Some notes about limits to governmental experiments:
As I understand, it would be a grave violation of medical and scientific ethics to experiment on somebody, in possibly dangerous ways, without their consent. Government actions routinely lack the consent of some of the people being acted upon. The cases are therefore not parallel. Since consent to a proposed policy measure is likely highly correlated with political affiliations, a randomlzed trial is likely to exacerbate the problem.
Moreover, I think experimenting on citizens is likely to dangerously reduce the legitimacy of the government. Much of government’s claim to authority is that it’s good for the citizens. Being experimented upon without consent might very easily NOT be good for the citizens concerned. “You are using us as guinea pigs for your harebrained social engineering experiments that resulted in negative consequence X” seems like a powerful election slogan.
Some experiments are probably in violation of national constitutions. It’s a very basic principle of liberal democracy to treat all citizens equally and under the same laws. So you’d have a problem if you tried to experiment, e.g., with giving some people different rights or duties than others.
I must say, my assumption was very much this. But as far as I can make out, we are currently planning to trial certain things such as experimenting with different jail times: which I’m surprised got past an ethics committee, so to speak.
In Britain, the only likely risk is if it breaks human rights: we don’t have a constitution in quite the same way.
Of course, you could let people opt-in to the trial, but to make it meaningful you’d have to only provide the new service/approach to some people who opted in.
It’s odd that in some ways the idea of a deliberate trial with the aim of getting the best policy seems less shocking than devolving power and having a host of different approches spring up naturally.
Some notes about limits to governmental experiments:
As I understand, it would be a grave violation of medical and scientific ethics to experiment on somebody, in possibly dangerous ways, without their consent. Government actions routinely lack the consent of some of the people being acted upon. The cases are therefore not parallel. Since consent to a proposed policy measure is likely highly correlated with political affiliations, a randomlzed trial is likely to exacerbate the problem.
Moreover, I think experimenting on citizens is likely to dangerously reduce the legitimacy of the government. Much of government’s claim to authority is that it’s good for the citizens. Being experimented upon without consent might very easily NOT be good for the citizens concerned. “You are using us as guinea pigs for your harebrained social engineering experiments that resulted in negative consequence X” seems like a powerful election slogan.
Some experiments are probably in violation of national constitutions. It’s a very basic principle of liberal democracy to treat all citizens equally and under the same laws. So you’d have a problem if you tried to experiment, e.g., with giving some people different rights or duties than others.
I must say, my assumption was very much this. But as far as I can make out, we are currently planning to trial certain things such as experimenting with different jail times: which I’m surprised got past an ethics committee, so to speak.
In Britain, the only likely risk is if it breaks human rights: we don’t have a constitution in quite the same way.
Of course, you could let people opt-in to the trial, but to make it meaningful you’d have to only provide the new service/approach to some people who opted in.
It’s odd that in some ways the idea of a deliberate trial with the aim of getting the best policy seems less shocking than devolving power and having a host of different approches spring up naturally.