Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

It makes sense for social scientists to become more involved in policy because many of society's most challenging problems are, in essence, behavioral.

I learned that you have to evaluate the effects of public policy as opposed to intentions.

I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline. It didn't have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, 'Hey, here's the key. Here's the key to understanding life and all its forms.'

You can’t start a conversation about public policy by saying it is complex.

All policy is targeted in one way or another.

Successful and unsuccessful political policies have one commonalty. The people who created the policies thought they would be successful.

You have to have a sense of what it looks like, not from the point of view of the policymaker but from the point of view of those who are at the receiving end of your policies.

I think that policy matters. I'm a policy guy.

In a mature democracy any proposed policy should be subjected to a close analysis of its likely benefits and costs.

I wanted to work on policy because I think it really makes a difference.

Every plausible policy must be followed by the question 'And then what?'

I wrote my thesis on welfare policy.

It's not rocket science. It's social science.

All policy is a matter of gains and losses, upsides and downsides.

She may hide it, but Clinton is a policy nerd. Ask about microfinance, and she'll talk your ear off. Mention early childhood interventions, and she will gush about obscure details of a home visitation experiment in Elmira, N.Y., that dramatically improved child outcomes.

Science of Society

A scientifically trained observer can of course always analyze a particular social abuse, or suggest a particular remedy. but he can do little, as a scientist, to predict what general effects the application of a given remedy or the elimination of a given source of misery or injustice is going to have on other—especially on remote—parts of our total social system.

Government is not an exact science.

It's easy to defend a policy that works. It's not so easy to defend a policy that didn't work.

Policies absent people have no meaning.

The quality of the data and information of a social science, economics or government study is inversely proportional to its importance and social significance.

It's really important that policy be properly designed. It's not enough just to.. .get angry over a subject.

I prefer to work at the policy level, on trying to fix flawed government policies.

Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.

When I originally went into government early in my career, it was because I was interested in finding ways to help people by finding policy solutions that would help people. And what's amazing about Facebook is that we're able to use our platform to help people, too.