Debate

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February 12, 2013 | 11:58 AM | By  | 

Kenya Holds Historic Presidential Debate | 

Kenya
Flickr, Albert Kenyani Inima

Analysis

Kenya held its first ever presidential debate on Monday, an historic event.

The eight candidates* gathered in Nairobi to debate the most pressing issues in the first of two televised debates. The young country’s event was everything that the 2012 US presidential debates were not.

Candidates from minority parties with no chance of making a dent on election day stood side by side with the front runners. The event went over its scheduled 2 hours lasting near 3.5 hours when all was said and done.

However, it was not because the candidates were wasting time or talking too much. An efficient tandem of moderators, NTV’s Linus Kaikai and Citizen TV’s Julie Gichuru, moved the conversation along, kept the candidates to their time limits, interrupted them when the question asked was not answered and provided immediate follow-ups when necessary.

FILED UNDER: Politics, Debate, elections, Kenya
August 17, 2012 | 8:00 AM | By  | 

Easterly-GiveWell Debate Is Good for Aid | 

An interesting conversation took place in mid-July between Bill Easterly of NYU; Holden Karnofsky and Stephanie Wykstra of GiveWell; and an unnamed funder. Easterly and Karnofsky penned a pair of blog posts that shared some of the highlights of the conversation. It is interesting in terms of how the two sides perceived the conversation in light of their disagreement on whether or not to make recommendations based on academic research.

Easterly, who has emerged as one of the critics of the much lauded randomized control trial (RCT) explains his point of view at the start of the conversation.

As Angus Deaton has repeatedly emphasized, RCTs give an average result. Treatment effects vary a lot depending on the context. When we average over a lot of them it’s almost certain that we’re getting some negative treatment effects, even when the average is a positive and significant result. You want a safeguard against having one enormous beneficiary with everyone else losing. You want a safeguard against harming a lot of people unacceptably. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: aid, Bill Easterly, Dean Karlan, Debate, development, Easterly, GiveWell, Holden Karnofsky, NYU, RCTs, Stephanie Wykstra