That is to say, governments in charge of deciding goals, metrics and studies/reviews will inevitably cherry-pick, pay consultants, and fund those things which selectively support their desired policy-implementations and outcomes.
You may say: "well, make the thing independent", but that's easier said than done.
You might also say: "well, it will be immediately obvious if anyone is doing this", to which i'd respond that it really isn't immediately obvious to most people, and if the efficacy of policies/metrics/evaluations were immediately obvious, we would often negate the need to be attempting/implementing the additional overhead of formally introducing evidence-based policy (since we'd commonly agree on policy and whether it worked).
Which is of course not to say that evidence/experiments is not noble or the right thing to do, but more so to point out that governance is a far tricker situation than just saying "well, we'll fix it by legislating that governments have to do the right thing..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy-based_evidence_making
That is to say, governments in charge of deciding goals, metrics and studies/reviews will inevitably cherry-pick, pay consultants, and fund those things which selectively support their desired policy-implementations and outcomes.
You may say: "well, make the thing independent", but that's easier said than done.
You might also say: "well, it will be immediately obvious if anyone is doing this", to which i'd respond that it really isn't immediately obvious to most people, and if the efficacy of policies/metrics/evaluations were immediately obvious, we would often negate the need to be attempting/implementing the additional overhead of formally introducing evidence-based policy (since we'd commonly agree on policy and whether it worked).
Which is of course not to say that evidence/experiments is not noble or the right thing to do, but more so to point out that governance is a far tricker situation than just saying "well, we'll fix it by legislating that governments have to do the right thing..."