This is a special year for social science research, marked in this edition of The Edge, which is also published to coincide with Social Science Week. In 1965 the Social Science Research Council, the ESRC's predecessor, came into being. It had taken a long time.
As long ago as 1944, by which time the contribution to public policy of social scientists such as Keynes and Beveridge was abundantly clear, Clement Attlee (deputy prime minister in the war years) had commissioned Sir John Clapham, the eminent Cambridge economic historian, to consider whether a separate research council for the social sciences was needed.
Clapham, while sympathetic, came out in his report two years later against the idea of a research council for the social sciences, suggesting that a greater priority was to direct resources to the relevant university departments. A council, he said, would run the risk of "a premature crystallisation of spurious orthodoxies". It was, as Sir Claus Moser, a founder member of the SSRC, put it, another manifestation of the phenomenon that: "Time and again, rational arguments for establishing a council encountered a mixture of prejudice coupled with ignorance of what the social sciences were really about."
By the time the SSRC did come into being 40 years ago, the problem was perhaps the opposite one; that of exaggerated expectations. As Michael Young, its first chairman, wrote on the 10th anniversary in 1975: "There were high hopes even among some normally cautious administrators about what social sciences should do to illuminate public policy."
Perhaps , though, the high hopes were justified. As Ivor Gaber's report on some of the successes of social science research over the past four decades shows, it has indeed illuminated public policy. In the mid-1960s everybody knew that Britain's industrial relations needed fixing. Identifying the problem and solving it were, however, different things. The Industrial Relations Research Unit at Warwick University, sponsored by the SSRC, provided the detailed and rigorous analysis of workplace industrial relations and its research helped in framing the labour market legislation of the 1980s.
Ironically, given the importance of that research, and of the work undertaken by the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, then at Bristol University, it was under the Thatcher Government the social sciences faced their biggest challenge. The SSRC survived, but with a significantly smaller budget and a name change to the current Economic and Social Research Council.
In cash terms, of course, the biggest direct contribution of social science research to public policy was one that has been commented upon in The Edge before. Under the direction of Ken Binmore and Paul Klemperer the ESRC's Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution came up with the auction method, derived from game theory, for the government's auction of third generation (3G) mobile phone licences. The auction, in 2000, raised an astonishing £22.5 billion. Any minister who frets about the cost of social science research should bear that number in mind.
As this edition of The Edge demonstrates , social science research today is vibrant and self-confident. It can do everything from offering a modern insight into the seven deadly sins to explaining why we do - and often do not - give money to charity. Social scientists at the Advanced Institute of Management Research are producing new insights on the key questions of boosting productivity and innovation, while the ESRC's Teaching and Learning Research Programme has important things to say about raising the standards of vocational education.
Few pieces of research will make a direct contribution to the Government's coffers of tens of billions of pounds as the 3G auction did. Directly and indirectly, however, social science research is at the heart of public policy.