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Randomistas by Andrew Leigh: book review



Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World (2018) provides a collection of examples of randomized trials and experiments.

The book desribes randomized experiments in medicine, business, and government programs – for improvements to prison programs, preventing scurvy on long sea voyages, encouraging philanthropy, and so on. Not only does it show that randomized tests are important, but it shows the surprising and unexpected – and often counter-intuitive – results. 

Andrew Leigh describes how the randomized tests work, and what they reveal about people’s choices and behaviours – even how political parties win elections.

Randomized control trials, tests, and experiments are when researchers randomly allocate participants into two or more groups: one that gets the treatment or program (or different groups receive variations of the treatment or program), and another doesn’t. 

Leigh devotes time to the pioneers of randomized trials – the early randomistas – such as Charles Saunders Peirce in 1885 for psychology; Ronald Fisher in the 1920s for agriculture and biology; Austin Bradford Hill in 1946 for medicine (tuberculosis); and Judit Gueron in 1974 for social welfare policy.

Leigh also responds to the criticism of randomized trials – too narrow, too expensive, too slow, unethical, not feasible, the world is too complex to isolate specific testing components, it’s not fair, and so on – and he discusses when randomized trials are effective and when they are not. For example, what is the value of placebo testing (pretending to provide treatment and the participant does not know of the pretence) and is it ethical? What is the value of conducting four kinds of criminal justice experiments: prevention, policing, punishment, and prison? 

Leigh also outlines how many randomized trials are currently being conducted daily by organizations, big and small, across the globe.

Randomistas is a fascinating book about the wrongs and rights of randomized control trials, and their impacts in decision-making from what to buy to how to heal. From the simple to the complex, from fun to life-changing decisions, this book covers the gamut, and is a far from dry statistics: it is entertaining and educational and interesting.


MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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