I disagree. These people are academics who want to help the poor. They go in and try to figure out what could help them and then write about it to help policy

I disagree. These people are academics who want to help the poor. They go in and try to figure out what could help them and then write about it to help policy makers. It would be nice if policy makers could just figure out what works and do it, but that isn't working, so someone needs to run experiments. What would you prefer they did instead?