 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today, we are going to talk to Praveer Purkayas, the editor of NewsClick, about the latest Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize has gone to the work that the S.S. Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee have done on RCTs. Also, Krember, right? Michael Krember. And Michael Krember, right. So, what is the big deal with RCTs? And is the science Well, you know, you started with RCTs right in the beginning, but let's first look at what the prize was about. In the sense, it's also about poverty reduction. It's also focusing on poverty on societies to do something about it. And I don't think we should sort of forget all of that in the hype over the RCTs, which of course is what distinguishes supposedly their work from others. Now, my problem of RCT or randomized controlled trials as it were is not because that I am against any evidence-based interventions at all. Of course, some cases you might want to check what is the evidence and you might need to do trials for that as well. And it could be have two or three different kinds of solution, you know, which is the most optimal one. You want to fine tune it. All those, that's a different issue. But my problem is fundamentally when you look at it as a gold standard of interventions and also consider randomized controlled trials as the highest standard in sciences. Now, since I have been dealing with sciences technology for a very long time, I do not find the randomized controlled trials have been used in sciences widely. In fact, they're not. Whether you take physics, you take chemistry, you take biology, laboratories, looking at cosmic phenomena, looking at micro phenomena, I don't see anywhere randomized controlled trials being used to evolve scientific principles. Why is it so? Because normally the correlations, once you know what the correlations are, formulating a law which explains those correlations is the task of a scientist. And the experiments tell you what kind of correlations you're looking for. And these do not need randomized controlled trials. In fact, they are very, very clear, like Newton's example of the apple falling on his head. He didn't need to sit under the tree for a long number of years to say how many trial, how many apples fall in his head, or some of them are simply blown away in there, or some of them are given over and upwards, you know. So what I'm saying is these doesn't require randomized controlled trials. This is not the method of physics, that this is not the method of chemistry, this is not the method of science. In fact, randomized controlled trials have been only used in the case of pharmaceutical companies testing their medicine. That is because of a number of reasons. One is the drug response is not a very large one. In fact, what happens is, amongst other responses in the body, the response of the immune system which is fighting the infection and the response of the drug, they sort of hide each other. And therefore, only when you do a large number of trials, you also take into account the variability of the people. So, not every group of people behaves similarly. So, and you also want to see the ill effects of the drug, that it could have other bad effects. It might cure you, but it might cause a lot of other damages. In the Thalidomide case is a clear example of that, where it really caused deformities in the womb. So, these are the kind of things for which you use randomized controlled trials, particularly when the systems are complex, the effects are small and you are essentially trying to find a signal in a rather noisy environment, which in the case of more scientific experiments is not the case. So, I do think this talking about the gold standard of science is a misunderstanding of science. You see, most of the social sciences response has been or the economic response has been that it might work in science, but social sciences, this is not the way to go. I would say this is not the way to go even in sciences, it is only very specific application. Therefore, I think what the social scientists are doing is accepting uncritically the argument that it is really something which is crucial to science, which it is not. So, I think there is that kind of shall we say hype is what I find rather disconcerting because this is not the way we have looked at science and this is not the way we should look at one particular method among very many others. Is it the kind of problems that India's economy faces or is it the fact that our cities cannot be scaled? Where is the problem? No, I think if you look at it, the RCT issue applies to a different set of things. One is it really applies to micro interventions. It is not really big interventions. Say you want to do breakup land concentration. You are talking of for instance, Elizabeth Warren in the United States is saying big companies like Facebook and Google should be broken up. Nobody has said that this should be done to randomize controlled trials. That is not the argument. These are self-evident. They are political issues. They are much larger social issues. There your ideology comes in. What do you really want to do? And those are the kind of debates that took place. For instance, India when they broke up, they say the monopolies, they took over the private banks. We got rid of previous forces and land reforms. Of course, the biggie that we have a bitter battle about land reforms and concentration of land and nobody is in this kind of cases talking about we should really do randomized controlled trials. To see what happens. That is not the way it goes. These are available when you talk of micro interventions. It is also interesting. Mostly it is about poverty alleviation. In effect, what you are saying is when it comes to tax reliefs, then that is the prerogative or otherwise of the government and the great big, the bramins of today, the economists or the financial analysts and the business houses suggesting what should be done. Nobody talks about randomized controlled trials. They totally comes in when you are talking about poverty alleviation programs. And then there are funded programs. There are funders who want proof that the system really works or is going to work. What is the way our funds have been utilized? Is there any proof? It is going to give benefits. So, I think it has become very closely enmeshed with the kind of, shall we say, donor driven programs demanding evidence that these ideological positions seem to come. But I think one thing Abhijeet Banerjee, Duflo's Krebber's work is also important because at least it brought this to the table again that poverty is an issue and it needs to be addressed. And to that extent, this is the anger of Mr. Piyush Goyal, that why should poverty be an issue? And the policies for this is being, he thinks it's all left-wing. While the left doesn't really think it's left-wing but say, yeah, it's welfare economics of a certain kind, but they wouldn't really call it a left-wing. But leaving that, those kind of things aside, the really fundamental issue comes from the context that Abhijeet Goyal or Mr. Bodhi or his advisors, they believe that wealth is created by capitalist, not by labor, not by the farmer, those who produce do not create wealth, but those who deal with money, they are the wealth creators. So, this is the ideological issue that who do you really support, the capitalist or the poor? I think Abhijeet Goyal is to his credit, Abhijeet Goyal Duflo and others are saying the state has a responsibility of poverty alleviation, which this government does not really recognize. In fact, if you remember, it opposed the Manrega program, though it claims to have expanded it now, it's trying to do away with support prices for the farmers. So, there are various anti-poverty measures it would like to do away with fair price shops, it could and say, you know, the Aditya, those who are hoarding grains, the traders, will take care of this as well. So, you have a number of responsibility of the state being given up. And to this extent, Abhijeet Banerjee and Duflo and other people's work, that we should look at as a responsibility of the state that I think is important. One of the things that every government has tried to do in recent years is to try and have a sort of random test model in place for, say, direct benefit transfer and so on. Is this where Duflo and Banerjee's model would be useful? You know, the direct transfer model vis-a-vis the welfare model, that you should, there is a right to education, there's a right to food, there's a right to health, these are alternative models. And I don't think these are to be resolved through this kind of tests. As I said, they are micro-intervention, these are macro-interventions and they are very closely tied up to what kind of policy those running the government believe in. So, the direct transfers are those, they say that welfare means intervention of the state. If you do direct benefits, direct transfers, that it means we can have insurance to take care of health, private sector to take care of health. So, it really gets caught in this kind of insurance-driven, market-driven framework, which is what some of the governments believe in. So, it's really accompanied by a withdrawal of the state from all these kind of areas, which I think is the problem. So, the direct benefit versus the welfare model, these are the two opposite models that therefore, Duflo's work, I would say, lies outside this because this is really the larger ideological issue. Abhijit Babaji, Duflo's work would apply for small intervention, that this is my other problem. That's really where they talk of micro-interventions. Then should this be done or that be done, that could be argued is a valid enough question where we can test out alternatives and they could be alternative tested out in different ways. Of course, testing out alternatives is not my problem. Looking for evidence to test out alternatives is not a problem. But when you talk about big macro issues, I don't think that really works or should work. There, it's a question of what is the end you have and therefore, the end determines the instruments you use. There, it's not a question of the, there's a consensus of the end itself. If you take what you call the direct transfers versus welfare being a state responsibility, you're really talking about what are the ends a society has and not about the means. So I'm trying to sort of understand why this is important because when the end is clear and how we want to get there is clear. When we're clear that it has to be a right to education, then why do we worry about a statistical model or a model which studies how school, how a particular school does well? Is it a waste of resources? Is it the fact that everyone cannot be covered in the country? No, I will say that different, for different methods of education. If you want to use some evidence-based mechanism, if everything else being equal, if I do A instead of B, what will happen? Those could still be considered a part of a larger repertoire of instrument that you have. But to consider the sole instrument, that is my problem. And finding, holding all things equal is that also depriving the students in this particular case of benefits which otherwise they would have got. So is that even ethical to say, let's hold everything constant, just change this two things and then do it? Because I think a real-life scenario would mean that you do a number of interventions and not hold everything constant to do this. And that's one of the disadvantages of the using the laboratory model of sciences to the social conditions because the laboratory holding one thing changing and everything else constant is easy. It's an artificial environment you have created. Society, how do you do that? Even that's very difficult because change is constant. So you can only do it if you artificially decide. Everything is to be held constant, only one thing is to change. And I think those are the ones which create the problem of transferring so-called laboratory model to essentially what would be a societal model. So those are some of the issues. But I was basically saying that this has never been, the randomized controls has never been trials, has never been the gold standard of science as it is being claimed. And I don't even know where this comes from. So I consider it hype and an ideological alternative to really stick to micro solutions rather look at the macro picture. So if we have say a state which is considering what to feed children in the mid-day meal scheme, we have a debate about egg whether it should be served or not. Trial of any kind will not help because this is a political choice. I would say trial of any kind is to deprive some children of eggs. So the answer is already known. We don't need randomized controlled trials to see whether the apple does really fall on Newton's head. It would be that kind of a trial. So I think that's the issue. And those who are denying eggs are not doing it because they will not don't accept the science of it. They're doing it again for ideological reasons. So the fundamental work still remains with the politics for them to solve these fundamental issues. For the macro issues, yes. For a micro, a number of options can be there to test out what could be the kind of evidence, particularly when we don't be not sure of it. And sure, this can be one of the instruments among many others to check out whether this is appropriate or not. The appropriateness of instrument follows from the nature of the problem. It is not that you a prior you privilege one instrument over all others. So that's the that's other part of what I'm really trying to say. Thank you, Pravee, for being with us. Do keep watching NewsClick.