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Jane Smith's avatar

I’m curious what role you believe economics knowledge should play in evaluation training programs and requirements. I have found economists start with the assumption that they will be analyzing costs and benefits and then work from there, using whatever methodologies will help them understand behavior and decisions making within that framework.

However, in my evaluation work I have found that evaluators and the nonprofit sector are either completely ignorant of or actively hostile toward this economic lens of analysis. As you point out, this is a huge ethical problem, when the many of the professionals of the field entrusted with evaluating a sector receiving public dollars fundamentally oppose the idea of translating services into monetary value (!).

Should there be more of a merger between the interdisciplinary fields of economics and evaluation? I personally don’t think the his could be productive, though we would have to learn from previous less-than-successful attempts to integrate “business thinking” into the social sector.

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