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Imagine I wrote a blog post...
reviewing an private draft paper that only I saw...
& made claims about the size of some important treatment effects in Dev. Economics.
You'd call BS, right? Right...
So, @GiveWell , what on earth are you guys doing?https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cash-transfers/spillovers#top …
The blog post excluded any other study from its review than those evaluating a GiveDirectly CT, called the private study the "best study" (sorry Drs. @jhaushofer , @AndrewZeitlin and co-PIs), and then essentially declared spillovers in CTs not an issue...
What was the hurry? What couldn't wait until the paper is public or better peer-reviewed?
Whatever it is, I hope that it is worth the hit in credibility @GiveWell will take...
Excluded perfectly good (and all public/well-published work) evidence from other CT studies, including by @seema_econ , myself, and @eeshani_kandpal). Doesn't matter if they would change your conclusions or not. Do it well and thoroughly or not at all: not this half-baked crap.
Also, are you guys saying that if the spillovers are on anything other than consumption, they are unimportant?
Never mind if other papers showed increased in stunting or decreased psychological wellbeing among spillover groups within villages: irrelevant for the task at hand, whatever that task is...
GiveWell has to update its recommendations near the end of the year because that's when most donations happen. They had to decide whether to recommend GiveDirectly or not based on incomplete/nonpublic information.
Terrible reason. Make the paper public or don’t update. Question, how many other charities did they do this for?
Do you think GiveWell should have ignored relevant information that might affect millions of dollars of donations or that they should have used that information but not been transparent about that fact?
They are self-admittedly ignoring published relevant information in that very post. This is not how science works. You at least put out a working paper that people can scrutinize: why should anyone just trust GW’s word on what the evidence is?
How is this different than big pharma stating that their drug works when they have shelved theunsuccessful studies and drum up the one successful trial? To be clear, I am not saying this is what GW is doing, but if we’re talking transparency and evidence, that is a good analogy.
Exactly because millions of dollars in donations might shift, I am worried about how that blog post came about (using a private paper co-authored by the founder of GiveDirectly)
In the post, GW says that they wanted to do a sort of meta analysis, but decided against it. It would have been incomplete anyway (excluding CCTs, trials from non-SSA countries, etc.) but that would have been a start. Making the private draft public would be another one...
The paper currently muddles spillovers with externalities, general equilibrium effects and unintended consequences. The critique of general equilibrium effects is also a reflection on targeting.
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