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Using the states to perform the experiments is useful, and we've been doing that for hundreds of years, but it's besides the point of the article. The whole po
by ddlatham 16y ago
Using the states to perform the experiments is useful, and we've been doing that for hundreds of years, but it's besides the point of the article.
The whole point is to produce sets of people that are drawn from an identical distribution where the only difference is whether the law applies to them or not. That way any changes that result can be confidently attributed to the law itself.
Right now, when we see differences between California and Iowa, there are a million other factors that may be causing different outcomes than a single law.
- jessriedel 16y agoYes. Independent of your position on the proper distribution of power between the state and federal government, having states experiment is little better than doing observational studies. There is a reason randomized experiments are the gold standard.
- DougWebb 16y agoRandom testing, particular in cases like drug trials where the technique started, also relies on neither the testor nor testee knowing who is being tested. That can't be the case for laws. So, if someone behaves differently, is it because of the law that applies to them, because of the law that applies to others but not them, or because they're being watched to see how they behave? You know, we used to have laws like this: segregation laws. The people who weren't subject to the laws became abusive to the others, and the people who were subject to the laws rebelled against them. The situation was very unjust.
- lutorm 16y agoSegregation laws are by nature nonrandom. It doesn't seem very apt of an analogy to me. You're right about the fact that people might react differently when they know they are being singled out, though.
- DougWebb 16y agoMy point in bringing up segregation wasn't about the selection process, but the outcome. I believe that if two groups of people are given different variants of a law to live by, one of those groups is going to discover a way to use the difference in the laws to gain an economic, social, or political advantage over the other group. As soon as that happens, you've got state-mandated discrimination, and we already know how that turns out.
- Travis 16y agoNot necessarily always the case. Anyway, the author isn't suggesting that we do this in all areas of society. Just the ones that fit the experimental structure pretty well. Using the articles examples of education and crime -- seems pretty difficult to imagine criminals gaining advantages over each other b/c they had different rehab experiences. Also, "[using] the difference in the laws to gain an ... advantage" does not equal state mandated discrimination. It's more of a state-accepted, or allowed, discrimination. State mandated discrimination is something a little more explicit, like when Zimbabwe's President Mugabe enacted laws that took land from one racial group and bequeathed it to another.
- lutorm 16y agoThere are already ways in which people are given different variants of a law to live by, perhaps due to selective enforcement and because people with wealth and power are given a lot more slack than nobodys. Compared to that, these sorts of experiments, limited in both scope and deployment, seem quite reasonable.
- Travis 16y agoThe article actually explicitly discusses your first point: that people can be affected by the experiment. It's called Hawthorne's Law, and the author discusses what types of laws might be good / bad to perform these tests on. Your second paragraph isn't particularly applicable, because what you're describing doesn't meet the requirements to be considered a double blind randomized trial, modeling after drug testing policies.