Read more: Blueprint for a better world
Good intentions are not enough. If leaders and governments are serious about achieving their aims, they must base their actions on hard evidence.
YOU break your arm. At the hospital, the doctor tells you his team is going to inject iron nanoparticles into the broken bone and use electromagnets to realign it. Wow, you say, you鈥檝e never heard of this method. 鈥淥h, it鈥檚 never been tried before,鈥� says the doctor. 鈥淏ut our hospital needs some publicity, and it sounds really impressive and high-tech, doesn鈥檛 it?鈥�
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You would rightly be appalled if hospitals chose treatments this way. We expect medical therapies to undergo rigorous trials to ensure they are safe and effective. Yet we seem content to let our leaders conjure up policies based on what sounds good, rather than on what has been proved to work.
The effectiveness of policies in many areas, from education and crime to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, can be empirically determined. As in medicine, the comes from randomised controlled trials; better still, of multiple randomised trials.
Admittedly, there are plenty of . There are many aspects of government which the scientific method cannot be applied to and, even where it is applicable, it can be time-consuming and expensive. Trials have to be well designed and they often need to involve large numbers to produce robust results. Researchers also need to ensure trial results are directly relevant to policy-makers.
Proper trials are worth the effort, though. When they are carried out, they often reveal that policies and laws are having the opposite effect to that intended. 鈥淐ommon sense鈥� and good intentions are no substitute for hard evidence. You might think, for instance, that scaring young offenders by showing them what prison life is like will discourage them from reoffending. In fact, randomised trials show that such schemes, long popular in the US, .
鈥淪o-called common sense and good intentions are no substitute for hard evidence鈥�
The big challenge is to get politicians and policy-makers to understand what constitutes rigorous evidence and to base their decisions on it, rather than on the urgings of lobbyists. The only alternative is to spend vast sums on programmes and policies that, far from achieving their aims, may be making matters worse.
Read more: Blueprint for a better world