From The Tipping Point to Nudge, the rise of pop-social science has been a noticeable feature of the past decade in publishing. Not everyone is impressed. I recently interviewed a professor of education who is an expert in policy evaluation. She lamented the fact that politicians tend to get their facts from popular social science books containing innacuracies. A couple of hours later, I interviewed a politician who was fizzing with excitement about a popular social science book. If only I'd been able to introduce them, the explosion would have been something to see.

I think the professor was right to worry about ministerial exposure to authors such as Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Ariely, Richard Thaler and even Tim Harford – but not for quite the right reasons. The problem is not that such authors are inaccurate. I'm not sure that they are. Gladwell has plenty of critics, but I find him a careful reporter. Ariely is a respected academic; Thaler – also a professor – is widely tipped for a Nobel prize. And what can we say about Tim Harford? I am told he is all but infallible.

Yet infallibility is not enough. It's perfectly possible for an author to do nothing but weave together credible, peer-reviewed research and yet produce a highly partial view of reality. Different pieces of research invariably point in different directions. Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational is full of examples of irrational behaviour. My own Logic of Life is full of examples of rational behaviour. Occasionally I am asked to explain the contradiction, but if there is a contradiction, it is a subtle one.