By Ted Scheinman
Pacific Standard
Social science in America has become a political act. Evidence-based conclusions are far less modish than ideological ones, to the point where governors are changing the mission statements at public universities to forestall potentially progressive policy interventions. Our national fear of the pointy-headed has coupled with political animosity, among some on the right, toward what they perceive as touchy-feely social engineering advocated by proponents of the so-called “soft” sciences. This reflexive political aversion to social engineering is a myopic extension of small-government orthodoxy, but anyone engaged in making or disputing laws must recognize that social engineering is intrinsic in governance, and that non-intervention can be its own type of engineering—call it a “policy intervention by omission.”
Things are less dire in the United Kingdom for social scientists—but dire nonetheless. In the United States, the National Science Foundation is re-directing more and more funding from the social sciences to the “hard sciences,” with a tilt toward the STEM subjects; in the U.K., funding has also skewed toward physics and engineering and away from sociology, though at a slower rate, and without anything resembling the doctrinaire political pressures of the States.
“Social scientists may be forgiven for being troubled by U.K. trends in funding undergraduate training and the ‘impact’ agenda in research,” write professors Jonathan Michie and Cary L. Cooper in the introduction to Why the Social Sciences Matter, a new, decidedly “big picture” collection of essays on various topics of moment and how the empirical study of society has been central to our understanding of child development, marriage and divorce, crime rates, mental and physical health, and the rise and fall of economies. “Big or small,” Michie and Cooper write, “problems need solutions and solutions need to be based on accurate and suitable information, and on a proper understanding of the issues involved.” There is a subtext to some of these more straightforward pronouncements—do we really have to spell it out for you guys?—but they do need to spell it out, especially for American audiences. And so they made a book.
Read the full interview here.