In 1987, Peter Rossi wrote,
The Iron Law of Evaluation: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero.”
The Iron Law arises from the experience that few impact assessments of large scale2 social programs have found that the programs in question had any net impact. The law also means that, based on the evaluation efforts of the last twenty years, the best a priori estimate of the net impact assessment of any program is zero, i.e., that the program will have no effect.
The Stainless Steel Law of Evaluation: “The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero.”
This law means that the more technically rigorous the net impact assessment, the more likely are its results to be zero—or not effect. Specifically, this law implies that estimating net impacts through randomized controlled experiments, the avowedly best approach to estimating net impacts, is more likely to show zero effects than other less rigorous approaches. [pg5]
The Brass Law of Evaluation: “The more social programs are designed to change individuals, the more likely the net impact of the program will be zero.”
This law means that social programs designed to rehabilitate individuals by changing them in some way or another are more likely to fail. The Brass Law may appear to be redundant since all programs, including those designed to deal with individuals, are covered by the Iron Law. This redundancy is intended to emphasize the especially difficult task in designing and implementing effective programs that are designed to rehabilitate individuals.
I arrived at this by following Tyler Cowen’s recommendation to check out Gwern and starting to read the latter’s essay on why correlation is so frequent and causation is so rare.
My comments on the Rossi article.
1. James Manzi had very similar thoughts in Uncontrolled. Is that correlation or causation? Concerning the “brass law,” Manzi said that you are more likely to effect change by taking people’s nature as given and changing their incentives.
2. Imagine how much more often we would see these sorts of results if it were not for social desirability bias in reporting on interventions.
I think Rossi describes a common reoccurring pattern but I don’t think it has the determinism required to qualify as a “law”. For instance, there is a long history of large scale social programs that had expectations of positive results but ultimately ended in massive negative-sum catastrophes (e.g. Chavez’s Venezuela, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Hitler’s Germany, etc.). I think Rossi’s Iron/Stainless-Steel Law has a built-in assumption that an “orderly liberal meritocracy” is the starting point and that designed large scale social interventions, that fall outside of the scope of improving the orderly liberal meritocracy, do not make a positive-sum contribution over time.
As another Canadian example, David Henderson has written about the impact of Finance Minister Paul Martin’s fiscal reform in the 90’s.
Rossi’s Law needs its scope redefined in order to accommodate/exclude the recent Venezuelan and Canadian examples.
“Manzi said that you are more likely to effect change by taking people’s nature as given and changing their incentives.”
That’s a good definition of “conservatism” (specifically, Null Hypothesis Conservatism), and my guess is that it is linguistically supplanting “civilization vs barbarism” as the conservative language of politics, as regards Human Nature the axis is “Realism vs Utopianism” (that is, “Real vs Fake”).
That also raises the question of whether libertarian language will change, now that some people are advocating evolution in a different discretion. The liberal libertarianism speaks the same axis language as progressivism. What about pragmatic, conservative libertarianism?
Perhaps a stoic language of “limited vs unlimited”, empirically and morally. Limits imposed by nature, and limits of the ethics of individual liberty and wisdom about unintended consequences.
“Accept what you cannot change, and even for what you can, mind your own business.”
Golden Sum Liberal?: Golden Rule + Positive Sum + Classical Liberal
I don’t think we speak the same axis language as progressives. They see large profits as exploitation a priori. They see all inequality as oppression a priori. Classical Liberal style Libertarians follow an “innocent until proven guilty” approach on oppression/exploitation and we think the evidence is pretty clear: systematic oppression/exploitation is negligible and perhaps fully eliminated.
Perhaps people and communities are not fungible. Perhaps as we are seeing with medicine, a personalized or localized approach will out-perform the one-size must fit all paradigm. Perhaps the principle of subsidiarity is reflected in these laws. May top-down command style approaches favored by the elites are more about advancing their interests than those they purport to serve. Maybe smaller jurisdictions and decentralization offer advantages and fulfill values that mass production on social services assembly lines can’t.
I probably agree with the thrust of this post, and yet I have always pondered why in certain cultures and times it has been acceptable to embrace barbarity.
For example, ancient Romans liked to watch people being hacked to death in the old Collosseum. Would their descendents enjoy such a spectacle or would they have unaffected horror?
So, what happened? Why would ancient Romans be so different from today’s Romans, assuming more or less the same gene pool?
Not so different: I have no doubt plenty of people today would pay good money to see Roman style games, or to watch a hanging. It’s the law that forbids it, not the lack of demand in the market.
Because civilization accumulates and distributes knowledge in an emergent and positive sum fashion that exceeds the capacity of our best individual minds or the top group of minds given the Dunbar limit to coordinated action.
As Handle darkly broods about the crooked timber of humanity, it might be helpful to acknowledge the miracle that is implied in your (Benjamin Cole’s) question. We are a eusocial species with a twist; we can dynamically adapt our eusocial behavior without genetic modification.
As for the mechanism underlying the reduction in bloodlust, I think it is useful to look at it through the lens of the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule itself doesn’t change over time but the rule doesn’t specify what to do when violations occur; an inevitability given that humanity is made of crooked timber. I claim it is the response to Golden Rule violations that is evolving socially in a general direction towards minimizing violence. It was once acceptable to respond with disproportional violence to an insult or misdeed but this is no longer the case.
Traditionalists have been living this truth for millennia. The Christian concept of sin and forgiveness, turn the other cheek, is an important manifestation of this process. Handle is right that it’s “the law that forbids it”, but it is not formal law that is crucial it is the informal law that emerges from our social order that matters.
Professor Prem raj Pushpakaran writes — 2020 marks the birth centenary year of Douglass Cecipl North, who pioneered the cliometrics !!!
I note that even in Gwern’s article, there is one causal axiom that is exempted from skepticism: Anthropogenic CO2 emissions cause global warning. See under “A Priori”: “but we know pirates don’t control global warming and it’s more likely something like economic development leads to suppression of piracy but also CO2 emissions.”
Also, it is odd that an article that so broadly rebukes causal intervention would propose causal interventions to restore the integrity of “correlation≠causation”.
As a skeptic, I complete agree with the a priori assumption that “Anthropogenic CO2 emissions cause global war[m]ing”. What I’m skeptical about is that: 1. the warming response of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations is linear, and 2. the non-linear response of CO2 will be catastrophic, and 3. the recent warming trends are mostly due to CO2 and not part of the longer 100ky Cryosphere/Milankovich cycles.
I think skeptics make the mistake of not making a distinction between the relatively weak consensus statements about global warming and the assumption that this warming will be catastrophic.
Global Warming Interventionists need to answer one question: why will global warming be catastrophic rather than beneficial?