Yale economist Dean Karlan may be best known for starting Stickk.com, a site that aims to help you achieve personal goals by forming "commitment contracts" in which a liberal Democrat might be forced to forfeit $1,000 to the Tea Party, let's say, if he or she falls off the wagon. But Karlan has amassed weightier accomplishments as the protegee of pioneering development economist Esther Duflo, who I write about in this month's Life in Beta column.
Like Duflo's Poverty Action Lab at MIT, Karlan's Innovations for Poverty Action is dedicated to evaluating various poverty interventions using randomized controlled trials: the rigorous, scientific gold standard, like a doctor conducting trials of a new drug. His new book More Than Good Intentions--written with Jacob Appel--is full of surprising insights on what really works to fight global poverty. It's also full of funny, human stories about the people that Appel and Karlan have met around the world in the course of this research.
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Jean Case at the 2013 Yale Philanthropy Conference
