Evidence-Based Policy

A Practical Guide to Doing It Better

Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie

Provides general advice, illustrated across a range of domains, including development economics, education, child welfare, international AIDS policies and business.

Ideal for policy makers and analysts who are not experts in the sciences and statistics.

Offers compelling insights into major policy examples like California's massive effort to reduce the size of elementary school classes and the Bangladesh Integrated Nutrition Program.

Evidence-Based Policy

A Practical Guide to Doing It Better

Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie

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.

Evidence-Based Policy

A Practical Guide to Doing It Better

Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie

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 Why Chapter 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 Ingredients Chapter II.B: Causal Roles: Shared and UnsharedPart III: Strategies for Finding What You Need to Know Chapter III.A: Where We are and Where We are Going Chapter III.B: Four StrategiesPart IV: RCTs, Evidence-Ranking Schemes, and Fidelity Chapter IV.A: Where We are and Where We are Going Chapter IV.B: What are RCTs Good For? Chapter IV.C: Evidence-Ranking
Schemes, Advice Guides, and Choosing Effective Policies Chapter IV.D: FidelityPart V: Deliberation is not Second Best Chapter V.A: Where We are and Where We are Going Chapter V.B: Centralization and DiscretionPart VI: ConclusionAppendix I: Representing Causal ProcessesAppendix II: The Munro ReviewAppendix III: CCTV and Car TheftNotesReferencesIndex

Evidence-Based Policy

A Practical Guide to Doing It Better

Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie

Author Information

Nancy Cartwright is Professor of Philosophy at UC-San Diego and London School of Economics.Jeremy Hardie is an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford and a Fellow of King's College London; he is also Vice President of the Royal Economic Society, and was Chairman of the WH Smith Group from 1992 to 2010.

Evidence-Based Policy

A Practical Guide to Doing It Better

Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie

Reviews and Awards

"Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie are to be complimented. In their new book, Evidence-Based Policy, the authors have attempted to address a serious problem in policy design... In the process, they do a number of things very well, including debunking the notion that randomized clinical trials are the gold standard for solving all problems in all situations... In addition, they spend a lot of time helping the reader understand why a particular approach to policy design may work well in one venue but not in another." --Health Affairs

Evidence-Based Policy

A Practical Guide to Doing It Better

Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie

From Our Blog

By Jeremy Hardie
Everybody likes evidence based policy ' who could favour a policy that is not confronted with the facts? ' but after twenty or more years trying to make it work, we have ended up with some quite strange results, at least in the US and the UK.