The poverty lab

Esther Duflo, co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) which she co-founded in 2003 at MIT with Abhijit Banerjee, is a pioneer of a branch of academic study that combines the ideas of doing good science and doing good. She and her colleagues at J-PAL ascribe to a certain pragmatic idealism; one that supposes there is something that can be done to alleviate poverty and that once identified, it can be put into practice.

J-PAL’s work revolves around a well-known practice in medical research, but one less applied to developmental economics: randomised control trial evaluations. In Esther’s words, randomization ‘takes the guesswork, the wizard, the technical prowess, the intuition, out of finding out whether something makes a difference.

The advantage of randomisation in Esther’s view is that it not only identifies the best interventions to alleviate a particular situation, but it does so with an element of precision that should, in theory at least, be attractive to policymakers. Although she is not blind to the idea that policymakers may be swayed to adopt bad policy based on political support rather than data, J-PAL’s work is geared towards collaborating with governments beyond experimental stages but in the adoption and scaling-up of programmes that have been vetted.

‘There is a lot of noise in the world,’ Esther explains. ‘And there is a lot of idiosyncrasy. But there are also regularities and phenomena. And what the data is going to be able to do—if there’s enough of it—is uncover, in the mess and the noise of the world, some lines of music that actually have harmony. It’s there, somewhere.’