ABSTRACT
Social science today is part of the policy-making process in a way that it was not a generation ago. Governments of all political persuasions, on both sides of the Atlantic, rely upon social fact-gathering and analysis on an unprecedented scale. In the United States, considerable policy interest developed during the 1960s and has continued since in the idea of a ‘negative income tax’, the basic idea being that all adults in the population would fill in a tax return, but that the poorer members of the society, whose incomes fell below the tax threshold, rather than paying tax, would themselves receive a cash payment. A common misapprehension of academic commentators on the policy-making process is that insights derived from social science have a particularly large contribution to make because they are based on factual knowledge which is rationally arrived at and applied to the problem.
