That all sounds very clever and all, but there's still a rather important question being left unanswered here: on what basis should a government make decisions? Coin flips? Gut feelings? The phase of the moon?
Let's say you're the King of the United States. One of your noblemen comes in to your palace and says 'Your majesty, I suggest we eliminate corporate taxation and replace the lost revenue with a tax on consumption.' What happens next?
Coin flips are actually okay when you don't know something: Create many small experiments instead of trying the "world formula" solution. Also, create an environment where responsibility and decision making authority is as low as possible, not as high as possible - meaning where both the data and the consequences can both be found together.
Oh and use "muddling through" more openly, because that's what life is about no matter how much data you collect. So don't pretend that there even IS an "optimal" answer, and/or that you know it and/or even that anyone can find it. Let's admit that we are all just trying things and that failure IS an option. So create systems that a) actually encourage and allow experimenting, and b) let those fail safely.
While I respect what you're saying, and agree to a limited extent, I don't agree with the idea that people, and society, are completely impermeable to analysis. Perhaps you truly are neutral on the question of democrats and republicans, and have no preference regarding Hillary, Trump, Sanders or Kim-Jong Un (given your view that we can only understand something through experiment and direct experience, and not through logic, reasoning and extrapolation).
However, if you do happen to have political opinions (that you think are well-reasoned), then you are engaging in this form of 'misguided analysis' that economists also engage in (albeit unknowingly). As for the 'economists' who claim to 'know the optimal answer', I guess I've just been fortunate to have never encountered one. More precisely, I've never run in to one in the various federal economic public policy organisations where I've spent the majority of my career. Where do they hang out?
And good luck designing experiments around, say, national healthcare policy that 'fail safely'. I think you'll find that an alarming number of them end up 'failing deadly'.
I don't agree with the idea that people, and society,
are completely impermeable to analysis.
Nice strawman - I never said that.
This is just like medicine: You can theorize all you want, but in the end only a clinical trial shows you if your plans actually work. The subject is too complex. All you can do with your models is use them as input into the trials. If you skip trials you will get disaster and failure on an unsafe scale.
And good luck designing experiments around, say,
national healthcare policy
If you don't you will still run a trial - only that your trial is a very large population. Good luck with that.
Coin flip sounds good to me. If you honestly don't know how to solve a problem, inventing a discipline for the express purpose of having an authority to point to sounds like the worst possible idea. It makes it much harder to change course if you can't merely say "oh, we should try tails instead due to xyz" because now you've got another institution fighting to justify its own survival.
We need a reason to sound Certain. We should do away with the Fed, etc and systematise on the Oracle. That way when things go wrong we can still say it was the will of the Gods without needing to have an inquiry about it.
Though we would probably just have one about who offended the gods.
We live in a large nation, why not let a few states trial a program before running it nationally? Move fast and break things isn't good enough when lives and livelihoods are at risk in my opinion.
Testing on human subjects is limited and I don't think you can build a sample size that is large enough.
Single payer is a great example, Californian or NY voters will likely vote in such a system while Texans would likely opt into a free market approach. Wait a few years and see the outcomes of each policy. Now you can make an evidence based decision rather than a political one.
Well, after arguing that it's impractical to run RCTs I guess it's time for a bit of a 'climb-down', because this is a really great idea. I could definitely see this working in a place like the USA, where you have lots of big States with diverging political views.
I wonder what would be the best way to implement something like this? Just spitballing, but what about Federal grants to partially fund the 'treatment' States (with non-participating States acting as controls), with the policy issue and various 'treatments' negotiated between the Fed and State level? And then after that, States sign on using a mechanism similar to California proposition voting during State elections maybe?
Or maybe even push it down to a local government level? I seem to remember somewhere in the US conducting trials of basic income around the 50s or 60s. Maybe there's a model there...
> lots of big States with diverging political views.
The thing is, political views don't diverge quite as much as it is being made to seem. Gerrymandering scrambles the signal[0] quite a bit and the Electoral College then magnifies[1] the apparent differences.
Unfortunately, you then have to contend with assymetric information effects such as self selection, where sick people who are faced with increased expenses under a free market approach move to CA and NY, while healthy people who would pay more under a single-payer approach would move to TX.
Let's say you're the King of the United States. One of your noblemen comes in to your palace and says 'Your majesty, I suggest we eliminate corporate taxation and replace the lost revenue with a tax on consumption.' What happens next?