Experiments for Social Change

Can policy problems like broken systems of representation, social prejudice, fake news, and environmental mismanagement be solved? How would we know if we are making progress? In this course we will combine the examination of the theoretical underpinnings of these policy challenges with real world lessons that social scientists have learned in their efforts to alleviate them. We will focus not only on the ideas behind solutions to policy problems, but we will also learn if and how these solutions work. We will explore how randomized control trials, also known as A/B tests and randomized experiments, have already been used to test these ideas.