ABSTRACT
In the field of medicine, public policies based on rigorous evidence have produced extraordinary advances in health since the mid-twentieth century. By contrast, in many other areas of policy—such as education, poverty reduction, welfare and employment, health care financing and delivery, crime and justice, substance-abuse prevention, and foreign aid—government programs often are implemented with little regard to evidence, costing billions of dollars yet failing to address critical needs of our society. However, in these areas rigorous evaluations have identified a few highly effective interventions (i.e., programs, practices, and strategies), suggesting that a concerted government strategy to develop such interventions, and spur their widespread use, could bring rapid progress to many key policy areas similar to the way in which policies transformed medicine. This chapter advocates a major government effort to (1) increase the number of rigorous evaluations, in order to build the knowledge base of interventions proven to produce meaningful improvements in participants’ lives; and (2) facilitate and/or incentivize the widespread use of these research-proven interventions.
