What if we ran society not based on the market but on evidence?

Following the successful Brexit campaign, Dominic Cummings – the then campaign director of Vote Leave – published a series of blog posts describing how the campaign was run and what his plans were for a successful civil service.

The last of these posts was released on June 26 2019, just before he became the special advisor to the current prime minister, Boris Johnson.

The idea this post resurrects is a promise in public policy that has died since the 1970s – the use of hard scientific (knowledge-based) methods to …