Eric A. Posner Reviews Jim Manzi's "Uncontrolled" | The New Republic - 0 views
www.tnr.com/...uncontrolled-jim-manzi
social science policy science methods conservativism bureaucratic
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Most urgent questions of public policy turn on empirical imponderables, and so policymakers fall back on ideological predispositions or muddle through. Is there a better way?
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The RFT works better than most other types of empirical investigation. Most of us use anecdotes or common sense empiricism to make inferences about the future, but psychological biases interfere with the reliability of these methods
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Regression analysis is inferior to RFT because of the difficulty of ruling out confounding factors (for example, that a gene jointly causes baldness and a preference for tight hats) and of establishing causation
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RFT has its limitations as well. It is enormously expensive because you must (usually) pay a large number of people to participate in an experiment, though one can obtain a discount if one uses prisoners, especially those in a developing country. In addition, one cannot always generalize from RFTs.
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academic research proceeds in fits and starts, using RFT when it can, but otherwise relying on regression analysis and similar tools, including qualitative case studies,
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businesses also use RFT whenever they can. A business such as Wal-Mart, with thousands of stores, might try out some innovation like a new display in a random selection of stores, using the remaining stores as a control group
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Manzi argues that the RFT—or more precisely, the overall approach to empirical investigation that the RFT exemplifies—provides a way of thinking about public policy. Thi
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the universe is shaky even where, as in the case of physics, “hard science” plays the dominant role. The scientific method cannot establish truths; it can only falsify hypotheses. The hypotheses come from our daily experience, so even when science prunes away intuitions that fail the experimental method, we can never be sure that the theories that remain standing reflect the truth or just haven’t been subject to the right experiment. And even within its domain, the experimental method is not foolproof. When an experiment contradicts received wisdom, it is an open question whether the wisdom is wrong or the experiment was improperly performed.
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The book is less interested in the RFT than in the limits of empirical knowledge. Given these limits, what attitude should we take toward government?
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Much of scientific knowledge turns out to depend on norms of scientific behavior, good faith, convention, and other phenomena that in other contexts tend to provide an unreliable basis for knowledge.
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Under this view of the world, one might be attracted to the cautious conservatism associated with Edmund Burke, the view that we should seek knowledge in traditional norms and customs, which have stood the test of time and presumably some sort of Darwinian competition—a human being is foolish, the species is wise. There are hints of this worldview in Manzi’s book, though he does not explicitly endorse it. He argues, for example, that we should approach social problems with a bias for the status quo; those who seek to change it carry the burden of persuasion. Once a problem is identified, we should try out our ideas on a small scale before implementing them across society
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Pursuing the theme of federalism, Manzi argues that the federal government should institutionalize policy waivers, so states can opt out from national programs and pursue their own initiatives. A state should be allowed to opt out of federal penalties for drug crimes, for example.
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It is one thing to say, as he does, that federalism is useful because we can learn as states experiment with different policies. But Manzi takes away much of the force of this observation when he observes, as he must, that the scale of many of our most urgent problems—security, the economy—is at the national level, so policymaking in response to these problems cannot be left to the states. He also worries about social cohesion, which must be maintained at a national level even while states busily experiment. Presumably, this implies national policy of some sort
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Manzi’s commitment to federalism and his technocratic approach to policy, which relies so heavily on RFT, sit uneasily together. The RFT is a form of planning: the experimenter must design the RFT and then execute it by recruiting subjects, paying them, and measuring and controlling their behavior. By contrast, experimentation by states is not controlled: the critical element of the RFT—randomization—is absent.
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The right way to go would be for the national government to conduct experiments by implementing policies in different states (or counties or other local units) by randomizing—that is, by ordering some states to be “treatment” states and other states to be “control” states,
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Manzi’s reasoning reflects the top-down approach to social policy that he is otherwise skeptical of—although, to be sure, he is willing to subject his proposals to RFTs.