Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [148]
22. See Brynjolfsson and Schrage (2009). Department stores have long experimented with product placement, trying out different locations or prices for the same product in different stores to learn which arrangements sell the most. But now that virtually all physical products are labeled with unique barcodes, and many also contain embedded RFID chips, they have the potential to track inventory and measure variation between stores, regions, times of the day, or times of the year—possibly leading to what Marshall Fisher of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School has called the era of “Rocket Science” retailing (Fisher 2009). Ariely (2008) has also made a similar point.
23. See http://www.povertyactionlab.org/ for information on the MIT Poverty Action Lab. See Arceneaux and Nickerson (2009) and Gerber et al (2009) for examples of field experiments run by political scientists. See Lazear (2000) and Bandiera, Barankay, and Rasul (2009) for examples of field experiments run by labor economists. See O’Toole (2007, p. 342) for the example of the national parks and Ostrom (1999, p. 497) for a similar attitude to common pool resource governance, in which she argues that “all policy proposals must be considered as experiments.” Finally, see Ayers (2007, chapter 3) for other examples of field experiments.
24. Ethical considerations also limit the scope of experimental methods. For example, although the Department of Education could randomly assign students to different schools, and while that would probably be the best way to learn which education strategies really work, doing so would impose hardship on the students who were assigned to the bad schools, and so would be unethical. If you have a reasonable suspicion that something might be harmful, you cannot ethically force people to experience it even if you’re not sure; nor can you ethically refuse them something that might be good for them. All of this is as it should be, but it necessarily limits the range of interventions to which aid and development agencies can assign people or regions randomly, even if they could do so practically.
25. For specific quotes, see Scott (1998) pp. 318, 313, and 316, respectively.
26. See Leonhardt (2010) for a discussion of the virtues of cap and trade. See Hayek (1945) for the original argument.
27. See Brill (2010) for an interesting journalistic account of the Race to the Top. See Booher-Jennings (2005) and Ravitch (2010) for critiques of standardized testing as the relevant metric for student performance and teacher quality.
28. See Heath and Heath (2010) for their definition of bright spots. See Marsh et al. (2004) for more details of the positive deviance approach. Examples of positive deviance can be found at http://www.positivedeviance.org/. The hand-washing story is taken from Gawande (2008, pp. 13–28), who describes an initial experiment run in Pittsburgh. Gawande cautions that it is still uncertain how well the initial results will last, or whether they will generalize to other hospitals; however, a recent controlled experiment (Marra et al. 2010) suggests that they might.
29. See Sabel (2007) for a description of bootstrapping. See Watts (2003, Chapter 9) for an account of Toyota’s near catastrophe with “just in time” manufacturing, and also their remarkable recovery. See Nishiguchi and Beaudet (2000) for the original account. See Helper, MacDuffie, and Sabel (2000) for a discussion of how the principles of the Toyota production system have been adopted by American firms.
30. See Sabel (2007) for more details on what makes for successful industrial clusters, and Giuliani, Rabellotti, and van Dijk (2005) for a range of case studies. See Lerner (2009) for cautionary lessons in government attempts to stimulate innovation.
31. Of course in attempting to generalize local solutions, one must remain sensitive to the context in which they are used. Just because a particular hand-washing practice works in one hospital does not necessarily mean that it will work in another, where a different set of