The Right Books

These are days of revolution in the social sciences, and this time the rebels have a proper cause. At Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins, and other unlikely outposts of sedition, cold-eyed empiricists have been measuring received opinions against the benchmarks of experience. And what they have discovered is that the reigning ideology of social uplift has produced a series of egregious failures. Take the readouts where you will—education, employment, health care—the verdict is the same: rather than solving social problems for us, federal intervention has managed to create them.

These studies are the more persuasive because the people turning them out have no observable axe to grind. By and large, they share or sympathize with the goal of doing good through government, and are loath to use such cutting words as fraud or failure. It is just that they had this strange idea of asking whether the theory worked—and found, consistently, that it didn’t. The result is a growing, and extremely useful, literature of lost illusions.

MS

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M. Stanton Evans

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These are days of revolution in the social sciences, and this time the rebels have a proper cause. At Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins, and other unlikely outposts of sedition, cold-eyed empiricists have been measuring received opinions against the benchmarks of experience. And what they have discovered is that the reigning ideology of social uplift has produced a series of egregious failures. Take the readouts where you will—education, employment, health care—the verdict is the same: rather than solving social problems for us, federal intervention has managed to create them.

These studies are the more persuasive because the people turning them out have no observable axe to grind. By and large, they share or sympathize with the goal of doing good through government, and are loath to use such cutting words as fraud or failure. It is just that they had this strange idea of asking whether the theory worked—and found, consistently, that it didn’t. The result is a growing, and extremely useful, literature of lost illusions.