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.
Fraud really thrives in moments of great social change and transition. We're in the midst of a technological revolution. That gives con artists huge opportunities. People lose their frame of reference for what can and can't be real.
With us air people, the future of our nation is indissolubly bound up in the development of air power.
As we put autonomous cars on the road, connect Alexas to our lights and our thermostats, put ill-protected Internet-connected video cameras on our houses, and conduct our financial lives over our cell phones, our vulnerabilities expand exponentially.
Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.
The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services.
One way to think about the magnitude of the changes to come is to think about how you went about your business before powerful Web search engines. You probably wouldn't have imagined that a world of answers would be available to you in under a second. The next set of advances will have an different effect, but similar in magnitude.
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