An article in Scientific American lays out the difficulty of determining the efficacy of anti-poverty programs. Historically, doing a controlled experiment to determine which set of policies will have the greatest impact on poverty has been extraordinarily difficult, and often impossible. Recently, however, the availability of cheap, skilled labor in India has made running such studies easier and less expensive. Problems still remain however because of the inherent complexity of social interactions and the enormous number of uncontrolled variables that can affect the results.

The take-away point is this: If anyone tells you that they know how to solve poverty, they are lying. They may have an idea or a theory. The idea or theory may be logically sound. But until we have scientific, documented proof of what works and what does not work, nobody really knows how to solve the problem of poverty. So, does this mean we should do nothing No. Of all the things that have been tried to fight poverty, doing nothing has been the most popular, and we know that it doesn’t work. What we need are more trials and tests. As difficult as conducting these trials are, this is the only way we will come up with a long-term solution that is scientifically defensible.

Once Liberals and Conservatives admit what they dont know, they can begin to work together to find a real solution. And they will both have to be big enough to admit that they are wrong if the evidence shows that their theory wasn’t the correct one.