【EconTalk】Lant Pritchett on Poverty, Growth and Experiments

Today is May 25th, 2017. My guest is author and an economist Lant Pritchett, senior fellow with Senate with Professor Practice of International Development in Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Lant first appeared on EconTalk in 2013 just cause his book The Rebirth of Education. Lant, welcome back to EconTalk.
Thanks. Thanks for having me back.
Now our topic for today comes from an open letter by Chris Blattman, an another former EconTalk guest, an open letter that Chris wrote to Bill Gates. Gates had suggested that if we want to reduce poverty, we should give Sub Saharan Africans chickens. Right now I think the number's about 5 percent of Sub Saharan Africans in their very poor people in general raise chickens. If we get that number up to 33 percent, we could really make a dent into poverty. And Chris Blattman thought maybe we just gave them money, which Chris has been working on and we did an EconTalk about that with Chris . And he propose the experiment to find which is better, giving poor people chicken or money. And here’s what Chris wrote. Despite the suggestive research that I've cited here, no one has run the race between the chicken and cash programmes. No one has asked whether the expensive training or supervision that often goes along with these things is worth it. It would be straightforward to run a study a few thousand people in six countries and eight or 12 variations, to see which combination is best, where and with whom. To me that answer is the best investment we could make to fight world poverty.