Richard Thaler argues in his Economic View column in the Sunday Times that social scientists should play a greater role in shaping public policy, but prior probability wonders whether the opposite is true. After all, most published social “science” findings are false, and moreover, so-called social “scientists” are unaccountable to voters and have the same cognitive biases that most people suffer from.

In any case, Thaler’s three examples of how social science can help improve people’s lives are pretty weak. First, Thaler writes about the “word gap” between children from poor and rich families, but he admits there is no silver bullet for closing this word gap, so if there is no solution to a given problem, one wonders whether there is a problem at all (or, as economist Luke Froeb likes to say, “If there is no solution, there is no problem“). Also, even if we were somehow able to close this word gap between rich and poor children, we suspect that rich children would still have more advantages than poor ones.

Next, Thaler talks about wait times at the National Domestic Violence Hotline call center. The problem here, according to Thaler, is that many victims hang up before they’ve had a chance to speak with a counselor. But isn’t this just a simple resource-allocation problem (i.e., we need to hire more counselors to handle these calls)?

Lastly, Thaler notes how difficult it is to get (some) patients to follow up on their own treatment regimens. But at the end of day, if certain individuals choose to avoid taking responsibility for their own health, why should the rest of us care? Yes, we all want sick people to get well, domestic violence victims to get help, and children to excel, but how much government intrusion and “nanny-state” tactics are we willing to tolerate to achieve these goals? Thaler (once again) fails to address these larger, more fundamental questions.