Oren Cass, writing in National Affairs, articulates some of the difficulties in basing policy on evidence, and includes examples from the Oregon health insurance experiment, the stimulus effect on unemployment, and other challenges of deciding what counts as evidence.
I learned some of these lessons while leading the NC Government Efficiency and Reform (NC GEAR) initiative from 2013-2015. We sought evidence for policies, but actual policy reforms were in areas where research and data were ambiguous or where I would see a compelling case for change and others would not.
From Cass:
Politics compounds the methodological shortcomings, imposing a peculiar asymmetry in which positive findings are lauded as an endorsement of government intervention while negative findings are dismissed as irrelevant?—?or as a basis for more aggressive intervention. Policies that reduce government, when considered at all, receive condemnation if they are anything other than totally painless. Throughout, the presence of evidence itself becomes an argument for empowering bureaucrats, as if the primary explanation for prior government failure was a lack of good information.
The common thread in these shortcomings is an implicit endorsement of the progressive view of the federal government as preferred problem-solver and a disregard for the entire range of concerns that prevent conservatives from sharing that view. Like Charlie Brown with his football, conservatives repeatedly lunge with enthusiasm at the idea that evidence will hold government accountable for results, only to be disappointed. Lauded as a tool of technocratic excellence, EBP more often offers a recipe for creeping statism.
Even in this era of populist uprisings and collapsing faith in institutions, confidence has never been higher that the challenges of government can be “solved” with the right studies. This confidence is misplaced; to the contrary, there is no evidence that our investments in social science and EBP have improved our capacity to govern wisely and effectively at all. For evidence to play a valuable role in the policymaking process, social scientists designing their research and policymakers using the results need a better understanding of what evidence provides?—?and what it cannot.
