Description
Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the 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 the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now--broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized control trials--do not work. They fail, Cartwright and Hardie contend, because they do not enhance our ability to predict if policies will be effective.The prevailing methods fall short not just because social science, which operates within the domain of real-world politics and deals with people, differs so much from the natural science milieu of the lab. Rather, there are principled reasons why the advice for crafting and implementing policy now on offer will lead to bad results. Current guides in use tend to rank scientific methods according to the degree of trustworthiness of the evidence they 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, explaining what types of information are most necessary for making reliable policy, and offers lessons on how to organize that information.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsPreface: Do You Want to Read this Book? Putting our Conclusions FirstPart I: Getting Started: From `It Worked There' to `It Will Work Here'.Chapter I.A: What's in This Book and WhyChapter I.B: The Theory that Backs up What We SayPart II: Paving the Road from 'There' to 'Here'Chapter II.A: Support Factors: Causal Cakes and their IngredientsChapter II.B: Causal Roles: Shared and UnsharedPart III: Strategies for Finding What You Need to KnowChapter III.A: Where We are and Where We are GoingChapter III.B: Four StrategiesPart IV: RCTs, Evidence-Ranking Schemes, and FidelityChapter IV.A: Where We are and Where We are GoingChapter IV.B: What are RCTs Good For?Chapter IV.C: Evidence-Ranking Schemes, Advice Guides, and Choosing Effective PoliciesChapter IV.D: FidelityPart V: Deliberation is not Second BestChapter V.A: Where We are and Where We are GoingChapter V.B: Centralization and DiscretionPart VI: ConclusionAppendix I: Representing Causal ProcessesAppendix II: The Munro ReviewAppendix III: CCTV and Car TheftNotesReferencesIndex
