POLITICAL SCIENCE: Political Diversity and the Daycare Wars.

A new National Affairs essay highlighting some of the overlooked deficiencies of universal daycare (now a mainstay of the Democratic policy agenda), raises an interesting question: Why is there so little reliable public information on the costs and benefits of such programs? . . .

In other words, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (the lead author of the study in question) put it on Twitter, “daycare research may be biased by fact that nearly all researchers want to reach conclusion that there’s no downside.”

The essay reinforces a point that we have emphasized in these pages before: The reason America needs more political diversity in the social sciences is not because moderates and conservatives in academia need an affirmative action-style spoils system. Rather, it’s because the knowledge-creation process—the system by which scientists create knowledge and that knowledge is disseminated to the public and incorporated into political decisions—functions better if there is disagreement and debate among the scientists. Findings are more robust if they have been repeatedly challenged and refined over time.

Conservatives upset with the state of academic research have often emphasized the way non-progressives are discriminated against suppressed in many fields. And that may be true. But a more productive approach may be to highlight the way that their absence undermines the integrity of science itself—and, in the long run, the quality of public policy decisions.

To be fair, it’s intended to do that.