“More powerful” seems like it’s implicitly using categories that don’t cut at the joints. I think Aceso Under Glass’s post on Tostan makes an important distinction between capacity-building and capacity-using interventions:
This is more speculative, but I feel like the most legible interventions are using something up. Charity Science: Health is producing very promising results with SMS vaccine reminders in India, but that’s because the system already had some built in capacity to use that intervention (a ~working telephone infrastructure, a populace with phones, government health infrastructure, medical research that identified a vaccine, vaccine manufacture infrastructure… are you noticing a theme here?). [...] Having that capacity and not using it was killing people. But I don’t think that CS’s intervention style will create much new capacity. For that you need inefficient, messy, special snowflake organizations.
I’d guess that treatment effects seem less powerful than selection effects of equal importance because treatment effects are typically more capacity-building loaded.
“More powerful” seems like it’s implicitly using categories that don’t cut at the joints. I think Aceso Under Glass’s post on Tostan makes an important distinction between capacity-building and capacity-using interventions:
I’d guess that treatment effects seem less powerful than selection effects of equal importance because treatment effects are typically more capacity-building loaded.