It is high time that the scientific method was applied to the legislative process. Let me explain. Imagine that a controversial new proposal is sweeping America's cities. It is called the Business-Community Act and would impose a small tax on business transactions to finance programs designed to improve the general business climate (eg. sweeping sidewalks in front of shops etc.)
Does the act work? Does business prosper or flounder? Let's see. Well, they pass it in New York and business goes up. But they also pass it in LA and business goes down there. And different cities that pass it or don't pass it have different results. This is a common evaluation problem. Now, we could look at percentages of success or failure, but the adoption of the measure in a particular municipality is decidedly nonrandom. It depends on the local politics which is itself largely dependant on the very local economy the act is designed to influence.
So, if we really want to find out if the idea is worth its salt, we need another approach. Imagine that New York does not pass the act in full. Instead it decides that, as a test, the act should be enforced only in certain RANDOMLY SELECTED (this part is important) neighborhoods or business sectors for a trial period. Ie. They only collect the tax and sweep the streets in the selected areas or sectors. At the end of the test, the differences in results can be analyzed, and only then will we truly know if the proposal works.
Of course this concept of experimental legislation is not a perfect solution to all problems. Many will say that it violates principles of fairness. Certainly it would be inappropriate to use this method to, for example, determine the efficacy of capital punishment in dettering murder (one shudders at the thought), but I think it can serve an important purpose for non criminal matters.
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Theres already 52 experimental areas in USA.In the UK there used to be only 3 legal areas.It was quite common to try something out in Scotland before introducing it in England&Wales. e.g. The disastrous polltax.
Surely you are back to Californias experiments possibly spreading to the other states. Particularly on pollution/energy conservation.
I am afraid you misunderstand. As explained in my post, there is a problem in evaluating the effectiveness of legislation in various areas because the choice of adoption in an area is nonrandom, ie. biased. One can argue that other factors that prompted the law's adoption also caused an observed positive result. Here is an imperfect example. Imagine that in London there is great general motivation to, I don't know, reduce smoking. The tax on cigarettes is increased, but there a general social ostracizing of smoking and smokers also develops. After a while, the smoking rate declines. Now is this due to the tax, or is it just due to antismoking social mores? Well, I don't know, and I'll never be able to find out because there is a distinct bias of generally smoking-unfriendly cities adopting the cigarette tax. If I'm writing the laws in, say Leeds, which for the sake of arguement is smoking-friendly, I don't know whether the cigarette tax will lower smoking rates or not.
But in real life the biases are even worse; they are often unquantifiable, even unknowable. For an experimentally sound conclusion the selection must be random.
It would make sense if laws were enacted logically and rationally and with fairness in mind, but the majority of legislation is biased in favor of special interest groups, enacted as an emotional response to a particularly emotional issue or event, or used as a political instrument for purely partisan reasons.Taxes collected for an alleged purpose rarely are spend for that, revenues usually go into the general fund. Highway "road use" taxes are a prime example of this- taxes are levied against heavy trucks on a per-mile basis, yet only a tiny fraction is actually spent on highway maintenence and repair.