Issue 14June 14, 2026
EducationLibraries
What summer does to reading.
Low-income children lose two months of reading skill every summer. Giving them twelve books of their own choosing costs fifty dollars and prevents it.
Every fall, something predictable happens in American schools. Students from higher-income families return from summer having held steady or improved. Students from lower-income families return having…
Read → 9 min readIssue 13June 9, 2026
Property rightsInternational development
The land question.
What happens when farmers get formal title to land they already farm — and why the answer is more complicated than property rights economists expected.
One of the central claims of development economics is that insecure property rights inhibit investment. If you don't know whether the land will still be yours next year, you won't plant trees or build…
Read → 10 min readIssue 12June 4, 2026
Guaranteed incomeEconomic policy
What Stockton showed.
The first mayor-funded guaranteed income pilot in the US ran for two years and produced clear results. Why the debate continued anyway.
In February 2019, the city of Stockton, California began sending $500 a month to 125 randomly selected residents. No conditions. No work requirements. No documentation of how the money was spent. The …
Read → 11 min readIssue 11May 23, 2026
HealthcareMedicaid
The Oregon health lottery.
When the state couldn't afford to give Medicaid to everyone who wanted it, a lottery created the most important health insurance experiment in history. What the data showed was inconvenient for everyone.
In early 2008, the state of Oregon did something unusual. It wanted to expand its Medicaid program to cover more low-income adults — but it only had enough funding for about 10,000 new enrollees, and …
Read → 11 min readIssue 10May 18, 2026
Donald CampbellEvaluation theory
Campbell's vision.
The psychologist who invented modern policy evaluation — and why his idea of the Experimenting Society is still ahead of its time.
In 1969, a psychologist named Donald T. Campbell published a paper titled 'Reforms as Experiments.' It was not a study of any particular policy. It was an argument about what governments should become…
Read → 10 min readIssue 09May 13, 2026
Behavioural Insights TeamBehavioral science
What the Nudge Unit proved.
How a seven-person team in the UK Cabinet Office tested behavioral science at government scale — and what it means for institutional learning.
In 2010, the UK Cabinet Office created a small team with an improbable mandate: apply behavioral economics to government, and prove the results through randomized controlled trials. What happened over…
Read → 9 min readIssue 08May 8, 2026
Elinor OstromPolycentric governance
Ostrom and the commons.
What the Nobel Prize winner showed about governance that economists missed — and why it matters for civic experimentation.
In 1968, Garrett Hardin argued that shared resources would inevitably be destroyed by self-interest. The person who showed why he was wrong became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.…
Read → 10 min readIssue 07May 3, 2026
Job TrainingHuman capital
Why most job training programs fail — and what the ones that work have in common.
The largest RCT in US workforce policy found no effect. A smaller study found 30%. The difference is not the training.
In 1994, the largest randomized evaluation of job training ever conducted found no significant effect on earnings. Twenty years later, a different study found a 30% increase. Both were rigorous. Both …
Read → 10 min readIssue 06April 28, 2026
Voter EngagementSocial norms
The mailer that changed political science.
What a 2006 Michigan experiment revealed about civic behavior — and why the finding is more complicated than it looks.
In 2006, researchers mailed 344,000 Michigan voters a simple letter showing their voting history alongside their neighbors'. Turnout increased 8.1 percentage points — the largest effect ever documente…
Read → 9 min readIssue 05April 23, 2026
FederalismConstitutional law
Federalism as experiment.
Brandeis, the Tenth Amendment, and why the constitutional structure of the United States is a learning architecture.
In 1932, Justice Brandeis wrote that a state may 'serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.' The idea is more precise — and more int…
Read → 11 min readIssue 04April 18, 2026
SimplificationTax & Revenue
Friction is policy.
What a decade of simplification experiments tells us about administrative burden as a choice.
Across twelve countries and four policy domains, one finding recurs: when you reduce the steps required to comply with a government process, compliance goes up — sometimes dramatically. Administrative…
Read → 8 min readIssue 03April 13, 2026
Public SafetyTargeting
What hot spots policing actually showed.
The most replicated finding in criminology is also the most misapplied.
The Kansas City Gun Experiment is widely cited as the origin of hot spots policing. The finding has been replicated more than 50 times. It is also routinely misapplied — because the effective componen…
Read → 10 min readIssue 02April 8, 2026
Evidence qualityPublication bias
The null result problem.
Why the most important experiments don't get published, and what to do about it.
Roughly 60% of randomized controlled trials in public policy show no statistically significant effect. In published literature, that share drops to about 30%. The gap is not random — and it produces s…
Read → 7 min readIssue 01April 3, 2026
Cash TransfersInternational Development
How conditional cash transfers actually work.
The mechanism behind Mexico's Progresa and what three decades of evidence shows.
Mexico's Progresa was one of the first large-scale conditional cash transfer programs. More than 200 papers have been published on its effects. What does three decades of evidence actually show? The c…
Read → 9 min read