I made this Radio 4 documentary on randomised trials on government policy

January 6th, 2013 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, evidence based policy, government reports, podcast, politics | 4 Comments »

Here’s a documentary I made for BBC Radio 4 (with producer Rami Tzabar) about evidence based social policy, and why we should do more randomised trials in government. It’s good fun, 40 minutes, with contributions from Dean Karlan (who wrote this book and is behind all these excellent trials on reducing poverty), Prof Sheila Bird, Jonathan Portes from NIESR (his excellent blog here), the man they call GOD, and many more.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01phhb9

It’s also Radio 4 documentary of the week (woo!) which means you can download it as an mp3. The link is live for another 5 days, and it works for some countries outside the UK too.

www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/r4choice

And now that it’s expired on iPlayer, you can listen to it on FigShare here:

figshare.com/articles/R4Doc_04_Jan_13_Ben_Goldacre/105918

If you’re interested in reading more evidence based policy, I highly recommend this Cabinet Office paper that I co-authored a few months ago, downloadable for free online. As explained here, it’s brief, and very much designed to be the Ladybird Book of RCTs in Government. If you want more on the uses for randomised trials in criminal justice, I wrote this in the British Medical Journal with Sheila Bird and John Strang in 2011 (sorry it’s not open access, I’ll try to fix that soon). More to come on this topic soon.

Cheers!



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4 Responses



  1. jameswight said,

    January 12, 2013 at 1:36 pm

    I enjoy your blog, and have nominated you for a Very Inspiring Blogger Award. The details are at jameswight.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/very-inspiring-blogger-award/

  2. bshell said,

    January 15, 2013 at 6:51 am

    If we missed the show, and it’s now 14 January, how can we get a copy of the mp3 file?

  3. foofdawg said,

    January 16, 2013 at 12:19 am

    I also would like to know how to listen to the show now that it’s no longer available at either of the links Ben posted.

  4. robzrob said,

    February 10, 2013 at 9:35 pm

    If you think government is going to behave according to evidence, you must be nuts.