July 2, 2018
Leigh (The Luck of Politics), an Australian MP, covers the important and contested subject of randomized trials and how they affect the world in this encompassing account. He provides readers with an intelligible guide to this scientific technique from the mid-18th century, when trials were conducted seeking a cure to scurvy, to the present variety of trials taking place across industries and disciplines. Randomized trials have been used to test the effectiveness both of tiny changes—the U.K. government’s “Nudge Unit” discovered car tax collection letters became 9% more effective “if they included a photograph of the offending vehicle”—and of high-stakes processes—a 2013 trial found a very common kind of knee surgery no more effective than simply telling patients they had undergone the operation. Leigh finds that randomized trials have challenged assumptions in many fields, from social welfare policy to retail marketing strategies. And though many people presume that randomized trials are impractically costly and time-consuming , Leigh shows how today’s researchers are demonstrating that “randomised experiments can be done quickly, simply, and cheaply.” Even a general audience can appreciate this well-rounded and intriguing overview of a surprisingly far-reaching topic.
January 25, 2018
Randomised trials are scientific experiments that aim to clear the fog of our personal biases to arrive at the truth. Participants in a randomised trial are generally split into a control group and a treatment group, with the results contrasted. For example, a new drug could be tested by giving one group a placebo and the other the drug, then studying patient outcomes. A recurring theme of Federal MP Andrew Leigh’s insightful Randomistas is how often the assumptions of experts and top officials are completely wrong. When it comes to making important decisions, Leigh urges that we should be sticking to the science. Our own instincts aren’t reliable. Randomistas takes many fascinating examples from medicine, politics, crime, technology, agriculture and business to show how randomised trials are, in the words of one researcher, ‘the epitome of transparency’. Full of compelling and sometimes jaw-dropping stories of random trials that threw out surprising results, from the science behind Sesame Street to how the cure for scurvy was discovered, Andrew Leigh’s book entertains and informs in equal measure. It will change the way you think. Randomistas is certain to appeal to readers of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan.
Chris Saliba is co-owner of North Melbourne Books and a freelance reviewer