Over the past two or three decades, no economic method of analysis has skyrocketed in popularity, and in research funding, more than randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Nowhere has this popularity been recognized more than in 2019 when Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer won the Nobel Prize in economics for their work on it. Furthermore, never has any method in economic research been so incredibly fused with principles of altruism, suggesting that an economist is a “good person who cares about others” when they perform RCTs. Likewise, RCTs have been touted by their protagonists as being the one and only, most-reliable, and “most scientific,” method for addressing humanity’s greatest problem—abject poverty.

Within all this hoopla, euphoria, and hundreds of millions of dollars poured into RCT research grants, one story, in particular, has stood out as the RCT’s posterchild. It is the one story that is most told, and most upheld as evidence for how wonderful RCTs have been for humanity. This is Banerjee and Duflo’s story of how RCTs “saved millions of lives” by promoting the issuance of bednets in malaria-ridden countries. By understanding this story better, we may better understand the true value of RCTs in development economics, relative to the alternatives that exist for addressing world poverty.