Social Science and the Public Agenda: Reflections on the Relation of Knowledge to Policy in the United States and Abroad

Abstract

It helps to put these recurrent American laments in cross-national and cross-disciplinary perspective. As a student of comparative political economy and social policy for 30 years, I have interviewed more than 400 politicians, budget officers, experts in taxing and spending, health and welfare officials, labor and management people in 19 rich democracies for my project on the politics of taxing and spending. I would like to share my observations about the similarities and differences among these nations in the interplay of knowledge and public policy. It is clear that intellectuals, including social scientists, have 1Revision of a lecture presented at

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