Policy Experimentation Quotes

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.

He [Louis Brandais] did believe in the states famously as laboratories of democracy, to use that resonant phrase that Tea Party and conservative libertarians have embraced today because he loves state experimentation.

I think of Texas as the laboratory for bad government.

This was a type of war that we'd had no experience with before. Some of our policies were kind of trial and error in character.

It's an experiment, and it's probably good to have a couple states try it out to see before you make that national policy.

In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something - so why aren't we doing that with social policy?

If the issue is letting the states experiment and letting the society have more time to figure out its direction, why is taking a case now the answer?

In England they always try out new mobile phones in Isle of Man. They've got a captive society. So I said, you should try the legalization of all drugs on the Isle of Man and see what happens.

This I hope will be the age of experiment in government.

The world changes! So we're in a situation today where the only policymakers that have flexibility are central banks. But they don't have the instruments! So they've had to experiment, and the more you experiment, the more uncertainty and the higher the risk of collateral damage.

It would be kind of a tragedy if we got to the end of four years of Democratic rule without having really tried any Democratic policies.