The Limits of Death Star Thinking

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The observation that most “evidence-based interventions” deliver disappointing results rhymes with something I’ve been observing in my work to improve government capacity — namely, that our entire system of law, policy and regulation is assumed to be mechanistic. Do X to get Y. Change this rule to get this outcome. And it seldom works. Most people writing laws and policies are trying to achieve a particular goal. But they take what Megan Stevenson calls an engineer’s view, which “presumes a mechanistic structure that can be predictably manipulated to achieve social goals.” In their engineer’s view, policymakers miss the ways their rules will play out in a complex, adaptive system, rather than a complicated but fundamentally deterministic one. The lawmakers who outlawed or restricted abortion in their states after the Dobbs decision, for example, hoped that fewer women would have abortions. They may have succeeded locally, but nationally, abortion rates for 2023 are up over 2020. Anothe

Why we need a new theory of change The observation that most "evidence-based interventions" deliver disappointing results rhymes with something I've been observing in my work to improve government capacity — namely, that our entire system of law, policy and regulation is assumed to be mechanistic. Do X to get Y. Change this rule to get this outcome. And it seldom works. Most people writing laws and policies are trying to achieve a particular goal. But they take what Megan Stevenson calls an engineer's view, which "presumes a mechanistic structure that can be predictably manipulated to achieve

The Limits of Death Star Thinking

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