Today, marks the death of evidence-based policymaking in the British government. According to your tastes, you can either mourn its passing or celebrate the new, more ideological decision making. But dead it is. This is clear from today’s Cabinet Office document -the State of the Nation report – a report mostly about social policy.
We will have to see whether the explicit disregard for evidence in the report is continued into UK fiscal and monetary policy.
Chapter 5 of the report deals with “severe problems in the UK today related to family breakdown”. It notes that “family breakdown is associated with a number of poor outcomes for the adults and children involved”. Relationship breakdown is associated with ill-health among adults and worse educational and behavioural outcomes among children. As evidence, the report cites a few facts, including that:
Children in lone-parent and stepfamilies are twice as likely to be in the bottom 20 per cent of child outcomes as children in married families.
Fine, that’s a correlation. It is true and there are many more like this. But don’t we know that there is almost no evidence that these correlations are causal? Isn’t it the case that rather than marriage causing better outcomes for children, the kids of stable, married parents do better than those of cohabiting parents or lone parents because their richer, more loving and better educated parents are also more likely to get married. Absolutely, according to the Cabinet Office report:
Research indicates that outcome gaps vary significantly within family structures and are relatively small compared with socio-economic factors, while separation may in fact benefit children where there are high levels of parental conflict.
Evidence, schmevidence. For the new government, correlations count more than causal relationships. The next paragraph says:
Nevertheless, the strong evidence linking the experience of family breakdown and dysfunction to poorer outcomes for both adults and children indicates the importance of family structure and home environment for policy.
It does nothing of the sort. I will return to some of the fiscal implications of the report later in the day.
