Think Before You Give: Charity Should Be More Rational and Less Emotional by Maarten Boudry

Think Before You Give: Charity Should Be More Rational and Less Emotional by Maarten Boudry, Areo, September 2017.

"The Harvard economist Michael Kremer used the gold standard of scientific research, a randomized trial, to examine the effectiveness of a variety of programs that were intended to raise education standards in developing countries.What would be the best way to improve children’s education?You can probably come up with a few ideas: more books, better classroom equipment, more teachers per 100 children.All pretty obvious.And if those things don’t help much, they certainly can’t do any harm, right? Surprisingly, Kremer’s study showed that none of those “obvious” remedies improved the children’s school results.After a great deal of research, he found — to his surprise — that the one intervention that made far more difference than anything else was deworming.It turns out that the effects of parasitic worm infection are the number one cause of school absences in many developing countries.A simple deworming program typically reduces absence by 25%.But without careful scientific research into the effectiveness of various programs, we would probably never have discovered this.Instead, we would have had our heartstrings tugged by yet more pictures of classrooms full of children without books or pencils, and we’d have put our hands in our pockets to send case after case of learning materials, and they would have been placed on the empty desks of children who were too sick to come to school."