A New York Times news article asserts that Keynsianism is being ignored in Europe. Instead of stimulating their economies by borrowing and spending or cutting taxes, European governments are tightening their belts. Writing specifically about the looming cuts in Britain, Paul Krugman sees disaster ahead.

On the other hand, European countries have institutionalized Keynsianism (to a degree) by creating social welfare entitlements. When people are entitled to extensive unemployment benefits, as unemployment rises, state spending can soar. In Germany, for example, people who are laid off get between 60 percent and 67 percent of their former income as government benefits, plus health care. Thus I thought that perhaps the current round of budget cutting in Europe was only a course correction after a lot of automatic Keynsian stimulus.

You can measure spending lots of ways, and I ran the numbers for gross government expenditures in nominal dollars and as a percent of GDP. But I decided that the clearest story about governments’ decision-making was the trend in their annual expenditures compared to their own pre-recession baselines. Here is that comparison, based originally on IMF data:

It’s interesting that the US has had the largest stimulus, despite our relatively weak policies for automatically raising entitlement spending in recessions, and despite our alleged resistance to government. The stimulus began under Bush and actually leveled off under Obama. Likewise, Britain has more modest social welfare policies than those in Germany and France, yet British spending has increased more than theirs. As we look forward, the spending line is likely to flatten out in the US but decline in Britain.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach. We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely. We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer. We need the courage of the young. Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you. May every one of us be granted the courage, the faith and the vision to give the best that is in us to that remaking!

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Oglethorpe University Commencement Address (22 May 1932)

I think FDR’s words apply today–to the letter–because our problems are as serious, and our understanding of what will fix them is as tentative and preliminary, as it was in 1932. Once again, we especially need a new generation to be social innovators. But I would distinguish between two forms of “experimentation.”

1. Looking for “cures,” replicable programs and strategies that are proven to work. This is a very popular goal today (consider the Department of Education’s What Works database). The major analogy is to bench science, and the hope is to find treatments for social ills that work as reliably as chemicals that kill harmful microbes on contact. A social entrepreneur is someone who invents a new solution, proves that it works, and helps it spread through society, rather like Jonas Salk with the polio vaccine.

2. Tinkering: setting up programs that embody one’s profound ethical commitments and theories of society and then experimenting in order to improve their impact or–if they consistently fail, scrapping them and moving on. (As FDR advised, sometimes you have to “admit [failure] frankly and try another” approach.)

One of the flash-points today is the proper role of randomized experiments with control groups. (See, for example, this New York Daily News story headlined, “200 families on brink of homelessness being treated like ‘rats in lab experiment'”.) Randomized experiments do raise ethical questions about the treatment of the people in the studies. But they can be handled ethically, and they are powerful tools for determining what works. I think they have special promise as part of a “tinkering” strategy.

Experiments are actually rather simple and accessible tools for practitioners to use in program-improvement. Imagine, for example, that you are running a program that depends on regular meetings, and you need good turnout. Who shows up seems to depend on when you schedule the meeting, but you aren’t sure whether recent changes in the meeting time have helped because there are many other factors in play (the weather, the subject of the meetings, and so on). You can answer the question with a simple experiment. Randomly divide the next ten meetings into two groups: say, evenings and Saturdays. Count the total number of people who attend the two categories. If one is much better than the other, go for that. No fancy math, survey design, or other research skills are required.

If many organizations routinely applied experimental designs, they could become more effective, and that would help society. Randomization is merely a tool; they would also need a general ethic of experimentation and rigorous self-review.

But often randomized experimentation is motivated by a faith in a shorter path. The hope is to identify big cures that can be quickly “taken to scale” after experiments prove they work. This hope is likely illusory.

A randomized experiment can prove that a social intervention works; its success was not caused by other factors, such as the participants’ enthusiasm. But an experiment cannot prove that the same intervention would work in different contexts. To find real “cures,” one would have to replicate success in many contexts. But experimental results rarely replicate when human beings and communities are involved.

One reason is that the roots of problems lie in human motivations and choices. Often, the chief culprits are not the people directly in view as one experiments, such as the delinquent adolescents who are enrolled in a program. The real fault may lie with policymakers, business leaders, and other people out of view. But in any case, human intelligence and will are involved. So when one intervenes, all the affected parties adjust and seek their own goals, often frustrating the intervention. Microbes don’t respond that way. It is true that bugs can evolve to develop resistance, but human change is deliberate and immediate, not evolutionary.

Besides, many of the most important factors that determine human well-being are not programs or interventions that we can possibly offer to people or assign them to. An example of a program would be a community-service opportunity that students can be required to take or else rewarded for choosing. That is worth assessing with a randomized experiment. But consider a community service activity that kids develop completely on their own. That might be more important and valuable than a program, yet there is no point in assigning individuals to such an experience; it is essential that they created it. Or consider a community, like the city of Somerville, MA, where I am writing this paragraph. There are good things and bad things about Somerville as a context for human development, and we should understand its pros and cons and tinker with its elements as citizens. But Somerville wasn’t designed by anyone, nor can people be assigned to live there (without changing it dramatically). Somerville emerged from three centuries of choices and work by countless powerful and relatively powerless people. If you try to replicate its positive aspects elsewhere, you will be creating something entirely different.

In short, I believe in “bold, persistent experimentation.” I take “experimentation” literally and believe that techniques developed for scientific experiments, such as randomized control groups, have value. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that there are cures waiting to be discovered. Persistent experimentation is the key: constantly refining our programs and projects in the light of the best available evidence.

Here I am on CBS News, talking about youth voting:

We’ve been doing a lot of press work, and reporters’ main questions seem to be: “Why are young people disconnected?” and “What will the decline in their enthusiasm mean for the Democrats?” The implied baseline is usually 2008, when more than half of young people voted, two-thirds of them supported Barack Obama, and more than four percent said they had volunteered for a campaign. You don’t need polls to demonstrate that youth enthusiasm is lower today than it was then: in fact, we could have predicted that years ago.

Consistently, 25-30 percent of young people vote in midterm elections–half as many as in presidential years. Thus I think the appropriate baseline is 2006. Compared to that year, I am not sure that youth enthusiasm is down now. We’ll have to wait for the actual election to know.

In any case, it makes good strategic sense for the president–and the newly energized libertarian right–to try to engage young people. Young adults will not vote at the rates we expect in presidential years, but their turnout could range from, say, 23-33 percent, and that difference would matter for the election’s outcome. Rigorous research shows that young people’s decision to vote is sensitive to whether they were contacted by campaigns. The Obama moderate left, the libertarian right, or both could build lasting constituencies by enlisting significant numbers of young people.

“Transparency” means making the government’s decisions public–along with all potential influences on government–so that the results will be better: less corrupt, more fair, wiser. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” said Louis Brandeis, and his theory has many proponents today.

One thing that has changed since Brandeis’s day is the sheer volume of decisions and possible influences. In 2004, federal administrative agencies published 78,851 pages of proposed rules. That does not count determinations by federal administrative law judges, provisions in contracts between federal agencies and grantees, or the policy decisions that those contractors make. The legislative branch, meanwhile, produces reams of policy in the form of appropriations bills and riders, earmarks and other detailed instructions in statutes, and committee reports. And flowing into government are countless campaign contributions, uncoordinated campaign expenditures, bids, lawsuits, and lobbying contacts.

It was not always so. The government during the New Deal and the Great Society made much more momentous decisions, but far fewer of them. For example, the Federal Register (which presents proposed federal rules) was 30 times longer during the supposed anti-regulatory regime of George W. Bush than it had been during the first term of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was rapidly changing society. From the 1930s through the early 1970s, Congress was almost always considering some kind of “landmark” legislation, whether conservative or liberal, that drew the attention of the nation and that plausibly promised to change America. Only a few such bills have even been seriously considered since 1980. Yet routine decisions are made off the the floor of Congress at an enormous rate and with great cumulative effect.

This trend is no accident. It serves the interests of professional politicians, administrators, and lobbyists to avoid big, public decisions in favor of routine administration, negotiation, and deal-making. Also, the public lacks the political will for difficult choices and real changes of course. I strongly supported the health reform of 2010, but in its tentativeness, its delegation of hard choices to agencies and panels, and its internal compromises, it exemplifies modern lawmaking. And yet it seems to have been bold enough to exhaust the whole system.

The standard “transparency” agenda is to disclose all of the routine decisions and possible influences on them. Since the volume is astounding, no individual and no mass movement can possibly pay attention. The two solutions appear to be:

1. Crowdsourcing. Get thousands of eyes on the minutiae of federal decisions and campaign finance data to reveal evidence of corruption (or simple inconsistencies and gaps in policy). These are “bugs,” and the programmer’s adage is probably right: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” (or fixable). But our worst problems aren’t bugs. They are not corrupt acts or even patterns of corruption, but official, public policies that are shortsighted, unfair, or wasteful. It doesn’t take great masses of data to show what’s wrong with them. It does take public pressure to promote solutions, and there is no evidence that transparency drives such pressure.

2. Specialization: Most people cannot pay attention to all the details of policy, but experts on watersheds can watch the EPA, reporters on Capitol Hill can scrutinize congressional office expenditures, and civil libertarians can keep an eye on Guantanamo. The problems are: (1) wealthy special interests can watch regulators at least as effectively as public interest groups do; and (2) knowing that something is wrong doesn’t do any good unless lots of other people care.

This has been a pessimistic post so far, but I actually believe there is a solution. We must free government from the morass of routine decision-making so that Congress and the president can make really consequential reforms in the form of landmark statutes. Such acts will be transparent virtually by definition. People will care about them. And they have a chance of addressing our problems. Routine decision-making cannot do that, even if it is fully transparent and thoroughly scrubbed for “bugs.”

Making data public is fine, but is not likely to make a big difference. Process reforms should emphasize codification, simplification, and new rules against the delegation of crucial decisions to administrative agencies. No thanks to the Supreme Court, campaign finance reform will now require a constitutional amendment, but at least that means that our proposals in that domain should be radical. Meanwhile, social and environmental policy should be made through large, relatively simple, landmark statutes. Even though Congress may choke on such bills, they belong high on the agenda so that people can judge what passes and what fails to pass.