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I'm not sure if this is really plausible, but I would love to see a legislative rule instituted which stated that programs, regulations, and spending measures c

I'm not sure if this is really plausible, but I would love to see a legislative rule instituted which stated that programs, regulations, and spending measures cannot be passed without doing the following: * Clearly laying out the goals that bill sponsors are trying to achieve with the proposed change as well as the reasoning driving the change * Clearly articulating a set of metrics by which we can judge the efficacy of the program or change * Defining a period in which studies or review will be conducted to evaluate efficacy and who will be funded to do them If the change is later reviewed and it is found to be ineffective, it should either be forced to be modified or immediately rolled back. This would protect against a whole host of legislative silliness such as pork belly / vote buying projects, bill scope creep, the immortality of improperly validated programs as mentioned in the article, and knee jerk reaction regulations after tragedies or in the face of anecdata and moralizing.

wallace_f 9y ago
There might be an interesring underlying problem here which you are trying to solve, but not addressing explicitly. Perhaps humanity is, for the first time, entering a period where it is possible for corruption to go un-checked. If you look at history, go back a bit and it could be described as just groups of people teaming up to kill each other. Over history, the trend was generally towards larger groups. Now the group is nearly as large as possible (global), and there's no threat to the group. So the interesting problem is that those with power over the group now have no incentive to keep the group's evolutionary fitness level high--maybe their incentive is even to decrease the group's fitness? Looking at examples in the article and in the comments, it's hard to believe this is never the case. We know the War on Poverty, Drug War, War on Terror, and other efforts have intentionally been designed to not solve the problems they were tasked with solving (poverty, drug use, and terror have not measurably dropped due to those efforts, despite trillions spent). So when you say it "should be" you are advocating perhaps a difficult path for humanity. I personally would like to see humanity try to go down that path of improving our evolutionary fitness over our environment, but maybe to do that we need to recognize this inconvenient truth. I don't see how these things you mention change, otherwise. Youtuber CGP Grey has a related video about this reality of leadership: https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs
kweinber 9y ago
I’ve been saying exactly this for years. Want to start a party that only advocates for candidates and laws that follow these rules? We could call the platform/mechanism “test-first” legislation.
analog31 9y ago
While this sounds like a good idea, and has me nodding in agreement, it has a potential downside. A somewhat analogous example is during the Reagan administration, they announced a rule that no new environmental regulations could be passed unless they performed an exhaustive cost-benefit analysis. It turns out that such an analysis is impossible. It was rather transparently recognized as a way to deliberately cripple the EPA. A less analogous yet instructive example of government trying to regulate itself: Most states have "balanced budget" laws at the state level, yet most states run deficit budgets.
ACow_Adonis 9y ago
For those curious, in practice, one of the problems we find with this kind of thing in practice is the phenomenon of policy-based evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy-based_evidence_making https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy-based_evidence_making That is to say, governments in charge of deciding goals, metrics and studies/reviews will inevitably cherry-pick, pay consultants, and fund those things which selectively support their desired policy-implementations and outcomes. You may say: "well, make the thing independent", but that's easier said than done. You might also say: "well, it will be immediately obvious if anyone is doing this", to which i'd respond that it really isn't immediately obvious to most people, and if the efficacy of policies/metrics/evaluations were immediately obvious, we would often negate the need to be attempting/implementing the additional overhead of formally introducing evidence-based policy (since we'd commonly agree on policy and whether it worked). Which is of course not to say that evidence/experiments is not noble or the right thing to do, but more so to point out that governance is a far tricker situation than just saying "well, we'll fix it by legislating that governments have to do the right thing..."
dhimes 9y ago
Like kweinber, I've also advocated this for years. I'll accept that it's hard, but I won't accept that it's impossible. Think of it as "scientific government." We institute falsifiable hypotheses and test them. This can only be done by folks who want the right answer however, and not too many people in government are like that. They may want their answer to be right, but of course that is not the same thing. At the very least, set up a criterion (or criteria) at which we will agree that a policy has failed. Betsy DeVos is being disruptive in U.S. education. Will it work? Take the US rankings now. If in four years our ranking has fallen, we try something else. Try a tax cut. If the economy is x% worse 18 months after it going into effect, it failed. I'm sure when we first start this we will struggle to get the metrics right and to ask the right questions. But we should aim in that direction. I suspect that the reason we don't has to do with money, and in a bad way.
- spiralx 9y ago
  I call it "evidence based government" to match evidence-based medicine. But it is one of the things I'd most like to see happen, because the real world seems like far too small an influence on politics nowadays.
  - dhimes 9y ago
    Evidence-based works too, but I chose scientific because of the falsifiable hypothesis approach. We set it up so that we can eliminate things that don't work from being retried under similar conditions just because a different party takes over.

wallace_f 9y ago

There might be an interesring underlying problem here which you are trying to solve, but not addressing explicitly. Perhaps humanity is, for the first time, entering a period where it is possible for corruption to go un-checked. If you look at history, go back a bit and it could be described as just groups of people teaming up to kill each other. Over history, the trend was generally towards larger groups. Now the group is nearly as large as possible (global), and there's no threat to the group. So the interesting problem is that those with power over the group now have no incentive to keep the group's evolutionary fitness level high--maybe their incentive is even to decrease the group's fitness? Looking at examples in the article and in the comments, it's hard to believe this is never the case. We know the War on Poverty, Drug War, War on Terror, and other efforts have intentionally been designed to not solve the problems they were tasked with solving (poverty, drug use, and terror have not measurably dropped due to those efforts, despite trillions spent). So when you say it "should be" you are advocating perhaps a difficult path for humanity. I personally would like to see humanity try to go down that path of improving our evolutionary fitness over our environment, but maybe to do that we need to recognize this inconvenient truth. I don't see how these things you mention change, otherwise. Youtuber CGP Grey has a related video about this reality of leadership: https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

kweinber 9y ago

I’ve been saying exactly this for years. Want to start a party that only advocates for candidates and laws that follow these rules? We could call the platform/mechanism “test-first” legislation.

analog31 9y ago

While this sounds like a good idea, and has me nodding in agreement, it has a potential downside. A somewhat analogous example is during the Reagan administration, they announced a rule that no new environmental regulations could be passed unless they performed an exhaustive cost-benefit analysis. It turns out that such an analysis is impossible. It was rather transparently recognized as a way to deliberately cripple the EPA. A less analogous yet instructive example of government trying to regulate itself: Most states have "balanced budget" laws at the state level, yet most states run deficit budgets.

ACow_Adonis 9y ago

For those curious, in practice, one of the problems we find with this kind of thing in practice is the phenomenon of policy-based evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy-based_evidence_making https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy-based_evidence_making That is to say, governments in charge of deciding goals, metrics and studies/reviews will inevitably cherry-pick, pay consultants, and fund those things which selectively support their desired policy-implementations and outcomes. You may say: "well, make the thing independent", but that's easier said than done. You might also say: "well, it will be immediately obvious if anyone is doing this", to which i'd respond that it really isn't immediately obvious to most people, and if the efficacy of policies/metrics/evaluations were immediately obvious, we would often negate the need to be attempting/implementing the additional overhead of formally introducing evidence-based policy (since we'd commonly agree on policy and whether it worked). Which is of course not to say that evidence/experiments is not noble or the right thing to do, but more so to point out that governance is a far tricker situation than just saying "well, we'll fix it by legislating that governments have to do the right thing..."

dhimes 9y ago

Like kweinber, I've also advocated this for years. I'll accept that it's hard, but I won't accept that it's impossible. Think of it as "scientific government." We institute falsifiable hypotheses and test them. This can only be done by folks who want the right answer however, and not too many people in government are like that. They may want their answer to be right, but of course that is not the same thing. At the very least, set up a criterion (or criteria) at which we will agree that a policy has failed. Betsy DeVos is being disruptive in U.S. education. Will it work? Take the US rankings now. If in four years our ranking has fallen, we try something else. Try a tax cut. If the economy is x% worse 18 months after it going into effect, it failed. I'm sure when we first start this we will struggle to get the metrics right and to ask the right questions. But we should aim in that direction. I suspect that the reason we don't has to do with money, and in a bad way.

spiralx 9y ago
I call it "evidence based government" to match evidence-based medicine. But it is one of the things I'd most like to see happen, because the real world seems like far too small an influence on politics nowadays.
- dhimes 9y ago
  Evidence-based works too, but I chose scientific because of the falsifiable hypothesis approach. We set it up so that we can eliminate things that don't work from being retried under similar conditions just because a different party takes over.