Stop guessing whether a bill will work. Instead, let’s test it.

[xchrom]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-stop-guessing-whether-a-bill-will-work-instead-lets-test-it/2012/12/07/903396f2-3d64-11e2-bca3-aadc9b7e29c5_story.html

***SNIP


Each year, hundreds of carefully controlled, double-blind studies are done to learn whether a given pill is better than a placebo or whether a new surgery leads to quicker recoveries. Many of these studies are funded by a single agency, the National Institutes of Health. By contrast, in a typical year, no such studies are conducted to evaluate social policy proposals.

That’s not because such studies are impossible. In 1962, researchers in a small Michigan school district randomly selected 58 3- and 4-year-olds to enroll in a preschool program, then spent decades comparing them with a control group of 65 kids who didn’t go to preschool. Those who enrolled learned more and made more money as adults. In 1976, the Chicago Housing Authority randomly placed public-housing residents in apartments either in the city or in the suburbs, and then tracked the two groups. Those given places in the suburbs did better on every metric from household income to their children’s rates of college attendance.

Those studies had a big impact. The Chicago study, for example, is the main research cited in proposals to provide housing vouchers to poor families to break up pockets of “concentrated disadvantage.”

But studies like those are very rare. They’re expensive, which discourages universities and school districts (such as the one in Michigan conducting the preschool study) from doing them. And often, as in the Chicago case, they come about only because a court orders them .

[Buzz Clik]

1. I guess Dylan Matthews is suggesting testing akin to FDA's.

So, 5-12 years after a social program is proposed, we have the results of the study and can decide yes or no.

[DetlefK]

2. I have a faster (and more expensive) idea:

Supercomputers are not that exotic anymore today. The problem is just that there is way too much demand for their services (folding proteins, predicting weather and whatnot).

Easy: Build one explicitly for the purpose of simulating how a society evolves under different conditions. If we can simulate a molecule with hundreds of atoms, we surely can simulate a city with hundreds of families. Or a market with hundreds of companies. Make it open-source and repeat simulations with identical or slightly different start-parameters over and over so we get better statistics.
That way it will take a year to test a bill, instead of 20 years.

[Wounded Bear]

3. Oooohhh...Foundation....

Asimov would love it.