assistance at the scale of the new US commodity purchase requirements, and the tough position that USDA’s limited staff have found themselves in to design and run these programs (bonus point to anyone at USDA reading this: following the evidence and deploying the Graduation program actually requires less oversight because it is a more streamlined program and thus you can deliver tremendous value to both recipients and the American people).

As former chief economists of the US and UK foreign aid agencies, our jobs were to advise on the most effective ways for money to be spent.

Now, as global aid budgets shrink and donor countries reconsider their approaches, we are calling for a radical simplification in how we do the portion of aid that focuses on service and transfer policies. By omission, we are not declaring efforts to improve macroeconomic outcomes such as growth as unimportant. The world is a big place, and there is no corner solution to the world’s problems.

Things like providing nutritious food to malnourished children; distributing free anti-malaria bed nets; ensuring teachers have lesson plans; or giving cash to families have all been rigorously tested and provide incredible impact per dollar spent.

Countries and organisations that provide such aid must focus on just a few of these things, on a large scale.

This will ensure more of our money gets to the people who need it, and is spent on things which have been proven to be cost-effective. It also means the taxpayer will be able to see—and understand—what foreign aid is being spent on.

While many donors do fund this type of highly effective intervention, projects tend to be layered with dozens of different objectives and subprograms. A program that introduces better lesson plans may also add solar panels to schools and change how data is collected, for example. This makes projects expensive to design, hard to manage, and almost impossible to evaluate.

Yes, the poor often face multiple interconnected problems, but many interventions have been found to be effective in isolation. The assumption that adding more, often untested, interventions on top will improve outcomes is just that: an assumption. And often, a simpler project focusing on just one highly effective intervention can be rolled out at scale, while a complex project can be done in only a few places.

We need to admit we can’t fix every problem with one program and sometimes we can be more effective if we don’t try to.

Much aid today doesn’t deliver services directly but supports local governments to do more with their own budgets. Here too, we should be advocating for the proven, cost-effective interventions we know work, to help governments get the most bang for their buck (or quid, or shilling). That doesn’t just solve problems now—it reduces future reliance on aid.

To advance our call for simplified aid, we’ve joined with like-minded partners to launch the Smart Buys Alliance and promote the adoption of the world’s most cost-effective development interventions.

Smarter aid won’t undo the damage of cuts. Improving service delivery won’t solve the macroeconomic constraints to inclusive growth. But if we focus on what works and keep it simple, we can still make a meaningful difference.

Cross-posted with the Center for Global Development.

I combed through the results to find that Bald Assertions won by a hair, with 42 first-choice votes. More than Good Intentions came in second, with 35 first-choice votes. You might say that’s splitting hairs, but the data don’t lie. The ranked-choice results below in a nice tapered display. The remaining options receded like my hairline.

You made a lot of suggestions. I did like some of them, but not enough to override or redo the poll. Some made me laugh but stood no chance of making the cut… I’ll let you figure out which ones those are.

• Evidence, Mostly

• Bold Studies, Bald Solutions

• The Bald and the Empirical

• Evidence-Based Blathering

• Random Controlled Thoughts

• Dog-leg Left

• Dean’s Beans (for those who never saw There’s Something about Mary or are off on American slang, this clip explains why this one did not get added to the contenders).

A few of you rightly pointed out that the original subtitle for Bald Assertions didn’t really explain what the Substack is about. Point well-taken, new subtitle morphed a few (but kept the double-down on the bald joke…).

Thanks everyone!

Got a 7th idea or tweak you like more? At the end, put it in as a comment please. Or if you like one sub-title with another title, comment away please. Enter ideas quickly and I’ll be able to update the poll.

$50 donation to the charity of your choice (assuming no unreasonable ask) for one person randomly chosen from those who fill in the optional email address box.

Take the ranked-choice poll!

The abrupt shuttering of USAID and canceling of foreign assistance left many partners, abroad and at home, anxiously awaiting news from the State Department on what’s next. We recently received a glimpse, and it is not pretty. Although shrouded in the rhetoric of “America First”, it is only America First if one has the foresight of a moth flying into a flame.

The State Department has made provision of medication and HIV assistance to African countries conditional on the countries’ granting of access to confidential patient data, with limited or no promise of sharing resulting medical advancements. In some cases, it is also conditional on granting the U.S. market access and/or partnerships with U.S. firms (see “America First” Global Health MOU template obtained by Public Citizen). A draft memo, reported by Stephanie Nolen in the New York Times in March, previewed this approach in Zambia. Similar approaches have since been used in MOUs with the governments of Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda, Zimbabwe, among others. Negotiations have stalled as countries pushed back on the deals, with some, like Zambia, walking away. This could negatively impact U.S. long-term strategic interests.

To the average person this “aid for minerals and health data” may seem like a small negotiating strategy change, but it represents a major and short-sighted foreign policy shift. There has consistently been broad bipartisan support for the idea that providing international aid for health purposes serves U.S. interests. Former Senate majority leaders Bill Frist (R) and Tom Daschle (D) long championed “strategic health diplomacy.” They argued that fighting diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria serves U.S. self-interest via soft power: countries receiving higher amounts of U.S. health funding have a more favorable view of the U.S. than those receiving less, which enhances standing in the world, improves international cooperation, and decreases the likelihood of malicious acts against the U.S. by individuals or rogue groups. High prevalence of HIV/AIDS and other potentially dangerous diseases also breeds instability and conflict within affected societies, which can become a security and border problem for the U.S.

This short-term view of what it means to be “America First” will have long-term negative consequences for American self-interest: as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates once noted, “development is a lot cheaper than sending soldiers.” And it may not even achieve the stated aim of securing mineral rights, which could be deemed illegally secured under a logic similar to doctrines on odious debt. Agreements made at gunpoint are not typically enforceable – except with another gun.

China has dominated the critical minerals sector in African countries through at least partially extractive and anti-competitive trade policies. Countering such efforts could benefit the U.S., Zambia, and the broader global economy (as long as our oligopolists do not abuse their market power as much as Chinese oligopolists would). But holding Zambia and other countries hostage by threatening to cancel life-saving aid pursues a lazy short-sighted transactional strategy in lieu of working toward a much harder – but likely more durable and beneficial – diplomatic solution.

Popular support for China in Zambia has fallen: In 2014, 72 percent of those surveyed by Afrobarometer believed that Chinese economic and political influence was positive; this fell to 51 percent ten years later. The U.S. could work with allies to seize this opening and develop durable win-win solutions with African countries that promote U.S. economic and strategic interests, position the U.S. as a leader in diplomatic efforts regarding critical minerals, and foster long-term goodwill and cooperation with African nations by offering more equitable partnerships than China offers.

Instead of working toward long-term solutions on access to critical minerals, the State Department is looking for a quick “win” achieved by withholding life-saving medical assistance to a country that has the sixth highest poverty rate in the world, with 64 percent of its population living on less than $2.15 per day. Reputational damage to the U.S. from reports of this possible policy shift has already extended well beyond Zambia and the African continent. There is little upside to this bullying and transactional approach, but there is still time for a course correction, and still an opportunity to reshape aid policy to genuinely serve long-term U.S. strategic interests.

Life-saving food and medicine have historically been emblazoned with the motto “From the American People.” A more accurate motto now might be, “Bought under Duress from the American People.” We are acting as a Bad Samaritan, telling the victim that we will only help them if they sell us their future.

Co-authored with Sarah Bermeo, Associate Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

One quick thing to make clear: when USAID tumbled, many argued “we need to make the case on its impact.” Or “if only USAID were more effective, it wouldn’t have been dismantled.” The pretense is that some analysis on its actual effectiveness was underlying the decision to dismantle it, but I’m unaware of any such analysis. Of course I’m all for being more effective (and then publicizing that too), but I do not believe doing so would have changed anything.

To the thrust of Todd’s article, it seems like these criticisms of RCTs keep coming up and we keep going in circles. But much like the Fast and the Furious franchise needs to keep putting out movies, this conversation keeps coming back every so often, which is probably a sign that we should keep clarifying what methods help achieve which goals. For other expositions on this, see Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s How Poverty Ends (2020, in Foreign Affairs, gated), for a broader history of RCTs, see Tim Ogden’s interviews with Randomistas and their critics in his book, Experimental Conversations: Perspectives on Randomized Trials in Development Economics, and more recently for an overview of the field in general including RCTs, Noah Smith’s recent Substack post, Could Development Economics be More Useful?

But nearly all of these attacks on RCTs seem to take the format of “RCTs have taken over the field—but one method can’t tell you everything!” To which we all sigh and say, “Yes, you’re absolutely right. If you know of a method that answers all questions, please let us know. Until then, we will keep working with this method to answer the many questions it does.” So without further ado I present this year’s latest installment in the “RCTs Can’t Do Everything” franchise of blog posts and thought pieces.

Some of Todd’s criticisms are familiar, accurate, and useful to point out. Others are based on common misunderstandings which I’d like to correct. First, a basic principle I think we can agree on is that we both want the same thing: less poverty and more prosperity for as many people as possible. And it’s useful to remember that in the grand scheme of history, humanity has made great progress reducing extreme poverty, albeit not monotonically improving everywhere. But the world was already at a critical moment in danger of slowed growth before aid cutbacks from wealthy nations, disruptions to trade, and a dual energy and fertilizer crisis for the world’s poorest countries where the vast majority of the population make their living from agriculture. And that means the decisions of how to spend fewer dollars are even more critical to get right, which is why I think it’s unethical not to make the most informed decisions we can.

Where Todd and I part ways is on the role of RCTs—he thinks their inability to answer big macro questions is a reason not to use them (or to scale them far back), and I think it’s a reason to be clear about what they are good for.

Todd’s characterization of the mechanics of an RCT is fairly accurate at its core. Some people get a program (or a version of a program), others don’t (or they get another version of the program), and we compare them. To make sure you’re comparing equivalent groups, you assign them randomly to be offered the different programs. As it happens, in under-resourced areas, this often ends up being the most fair way to choose who should and who shouldn’t get access to something. RCT designs have evolved, however, and we see many that are not just estimating program effects, but rather are designed to estimate parameters of interest for a broader model, one that could, for instance, even be a macro model! But he’s right that you can’t randomize everything, nor would you want to, and I’ve never met an economist, or any researcher, who’d claim that you should or could. (The closest I came to arguing for it was this satirical piece proposing we randomize which SDGs apply to which countries.)

But the tone of the piece feels a bit straw man-ish.

First, a fact check: He calls RCTs the “dominant tool in development economics,” about which I’m conflicted. Todd says “This approach has pretty much overtaken the entire field of development economics. It’s nearly a cult.” He’s wrong with the implication (as I read it), that the RCT methodology has taken over development economics. Jessica Leight’s recent analysis of published research papers in the field shows that from 2021-2025 the share of RCTs in development economics has been consistently about 25%. So 75% of published papers were other methods. If that’s “dominant,” Todd’s competing with my sycophantic AI for flattery. I’d also point out: the share of all the development programs undergoing academically publishable evaluations is a minority, so the share of development programs being RCTed is probably very small. (There is a certain irony in RCTs being criticized for only being conducted with a small set of highly selected NGOs and thus not being representative of development efforts writ large, and also being so dominant in the space as to drown out all other forms of expertise.)

Second: When it comes to what RCTs can tell us, are they the “Gold Standard”? Yes, if it is the right tool to answer your question. No, when it is not. Which is, when put together, fairly tautological and thus meaningless. Which is why I tend not to use the phrase. Todd’s also right that ranking methodologies is a fool’s errand. We should be asking “is this the best method to answer the question at hand,” and no serious researcher I know would disagree.

RCTs reduce the uncertainty (and in many cases, bias) inherent in estimating impact of a program or policy or just in general in estimating any parameter of interest (could be a parameter such as price elasticity, to then use to calibrate a macroeconomic model, the type that Todd, and I, would like to see more work on). Reducing the uncertainty, and bias, on key decisions that policymakers must make seems tough to argue against. Would we want our doctor to ignore the latest evidence on what medical treatments are most effective? Certainly not. I want nothing less of my policymakers, when the setting allows for it. And often an RCT is the right tool for the job. A lot of concrete day-to-day decisions about how to spend limited dollars on education, health, livelihood promotion, economic opportunities for women and marginalized populations, fighting corruption, and encouraging good governance, come down to a limited budget and choice between many options. Knowing which ones to choose can help guide many government decisions to the best possible outcomes.

Todd’s mostly right when he says that RCTs of individual programs can’t tell the finance minister how to make their country rich, but that’s not exactly a critique of RCTs: what he’s saying is microeconomics can’t tell the finance minister which fiscal policy will usher in an era of growth and prosperity for all. He’s thinking of macroeconomics. And what he’s saying is macroeconomics is where it’s at. And he’s almost right, except that development macroeconomists don’t know either. Noah’s substack cites another similar debate online, and the example of Bolivia and South Korea starting in the same place but one got rich and the other didn’t. Macroeconomists can describe what happened in retrospect, but didn’t know in advance which one would turn out that way, and generally still can’t predict that. (And “growth” is not sufficient; it must be inclusive growth to handle the issues that many of us are quite concerned with, such as the ultra-poor, the most disconnected to markets, etc.)

In fact, while microeconomics is a relative newcomer in development, macroeconomists have been doing development far longer. Give us micro folks a little time to catch up to not knowing as much as them.

Some years ago, when the micro/macro debate in development was already old, I was in the audience at a symposium in which the legendary macroeconomist Robert Lucas, Jr. said (I’m paraphrasing as best as I remember!): “I don’t understand why you’re arguing about which is more important. We learn something from each approach, both are interesting and important and we need advances in both in order to better understand the world.”

A microeconomist can’t tell you how to make Kenya rich. But she can tell you which of several candidate strategies, based on prior theory and evidence, is most likely to get more kids into school, keep them healthy, move them into the workforce, or help girls delay marriage to a healthier age. These things matter, a lot of money rides on them, and (critically) the right answer is often less than obvious. If we can do each of those even 10% better, I count those as wins even if they’re small potatoes by Todd’s standards.

Todd points to an RCT in his area of expertise, providing electricity, which didn’t have to be done because the answer was completely obvious to him. I also find this effect commonly. After finding out the answers, many experts say “well that’s obvious! I could have told you that!” Study co-author Catherine Wolfram says it wasn’t, and still isn’t, obvious to many in the field. Todd tells us that the key to success isn’t providing people electricity in their homes, it’s businesses:

don’t prioritize connecting the poorest households. Instead, focus on delivering cheaper and more reliable power for businesses in towns and cities. And let’s just accept that it’s impossible to randomize power for industry. No business would ever knowingly volunteer to suffer blackouts to help an academic study.

Two problems. First, the oversimplification of both the problem and the solution. We frequently find this phenomenon among experts who have the one great idea that will fix everything! But often when we do test it, it doesn’t work for other reasons—the businesses don’t have the machinery to take advantage of the electrification and would first need loans to afford them. Or they don’t have the customer base to sell their higher outputs to because transportation to bigger markets is expensive or impractical, or the towns don’t have the trained professionals to fix the machines when they break. If you assure the Kenyan government that business electrification is the answer, and then one of these other constraints turns out to bind, what is the fallback?

Second, the claim that this isn’t randomizable. Of course no business would volunteer for blackouts, but what if there were a way to find out in advance whether Todd’s idea works? Governments typically can’t electrify everywhere at once, so working with one you could randomize the sequence in which towns get connected, and see if prosperity follows (or at least whether the shorter-run changes the theory depends on actually show up). And if it doesn’t, why not? If it does turn out that businesses need a loan to afford the machinery needed to take advantage of the electrification, wouldn’t that be good to know before rolling it out nationally?

If we had a room full of omniscient experts who knew the answers in advance, we wouldn’t need to test anything. But until we do, we need a way to find out practical answers, and if we have a tool that helps do that, isn’t it incumbent on us to use it when we can?

I disagree with Todd on two other aspects. One is in rhetorical style, painting development research as an all or nothing binary: if your method can’t solve poverty, why bother? That’s like saying “Ugh, your car can’t even drive on water? On a planet that’s 70% water?” My car is the right tool for some jobs, but not all. Development challenges are complicated and tricky, and falling into the trap of assuming one tool has to solve all problems is a recipe for failure.

The second is partially economists’ fault, but is not unique to economics. Todd brings up a criticism that is valid and more people should talk about. He cites the household electrification study title “Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development?” Economics articles often have bold titles that sound like they’re trying to answer the question stated quite generally but in reality are simply testing the question in one context. That’s an artifact of how economists write for each other in journals: framed as strong arguments, knowing other economists will deduct strength in their reading, and will look in the meat of the paper for contextual information in order to judge how broadly to consider the results. Oncologists who write “Drug X shrinks tumors of type Y,” but in paragraph 5 note it was a test in mice, cause similar frustrations with lay readers. But the intended oncologist audience likely knows the test was done in mice and was expecting it. All fields use technical jargon and shortcuts that bear resemblance to English but can cause misunderstandings.

To summarize my arguments (feel free to copy/paste the next time this debate gets a sequel release):

1. Micro and macroeconomics both care about development but specialize in answering different kinds of questions. We need both.

2. No single method is the gold standard for everything. Choose good questions and then best viable tool for that question.

3. I’ve found you can study, and sometimes even randomize, more things than people first assume, including parameters to models that speak to “big” questions in macro.

4. If we have a choice between guiding critical decisions with more information or less information, why not choose more?

Bottom line: Todd’s right that more evidence might not have been a political solution in these times, but it can help us spend scarce dollars where they’ll do the most good. Hopefully that’s a goal on which we can agree.

There is a twist this time. A champion is crowned only once, but the tournament gives joy every night, and the best of it comes from surprise. So the guide’s default is not who should win it all, but who is beating expectations: a long shot reaching the quarterfinals thrills more than a favorite who would be disappointed to not be there.

The headline pick? Democratic Republic of the Congo. Open the interactive guide, choose your lens, and see who to pull for tonight:

Full interactive site here.

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Two aspects I love about this statement, and two I do not.

Being proud of being generous, full stop, demonstrates the values that many of us share. I’m glad to see that this principle has not gone by the wayside, and that Rubio still speaks of generosity as a noble and appropriate motivation for foreign aid. These are values Rubio has voiced many times over, for years. And I hope they are central to his future directions, actions, and speeches.

Being focused on what the results are—what the impact is—of aid is also of utmost importance. This is why we built the Office of the Chief Economist at USAID. Kudos on the principle and the aspiration.

So the two beefs?

First, claiming we are the most generous “by far” is nice feel-good rhetoric but it demonstrates nothing about our generosity. Is a billionaire who gives away $1000 more generous than a homeless person who shares a sandwich? There is no sense in comparing raw dollars rather than dollars per capita or dollars as a % of income. On either metric, America still has a lot to be proud of, but claiming to be the most generous “by far” only demonstrates how bad we are at math. In terms of aid as a share of national income, the U.S. ranks 33rd among wealthy nations (0.09% of gross national income). Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, and Germany, for example, all give a considerably larger share of their income. A similar conclusion would be drawn if one considered aid per capita, i.e., divide by population of the donor country.

Second, claiming success because countries and the United Nations claimed to appreciate the support feels a bit off. Of course they’ll be appreciative – it’s no secret or surprise that leaders may fear retribution such as tariffs and other extraction. But more critically, using evidence in foreign aid planning and design is absolutely essential, and there is strikingly no indication of such evidence use in State department public documents. USAID was shut down on the pretense of being wasteful, but where is the evidence that today’s foreign aid is any better? Merely claiming it is better does not make it better. Using evidence to guide how the money gets spent is essentially about stopping waste (ineffective programs) before it happens. Why isn’t the current administration funding programs with proven track records? I know that the $1.7 billion of programs my office moved into programs with proven cost-effectiveness (“programmatic efficiency”, to use the language of the executive order on day one of this administration) have all been canceled, and I’m unaware of any effort to examine the evidentiary base on which those programs were designed.I don’t see anything to suggest that State is applying evidentiary due diligence to its new foreign aid portfolio.

Rubio’s statement demonstrates two things about America: That we need to do better at math. And that generosity–full stop–is still a value we all hold dearly and wear proudly. Let’s live up to that value. And I hope Rubio will demand some evidence in the planning of how foreign aid is spent, so that we as a nation can live up to his ideal of driving for results.