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Joining the IoI as an associate is a way of showing your support for our efforts to create a public space where ideas can be contested without restraint. To join the Institute of Ideas, please select click the appropriate link below, or print and return this form. Session: Policy-based evidence? In his first appearance before the cross-party House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, universities and science minister David Willetts conceded that it is impossible to make policy solely on the basis of scientific evidence.
Yet despite this, politicians today rarely make policy statements without citing ‘the evidence’. Whether it’s the Chancellor’s avowed enthusiasm for the ‘empirical evidence about how people really behave’ furnished by behavioural economics and social psychology, or Iain Duncan Smith’s claim that ‘neuroscience tells us categorically’ that government intervention is best targeted in the first three years of a child’s life, politicians seem keener than ever to cite experts’ findings. Science and politics certainly seem locked in a new embrace. Willetts himself boasts that his recent book, The Pinch, ‘drew on insights from neuroscience, evolutionary biology and game theory’.