Monday, November 05, 2018

evidence-resistent policy - four thoughts

I read the Professor R.D.French's provocative article on four schools of thought on evidence-based policy, which did not seem to be terribly optimistic about our chances as scientists to influence policy makers (and at some level, may even have cast doubt on whether we should try).

It prompted me to think these even more negative thoughts about policy making itself, which might suggest that people that accumulate evidence, and wish to have an effect ("impact"), may just do better to look elsewhere - as with French's article, I group these four thoughts under for R's

Redundant - perhaps the tension between consideration of politics (popularity/fear etc) and evidence is such that it cancels out, and policy is made that essentially has no effect - an example of this was when presented with evidence of how to improve road journey travel, a policy maker said "oh no, if we do that that way, we'll be accused of spending too much money, and if it doesn't work we'll be accused of wasting money" so policy was to do it a way that cost little and did nothing.

Reactive - a lot of policy may just be a response to de facto behaviour - examples here might include some countries legalising of THC, where the alternative was to continue with the ludicrous position that half of the population were criminals. here policy makers are responsive followers, rather than leaders (which may also be the case above too).

Resignation - a decision has been made and can't be changed, despite al the evidence, even evidence that the population doesn't like the decision any more (think "invade Iraq" or "leave Europe" or Thatcher ignoring civil servant advice on the poll tax - flying in the face of policy because one is resigned to the decision is a suitable path to resignation in the other sense of the word:-)

Reality - some writing on EBP says that scientists should not be so arrogant. However, nuclear war, climate change, anti-biotic resistant bugs - these are very different matters from austerity and keynsian economics or fake news and brexit - to get these in proportion, they're potentially total extinction events. of course, there may be some of the same schmoozing and influence necessary to get some significant change of direction, but in my view we need something more fundamental like a shift away from capitalism (I didn't say socialism), since there's no evidence there are any ways to connect with longer time scales in the current scheme of things. And evidence suggests we must, and policy makers show little sign of understanding that these are game changers.



p.s. after discussion with Ian, lets note that natural & life sciences have probably had more success influencing policy, and perhaps the resistence is highest for input from social & economic sciences, where the evidence may more in dispute, or even the entire methodology or disciple in some doubt (recent results on lack of reproducibility in psychology, or lack of predictive value in macro-economics appear to lend credence to the policy makers' distrust of academic advice, for example, in those realms).

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