the cost of government are all assessed
upon the people you know I believe in
government there are things that can't
do of course but I think the government
has had a positive effect in the lives
of millions of people and yet no matter
where you fall on the political spectrum
it's hard to argue with those who
criticize government for the way that it
allocates and spends the money that it
takes out of our paychecks the US
government is a vast bureaucracy prone
to waste and redundant spending and this
is because it doesn't do what most of us
would consider to be common sense it
doesn't make decisions based on evidence
by setting priorities and making sure
tax dollars are spent wisely American
can be compassionate and responsible at
the same time let me just give you an
example of what I'm talking about in
2005 George W Bush signed the deficit
reduction Act and that bill set up a
council to figure out how many federal
programs were spending money on things
that were actually working the council
found that for example the government
was funding a hundred and five stem
education initiatives totaling three
billion dollars in 2006 of those one
hundred and five only ten had
evaluations that were scientifically
worth Adem and of those ten just four
were found to be effective
four out of one hundred and five for
three billion dollars you can find ugly
statistics like that all throughout the
government and the reason is because
spending decisions in Washington and in
the states too by the way are made on
things like costs on public opinion on
the pressure from lobbyists and on the
particular political ideology of parties
and politicians in other words
everything but evidence I mean you read
essays on evidence-based policy and you
invariably come across sentences like
the rise and promotion of evidence based
orientations within government agencies
is consistent with the public sectors
increased interest in efficiency and
effectiveness as if before they were
primarily concerned with inefficiency
and ineffectiveness back to the video
everything about life and our
technocratic society is hyper efficient
I mean Google just came out with a
function for web searching within the
messaging app because switching apps is
you know like really unproductive I
think the feeling is that we are getting
more efficient by orders of magnitude
while government is just taking a lot of
time switching between apps the result
of that is frustration and the result of
frustration is one of the great
sleazebags of our time why can't we use
science and evidence to improve
government how would it even work while
applying evidence to social programs
involves a few things but the most
important is something called randomized
control trials this means randomly
selecting a large number of people
splitting them into two groups where one
group gets the benefits of the
programming question while the other
group the control group doesn't and
these groups are monitored over a long
period taken from medicine randomized
control trials are the gold standard for
determining how effective something
really is a government can apply this to
policy by offering money only to the
programs that do this kind of research
and by attaching the condition that
scientifically rigorous evaluations must
be kept up over time or the money will
disappear now of course if you're going
to go down this road you have to be
willing to hear results that you might
not like one of the most rigorous
studies ever in this field for example
was the head start impact study plan
during the Clinton years implemented
during the Bush years and reported just
before Obama's re-election in 2012 the
study found that Head Start a program
that aimed to help children in poverty
had by the end of the third grade
very few impacts in any of the four
domains of cognitive social emotional
health and parenting practices at a cost
of 8 billion dollars a year to the
taxpayer those were pretty shocking
findings now the question is does poor
spending mean that funding should be cut
for poverty programs or that we should
scale back on stem initiatives I don't
think so in fact I think we should
increase spending on both what the money
should be given to stuff that works I
mean it just makes sense question we
asked today is not whether our
government is too big or too small
but whether it works where the answer is
yes we intend to move forward where the
answer is no programs will end major
kudos has to be given to the Obama
administration for facing the headstart
results squarely and ordering a full
review of one of the signature pieces of
liberal legislation in the 20th century
in fact evidence-based policy has been a
cornerstone of the Obama agenda and some
key areas there have been some major
by using a competitive model of funding
that requires strong standards of
evidence evidence-based policy doesn't
work for everything but that any
administration managed to shoehorn
science in among the other legislative
pressures is a major accomplishment of
course you won't ever hear about
accomplishments like this on the news
because this stuff is incredibly boring
but that's part of the problem under the
sensationalism of the media and the
squabbling of political parties there is
a deep boring ocean of governance where
tedious but crucial work is being done
every day I think it's part of our
responsibility to wade into that ocean
every once in a while and tune out the
noise if you do who knows maybe you'll
find something in there that'll make you
believe in government - hey everybody
thanks for watching I have to give a
heartfelt thanks to everybody who
supports this channel on patreon by
pledging $1 in $3 per video because that
allows me to put a lot of work into a
video like this with ideas that I think
are important and fascinating but not
very clickbait so thank you for that
freedom I don't take it lightly and I'll
see you guys next Wednesday