2021-03-25
46 分钟Why do so many promising solutions — in education, medicine, criminal justice, etc. — fail to scale up into great policy? And can a new breed of “implementation scientists” crack the code?
Hey there.
Steven Dubner.
Most episodes of freakonomics radio involve or are even built around academic research.
Obviously we think this research is interesting, even important.
But the sad fact is that a great deal of academic research, even the best stuff, often remains stuck in research land.
Converting it into policy or behavior change is a whole other proposition.
I've been thinking about this dilemma lately, as we are a few months into a new presidential administration here in the US.
Yes, some of the Biden administrations policy ideas plainly have a political component, but there's also a lot of proposed policy that's drawn from or at least tightly connected to academic research around things like poverty, healthcare, education, wages, energy, so on.
We will be exploring a lot of that research based policy over the coming months on this show.
But first I wanted to play for you a very relevant episode we made last year just before the pandemic.
It is about how rare it is for good academic research to be turned into good policy.
This isnt all about blaming policymakers and politicians.
Some of the failure has to be attributed to the researchers themselves.
As we tried to make clear in the title of this episode, its called policymaking is not a science yet, and it starts right now.
Usually when children are born deaf, they call it nerve deafness, but it's really not the actual nerve.
It's little tiny hair cells in the cochlea.
Dana Suskind is a physician scientist at the University of Chicago.
And more dramatically, she is a pediatric surgeon who specializes in cochlear implants.
My job is to implant this incredible piece of technology which bypasses these defective hair cells and takes the sound from the environment, the acoustic sound, and transforms it into electrical energy, which then stimulates the nerve.
And somebody who is severe to completely profoundly deaf after implantation can have normal levels of hearing.