Evaluation and the causal revolution
Content for week of Monday, January 11, 2021–Friday, January 15, 2021
Readings
- The syllabus, content, examples, and assignments pages for this class
- Chapter 1 in Impact Evaluation in Practice1
- DJ Patil, “What Makes a Radical and Revolutionary Technology?”
- (DJ Patil is the former Chief Data Scientist of the United States under President Obama. He gave this forum address at Brigham Young University on February 13, 2018.)
- Stephen Goldsmith, “Next Generation of Public Employees Must Understand Data and Policy”
- Hadley Wickham, “Data Science: How is it Different To Statistics?”
Slides
The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.
View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides
Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.
Videos
Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.
- Introduction
- Data science and public service
- Evidence, evaluation, and causation (1)
- Evidence, evaluation, and causation (2)
- Class details
You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:
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Paul J. Gertler et al., Impact Evaluation in Practice, 2nd ed. (Inter-American Development Bank; World Bank, 2016), https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/25030. ↩︎