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.
I am always going to advocate for a more muscular evaluation curriculum, particularly at the graduate level. It is one thing to argue that “not every evaluator needs to be good at economics” and another thing to argue that “no evaluator should have to sit through a single semester of economics” - and the latter appears to be the de facto position of most programs.
Sometimes the arguments about this start to sound political, but they shouldn’t. Hostility towards talking about resource distribution is not a viable political position anywhere on the compass.
I am also aware that, as a transdiscipline, evaluation has an information overload problem. To master evaluation we need to become at least pretty good at about a dozen different things at the level of an undergraduate major in that subject. This means either that we embrace specialization within evaluation and demand teamwork or that we deepen and broaden the curriculum. My concern is that we appear to be pursuing neither path effectively. (Licensure would be one way to wag the dog and improve programs in this way, but there are other options too.)
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.
I am always going to advocate for a more muscular evaluation curriculum, particularly at the graduate level. It is one thing to argue that “not every evaluator needs to be good at economics” and another thing to argue that “no evaluator should have to sit through a single semester of economics” - and the latter appears to be the de facto position of most programs.
Sometimes the arguments about this start to sound political, but they shouldn’t. Hostility towards talking about resource distribution is not a viable political position anywhere on the compass.
I am also aware that, as a transdiscipline, evaluation has an information overload problem. To master evaluation we need to become at least pretty good at about a dozen different things at the level of an undergraduate major in that subject. This means either that we embrace specialization within evaluation and demand teamwork or that we deepen and broaden the curriculum. My concern is that we appear to be pursuing neither path effectively. (Licensure would be one way to wag the dog and improve programs in this way, but there are other options too.)