Well.....Well....Well...

[Dill]

(06-26-2018, 04:44 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: I had a little back and forth with a conservative person I follow on Twitter that works at RSI. She was discussing how amazed she was at how little policy (including laws) are made based on evidence. Instead, it is based almost exclusively on special interests, "gut" feelings, things of that nature. Evidence based policy is the goal for people like me, and this includes many think tanks out there as well as most public servants, but it just doesn't happen.

I was talking about how true this was and how even though this person and I would likely disagree on many things, we would be able to provide evidence for our positions. Evidence can point you in different directions, but the data helps to provide a (nearly) objective starting point at which to compromise and come to an agreement. We haven't been able to collect data to the degree we are able to today until very recently, but in the past 30-40 years there has been an attack on the wonks. The people whose job it used to be to craft policy have been pushed out of Congressional offices and replaced with lobbyists that are writing the legislation. The wonks that are left in the government are not consulted as they once were, officials preferring to give deference to special interests that will then cut them checks come campaign time.

I agree this is a disturbing trend--leaving it to lobbyists to write legislation.

Could there be another dimension to this problem? Think of climate change. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that it is anthropogenic. Even Exxon agrees. But half or more of the public does not.  This despite plenty of news reports and easily available information.

Part of the problem is that opponents of climate change also claim to use an evidence-base model, and while theirs is unconvincing and unscientific to the scientific community, it looks like science to the public.  Or close enough so there appears to be legitimate disagreement among authorities, so why implement policies which will raise the cost of living (by lowering profits in the extraction industries) if we don't know for sure?

Responsibility for governing still rests ultimately with "the people"; but they don't seem to think so, or are uninterested unless personal interests are at stake.  Not knowing how government works, or the history of policy, does not seem a problem to many. "who's to say who knows and who doesn't?" settles the question for too many. I'm just reminiscing about at time when the public got behind big national projects like landing a man on the moon and the interstate highway system. And a lot of them got behind social "projects" as well, like civil rights.  (Now the big project is building a wall--which the majority opposes.) Some of those grand accomplishments of the past were possible because technical, social and political authority was less fragmented than at present, even though it was constantly questioned