I have a new piece up on The Long And Short, suggesting that the “Evidence Based Policy Making” movement ought to be really very worried about the reproducibility crisis in the psychological and social sciences. In summary, the issue is that most of the problems that the sciences are dealing with are highly likely to be there in policy areas too, meaning that the evidence base for education reform, development economics, welfare and many other policy areas is equally likely to be packed with fragile and non-replicable results. I do suggest a solution for this problem (or rather, I endorse Andrew Gelman’s solution), but point out that it is likely to be expensive and time-consuming and to mean that evidence-based approaches are going to be a lot slower and deliver a lot less in the way of whizzy new policy ideas than people might have hoped.
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