I.
Imagine you run a charity which gives cows to people in the developing world. Your new boyfriend is a statistician and you want to impress him, so you’ve decided to look into this Monitoring and Evaluation thing he keeps going on about. So you give a bunch of people cows and then follow up a year later, and sure enough the people you gave the cows to are richer, healthier, and happier. You proudly tell this to your boyfriend and expect to reap rewards in the form of admiration, cuddles, and a ‘yes’ to your marriage proposal.
Your boyfriend, however, isn’t impressed. What if everyone in the country is getting richer, because the country is industrializing? What if the poor people you gave cows to were having an unusually hard time, and then they got back on their feet, and your cows had nothing to do with it? Apparently, in order to get a sample that really says anything about the world, you need to randomly give cows to half the people, and then check whether the people you gave cows to are doing better than the people you didn’t give cows to (a “randomized controlled trial”).
This [...]
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First published:
March 10th, 2026
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QsvFCcDR2TfSj32aM/the-joys-of-cash-benchmarking
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
