Update

The dregs of the semester are here, and we're finishing up papers and grading and etc. Normal blogging should resume in the next few days. Until then, everybody else is linking to this, so I will too; Esther Duflo, most recent John Bates Clark Medal winner, talks about the usefulness of randomized controlled trials in helping guide social policy. I am not likely to ever do this sort of work (because the research questions I'm interested in don't lend themselves to RCT), and questions always exist about external validity, but I think that these sort of experiments are interesting and worthwhile.