Social Science Space

Over the last three decades randomized trials have become an increasingly popular way of testing interventions designed to address developmental challenges. But do RCTs generate reliable results – or even retard progress?

“Many people die without getting a transplant because there aren’t enough organs for the people who need them, living donor organs included. Sometimes, you might love someone enough to give him a kidney but you can’t give a kidney to the person you love, because kidneys have to be very well-matched. Kidney exchange is a way of getting some transplants done, even when patients and their donors are not well matched.”

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2019 (commonly known as the Nobel Prize for Economics) has been awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Through the award, the Nobel committee recognized both the significance of development economics in the world today and the innovative approaches developed by these three economists.

Current mainstream economic theory needs an overhaul. Modern advanced economies are complex, evolving systems, which cannot continue to be understood only through aggregate quantity. Sergio Focardi discusses the explanatory power of qualitative (in addition to quantitative) understandings of the market.

Britain’s former chief economist knows a thing or two about the impact of immigration on native Britons. In this Social Science Bites podcast, he reviews what data can tell us about the UK’s current heavy inflow — such as that new arrivals create both supply AND demand.

Paul Johnson had one key theme in his SAGE Publishing lecture for the Campaign for Social Science: Long-term policy needs to be developed across government based on a broad understanding of the social and economic trends. And there is little evidence that this lesson is being heeded.

Two academics who have integrated what might have once seemed like non-economic externalities into economic models have been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics. The winners are William D. Nordhaus of Yale University, cited for integrating climate change into macroeconomic analysis, and Paul M. Romer of New York University’s Stern School of Business, cited doing the same with technological innovations.

Martin Shubik, an economist,  game theorist and political scientist whose sense of persepctive, and of humor, infused his voluminous work on complex and vexing questions, has died at age 92. He died August 22 at his home in Branford, Connecticut; Shubik had been on the faculty at nearby Yale University since 1963.

When Robert Dingwall was younger, sociology departments routinely taught a course on ‘industry,’, ‘work’ or ‘economic life.’ “Most of this turf has now been abandoned to business schools in the form of organization studies, where it increasingly struggles to resist the expansion of finance and accounting studies,” he says, and to our detriment.

Richard H. Thaler, the University of Chicago economist whose contributions linking psychology to the ‘dismal science’ caught the public’s eye in his co-authored bestselling book Nudge, has received this year’s Nobel Prize in economic sciences.

By one estimate of U.S. universities, there are about 300,000 fewer women students in the field of economics than there should be if sexism were not so rampant.

So if markets are truly good for English higher education, as many seem to think, should we follow that train of thought to its logical conclusions?