Dean Karlan's Utilitarian Guide to the World Cup

Dean Karlan's Utilitarian Guide to the World Cup

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In the Upshot section of the New York Times, IPA founder and president Dean Karlan applies IPA's utilitarian methodology to choosing a World Cup team. With data crunched by IPA's Nate Barker, Karlan ranks each team according to the impact on world happiness its victory would have: 

Ultimately, life is full of choices. Just as we can't have more than one winner of the World Cup, we also cannot send the same dollar to two different organizations. We must choose. So let's choose the ones that will have the biggest impact.

In a second post, Karlan and Barker updated the rankings to take a country's past performance in the World Cup into account. 

The data and methodology for both the original and updated posts is available in Excel format here

July 07, 2014