Why an activist fad has led to an overrated policy.
The idea of “lived experience” exerts wide sway across many areas of social policymaking today, from homelessness to mental illness to addiction. Those crises have deepened in recent years, even as lived experience’s influence has continued to grow.
Task forces, nonprofit boards, conferences, and congressional committee hearings frequently reserve slots for people in recovery, formerly incarcerated or homeless individuals, and “consumer survivors” of psychiatric care. Federal agencies request that grant applicants include people with lived experience in decision-making. Even the Department of Justice solicits people with lived experience for service as grant application reviewers. “Nothing about us without us” is the rallying cry of the disability rights movement.
The premise behind using “lived experience” as a policy approach is that social programs fail when they don’t listen enough to their beneficiaries. To many, that idea will come across as innocuous. “Prison abolition” and “defund the police” are dangerous but frank ideas. When we debate them, we know the stakes. Lived experience is more subtly fraudulent. It tends to elude critical analysis, but its influence comes at a cost. It promotes divisiveness in social policy debates and counterproductive individualism in the design of social programs.
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Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is a 2024-25 public scholar at the City College of New York’s Moynihan Center.
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