Evidence-based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Cartwright, Nancy / Hardie, Jeremy, PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press Inc, Over ong>theong> last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base ong>theong>ir recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to ong>theong> point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on ong>theong> facts. But are ong>theong> ong>methodsong> that policy makers rely on to gaong>theong>r and analyze evidence ong>theong> right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and ong>theong> economy, explain that ong>theong> dominant ong>methodsong> which are in use now--broadly speaking, ong>methodsong> that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized control trials--do not work. ong>Theong>y fail, Cartwright and Hardie contend, because ong>theong>y do not enhance our ability to predict if policies will be effective. ong>Theong> prevailing ong>methodsong> fall short not just because social science, which operates within ong>theong> domain of real-world politics and deals with people, differs so much from ong>theong> natural science milieu of ong>theong> lab. Raong>theong>r, ong>theong>re are principled reasons why ong>theong> advice for crafting and implementing policy now on offer will lead to bad results. Current guides in use tend to rank scientific ong>methodsong> according to ong>theong> degree of trustworthiness of ong>theong> evidence ong>theong>y produce. That is valuable in certain respects, but such approaches offer little advice about how to think about putting such evidence to use. Evidence-Based Policy focuses on showing policymakers how to effectively use evidence. It also explains what types of information are most necessary for making reliable policy, and offers lessons on how to organize that information.