That's a good point even thought it would be so much more efficient.

> There aren't too many people comfortable with intentionally letting others suffer for the sake of the scientific method, and those who do have a hard time getting past ethics review boards.

The way I see it, it is a mindset problem rather than an ethical one. Because policies are considered de facto as "improving things", it makes sense that not applying it would be unethical. However, the article makes a good point that this assumption is clearly flawed. If the mindset would be more along the lines of "there is a bad situation, we think we know how to improve it but we are not 100% sure", then it would not sound so unethical to form control groups.

For instance, using the "laptop for every child" case the governement could have instead picked a few schools that would receive school laptops with the intention to measure the effectiveness of the policy.

If it had a positive impact, then you can proceed with it and buy a laptop for every student. It seems to me more logical and also less wasteful to proceed that way.