The democratic world is stuck in a self-destructive, self-reinforcing loop: unforced policy errors lead to desperate gambles both by politicians and voters, leading to yet more unforced policy errors. I think it’s safe to say that there is room for improvement. But what might a better path look like?

It sometimes pays to look for a very different perspective, and I’ve found one in an “abbreviated and extemporaneous” lecture given in 1971 to the American Psychological Association, unpublished for many years, and yet even today worth serious attention. That lecture was titled “Methods for the Experimenting Society” and it was given by an academic, Donald T Campbell. It’s partly a manifesto arguing for the use of more rigorous randomised trials in evaluating public policy, but it’s much more than that.

Campbell begins: “The experimenting society will be one which will vigorously try out proposed solutions to recurrent problems, which will make hard-headed and multidimensional evaluations of the outcomes, and which will move on to try other alternatives when evaluation shows one reform to have been ineffective or harmful. We do not have such a society today.”