ok, I deleted a thread. I'm not the civility police, but too many calls for sending people to the guillotines in the replies.

For the record... deleting the tweet doesn't mean I’ve changed my mind and am now endorsing the study. I kicked off this storm by holding up a paper for ethical scrutiny and critique. I just drew the line at jokes about executing researchers. https://twitter.com/EconKilljoy/status/1292132669925531648

The fundamental, quite obvious problem here is that the researchers intentionally harmed their research subjects. https://twitter.com/JustinSandefur/status/1292100515845767173

That’s a red line that I had naively thought development economics as a discipline would not cross.

I heard today when the paper was presented at NBER-SI, nobody raised ethical concerns. And it was suggested that the Nairobi water company had no prior plans to cut off anyone’s service. This was done for the purposes of the study, at the research team’s initiative.

If true, this strikes me as beyond the pale.

There is a tendency for my fellow randomistas to circle the wagons when these cases come up. I hope that doesn’t happen here. Either IRB screwed up, or our approach to IRB needs serious rethinking.

I’m still against guillotines though, fwiw.