In the movie 21, a fictionalized recounting of how several
former MIT students used mathematical skill to win big at blackjack, being
“pretty good with numbers” looks like a quick way to get rich in Las Vegas.
Real life at MIT may seem less glamorous, but it’s actually more exciting,
because our students and faculty are using their gift for numbers and analysis
to change the world.
Take, for example, the problem of global poverty. Over five
decades, the world has spent upwards of $2 trillion on development aid, without
many lasting results. One reason is that, to a striking degree, aid money is
spent without an understanding of which interventions really work. It’s as if a
new drug could enter the market simply because some patients who took it got
better. We’ve long understood that without a control group for comparison,
there’s no way to tell whether symptoms improved because of the drug or for
some unrelated reason.
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Today, 2.6 billion people struggle to survive on less than
$2 a day. Given the magnitude of the problem, it’s imperative to identify which
antipoverty efforts work best. That is exactly the aim of MIT’s Abdul Latif
Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which is headed by MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and
Esther Duflo and includes a growing network of international researchers. The
lab is leading a quiet revolution. The idea is simple: to identify the most
effective ways to alleviate poverty by using the same kind of rigorous,
scientific, randomized trials routinely used to test new drugs.
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For instance, if you wanted to prevent the spread of HIV to
a new generation in rural Kenya
but had limited funds, would you teach schoolgirls about HIV? Or would you help
girls stay in school by covering costs like required uniforms? Or inform girls
that in Kenya,
older men (particularly those 20 to 45) are more likely than younger men to
carry HIV? Researchers at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab test the value of
interventions like these by comparing a group that participates in a program
with a similar group that does not. By evaluating the outcomes, they measure
how well an intervention works. By comparing results from different
interventions, they can determine cost effectiveness, too.
Sometimes they reach surprising conclusions. In Kenya, Duflo,
with colleagues Pascaline Dupas and Michael Kremer, found that keeping girls
in school was more effective in reducing girls’ risky behavior than teaching
the standard HIV curriculum. Moreover, alerting girls to the higher HIV rate
among older men dropped the rate at which children were born to teen mothers
and older fathers by a stunning 65 percent. By identifying the best ways to
reduce the spread of HIV to a new generation, these findings could help change
the course of the epidemic.
The Jameel Poverty Action Lab is only one of many projects
at MIT focused on fighting the ravages of poverty. Amy Smith, for instance,
works with MIT students to engineer low-tech ways to meet the day-to-day
challenges of people in the developing world, from a low-cost grain mill that
grinds flour 10 times faster than traditional tools do to an incubator for lab
samples that requires no electricity, allowing doctors to diagnose tuberculosis
in remote areas. In April, our students, through their own Global Poverty
Initiative, hosted a conference that brought to campus more than 1,000 young
people dedicated to tackling poverty.
Yet perhaps the most powerful tools to offer people in the
developing world are knowledge and analytical skills they can use themselves.
Today, MIT’s OpenCourseWare makes materials for virtually all of the
Institute’s 1,800 courses available online, to anyone on earth, free (see
ocw.mit.edu). Many courses have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and
Portuguese, with Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish versions on the way.
Since MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2001, more than 40
million people around the world have used the site. We regularly receive
e-mails from teachers, students, and self-learners, explaining how MIT
OpenCourseWare has improved their teaching or changed their lives. One woman
from Latin America wrote a note of thanks,
because OpenCourseWare opens “a window of knowledge for so many who are limited
by economic or other reasons,” as she put it; “It’s truly a way to spread
freedom to humankind.” We hope she’s right.
A version of this column by President Susan Hockfield ran in
the Boston Globe on April 14, 2008.
