#49 – Rachel Glennerster on a year’s worth of education for under a dollar and other ‘best buys’ in development

If I told you it’s possible to deliver an extra year of ideal primary-level education for 30 cents, would you believe me? Hopefully not – the claim is absurd on its face.

But it may be true nonetheless. The very best education interventions are phenomenally cost-effective, but they’re not the kinds of things you’d expect, says this week’s guest, Dr Rachel Glennerster.

She’s Chief Economist at the UK’s foreign aid agency DFID, and used to run J-PAL, the world-famous anti-poverty research centre based at MIT’s Economics Department, where she studied the impact of a wide range of approaches to improving education, health, and political institutions. According to Glennerster:

“…when we looked at the cost effectiveness of education programs, there were a ton of zeros, and there were a ton of zeros on the things that we spend most of our money on. So more teachers, more books, more inputs, like smaller class sizes – at least in the developing world – seem to have no impact, and that’s where most government money gets spent.”

“But measurements for the top ones – the most cost effective programs – say they deliver 460 LAYS per £100 spent ($US130). LAYS are Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling. Each one is the equivalent of the best possible year of education you can have – Singapore-level.”

“…the two programs that come out as spectacularly effective… well, the first is just rearranging kids in a class.”

“You have to test the kids, so that you can put the kids who are performing at grade two level in the grade two class, and the kids who are performing at grade four level in the grade four class, even if they’re different ages – and they learn so much better. So that’s why it’s so phenomenally cost effective because, it really doesn’t cost anything.”

“The other one is providing information. So sending information over the phone [for example about how much more people earn if they do well in school and graduate]. So these really small nudges. Now none of those nudges will individually transform any kid’s life, but they are so cheap that you get these fantastic returns on investment – and we do very little of that kind of thing.”

(See the links section below to learn more about these kinds of results.)

In this episode, Dr Glennerster shares her decades of accumulated wisdom on which anti-poverty programs are overrated, which are neglected opportunities, and how we can know the difference, across a range of fields including health, empowering women and macroeconomic policy.

Regular listeners will be wondering – have we forgotten all about the lessons from episode 30 of the show with Dr Eva Vivalt? She threw several buckets of cold water on the hope that we could accurately measure the effectiveness of social programs at all.

According to Eva, her dataset of hundreds of randomised controlled trials indicates that social science findings don’t generalize well at all. The results of a trial at a school in Namibia tell us remarkably little about how a similar program will perform if delivered at another school in Namibia – let alone if it’s attempted in India instead.

Rachel offers a different and more optimistic interpretation of Eva’s findings.

Firstly, Rachel thinks it will often be possible to anticipate where studies will generalise and where they won’t. Studies are being lumped together that vary a great deal in i) how serious the problem is to start, ii) how well the program is delivered, iii) the details of the intervention itself. It’s no surprise that they have very variable results.

Rachel also points out that even if randomised trials can never accurately measure the effectiveness of every individual program, they can help us discover regularities of human behaviour that can inform everything we do. For instance, dozens of studies have shown that charging for preventative health measure like vaccinations will greatly reduce the number of people who take them up.

To learn more and figure out who you sympathise with, you’ll just have to listen to the the episode.

Regardless, Vivalt and Glennerster agree that we should continue to run these kinds of studies, and today’s episode delves into the latest ideas in global health and development. We discuss:

  • The development of aid work over the past 3 decades?
  • What’s the right balance of RCT work?
  • Do RCTs distract from broad economic growth and progress in these societies?
  • Overrated/underrated: charter cities, getting along with colleagues, cash transfers, cracking down on tax havens, micronutrient supplementation, pre-registration
  • The importance of using your judgement, experience, and priors
  • Things that reoccur in every culture
  • Do we produce too many programs where the quality of implementation matters?
  • Has the “empirical revolution” gone too far?
  • The increasing usage of Bayesian statistics
  • High impact gender equality interventions
  • Should we mostly focus on reforming macroeconomic policy in developing countries?
  • How important are markets for carbon?
  • What should we think about the impact the US and UK had in eastern Europe after the Cold War?

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

Highlights

I think it’s really important to say that all of us who have worked on randomized trials have never suggested that this is the only methodology that you should use. Sometimes it’s held up as a straw person that we go around saying “this is the only methodology”, people criticize us for saying it’s the only methodology, but nobody who’s done RCTs has ever thought that that’s the right approach. I think the right way to see things is you have a toolbox of ways to answer questions, and the right tool depends on the question that you’re asking.

I think we need good descriptive work to understand what the problems are. A lot of development programs just fail because they’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. They’re just solving the wrong problem. The first really important thing you’ve got to do is really understand what the issue is in any given area. If we’re worried about girls not going to school because of menstruation, well, let’s start by finding out whether they actually don’t go to school more when they’re menstruating. That’s a really basic, obvious thing. But we actually need more work on that kind of understanding your context, understanding the problem, is a really important first step.

It’s really important to distinguish the different causes of why a different study might have a different result. Because we take away different conclusions, we act differently, depending on the reason for why a different study might have a different result. So one reason why a second study might have a different result is the problem didn’t exist there. So then I’m not at all surprised that you have a different finding in another study. It doesn’t worry me at all.

A second reason why you might have a different effect in the second study is it’s implemented less well. In the first study, you had 80% take-up, and the second study, you had 20% take-up, right? So, again, you don’t want to just compare the results of the two studies, you would then want to adjust for take-up in those contexts.

And the third reason is that people behave really differently in different contexts. And that’s the … that in a sense is the assumption behind saying this is a problem. And I guess my reading of the evidence is that actually, most of the variation between studies that we see is either they’re actually implementing a completely different kind of program, and we don’t have enough studies so we bundle a whole bunch of things that are completely different together, and it’s no wonder we get different results, or the implementation was really different, and bad, or really good. And that just tells us we really need to work on implementation. It might tell us really important things about, this is a really hard thing to implement, and that’s a really useful lesson. It’s not really about generalizability. Generalizability for me means, people act differently when they’ve faced the same problem and they’re given the same incentives, but they respond to those incentives really differently. And my reading of the RCT evidence is that, actually we get surprisingly similar results if anything across different studies.

Increasingly, I am getting convinced that the safe spaces for adolescent girls, we now have a number of those, with positive effects. This is in communities. So, I evaluated one in Bangladesh. BRAC does a lot of these. They had an evaluation in Uganda that was very successful. There’s just been one coming out in Sierra Leone, where they seemed to protect girls from pregnancy during the Ebola crisis. There was a massive increase in adolescent pregnancy during the Ebola crisis. So, that’s something we should definitely look at. I think, the standard girls’ education, I was always very skeptical, because that was based on pretty much no evidence, but now we’re building evidence, and it actually turns out it was quite a good thing.

There’s quite a bit of evidence from different contexts, that allowing access to family planning allows women to … Because they have more control in the future, they actually then invest in their education now, and they take on different roles and are more likely to work, and it’s sort of, that forward-looking, if you reduce the costs … If you don’t have family planning, you know you’re going to be having kids forever, and there’s no point in going to school. There’s no point investing in other human capital. So, I think that’s pretty general, too.

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About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

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