The Decline of Knowledge Based Policy and the Economics Nobel

I have structed this as a two-part post, where the second part is about one of the two winners of this year’s Nobel prize for economics. Both parts are directly connected, but I’ve split them because the second part is more of interest to those who know some economics. The Decline of Knowledge Based Policy I have written about this before, prompted by a post from Chris Dillow, who has returned to the theme more recently. Rereading all this I think we have a classic problem of overdetermination, by which I mean that we only have one observation - the decline in knowledge based policy over the last two decades - and far too many possible explanations for that observation. So here I want to counter that by putting forward just one story. My proposition is that the decline in knowledge based policy in the UK is a result of something that happened long before the decline became evident: the adoption of neoliberal ideology by the Conservative party in the 1970s and 1980s. Not a consequence…