JLF president John Hood has a new book coming out called Our Best Foot Forward, which analyzes the biggest problems facing North Carolina’s economy and offers a 10-point plan for addressing them. In his column today, John talks about some of the things that occurred to him while doing research for the book. A highlight:

If you are in politics, activism, or journalism, you want a clear, usable answer to every question. Social scientists, in particular, are right to push back against that demand. Human action is a complex phenomenon. Knowledge about it is widely distributed, hard to collect, and even harder to analyze. It does no one any favors to oversimplify when the best answer to the question is some version of “It depends.”

True that.