Otherwise known as 'placebo'

From The New York Times:

It has long been the standard practice in medical testing: Give drug treatment to one group while another, the control group, goes without.

Now, New York City is applying the same methodology to assess one of its programs to prevent homelessness. Half of the test subjects — people who are behind on rent and in danger of being evicted — are being denied assistance from the program for two years, with researchers tracking them to see if they end up homeless.

The city’s Department of Homeless Services said the study was necessary to determine whether the $23 million program, called Homebase, helped the people for whom it was intended. Homebase, begun in 2004, offers job training, counseling services and emergency money to help people stay in their homes.

But some public officials and legal aid groups have denounced the study as unethical and cruel, and have called on the city to stop the study and to grant help to all the test subjects who had been denied assistance.“They should immediately stop this experiment,” said the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer. “The city shouldn’t be making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable.”

It's fascinating to see how much perceptions of abstract situations depend on completely superfluous details. No one calls on cancer drug researchers to stop experimenting and immediately give new, untested treatments to everyone; no one vilifies them for making guinea pigs out of people. The NYT article is titled "To Test Housing Program, Some Are Denied Aid;" if the article was about a medial trial, what would the title be? Would it contain the phrase "denied aid?"

I have no idea if this experiment is actually methodologically valid or ethical. But if it isn't, it's certainly not because it treats people as lab rats or denies aid to the needy.