Development economics RCTs blame individuals while ignoring poverty’s structural causes

Evidence

Development economists whose research appears in the most prestigious academic journals—from the American Economic Review to the Review of Development Economics—receive the bulk of their funding from wealthy foundations to run randomized control trials that treat the people of the Global South like experimental rats. Such research studies often reduce countrywide dynamics to the decision-making of individuals, investigating how people’s choices may not be rational due to a failure to manage resources optimally. The narrow focus on individuals, in particular how poor people can make better decisions for themselves, takes for granted the macroeconomic context that produces poverty. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 289

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: ‘RCTs as colonial laboratory science’ - critiquing randomized trials’ methodological individualism.
• XREF: connects to: American conservatives blamed poverty on personal failings while favoring free competition — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1587; Elite economists blamed poverty on the supposed deficiencies of the poor themselves — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 226; Applied development economics theory produced disastrous results across Latin America (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal crisis narratives redirect blame from structures onto individual psychology #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 433
• Neoliberalism induces risk-bearing then blames the victims when risk fails #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 351
• Blaming individual borrowers hides a systemic precariousness produced by finance #expands (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 208
• Resilience-based responses wrongly shift blame from society onto individual victims #corroborates (0.80) — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 337
• Neoliberal development theory saw poverty as institutional failure in cultivating entrepreneurial #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 408
• Moral-poverty framing revives discredited cultural pathology arguments #expands (0.78)
• Applied development economics theory produced disastrous results across Latin America #expands (0.75)
• Victims of inequality can unknowingly adopt beliefs that perpetuate their own disadvantage #expands (0.75)
• Italian economists blamed poverty on working-class moral defects rather than economic causes #exemplifies (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1141