The dangers of policy-based evidence

Forecaster James Woudhuysen warned this afternoon that governments are displaying a dangerous “infatuation with forecasting”.

So often, he said, it goes wrong: the CIA failed to predict the Cold War, the much feared Millennium Bug fizzled out when midnight struck in 2000; and health scares regularly turn to dust.

The CIA’s failure, Woudhuysen suggested, was a result of “policy-based evidence” - the US government wanted to feel that the Soviet Union was a menace, so the CIA told it so.

“We see much more policy-based evidence than evidence-based policy nowadays,” he said.

Woudhuysen also bemoaned the western tendency to turn away from technology as a possible solution for problems such as climate change, because of the cost and commitment involved. Picking a fight with the green movement, he insisted that technology, rather than psychology or “behaviour control” are the key to overcoming these challenges.

Woudhuysen’s talk was something of a catch-all rant, squeezing in everything that has got on his nerves recently - including overcrowding on the London Underground, which provided him with the only concrete forecast of the afternoon: “The way things are going, there’s going to be a fire on the Central Line within the next year or two, and a lot of people are going to die.”

But the audience were less concerned with the comfort of Woudhuysen’s morning commute than with what advice he could offer research practitioners.

The best way to predict the future, he concluded, is to invent it.

“It’s the advice that you give to your clients about what they do next that can make a great difference to living standards and to the optimism of the world.”