We need more goat sacrifices

Before launching major policies or philanthropic programs, society should perform a mock goat sacrifice: a deliberately unsettling reminder that good intentions do not guarantee good results. The case rests on a catalogue of failed interventions across the political spectrum, including school grants, diversity offices, education technology, vaccination messages, Medicaid work requirements, and relationship counseling. Such failures are not unusual exceptions. Sociologist Peter Rossi’s satirical “laws” of evaluation capture the pattern: large social programs often have no net effect, rigorous evaluations are especially likely to find null results, and efforts to change people are prone to fail. Even seemingly successful ideas may falter when repeated elsewhere, while isolated positive studies can be unreliable. The deeper problem is that it remains hard to identify programs that work consistently.

The proposed explanation is an “illusion of control” that extends beyond superstition: people overestimate the power of their intentions and therefore fail to ask whether their interventions achieve anything. A famous 1975 experiment supposedly showed that people value lottery tickets more when choosing them, but participants actually selected football cards, so their higher prices likely reflected choosing players they preferred. Later lottery replications found no such effect, yet everyday magical thinking persists - and, the argument goes, so does confidence in our ability to improve other people’s lives. Evidence of this confidence appears in the failure to evaluate programs at all: many federally funded STEM education projects lack experimental assessments, and federal agencies may not define goals or track results. The ritual’s purpose is to make humility - and measurement - unavoidable.