When policy is too often made on a whim, amid lies, or to serve ideology, a prize for people who ask for a little bit of evidence first is worth celebrating.
Austrian novelist Peter Handke, who awarded this year's literature Nobel, has been controversial for his support of Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milošević.
Donald Trump has been vocal about India’s high import tariffs and has threatened retaliation. Simultaneously, his tough stand on China could see Chinese goods flood India.
The Chinese aircraft has uncanny similarities to the American F-35 jet. There are claims that China copied the design. Cyber theft of F-35 design data was reported in 2009.
While we talk much about our military, we don’t put our national wallet where our mouth is. Nobody is saying we should double our defence spending, but current declining trend must be reversed.
To the author, I am a physician and have done medical research. I do not know why economists and the Nobel committee are applying the term “Randomised Control Trials” for the experiments mentioned here. In medical research parlance, they are actually CASE – CONTROL STUDIES & COHORT STUDIES and have been done under community medicine and epidemiology since centuries including the sphere of health economics.
For an experiment to be qualified as an RCT, first it has to randomised i.e the subjects of experiment assigned to each group should be randomised. Second, their variables should be matched in both groups i.e equal number of similar age groups, gender etc, third, they need to be blinded such as single blind, double blind & triple blind studies and finally, they need to be multicentric. Then only, they can truly be called RCTs.
I think it would be more accurate for your Nobel laureates to start calling them CASE CONTROL STUDIES or if they do not know what an RCT designation entails, they can consult their clinical medicine colleagues.
Research in economics is far less scientific than medicine or other scientific branches not because it is difficult, but because economists are too lazy to apply the same scientific standards to economic research as other scientific branches.
A very good example is the research by economic Larry Summers [again another famous US university professor] who published without declaring his conflicts of interest with private industry and his biased opinions encouraging the subprime crisis resulting in a complete loss of credibility.
To the author, I am a physician and have done medical research. I do not know why economists and the Nobel committee are applying the term “Randomised Control Trials” for the experiments mentioned here. In medical research parlance, they are actually CASE – CONTROL STUDIES & COHORT STUDIES and have been done under community medicine and epidemiology since centuries including the sphere of health economics.
For an experiment to be qualified as an RCT, first it has to randomised i.e the subjects of experiment assigned to each group should be randomised. Second, their variables should be matched in both groups i.e equal number of similar age groups, gender etc, third, they need to be blinded such as single blind, double blind & triple blind studies and finally, they need to be multicentric. Then only, they can truly be called RCTs.
I think it would be more accurate for your Nobel laureates to start calling them CASE CONTROL STUDIES or if they do not know what an RCT designation entails, they can consult their clinical medicine colleagues.
Research in economics is far less scientific than medicine or other scientific branches not because it is difficult, but because economists are too lazy to apply the same scientific standards to economic research as other scientific branches.
A very good example is the research by economic Larry Summers [again another famous US university professor] who published without declaring his conflicts of interest with private industry and his biased opinions encouraging the subprime crisis resulting in a complete loss of credibility.
Nobel committee doesn’t know that our bureaucrats know better than these economists.