Dani Rodrik: evaluation

Transcript context

…Political economy, because it’s hard to do an RCT on political economy. But even in micro things. I think even in the kinds of things where we’ve applied RCTs, I think we should be thinking a lot harder conceptually and theoretically. There was a time, when I came out of graduate school, if you were doing development economics and you were doing something empirical, you could never get a job. Probably in development economics at the time, you couldn’t get a job period. But the point was, doing empirical economics would not make you sort of rise up. I think that was terrible, and I we’ve now basically moved all the way to the other extreme, where empirical work also means doing something where you put 100 percent weight on internal validity, but very little thought into issues of external validity or the basic theory. I think we just have to correct some of that balance. Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet and his Sufi mysticism. As you know, he wrote some in Turkish. Overrated or underrated?…

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