What Can Social Policy Analysts and Planners Learn from Social Experiments?

Abstract

In this article I examine the income maintenance experiments of 1968-1978 for clues as to how experimental and observational statistical-economic studies relate to social policymaking. I argue that techniques such as social experimentation involve anomalies and are very limited in what they can reveal about the historically evolving social world. If they are science, it is only in a weak sense. My conclusion is that courses in politics and history should share center stage with economics and statistics courses in curricula in planning and public policy. And economics and statistics courses should focus on the conceptual anomalies of their subjects so that students learn the limitations of statistical-economic studies for social policymaking.

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