I was flattered to be invited and really enjoyed it, though as usual I tried to talk about too much in the time allowed. I was delighted to be introduced by my friend Barbara Glover, who is one of those rare government bureaucrats who is both successful in government and "gets" academics and what they have to offer to the policy process.
One message that I hope got across in my talk is that Canada is way behind the Nordic and Germanic countries in Europe in terms of the data available for policy design and evaluation. This is also true in the US, but the US partially makes up for it by doing randomized social experiments, at least in the areas of labor market policy, education policy and criminal justice policy, while Canada does not.
My talk at the CEAs is a modified version of a talk I gave in Oz two years ago. The associated paper, which covers many of the same issues in textual form (and provides full citations) is on my web page here.
The SRDC folks would disagree that Canada don't do randomized social experiments. We did and we still do! e.g. MINCOME, SSP, ESP, CEIP, learn$ave, FTD, and AVID.
ReplyDeleteWhat we are doing less NOW is huge randomized social experiments. We have been doing more and more medium and small size experiments. Of course, what these smaller experiments can tell us is rather limited.