way of adding a scientific veneer to their ideology (which is essentially faith-based, as all economic ideologies are)? jimjial said, Great paper -- hopefully some politicians can be persuaded that RCTs can form a crucial part of policy making. Some comments do seem a little bit over-optimistic about the potential applications. Some comments point out that different people might be pursuing different policy goals. But I think a more important issue is that it is very difficult to come up with a control for many policy decisions. For example, it would be really great if someone could come up with an RCT to help set interest rates. Another big stumbling block is that it takes a lot longer than a parliamentary term to evaluate some of the most important policies. Try telling Michael Gove that his changes to education policy need to be evaluated over a 10 year period before we can have any evidence to support their wholesale introduction! auntbea said, May I ask who the intended audience of this piece is? Perhaps it is different here in the US, but as someone in the social science/politics/policy community, everyone I work with either runs experiments, uses quasi-experimental methods, or acknowledges experiments as the gold standard. There must be *at least* fifty organizations, not including universities, that run policy experiments. A large portion of these studies are commissioned by the government, politicians, or political parties. As to why politicians don't always use RCT evidence in their policy making, well, there