WE CAN'T DO EVIDENCE-BASED POLICY WITHOUT EVIDENCE

Make it easy, make it personal, make it salient. It's not rocket science, it's somewhere between common sense and psychology 101, and that goes a long way.

From Conversation:

Richard H. Thaler

[11.7.12]

Topic:

CULTURE

Example one: GPS. Now we all have our phones that tell us how to find things. That's how I found you in your hotel here from my hotel. We forget where does that come from. The government sent up satellites as part of the Defense Department initiative. Twenty years ago, in the Clinton Administration, they made the decision to make those data available to the public. Originally they added a little bit of error, but then they got rid of that. They provide that data for free and that's the way our cars tell us where to go, our phones tell us where to go. All the government had to do to generate this hundreds of billions of dollars a year industry was to take data they already owned and give it away to the marketplace, and then let the market work its magic. That's example one... Go to conversation

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