Thank you for the link. This part repeats a point that I've also made:
"You can’t change a social system without knowing how to do it, without having a plan, and without being able to evaluate how it’s going. So that requires expertise, training, and intellectual equipment."
But about this:
"In my book, Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945-70, I describe this as a reaction to overly economistic ways of thinking about policy that were common amongst left-wing policy-makers in the Attlee government and during the post-war period more generally. One of the arguments I’ve tried to make in my book is that Young was part of a battle in the post-war period between economistic thinking about policy, and a more humanistic approach which drew on the insights of social sciences like sociology, psychology and anthropology."
There are limits on what the government can do. Sociology might be useful for understanding the human condition, but good novels also teach us about the human condition. And there are many aspects of the human condition for which government has no answer. For instance, if your girlfriend breaks up with you, then perhaps you are brokenhearted. There is nothing government can do to help. But the government does have the power to get the macro conditions right: the government can keep unemployment low, so you can be sure of having a job. I'm not an advocate of "limited government" but I do think there are areas where the government can clearly do some good for people, and so the government should focus its efforts on those areas.
Expertise is important but on its own it’s not enough:
https://renewal.org.uk/experience-expertise-and-emotion-has-labour-had-enough-of-experts/
Thank you for the link. This part repeats a point that I've also made:
"You can’t change a social system without knowing how to do it, without having a plan, and without being able to evaluate how it’s going. So that requires expertise, training, and intellectual equipment."
But about this:
"In my book, Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945-70, I describe this as a reaction to overly economistic ways of thinking about policy that were common amongst left-wing policy-makers in the Attlee government and during the post-war period more generally. One of the arguments I’ve tried to make in my book is that Young was part of a battle in the post-war period between economistic thinking about policy, and a more humanistic approach which drew on the insights of social sciences like sociology, psychology and anthropology."
There are limits on what the government can do. Sociology might be useful for understanding the human condition, but good novels also teach us about the human condition. And there are many aspects of the human condition for which government has no answer. For instance, if your girlfriend breaks up with you, then perhaps you are brokenhearted. There is nothing government can do to help. But the government does have the power to get the macro conditions right: the government can keep unemployment low, so you can be sure of having a job. I'm not an advocate of "limited government" but I do think there are areas where the government can clearly do some good for people, and so the government should focus its efforts on those areas.