Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “How Do We Know What Really Works in Healthcare?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.) The gist of the episode: a lot of the conventional wisdom in medicine is nothing more than hunch or wishful thinking. A new breed of data detectives is hoping to change that.
Imagine there’s one elementary school in one district where the kids do much better than all the other nearby schools. This also happens to be the only school that serves its kids breakfast every day (in addition to lunch). It’d be tempting to conclude that the school’s good grades are due to the breakfast — and that if you simply started serving breakfast at all the other schools, their grades would also shoot up.
But how can you tell for sure? Maybe breakfast is one of 10 things this school does differently — or maybe the kids are different, or the parents, or the teachers, or the curriculum. Maybe this is the only school where dodge ball is played every day at recess. So how do you find out; how do you isolate the effect of the breakfast?