Obama posts scholarly article

[Antonio the Sixth]

What convinces you of its importance?

The constant stream of terrible policy decisions that anyone with a basic knowledge of the state of research in a field would have known to avoid. Education policy is probably the biggest victim, but there are examples everywhere.

So why do you think that social research has such little influence on public policy? What would you do to increase its influence?

I don't know, I haven't done any research on that.

Seriously though, a good part of it has to do with the fact that policymakers have little incentive to enact good policy. They have an incentive to enact "sexy" policy that can easily be sold to the media and the public (and, in the admittedly anomalous US case, can get through Congress), which is a very different thing.

So the West suffers from an excess of democracy?

Well, dictators have even less incentive to enact good policy.

[Mopsus]

Seriously though, a good part of it has to do with the fact that policymakers have little incentive to enact good policy. They have an incentive to enact "sexy" policy that can easily be sold to the media and the public (and, in the admittedly anomalous US case, can get through Congress), which is a very different thing.

So the West suffers from an excess of democracy?

Well, dictators have even less incentive to enact good policy.

What about technocrats?

[Antonio the Sixth]

Seriously though, a good part of it has to do with the fact that policymakers have little incentive to enact good policy. They have an incentive to enact "sexy" policy that can easily be sold to the media and the public (and, in the admittedly anomalous US case, can get through Congress), which is a very different thing.

So the West suffers from an excess of democracy?

Well, dictators have even less incentive to enact good policy.

What about technocrats?

Technocrats are dictators with a fancy name.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

What convinces you of its importance?

The constant stream of terrible policy decisions that anyone with a basic knowledge of the state of research in a field would have known to avoid. Education policy is probably the biggest victim, but there are examples everywhere.

So why do you think that social research has such little influence on public policy? What would you do to increase its influence?

I know when I was in grad school for mathematics a few decades ago, it was not unusual for the profs to make fun of social science papers that had made bad use of statistical methods.  Hopefully, the situation has improved, but it certainly had to have had some effect on why social science has been sometimes ignored.

[Antonio the Sixth]

What convinces you of its importance?

The constant stream of terrible policy decisions that anyone with a basic knowledge of the state of research in a field would have known to avoid. Education policy is probably the biggest victim, but there are examples everywhere.

So why do you think that social research has such little influence on public policy? What would you do to increase its influence?

I know when I was in grad school for mathematics a few decades ago, it was not unusual for the profs to make fun of social science papers that had made bad use of statistical methods.  Hopefully, the situation has improved, but it certainly had to have had some effect on why social science has been sometimes ignored.

I can only speak for political science, but my assessment is that it's in the process of improving. There's a lot of cutting-edge stuff being done these days, and I'm very lucky to have had professors who were rather "enlightened" in that respect, but at the same time some old habits are hard to change (see the obsession with p-values in most scholarly journals).

Worth noting that a lot of the bad methodological practices that poli sci has been plagued with originate from econometrics, the most "positivist" of all social sciences. By contrast, a lot of the good practices that we're discovering now come from the much-vilified field of psychology.