The Does It Add Up Challenge is a call for new thinking and action among RAND researchers to support effective decision-making and improve social and economic well-being outcomes for people.
For too long, we have often relied on a finite or bounded set of solutions, working for small changes that may or may not actually result in significant improvements in people’s well-being. We can become mired in the narrowness of our thinking, failing to connect the dots on the primary drivers of impact or using analytic methods that allow us to fully innovate.
By asking the question, “Does It Add Up?” we are pushing RAND researchers to step back and consider: If we summed all of our current programmatic or policy solutions for a big policy problem, would it make a material difference in the outcomes? For instance, if we added up all of our innovations in health, would the needle on life expectancy move positively, or would we make a real dent in chronic disease morbidity?
RAND researchers are challenging the current paradigm of how we conduct research, not simply moving from project to project, but examining policy portfolios to address this very question as part of our larger Rethinking Social and Economic Policy Systems effort and our broader research agenda. This challenge includes
This challenge started in RAND’s Social and Economic Well-Being division, where we began to hold ourselves accountable to the question, “Does it Add Up?” Example commentaries that challenge this idea, along with other outcomes of our research, are highlighted below. This notion of “Does it Add Up?” is a key question facing the Social and Economic Policy Rethink effort.
