In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something - so why aren't we doing that with social policy?
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need to apply the same innovative and cost-effective strategies used in technology to the development of social policies.
Esther Duflo highlights a critical observation that while technology thrives on experimentation and optimization to reduce costs and improve efficiency, similar methodologies are often lacking in the realm of social policy. She advocates for a more scientific approach to addressing social issues, encouraging policymakers to adopt rigorous experimentation and fine-tuning to enhance the effectiveness and accessibility of social programs.
In practice
In a speech addressing future innovations in welfare systems.
And there is a lot of idiosyncrasy. But there are also regularities and phenomena. And what the data is going to be able to do - if there's enough of it - is uncover, in the mess and the noise of the world, some lines of music that actually have harmony. It's there, somewhere.
The poor get bored the same as the rest of us. Their happiness might be as important to them as their health.
For millions of girls around the world, motherhood comes too early. Those who bear children as adolescents suffer higher maternal mortality and morbidity rates, and their children are more likely to die in infancy.
Part of me always wanted to do something useful for the world. It came from my mother. She is a paediatrician and she was active in a small NGO for the child victims of war.
I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.
What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
I don't tweet, I don't go on Facebook. I think there's too much information about all of us out there. I'm liking the idea of privacy more and more.
Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it's digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules - not just for governments but for private companies.
A design is intuitive when people just know what to do and they donβt have to go through any training to get there When a design is not intuitive, our attention moves away from what weβre trying to accomplish to how we can get the interface to accomplish what we want.
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