Ten years ago, FAI managing director Tim Ogden published Experimental Conversations, a collection of interviews with economists and other people who critique, promote, and use randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in development economics.
One of the interviewees was Michael Kremer, a pioneer of the movement, now a Nobel laureate, and recently appointed Chief Economist of the World Bank. (Other chapters were devoted to conversations with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, Rachel Glennerster, Dean Karlan, David McKenzie, Antoinette Schoar, and others.)
In Development, a new magazine of long-form essays on how progress does or does not happen in low- and middle-income countries, asked Tim to reprint the original conversation with a new introduction. Rereading it a decade on, Tim reflects on how fragile the systems for building and using evidence have proved to be, and why Kremer's questions matter even more now.
Read Tim’s reflections, and the full interview with Michael Kremer, here at In Development, which is free to read and worth subscribing to.
Editor’s Note: I’m going to assume that you are seeing plenty of AI content (news and papers, not AI slop, though I’m sure you’re getting plenty of that too) from other sources, so I’m trying to think hard about the marginal value that the faiV can provide. As far as I’ve gotten so far: a) make sure that directly AI-related content does not take up more than 2 of the 5 items, and b) try to focus specifically on the cybersecurity issue for financial inclusion. Beyond that, I’m open to feedback on the value you get from the faiV in relation to AI to help guide us in the future. On a different note, I’ll be making a brief cameo appearance at the e-MFP Inclusive Finance Conference to moderate the opening plenary. If you haven’t registered, do so and I hope to see you there! - Tim Ogden