Chetty's Opp Insights team uses ML 'digital twins' to recover causal effects, validated by RCTs
paulnovosad · x · 2026-11-04
The quoted post highlights a new paper by Chetty and the Opportunity Insights team: 'digital twins' — rich ML applied to generate counterfactuals from many covariates — can recover causal effects. They validate the twins against RCTs, enabling scalable program evaluation.
The replying econ voice quips 'With large enough N, you don't need randomization?' — pointing at the debate the method stirs in causal inference circles over whether ML counterfactuals can substitute for experiments.
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