Data's eye view

Since I quit academia in 2009 (one might have said the rot set in long before that) I’ve had an irrational aversion to reading or listening to anything intellectual. But during the long drive home yesterday, having finally tired of the mindnumbing thump of Radio 1 I tuned into Ben Goldacre’s R4 programme on RCTs in public policy.

Now a deep-seated reason for leaving the civil service is that I am utterly hopeless at numbers. And from where I sat within the Treasury the rise of the onus on the measurable and the drive to quantify tested to destruction many aspects of public services that I idealised and as a wet liberal socialist, I wanted to see restored. Frequently translated into crude and moronic measures by self-serving and upward-looing middle managers at the frontline, the results often served to subvert our understanding of wider outcomes for objectives or a set of narrowly defined figures and so deprive professionals of the discretion, judgement and ability to tailor decisions and actions in ways that could help their clients whose lives and circumstances were often highly complex and multi-dimensional.

Listening to Goldacre’s plea for more, and better research in public policy gave rise to divided emotions. On the one hand, how could any rational being oppose the call for better and more research that can help us identify “what works”. How could the ideal of disinterested scientific pursuit of the truth be in any sense culpable for adverse or ineffective policy outcomes? Surely any examples of failure are better explained by a failure to apply the scientific method properly? Or perhaps the failure of the policy-maker to interpret the results that can enlighten and improve policy design?

On the other hand, the journey towards this very holy grail of public policy is full of pitfalls. It is not so much that I believe that human irrationality or vested interests will inevitably undermine the process (I maintain a belief that certain well-regulated societies are capable of keeping these at bay) but rather a scepticism that aggregate numbers can tell enough of a meaningful story about improvements in some of the more important aspects of wellbeing in individuals' lives. I am thinking here of persons' moral progress, mental well-being and the condition of their social relationships and environment. I will no doubt be accused of falling into the "holistic" camp and of posing vague and non constructive objections but I can't help feeling that at the root of this is the unwillingness of social scientists to embrace a fully normative, person-centred conception of human well-being. What however that bodes for public policy I still haven't quite figured out.