Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (3rd Edition) PDF

POLICY PARADOX This material may not be reproduced, or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. POLICY PARADOX: THE ART OF POLITICAL DECISION MAKING Third Edition DEBORAH STONE b W · W · NORTON & COMPANY · NEW YORK · LONDON W. W. Norton & Comp...

POLICY PARADOX This material may not be reproduced, or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. POLICY PARADOX: THE ART OF POLITICAL DECISION MAKING Third Edition DEBORAH STONE b W · W · NORTON & COMPANY · NEW YORK · LONDON W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered at the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper Union. The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By mid-century, the two major pillars of Norton’s publishing program—trade books and college texts—were firmly established. In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees, and today—with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, college, and professional titles published each year—W. W. Norton & Company stands as the largest and oldest publishing house owned wholly by its employees. Copyright © 2012, 2002, 1997, 1988 by Deborah A. Stone. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Cover art by Josef Albers, Structural Constellation, 1953–58. Editor: Aaron Javsicas Editorial Assistant: Cait Callahan Project Editor: Diane Cipollone Production Manager: Eric Pier-Hocking Manufacturing by Maple-Vail Composition by Jouve North America—Brattleboro, VT Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stone, Deborah. Policy paradox : the art of political decision making / Deborah Stone.—3rd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-393-91272-2 (pbk.) 1. Policy sciences—Economic aspects. 2. Political planning—Economic aspects. I. Title. H97.S83 2012 320.6—dc23 2011047217 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT 1234567890  For Jim somewhere always, alone among the noise and policies of summer Contents Introduction: Why This Book? 1 PART I POLITICS 17 1 The Market and the Polis 19 PART II GOALS 37 2 Equity 39 3 Efficiency 63 4 Welfare 85 5 Liberty 107 6 Security 129 PART III PROBLEMS 155 7 Symbols 157 8 Numbers 183 9 Causes 206 10 Interests 229 11 Decisions 248 PART IV SOLUTIONS 269 12 Incentives 271 13 Rules 289 14 Facts 311 15 Rights 331 16 Powers 354 vii viii Contents Conclusion: Policy Analysis and Political Argument 379 Acknowledgments 387 Credits 391 Index 393 Introduction: Why This Book? Sometime in the second or third week of seventh grade, we had our first fire drill. The drill was one more set of rules to learn in a new school with new routines—a more adult world of homerooms, different teachers for different subjects, class periods, rigid schedules, and bells regulating everything. When the fire alarm went off, we marched outside single file and were instructed by our teachers exactly how and where to line up on the blacktop. I was standing next to Adele, my friend in the fragile sort of way that kids first come to know and like each other. We had several classes together, and whenever she spoke in class, she seemed very smart, very shy, and very gentle. Adele’s skin was dark, dark brown, and she stood out. She was the only black student in the school. Though she was not the first black person I’d ever known, she was the first one my own age. I sensed that her reticence had to do with always standing out so much, because I was painfully shy and I hated standing out. I thought it must be excruciating to be so visible all the time, and I was in awe of Adele’s grace in her predicament. Just after our long line had come to a standstill, a boy on a bicycle came rolling out of his driveway. He made lazy curves the length of our line and seemed to be gloating over the fact that he wasn’t in school that day and we were. He curved toward our line just in front of Adele and me, and as he reached the point on his arc closest to us, he sneered, “You should go home and take a bath. You’re dirty.” I felt the searing awfulness of his remark. I wanted to protect Adele, to shield her somehow, but he’d already said it, and I couldn’t make it go away. I wanted to say something to her to take away the sting, but I had no idea what to say. I wanted to beat the living daylights out of him, but he was already far away, and besides, I was small and not a fighter and I knew I couldn’t beat anything out of anybody. Finally, I thought I could tell the teacher. The boy had been smart enough to make his remark 2 Policy Paradox when the teacher was out of earshot, but if I told her, surely she would punish him and do something to help Adele. All the teachers were strutting around imposing order, demanding silence, and instructing us how to count off our presence by saying abso- lutely nothing but our names, one by one, down the line. Against this strict lesson in proper decorum and adult ways, shouting out to my teacher to tell what had happened would have meant breaking the rules by saying something other than the regulation words we were allowed to speak. Afraid to stand out myself and wanting only to be good, I did nothing. I tell this story because it was the first time I confronted a policy para- dox, though I didn’t see it that way at the time. (I saw it as my own moral cowardice.) Here was a social practice—the fire drill—whose purpose was to keep us secure. Yet, with all the seeming control the teachers had over the world, they couldn’t stop an act of violence against one of us and didn’t even know that one of us had been hurt. Here was a set of rules that seemed perfectly fair on the surface. They were like traffic regulations, just rules to make sure things ran smoothly, not the kind of rules that clearly confer advantages on one group rather than another. Yet if we followed only those rules, bullies would prevail and their chosen victims would get hurt. Ordinary rules, I realized, couldn’t stop bullies or help victims. Here was a set of rules that embodied rightness and goodness. (Follow instructions. Don’t talk. Do exactly as you’re told.) Good citizens follow these rules. Yet, in my gut, I could feel another set of rules I knew to be right, too. (Don’t hurt people. Stop people who hurt others. Help some- one who is hurt. Stick by your friends.) I couldn’t be good under both sets of rules. That morning on the blacktop, I had an inkling that even the clearest, simplest, most unambiguous policies could be mighty ambigu- ous indeed. I had a sense that citizenship was going to require learning to live with ambiguity and paradox. Paradoxes are nothing but trouble. They violate the most elementary principle of logic: something can’t be two different things at once. Two contradictory interpretations can’t both be true. A paradox is just such an impossible situation, and political life is full of them. Here are just a few. Winning Is Losing and Losing Is Winning President Obama succeeded in passing three major government pro- grams in his first seventeen months in office: a stimulus program, major health insurance reform, and a finance industry regulatory overhaul. But  Introduction: Why This Book? 3 his legislative victories quickly turned into a political liability. Each piece of legislation provided ammunition for conservatives to paint him as a big-government socialist.1 As the midterm elections of 2010 drew closer, Obama’s victories were becoming a liability for the Democrats and, ironically, it seemed as though his legislative prowess would soon jeopardize his power as president. How- ever, just before the midterm elections, when major Democratic losses were all but certain, political analysts saw a victory for Obama in elec- toral defeat. “The reality of presidential politics is that it helps to have an enemy,” wrote one. “With Democrats controlling both the White House and Congress, they shoulder responsibility for the country’s troubles. But if the Republicans capture Congress, Mr. Obama will finally have a foil heading toward his own re-election battle in 2012.”2 What did the analysts mean by claiming that an electoral defeat could be a victory? Politicians always have at least two goals. First is a policy goal—whatever program or proposal they would like to see accomplished or defeated, whatever problem they would like to see solved. Perhaps even more important, though, is a political goal. Politicians always want to preserve their power, or gain enough power, to be able to accomplish their policy goals. Achieving a policy goal can sometimes thwart political gains—or vice versa. Demonstration—Debate or Assault? The Westboro Baptist Church pickets soldiers’ funerals, carrying signs such as “Fag Troops,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “You’re Going to Hell,” “Priests are Rapists,” and “America is Doomed.” The church believes 9/11 was God’s punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality, and that it is serving the public interest by publicizing its warnings. The group demonstrated at the funeral of Matthew Snyder, a twenty-year-old Marine killed in Iraq. Snyder was not gay. Snyder’s father sued the group for infliction of emotional distress and for intrusion on his privacy. The Supreme Court ruled 8-to-1 in favor of the church. According to Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote for the majority, the protest highlighted “matters of public import,” including “the political and moral conduct of the U.S. and its citizens, the fate of the nation, homosexuality in the military, and scandals involving clergy in the Catholic Church.” However 1 Sheryl Gay Stoltenberg, “Obama Pushes Through Agenda Despite Political Risks,” New York Times, July 16, 2010. 2 Ibid. 4 Policy Paradox hateful or unpopular the group’s message, it contributes to public debate. According to Justice Samuel Alito, the one dissenter, the group exploits vulnerable people in order to gain publicity for its message. Alito said public issues could be “vigorously debated” without allowing “the brutal- ization of innocent victims.”3 Was the funeral demonstration a contribution to democratic debate or a vicious assault? For or Against Government Assistance? Portion of Americans who think “poor people have become too depen- dent on government assistance programs”: 69 percent Portion of Americans who believe “government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep”: 69 percent Portion of Americans who think individuals have a lot of control over their lives and who reject the idea that “Success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control”: 62 percent Portion of Americans who believe “government has a responsibility to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves”: 69 percent4 Enemies or Allies? For decades, manufacturing industries complained about government regulation. Regulation, the argument went, imposed unnecessary costs on manufacturers and consumers and stifled innovation. Better to let manu- facturers use their own voluntary standards. The relationship between industry and government regulatory agencies was decidedly adversarial. But after years of deregulation under presidents from Ronald Reagan on, a funny thing happened in Washington: makers of toys and cars, food and cigarettes, furniture and light bulbs, and a host of other products began pressing the government to issue quality, safety, and environmental regu- lations. Why the sudden turnabout? American manufacturers found themselves losing market share to cheaper foreign imports, whose makers didn’t have to meet American 3 Snyder v. Phelps, No. 09–751, 131 S. Ct. 1207 (2011). 4 All figures from the same survey in 2007. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987–2007,” Mar. 22, 2007, available at people-press.org.  Introduction: Why This Book? 5 industry’s voluntary standards. Mandatory government standards could level the playing field. Mandatory standards would enhance manufac- turers’ credibility and reputations. In some industries, consumers and workers were suing manufacturers for defects and hazards, and manu- facturers were losing. If the government issued regulations and coupled them with exemptions from liability, manufacturers (and presumably also consumers) would come out ahead. Moreover, in the absence of federal regulation, angry workers and consumers sought regulation at the state level. Manufacturers were better off with uniform federal regulation than having to meet different requirements in different states. Thus, industry benefited in many ways from government-imposed regulation.5 Which Came First, the Problem or the Solution? At first, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was presented to Congress and the American people as the solution to terrorist attacks like 9/11. Saddam Hussein was allegedly in league with Osama bin Laden and harboring Al 5 Eric Lipton and Gardiner Harris, “In Turnaround, Industries Seek U.S. Regulations,” New York Times, Sept. 16, 2007. 6 Policy Paradox Qaeda terrorists. A bit later, Saddam Hussein himself was cast as a threat to America. He was harboring weapons of mass destruction that an inva- sion could root out and disarm. Later still, the American occupation was depicted as the solution to Iraq’s devastated economy, as a necessary force to counteract violent insurgency, and as the means of constructing a democratic state. Some say the war was a solution to a very different problem—George W. Bush’s psychic need to redeem his father’s failure to topple Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. Another view holds that the war was a solution to America’s need for oil and oil companies’ need for profits. Was this a case of several problems for which war against Iraq just happened to be a solution? Or was war with Iraq a constant solution adapting to a changing problem? Are Low Prices Good or Bad? Cheap Iranian imports into war-torn Iraq—things like bricks, rice, and buses—provided Iraqis with essential goods they otherwise couldn’t afford. But these boons to consumers also undermined Iraqi industries. Some domestic manufacturers had to lay off employees, and some poten- tial businesses could never get started in the face of competition from cheap imports.6 Were Iraqis hurt or helped by low-priced goods? Wal-Mart faced a different paradox of low prices. The rock-bottom prices that had made Wal-Mart a commercial success posed an obstacle for the company when it tried to sell high-end merchandise like elec- tronics, home décor, fashion, and prescription drugs. “Our low prices actually suggest low quality,” an internal report explained.7 Prices are prices—they tell consumers how much money they must pay to acquire a product—but prices are also symbols; they signal intangible features like quality and prestige. What’s in a Pile of Rubble? In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans officials wanted to clear the rubble from city streets, but homeowners sued the city to stop demolition of their homes before they had a chance to search for their 6 Gina Chon, “Iran’s Cheap Goods Stifle Iraq Economy,” Wall St. Journal, Mar. 18, 2009. 7 Michael Barbaro, “Is Wal-Mart Too Cheap For Its Own Good?” New York Times, May 30, 2007.  Introduction: Why This Book? 7 possessions. “We’re not demolishing homes,” a lawyer for the city said. “There is debris being removed from certain streets.” A city aide gave further explanation: “They [the buildings] slid off their slabs.... They’re all in the right of way, and they are creating a public safety issue. If some- thing is already in a pile of rubble, we’re not demolishing anything.” A lawyer for a community group saw things differently: “This is not rub- ble. This is the remains of people’s houses.... There are trophies in there, children’s athletic equipment, toys.”8 The piles held vastly different meanings for the two sides. Closing Guantánamo American officials intended the Guantánamo prison to increase Ameri- can security by detaining suspected terrorists there and interrogating them. To close the camp might increase the number of dangerous terror- ists on the loose, especially if the governments to which prisoners were transferred set them free. Yet, once photos and stories from Guantánamo emerged, the camp became “a wonderful recruitment trigger for Islamist extremists,” in the words of one historian. Keeping the camp open also increased the risk of terrorist attacks on the United States.9 Does Guantánamo help or harm American security? Multiculturalism—Good or Bad for Human Freedom? In New York, a Chinese-American man bludgeoned his wife to death because, he claimed, she had been unfaithful. In court, his lawyer offered a “cultural defense,” saying that that Chinese custom allowed husbands to dispel their shame this way. The court accepted the cultural defense and convicted him of manslaughter instead of murder (a far lesser charge). Reacting to the decision, the director of the Asian-American Defense and Education Fund found herself on both sides of a dilemma. At first, she criticized the court for not granting Chinese women American lib- erties: “You don’t want to import [immigrant] cultural values into our judicial system.... We don’t want women victimized by backward cus- toms.” Later, however, she praised the court’s use of the cultural defense 8 Adam Nossiter, “New Orleans Delays Razing Houses 2 Weeks,” New York Times, Jan. 7, 2005. 9 Scott Shane, “Seeking an Exit Strategy for Guantánamo,” New York Times, June 18, 2006. 8 Policy Paradox and its protection of minority culture. To bar the cultural defense, she said, “would promote the idea that when people come to America, they have to give up their way of doing things. That is an idea we cannot support.”10 The Cheetah—Equalizer or Advantage? Under what conditions should people with disabilities be able to com- pete with nondisabled athletes? Oscar Pistorius, a South African double amputee, runs with prosthetic feet called Cheetahs. They were designed based on studies of the tendons in cheetahs’ hind feet. The International Association of Athletics Federations found that the device gave runners an unfair advantage, and ruled that no one would be allowed to use them in competitions for the able-bodied. A higher Court of Arbitration for Sport reversed the decision. Does the Cheetah give a runner an advantage? The Cheetah’s inventor, Van Phillips, said the device “may be more advantageous than the human foot” because its materials may be more energy efficient. But it would be hard to separate and measure all the factors that affect an athlete’s per- formance wearing the Cheetah, including the way the foot attaches to the athlete’s limb, how much knee flexion the athlete has, and how the runner comes out of the starting blocks. “Those differences are difficult if not impossible to quantify. Maybe there is not an answer.”11 How can we make sense of a world where such paradoxes abound and there may be no answers? In an age of human mastery over the inner- most and outermost realms, how are we to deal with situations that don’t observe the elementary rules of scientific decorum? Can we make public policy behave? Rajiv Shah apparently asked himself this question when he went from being “a brainy thirty-seven-year-old physician with little government experience” to head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He had previously worked on development aid in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he found the challenges of leading a pub- lic agency enormous. In the past three decades, USAID’s budget and staff had dwindled while government funneled most of its foreign aid through 10 Doriane Lamblet Coleman, “Individualizing Justice Through Multiculturalism: The Liberals’ Dilemma,” Columbia Law Review vol. 96, no. 5 (1996), pp. 1093–1167, quotes on pp. 1095–6. 11 Carol Pogash, “A Personal Call to Invention,” New York Times, July 2, 2008.  Introduction: Why This Book? 9 private contractors, and here he was, dealing with the Haiti earthquake, the Pakistan floods, and a surge of American foreign aid workers sup- posed to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan. Shah felt privileged and inspired by his opportunity to work in the Obama administration but, at the same time, a little wistful about “the super-exciting things we could do” in the private sector: “You could actually say, ‘O.K., my goal is to solve AIDS, and how would you solve AIDS analytically?’ You didn’t have to worry about the politics.”12 The Rationality Project The fields of political science, public administration, law, and econom- ics have had a common mission of rescuing public policy from the irra- tionalities and indignities of politics. They aspire to make policy instead with rational, analytical, and scientific methods. I call this endeavor “the rationality project,” and it has been at the core of American political cul- ture since the beginning. The project began with James Madison’s effort to “cure the mischiefs of faction” with proper constitutional design.13 In the 1870s, the dean of Harvard Law School (with the marvelous name of Christopher Columbus Langdell) ventured to take politics out of the law by reforming legal education. Law was a science, he proclaimed, to be studied by examining appellate court decisions and distilling their com- mon essence into a system of principles. At the turn of the twentieth cen- tury, Progressive reformers sought to render policy more scientific and less political by removing policy-making authority from elected bodies and giving it to expert commissions and professional city managers instead. The quest for an apolitical science of government continued in the twentieth century with Herbert Simon’s call for a “science of adminis- tration,” Harold Lasswell’s dream of a “science of policy forming and exe- cution,” and the development of college and graduate school programs in public policy. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the rationality project was in full bloom in political science and economics under the banner of “rational choice.” When I began teaching in one of the first public policy programs, Duke University’s Institute of Policy Sciences, it struck me that the new field of public policy was rooted in its own paradox. Policy science was passionately devoted to improving governance, yet the field was based 12 Mark Landler, “Curing the Ills of America’s Top Foreign Aid Program,” New York Times, Oct. 23, 2010. 13 This was the argument of his “Federalist Paper No. 10.” 10 Policy Paradox on a deep disgust for the ambiguities and paradoxes of politics. By and large, the new science dismissed politics as an unfortunate obstacle to clear-headed, rational analysis and good policy. My job was to teach the core political science course for public policy majors and, somehow, make political science into a rational analytical tool that would yield definitive answers about the best way to tackle any problem. I kept asking myself, if you take the politics out of governance, what exactly is left? Policy Paradox emerged from my wrestle with that conundrum. This book has three aims. First, I argue that the rationality project misses the point of politics. From inside the rationality project, politics looks messy, foolish, erratic, and inexplicable. Political events seem to leap outside the categories that logic and rationality offer. In the real world, we are often forced to entertain paradox, but we are able to live with it because paradoxes are paradoxical only from within one worldview. Poli- tics is one way we help each other see from different perspectives. If we can get outside one viewpoint, we can do a better job of living together and solving common problems. Thus, I aim to construct a mode of policy analysis that recognizes the dark, self-interested side of political conflict but also sees politics as a valuable creative process for social harmony. Second, the rationality project worships objectivity and seeks modes of analysis that will lead to the objectively best results for society. The categories of analysis are somehow supposed to be above politics or out- side it. Rationality purports to offer a correct vantage point from which we can judge the goodness of the real world. I argue, instead, that the very categories underlying rational analysis are defined in political strug- gle. I aim to construct a mode of policy analysis that recognizes ana- lytical concepts, problem definitions, and policy instruments as political claims themselves, instead of granting them privileged status as univer- sal truths. At the same time, even though—or perhaps because—there is no “gold standard” of equality, efficiency, social measurement, causation, effectiveness, or any other analytic tool, values matter. In every chapter, I try to show why policy analysts and decision makers must bring their own values into the picture. Third, the field of public policy is dominated by economics and its model of society as a market. A market is a collection of individuals who have no community life. Their relationships consist entirely of trading with one another to maximize their individual well-being. Like many social scientists, I don’t find the market model a convincing description of the world I know or, for that matter, any world I would want to live in. Instead, I start from a model of community where individuals live in a dense web of relationships, dependencies, and loyalties; where they care deeply about at least some other people besides themselves; where they  Introduction: Why This Book? 11 influence each others’ desires and goals; and where they envision and fight for a public interest as well as their individual interests. The project of making public policy rational rests on three pillars: a model of reasoning, a model of society, and a model of policy making. The model of reasoning is rational decision making. In this model, decisions are or should be made in a series of well-defined steps: 1. Identify objectives. 2. Identify alternative courses of action for achieving objectives. 3. Predict the possible consequences of each alternative. 4. Evaluate the possible consequences of each alternative. 5. Select the alternative that maximizes the attainment of objectives. This model is so pervasive it is a staple of checkout-counter magazines, self-help books, and child-rearing manuals. For all its intuitive appeal, however, the rational decision-making model fails to answer what Obama should have done on health insurance to maximize his objectives, because he, his staff, his party, and his constituencies all had multiple and sometimes conflicting objectives. Whether he succeeded in either his health insurance goals or his party-political goals depended in large part on how he was able to portray the health insurance reform to the American people—not merely sell it to them, but convince them in their guts that it would help them rather than harm them and that it fit their vision of good government. And whether he could convince them of those things depended far more on how he came across emotionally—whether he could connect with them at a human level—than on his advisers’ calculations of the dollar costs and benefits, or even their finesse at stir-frying the numbers. The rational decision-making model ignores our emotional feelings and moral intuitions, both powerful parts of human motivation and precious parts of our life experience. The rational model doesn’t help a Chinese-American leader know whether her immigrant community’s interests are better served by imposing American liberal norms on its members or by allowing them to maintain their culture. The rational model might help us begin to evaluate the security risks to the U.S. of closing Guantánamo versus keeping it open, but it doesn’t help us judge whether our anti-terrorist policy is morally right, or to understand how our policy affects the minds and motives of non-Americans. Throughout this book, I develop a model of political reasoning quite different from the model of rational decision making. Political reasoning is reasoning by metaphor and analogy. It is trying to get others to see a situation as one thing rather than another. Rubble can be seen as a public 12 Policy Paradox safety hazard or a family’s emotional refuge. A protest rally can be seen as a forum for public debate or an emotional assault on vulnerable people. Each vision constructs a different political contest, and invokes a differ- ent set of rules for resolving the conflict. Political reasoning involves metaphor-making and category-making, but not just for beauty’s sake or for insight’s sake. It is strategic portrayal for persuasion’s sake and, ultimately, for policy’s sake. The model of society underlying the contemporary rationality project is the market. In this model, society is a collection of autonomous, rational decision makers who come together only when they want to make an exchange. They each have objectives or preferences, they each compare alternative ways of attaining their objectives, and they each choose the way that yields the most satisfaction. They maximize their self-interest through rational calculation. The market model and the rational decision- making model are tightly related. In the market model, individuals know what they want. They have relatively fixed, independent preferences for goods, services, and policies. In real societies, where people are psychologically and materially depen- dent, where they are connected through emotional bonds, traditions, and social groups, their preferences are based on loyalties and images. How they define their preferences depends to a large extent on how choices are presented to them and by whom, and they aren’t always consistent. They think poor people are too dependent on government assistance, but they believe government should help them anyway. They want greater welfare spending when it’s called “helping poor children,” but not when it is called “welfare.” They want lower prices on the goods they buy, but not on the goods or labor they sell. They might want their government to go to war if someone shows them compelling security reasons or inspires them to fight on the side of the angels—and they might change their minds suddenly and dramatically when presented with different visions of what is going on “over there.” Thus, the starting point for political analysis must be a political com- munity, not a market. I develop a model of political community in Chap- ter 1, and use it as the basis for thinking about every aspect of policy analysis and policy making. The model of policy making in the rationality project is a production model, where policy is, or should be, created in an orderly sequence of stages, almost as if on an assembly line. An issue is “placed on the agenda,” and a problem gets defined. It moves through the legislative and execu- tive branches of government, where alternative solutions are proposed, analyzed, refined, legitimized, and, ultimately, selected. A solution is  Introduction: Why This Book? 13 implemented by the executive agencies and constantly challenged and revised by interested actors, often using the media and the judicial branch. And finally, if the policy-making process is managerially sophisticated, it provides a means of evaluating and revising its own policies. Ideally, as Rajiv Shah said about working for a private foundation, policy makers could solve each problem analytically without worrying about the politics. This model of policy making as rational problem solving can’t explain why sometimes policy solutions go looking for problems. It can’t tell us why solutions such as deregulation turn into problems for the very groups they were meant to help. Most important, the production model fails to capture what I see as the essence of policy making in political communities: the struggle over ideas. Ideas are a medium of exchange and a mode of influence even more powerful than money and votes and guns. Shared meanings motivate people to action and meld individual striving into collective action. All political conflict revolves around ideas. Policy making, in turn, is a constant struggle over the criteria for clas- sification, the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideals that guide the way people behave. The Plan of the Book Chapter 1, “The Market and the Polis,” sets forth the model of politi- cal community I call the Polis. It describes the fundamental elements of human behavior and social life that I take to be axiomatic, and contrasts them with the axioms of the market model. The other chapters build on this model of a political community. The rest of the book takes its shape from the notion of a policy issue implied in the rationality project: we have a goal; we have a problem, a discrepancy between reality and the goal; and we seek a solution to the problem. Parts II, III, and IV correspond to the three parts of this frame- work: goals, problems, and solutions. Needless to say, the political careers of most policy issues aren’t nearly as simple as this three-part formula would suggest. For example, people don’t always perceive a goal first and then look for discrepancies between the goal and the status quo. Often, they see a problem first, which triggers a new awareness of ideals and a search for solutions. Or, perhaps they see a solution first, then formulate a problem that requires their solution (and their services). Nevertheless, I use this framework because it expresses a logic of problem solving that is not only widespread in the policy field but that also makes sense to the rational part of our human nature. 14 Policy Paradox Part II is about goals—not the specific goals of particular policy issues, such as expanding health insurance coverage or lowering health care costs, but the enduring values of community life that give rise to con- troversy over particular policies: equity, efficiency, welfare (in the sense of well-being, not government aid), liberty, and security. These values are the standards of analysis most commonly invoked in policy debates. They are also “motherhood issues”: everyone is for them when they are stated abstractly, but the fight begins as soon as we ask what people mean by them. These values not only express goals but also serve as the stan- dards we use to evaluate existing situations and policy proposals. There might well have been other ideals in the section on goals, such as justice, democracy, and community. Rather than giving each of these ideals its own chapter, I have woven them into the other chapters and tried to show how they influence thinking about more tailored policy goals. One tenet of the rationality project is that there are objective and neu- tral standards of evaluation that can be applied to politics and that are untainted by the interests of political players. The theme of Part II is that behind every policy issue lurks a contest over conflicting, though equally plausible, conceptions of the same abstract goal or value. The abstrac- tions are aspirations for a community, into which people read contradic- tory interpretations. It may not be possible to get everyone to agree on the same interpretation, but the first task of the political analyst is to reveal and clarify the underlying value disputes so that people can see where they differ and move toward some reconciliation. Part III is about problems, and about how we know there is a disparity between social goals and the current state of affairs. There are many modes of defining problems in policy discourse, and each mode is like a language people use to express and defend their interpretations. “Symbols” and “Numbers” are about verbal and numerical languages, respectively, and both examine devices of symbolic representation within those languages. We also define problems in terms of what causes them (“Causes”), who is lined up on each side (“Interests”), or what kind of choice they pose and what ethical standards are appropriate for deciding (“Decisions”). Part IV is about solutions, or, more accurately, about the broad types of policy instruments governments can use to solve problems. These chap- ters start from the assumption that all policies involve deliberate attempts to change people’s behavior, and each chapter in this section deals with a mechanism for bringing about such change—creating rewards and penal- ties (“Incentives”), making and enforcing rules (“Rules”), informing and persuading (“Facts”), stipulating rights and duties (“Rights”), and reorga- nizing authority, or changing who has power to do what (“Powers”).  Introduction: Why This Book? 15 The common theme throughout Part IV is that policy instruments are not just tools, each with its own function and its own suitability for certain kinds of jobs. In the standard political science model of the policy-making process, policy solutions are decided upon and then imple- mented, though things usually go awry at the implementation stage. The task of the analyst is to figure out which is the best tool to use, and then to fix mistakes when things don’t go as planned. I argue, instead, that each type of policy instrument is more like a game than a tool. Each has its peculiar ground rules, within which people continue their political conflicts once the policy game has started. Each mode of social regulation draws lines around what people may and may not do and how they may or may not treat each other. But these boundaries are constantly contested, partly because they are ambiguous and don’t settle conflicts, and partly because they allocate benefits and burdens to the people on either side. The job of the policy designer, in this view, is to understand the rules of the game well enough to know the standard moves and countermoves, and to think about them strategically. Whether you are a policy analyst, a policy researcher, a policy advo- cate, a policy maker, or an engaged citizen, my hope for Policy Paradox is that it helps you to go beyond your job description and the tasks you are given—to think hard about your own core values, to deliberate with oth- ers, and to make the world a better place. Part i POLITICS 1 The Market and the Polis A theory of policy politics must start with a simple model of political society, just as economics starts with a simple model of economic society. Polis, the Greek word for city-state, seems a fitting name for a model of political society because it conjures up an entity small enough to have very simple forms of organization yet large enough to embody the essential elements of politics. In building a model of political society, it is helpful to use the market model as a foil because of its predominance in contemporary policy discussions. The contrast between the models of political society and market society will illuminate some ways the market model distorts political life. A market can be simply defined as a social system in which individuals pursue their own welfare by exchanging things with others whenever trades are mutually beneficial. Economists often begin their discussions of the market by conjuring up the Robinson Crusoe society, where two people on a lush tropical island swap coconuts and sea animals. They trade to make each person better off, but since each person always has the option of producing everything for himself, trading is never an absolute necessity for either one. (Economics textbooks usually neglect to men- tion that the “real” Crusoe was able to salvage a veritable microcosm of industrial society from his shipwrecked vessel—everything from gun- powder and muskets to cables and nails.) Participants in a market com- pete with each other for scarce resources; each person tries to acquire things at the least possible cost, and to convert raw materials into more valuable things to sell at the highest possible price. In the market model, individuals act only to maximize their own self- interest. “Self-interest” means their own welfare, however they define that for themselves. It does not mean that they act “selfishly”; their self-interest might include, for example, the well-being of their family and friends, but most market models give short shrift to anything but individual 20 Policy Paradox self-interest. The competitive drive to maximize one’s own welfare stim- ulates people to be very resourceful, creative, clever, and productive, and ultimately, competition raises the level of economic well-being of society as a whole. With this description of the essence of the market model, we can start to build an alternative model of the polis by contrasting more detailed features of the market model and a political community. Community Because politics and policy can happen only in communities, commu- nity must be the starting point of our polis. Public policy is about com- munities trying to achieve something as communities. This is true even though there is almost always conflict within a community over who its members are and what its goals should be, and even though every com- munal goal ultimately must be achieved through the behavior of indi- viduals. Unlike the market, which starts with individuals and assumes no goals and intentions other than those held by individuals, a model of the polis must assume collective will and collective effort. Untold volumes of political philosophy have tried to define and explain this phenomenon of collective intention. But even without being able to define it, we know intuitively that societies behave as if they had one. We can scarcely speak about societies without using the language of col- lective will (“Democrats want... ”; “Environmentalists seek... ”; “The administration is trying... ”). Every child knows the feeling of being in a group and reaching consensus. We can argue about whether consen- sus implies unanimity or only majority, or whether apparent consensus masks some suppressed dissension. But we know that consensus is a feel- ing of collective will, and we know when it exists and when it does not, just as surely (and sometimes mistakenly) as we know when we are hun- gry and when we are not. A community must have members and some way of defining who is a member and who is not. Membership is in some sense the primary political issue, for membership definitions and rules determine who is allowed to participate in community activities, and who is governed by community rules and authority. Nation-states have rules for citizenship. Private clubs have qualifications for members and procedures by which people can join. Religious groups have formal rituals for new members to join. Neighborhoods may have no formal rules limiting who may become a member, but informal practices such as racial discrimination in selling  The Market and the Polis 21 and renting homes, mortgage lending, and sheer harassment can accom- plish exclusion without formal rules. In many places, growing anti-immigrant sentiment has stimulated a wave of new membership policies—policies about who gets to become a resident or a citizen of any political jurisdiction, and what social and civic rights will be accorded them. Some states and cities have passed laws that restrict undocumented aliens’ access to health and social services, rental housing, and driving. In 2010, Arizona, the state with the highest rate of illegal immigration, passed a controversial law requiring police officers to investigate the immigration status of anybody they stop for any purpose, if the officer suspects the person might be an illegal immi- grant. The Arizona law raises fears of prejudice, because police might use looks and accents to decide whether they “suspect” someone is an illegal immigrant. The law also creates tension between the state and the federal government over which one has legal authority to enforce U.S. member- ship policies.1 A model of the polis must also include a distinction between political community and cultural community. A political community is a group of people who live under the same political rules and structure of gov- ernance. A cultural community is a group of people who share a culture and draw their identities from shared language, history, and traditions. In most nations, the political community includes diverse cultural commu- nities. Cultural diversity creates a profound dilemma for policy politics: how to integrate several cultural communities into a single political com- munity without destroying their identity and integrity. (This was exactly the dilemma in the “multiculturism” paradox in the Introduction.) Issues such as criminal standards, bilingual education, and interracial and inter- national adoption are about defending communities against death by assimilation, and about pitting community interests against individual interests. These issues can’t be adequately understood in terms of indi- viduals pursuing their self-interests. In Europe, discussions of cultural and political membership have been more salient than in the U.S. and proceed under the rubric of “integration policy.” Integration focuses on what values and behaviors immigrants must espouse in order to become citizens. For example, an immigrant applying for citizenship in Denmark 1 Darnell Weeden, “Local Laws Restricting the Freedom of Undocumented Immigrants as Violations of Equal Protection and Principles of Federal Preemption, ” St. Louis University Law Journal, 52, no. 4 (2008), pp. 479–500; Randal C. Archibold, “U.S. ’s Toughest Immigration Law is Signed in Arizona, New York Times, Apr. 24, 2010. 22 Policy Paradox must pass a Danish-language test that many Danes might not be able to pass, and must declare support for gender equality.2 Membership in a community defines social and economic rights as well as political rights. Even more than legal definitions of who’s in and who’s out, mutual aid among members transforms a collection of individuals into a community. Sharing burdens and bounty binds people together as a group. Immigrants in their new homelands tend to stick together in eth- nic neighborhoods, and one of the first things they do is establish mutual aid societies to pool their resources in order to provide each other with money for culturally acceptable funerals, for sickness and life insurance, and for credit to establish new businesses. Members of a community help each other in all kinds of non-monetary ways, too, such as sharing child care or helping each other maintain homes and neighborhoods. Mutual aid is a kind of social insurance. In the market model, insurance is a financial product that firms sell in order to make a profit and buyers buy in order to create economic secu- rity for themselves. In the polis, mutual aid is a good that people create collectively in order to protect each other and their community. Mutual aid might be the strongest bond that holds individuals together as a com- munity. And in a larger sense, sharing, caring, and maintaining relation- ships is at least as strong a motivator of human behavior as autonomy, competition, and promotion of one’s separate self-interests. Altruism Humans are social creatures and care about others as well as themselves. A model of political community must recognize altruism as a power- ful human motive.3 “Altruism” means acting in order to benefit others rather than oneself. Taking care of children, treating the sick, helping coworkers, volunteering as a tutor or a fix-it person—these are forms of everyday altruism. Altruism is so much a part of our existence that we take it for granted. But the rationality paradigm, with its picture of humans as fundamen- 2 Cultural pluralism within political communities is richly explored by Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Com- munity and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); and Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New Inter- national Politics of Diversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 3 Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1996); Deborah Stone The Samaritan’s Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor? (New York: Nation Books, 2008).  The Market and the Polis 23 tally self-interested, makes altruism almost invisible. In fact, according to many social scientists, altruism doesn’t exist. As Thomas Hobbes, one of the first modern democratic theorists, put it, “No man giveth but with intention of good to himself.”4 Behind every apparently altruistic behav- ior lurks an ulterior, self-interested motive. Perhaps when you help an injured child, for example, you’re really doing it to relieve your own dis- tress from seeing a child in pain. According to many modern social scientists, people’s actions don’t count as altruistic unless they receive absolutely no benefit themselves, or, to be even more stringent, unless they make some sacrifice or incur a loss when they act to help somebody else. As it happens, people who help other people almost always say they get psychic rewards: “When you help other people, you get more than you give.” Here is the paradox of altruism: when people act to benefit others, they feel satisfaction, fulfillment, and a sense that helping others gives their lives meaning. The strict self-interest paradigm, therefore, makes altruism impossible by definition. This is not to say that humans aren’t also self-interested. We have both kinds of motives. But trying to measure the exact proportions of self-interest and altruism in any human behavior is as difficult as measur- ing whether a high-tech prosthetic foot gives a runner greater capabili- ties than he would have had with his own two feet. Here, it’s enough to say that in the polis, people have both self-interested and altruistic moti- vations, and policy analysis must account for both of them. In the polis, altruism can be just as fierce as self-interest. A manager of a fast-food franchise keeps two sets of time sheets—one to show her boss that she follows the chain’s rules, the other to allow her employees time off and flexibility to deal with their family issues. The supervisor risks her job and her reputation (definitely not in her self-interest) in order to help her employees manage their jobs and personal lives. In schools, hospitals, retail stores, and government agencies, people sometimes fudge the records, bend the eligibility rules, take food and goods to pass on to desperate and suffering people—in other words, lie, cheat, and steal— when they believe the rules are unjust and there is a higher moral duty than obeying rules. Without an appreciation of altruism, we can’t fully understand how policy gets implemented at the street level, nor can we understand the currents of resistance and civil disobedience that make up the “moral underground.”5 4 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (orig. ed. 1651), chap. 15. 5 Lisa Dodson, The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy (New York: New Press, 2009). 24 Policy Paradox Public Interest In the polis, there is a public interest. “Public interest” might mean any of several things. It could be individual interests held in common, things everyone wants for themselves, such as a high standard of living. It could mean individuals’ goals for their community. Often people want things for their community that conflict with what they want for themselves. They want good schools and clean air, perhaps, but also lower taxes and the right to drive SUVs. Citizens in this view have two sides: a private, rather self-interested side and a more public-spirited side, and we might think of the public interest as those things the public-spirited side desires. Public interest could also mean those goals on which there is a con- sensus. Programs and policies favored by a majority of citizens, for exam- ple, would comprise the public interest. In this interpretation, the public interest is not necessarily enduring. It is whatever most people want at the moment, and so it changes over time. And of course, this notion of public interest raises questions of what counts as “consensus” and how we would know whether true consensus exists. Finally, the public interest could mean things that are good for a com- munity as a community. Even the most minimally organized community has a stake in preserving its own sense of order and fair play, whatever form that takes. All communities have a general interest in having some governing processes and some means for resolving disputes without vio- lence. The members of a community almost always have an interest in its survival, and therefore in its perpetuation and its self-defense. This question of community survival animates the debate over fighting terror- ism. One side argues that terrorism is such a threat to our existence that fighting it justifies virtually any tactic, including torturing suspects and restricting our own constitutional rights to privacy and freedom. The other side argues that our nation is defined by its civil rights and the rule of law, so that to sacrifice them is to destroy our community. Both sides agree that community survival is what is at stake. There is virtually never full agreement on the public interest, yet we need to make it a defining characteristic of the polis because so much of politics entails people fighting over what the public interest is and trying to realize their own definitions of it. Let it be an empty box, but no matter; in the polis, people expend a lot of energy trying to fill up that box. The concept of public interest is to the polis what self-interest is to the mar- ket. They are both abstractions whose specific contents we do not need to know in order to use them to explain and predict people’s behavior.  The Market and the Polis 25 We simply assume that people behave as if they were trying to realize the public interest or maximize their self-interest. This is not to deny that politics also includes people pursuing their self-interest. But there is no society on earth in which people are allowed to do that blatantly and exclusively. Even if we only want to understand how people pursue their self-interest, we need to understand how con- ceptions of the public interest shape and constrain people’s strategies for pursuing their own interests. It would be as much a mistake to think that the market has no concept of public interest as to believe that the polis has no room for self-interest. But there is a world of difference between public interest in a market and in a polis. In market theory, the public interest is the net result of all individuals pursuing their self-interest. If a community starts with a fair income distribution and has a well-functioning market, then whatever happens afterward is by definition the best result for society as a whole. In a market, in short, the empty box of public interest gets filled as an afterthought with the side effects of other activities. In the polis, by con- trast, people fill the box intentionally, with forethought, planning, and conscious effort. Commons Problems Because people often pursue a conception of public interest that differs from their conception of self-interest, the polis is characterized by a spe- cial problem: how to combine self-interest and public interest, or, to put it another way, how to have both private benefits and collective benefits. Situations where self-interest and public interest work against each other are known as “commons problems,” and, in the polis, commons problems are common. A factory owner gains a private benefit by discharging industrial waste into a river because it is a cheap and profitable disposal method; but this method ruins the water for everyone else, and so cre- ates a social cost. A high-quality school system is a collective benefit but requires individual tax payments, and so creates private costs. Commons problems are also called collective action problems because it is hard to motivate people to undertake private costs or forgo private benefits for the collective good. In market theory, commons problems are thought to be the excep- tion rather than the rule. Most actions in the market model do not have social consequences. In the polis, by contrast, commons problems are 26 Policy Paradox everything. Not only do they crop up frequently, but most significant policy problems are commons problems. It is rare in the polis that the benefits and costs of an action are entirely self-contained, affecting only one or two individuals, or that they are limited to immediate and direct effects. Actions have side effects, unanticipated consequences, second- and third-order effects, long-term effects, and ripple effects. The language of policy is full of such metaphors recognizing the broad social conse- quences of individual actions. One major dilemma in the polis is how to get people to give weight to these broader consequences in their private calculus of choices, especially in an era when the dominant culture cel- ebrates private consumption and personal gain. Influence Fortunately, in the polis, the vast gap between self-interest and public interest is bridged by some potent forces: influence, cooperation, and loyalty. Influence is inherent in communities, even communities of two. Humans aren’t freewheeling, freethinking atoms whose desires arise from spontaneous generation. Our ideas about what we want and the choices we make are shaped by education, persuasion, and socialization. From Kalamazoo to Kathmandu, young people covet expensive brand-name sneakers and the latest electronic gear, not because these things are inher- ently attractive to human beings but because global consumer culture heavily promotes them as desirable. Actions, no less than ideas, are influenced by others—by the choices other people have made and the ones we expect them to make, by what they want us to do, and by what we think they expect us to do. More often than not, our choices are conditional. A worker will go out on strike only if she thinks that enough of her fellow workers will join her. A citizen will bother to complain about postal service only if he believes that the post office will take some action in response. Influence works not simply by putting one individual under a figura- tive spell of another but also in ways that lead to curious kinds of collec- tive behavior. “Bandwagon effects” in elections happen when a candidate’s initial lead causes people to support him or her because they want to be on board with a winner. Panics happen when people fear an economic col- lapse, rush to cash out their bank accounts, and in so doing bring about the collapse they feared. Mobs often act with a peculiar sense of direction and purpose, as if coordinated by a leader, when in fact there is none. Fads for body piercing or backward baseball caps are frivolous examples of col-  The Market and the Polis 27 lective behavior; prison riots and “white flight” from urban neighborhoods are more serious. Such things can happen only because people’s choices are conditional. They want to do something only if most people will do it (say, go on strike), or to do something before most people do it (say, get their money out of the bank), or do something because others are doing it. Influence sometimes spills over into coercion, and the line between them is fuzzy. In fact, one big difference between traditional conserva- tives and liberals is where they place that line. Liberals tend to see pov- erty as a kind of coercion, and the far Left is wont to see coercion in any kind of need, even that born of desire to “keep up with the Joneses.” Conservatives have a more restricted view of coercion, seeing it only in physical force and commands backed up by the threat of force, but liber- tarians are wont to see it in any government rule or regulation. There is no correct place to draw the line, because coercion is an idea about what motivates behavior, a label and an interpretation, rather than the behav- ior itself. No matter that we can’t draw a clear line between influence and coercion—influence in all its fuzziness, varieties, and degrees of strength is one of the central elements of politics, and we’ll see it at the heart of many policy dilemmas. Cooperation In the polis, cooperation is every bit as important as competition. This is true for two reasons. First, politics involves seeking allies and coop- erating with them in order to compete with opponents. Whenever there are two sides to an issue, there must be alliances among the people on one side. Children learn this lesson when they play in threesomes. Every conflict unites some people as it divides others, and politics has as much to do with how alliances are made and held together as with how people fight.6 For this reason, the two-person models so prominent in economics and game theory are politically empty. When the only players in a model are “A” and “B,” there is no possibility for strategic coalitions and shifting alliances, or for joint effort, leadership, and coordination. The second reason cooperation must be central to a model of poli- tics is that it is essential to power. Cooperation is often a more effective form of subordination than coercion. Authority that depends solely on the use of force cannot extend very far. Prison guards, with seemingly all the resources stacked on their side, need the cooperation of inmates to 6 E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People (Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, 1970), chap. 4. 28 Policy Paradox keep order in the prison. Despite bars, locks, and the guards’ monopoly on weapons, prisoners outnumber the guards. So guards bargain with prisoners, offering them favors and privileges to gain their cooperation.7 Even commanders of Nazi concentration camps depended on the coop- eration and participation of inmates to operate the camps.8 American counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan rests on cooperation between American soldiers and Afghan civilians. According to the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency manual, soldiers can be most effective by helping to provide food, water, shelter, education, and medical care, and by showing respect for people of the country they occupy.9 In the textbook model of markets, there is nothing but pure competi- tion, which means no cooperation among either buyers or sellers. Sell- ers compete with each other to obtain raw materials at the lowest prices and to sell their products at the highest profit. They compete with savvy customers, who shop around for the best deals and thereby force the sell- ers to offer lower prices. Cooperation, when it occurs, is a deviation from the well-functioning market, and most words to describe it in the mar- ket model are pejorative—collusion, price-fixing, insider trading. In the polis, cooperation is the norm. It is the inseparable other side of competi- tion and a necessary ingredient of power. The words to describe it are decidedly more positive—coalition, alliance, union, party, support, treaty. Loyalty Cooperation means alliances, and alliances are at least somewhat endur- ing. For that reason, cooperation often goes hand in hand with loyalty. In the ideal market, when a store hikes its prices or lets its products and service deteriorate, a shrewd buyer will switch stores. There is no “glue” in buyer-seller relations. In politics, relationships aren’t usually so fluid. They involve gifts, favors, support, and, most of all, future obligations. Political alliances bind people over time. To paraphrase E. E. Schatt- schneider, politics is more like choosing a spouse than shopping in a dis- count store.10 The differing views of loyalty in the market and polis models are also reflected in language. In the market, people are “buyers” and “sellers.” In 7 Gresham Sykes, Society of Captives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), chap. 5. 8 Jean-Francois Steiner, Treblinka (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), especially pp. 55–75. 9 U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 10 Schattschneider, Semisovereign People, op. cit., note 6, p. 66.  The Market and the Polis 29 politics, they are “enemies” and “friends.” It is characteristic of friendships that we stick with our friends, even when they hurt us or do things not much to our liking. We honor friends more for what we have shared in the past than for what we expect them to do for us now and in the future. Friendships are forgiving in a way that pure commercial relationships are not. The idea of a “pure” commercial relationship is one not “tainted” by loyalty or sentiment. In the polis, history counts for a lot; in the market, it counts for nothing. This is not to say that political alliances are perfectly stable, or that people never abandon friends and join hands with former enemies. Chil- dren learn this lesson from their threesomes, too. But in the polis there is a presumption of loyalty. People expect that others will normally stick by their friends and allies, and that it would take a major event—something that triggers a deep fear or offers an irresistible opportunity—to get them to switch their loyalties. Breaking old alliances can be risky, and people don’t do it lightly. Groups Influence, cooperation, and loyalty are powerful forces, and the result is that groups and organizations, rather than individuals, are the building blocks of the polis. Groups are important in three ways. First, people belong to institutions and organizations, even when they aren’t for- mal members. They participate in organizations as citizens, employees, customers, students, taxpayers, voters, and potential recruits, if not as staff, managers, or leaders. Their opinions are shaped by organizations, their interests are affected by organizations, and they depend on organi- zations to represent their interests. Second, policy making isn’t only about solving public problems but about how groups are formed, split, and re-formed to achieve public pur- poses. On policy issues of any significance, groups confront each other, using individuals only as their spokespeople. Groups coalesce and divide over policy proposals, depending on how they expect the proposal to affect them. When a state legislature proposes a cut in school funding, parents and teachers in a school district might come together to fight the proposal. But when the school board is negotiating teachers’ contracts, many of the same parents might no longer wish to ally with the teachers. Third, groups are important because decisions of the polis are collec- tive. They are explicitly collective through formal procedures—such as voting, administrative rule making, and bargaining—and through public 30 Policy Paradox bodies, such as legislatures, courts, juries, committees, or agencies. Public decisions are implicitly collective in that even when officials have “sole authority,” they are influenced by outside opinion and pressure. Policy decisions aren’t made by abstract people but by people in social roles and organizations, addressing audiences of other people in their social roles and organizations, and using procedures that have been collectively approved. The roles, settings, procedures, and audiences exert their own influence, even on the most strong-willed and independent minds. I make groups an element of the polis in contrast to the market model, where the actors are conceived either as individuals or as groups acting as if they had one mind. But this model is not a pluralist theory of politics. The pluralist theory holds that all important interests have the capacity to form interest groups and that these interest groups have relatively equal chances to make their voices heard in the political system. I insist on the importance of groups, not to claim that a political system is equally open to all of them but to point out that politics is necessarily a system of alliances. Information In the ideal market, information is “perfect,” meaning it is accurate, complete, and available to everyone at no cost. In the polis, by contrast, information is ambiguous, incomplete, often strategically shaded, and sometimes deliberately withheld. Of course, it would be silly to say there is no such thing as correct information. Surely, when the newspaper reports that Microsoft’s stock closed at $27.21 per share, or that Senator John McCain voted against an arms limitation treaty with Russia, or that a police officer used the word “nigger” forty-one times in tape-recorded interviews, we are quite confident that the information is accurate and that it makes sense to think of that kind of information as being correct or incorrect. But in politics, what matters is what people make of such reports. People act on what they believe to be the financial health of a company, whether they think their senator represents their interests, or what they think a police officer’s use of racial epithets means for the pos- sibility of fair trials for black citizens. In the polis, iterpretations are more powerful than facts. Much of what we “know” is what we believe to be true. And what we believe about information depends on who tells us (the source) and how it is presented (the medium, the choice of language, the context). Some people are more likely to believe medical information from a doctor than  The Market and the Polis 31 from a friend, whereas others are more likely to believe a friend than a doctor. Some people find blogs more convincing than newspapers, and vice versa. The words, pictures, and imagery of information affect its very message as well as its persuasiveness. Timing matters. A company’s announcement about its safety practices will be interpreted differently if issued after an accident rather than before. Because politics is driven by how people interpret information, politi- cal actors strive to control interpretations. Political candidates and their campaign advisers are notorious for their creative presentation of information, or spin. But strategic manipulation of information is by no means the preserve of politicians. We all do it, have done it, and will continue to do it. (Think about the last time you told your professor why your paper was late, your students why the exams weren’t graded yet, or your children why you make them go to school.) Information in the polis is different from information in the market model, because it depends so much on interpretation and is subject to strategic manipulation. Much of this book explores how policy information is strategically crafted in politics. In the polis, information is never complete. We can never know all the possible means for achieving a goal or all the possible effects of an action, especially since all actions have side effects, unanticipated consequences, and long-term effects. Nor can we know for sure what other people will do in response to our actions, yet often we choose to act on the basis of what we expect others to do. Whenever people act, they act on guesses, hunches, expectations, hopes, and faith, as well as on facts. Information is never fully and equally available to all participants in politics. There is a cost to acquiring information, if only the cost of one’s own time. To the extent that information is complicated, sophisticated, or technical, it requires education to be understood, and education is not uniformly distributed. These are by now standard critiques of market theory. But even more important for a model of the polis is that political actors very often deliberately keep crucial information secret. The ideas of inventors, the business plans of entrepreneurs, the decision of a gov- ernment to devalue its currency, whether a putative candidate will in fact run for office, where the town leaders are thinking of locating a sew- age treatment plant—every one of these things might be kept secret if someone expects someone else to behave differently were the information made public. Secrecy and revelation are tools of political strategy, and we would grossly misunderstand the character of information in politics if we thought of it as neutral facts, readily disclosed. 32 Policy Paradox “Closing averages on the human scene were mixed today. Brotherly love was down two points, while enlightened self-interest gained a half. Vanity showed no movement, and guarded optimism slipped a point in sluggish trading. Overall, the status quo remained unchanged.” Passion In the market, economic resources are governed by the laws of matter. Resources are finite, scarce, and used up when they are used. Whatever is used for making guns cannot be used for making butter (a textbook example dreamed up by someone who surely never made either). People can do only one thing at a time (produce guns or butter), and material can be only one thing at a time (a gun or a stick of butter). In the polis, another set of laws operates alongside the laws of matter, ones that might be called laws of paradox if the phrase weren’t paradoxical itself. Instead, I’ll call them “ laws of passion,” because they describe phe- nomena that behave more like emotions than like physical matter. One of these laws is that passion feeds on itself. Like passion, political resources are often enlarged or enhanced through use, rather than diminished. Channels of influence and political connections, for example, grow stronger the more they are used. The more people work together and help each other, the more committed they become to each other and to their common goal. The more something is done—say, a regulatory agency consults with industry leaders on its proposals, or a school board negotiates with teachers on salaries—the more valuable the personal connections and organizational ties become, and the stronger people’s expectations of “doing things the way they have always been done.”  The Market and the Polis 33 Political skills and authority also grow with use, and it is no accident that we often use the metaphor of “exercise” when talking about them. That skills should grow with practice is not so surprising, but it is worth exploring why authority should work the same way. Precedent is impor- tant in authority. The more one makes certain types of decisions, the easier it is to continue in the same path, in part because repeated decisions require no new thought, and in part because people are less likely to resist or even question orders and requests they have obeyed before. How often have we justified our own begrudging compliance by telling ourselves, “I’ve never protested all the other times I’ve been asked to do this, so how can I refuse now?” Or, on the other side, “I’ve let them get away with it many times before, so it is hardly fair to punish them now.” In short, the more often an order is issued and obeyed, the stronger the presumption of compliance. The market model ignores this phenomenon of resource expansion through exercise, use, practice, and expression. A distinguished former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers once wrote that marketlike arrangements are good because they “reduce the need for compassion, patriotism, brotherly love, and cultural solidarity as motivating forces behind social improvement.... However vital [these things] may be to a civilized society, [they] are in too short supply to serve as substitutes” for the more plentiful motive of self-interest.11 To make such an analogy between compassion and widgets, to see them both as items with fixed quantities that are diminished by use, is to be blinded by market thinking. People aren’t born with a limited stockpile of sentiments and passions, to be hoarded through life lest they be spent too quickly. More often than not, fighting in a war increases the feeling of patriotism, just as comfort- ing a frightened child increases one’s compassion. Another law of passion holds that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A protest march, for example, means something more than a few thousand people walking down a street; repeated denials of credit to blacks in a neighborhood means something more than a series of unrelated bankers’ decisions. Widgets may get cheaper through mass production— economists call that “economies of scale”—but they are still widgets. By contrast, most human actions change their meaning and impact when done in concert or in quantity. Finally, the most fun—and the most vexing law of passion: things can mean and therefore be more than one thing at once. Convicting white-collar criminals with nominal fines signals both that the government condemns the activity and that it does not. The growth of medical care expenditures 11 Charles L. Schultze, The Public Use of Private Interest (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1977), pp. 17–18 (emphasis added). 34 Policy Paradox bemoaned by employers and taxpayers also means new professional oppor- tunities and job growth, not to mention new treatments that save and transform lives. Ambiguity and symbolic meanings find no home in the market model of society, where everything has its precise value or cost. In the polis, where people not only count but think, wish, dream, and imagine, meanings can run wild, and they matter. Power Up to this point, I have defined the polis by contrasting it with a market model of society. Now it’s time to summarize the characteristics, empha- sizing what the polis is instead of what it is not: 1. It is a community, or perhaps multiple communities, with ideas, images, will, and effort quite apart from individual goals and behavior. 2. Its members are motivated by both altruism and self-interest. 3. It has a public interest, whose meaning people fight about and act upon. 4. Most of its policy problems are commons problems. 5. Influence is pervasive, and the boundary between influence and coercion is always contested. 6. Cooperation is as important as competition. 7. Loyalty is the norm. 8. Groups and organizations form the building blocks. 9. Information is interpretive, incomplete, and strategic. 10. It is governed by the laws of passion as well as the laws of matter. By now, my readers must surely be wondering how a reputable politi- cal scientist could build a model of political society without making power a defining characteristic, let alone the primary one. I save power for last because it derives from all the other elements and can’t be defined without reference to them. Power is a phenomenon of communities. Its purpose is always to subordinate individual self-interest to other interests— sometimes to other individual or group interests, sometimes to the pub- lic interest. It operates through influence, cooperation, and loyalty, and through strategic control of information. And finally, power is a resource that obeys the laws of passion rather than the laws of matter. Any model of society must specify its source of energy, the force or forces that drive change. In the market model, change is driven by  The Market and the Polis 35 Concepts of Society Market Model Polis Model 1. Unit of analysis Individual Community 2. Motivations Self-interest Altruism and self- interest 3. Public Interest Sum of individual Shared interests; what interests is good for community 4. Chief conflict Self-interest vs. self- Self-interest vs. public interest interest (commons problems) 5. Source of ideas Self-generation within Influences from others and preferences the individual and society 6. Nature of social Competition Cooperation and interaction competition 7. Criteria for Maximize personal Loyalty (to people, individual decision gain, minimize cost places, organizations, making products); maximize individual and family interest; promote public interest 8. Building blocks of Individuals Groups and social action organizations 9. Nature of Accurate, complete, Ambiguous, information fully available interpretive, incomplete, strategically manipulated 10. How things work Laws of matter Laws of passion (e.g., (material resources human resources are are finite and diminish renewable and may with use) expand with use) 11. Sources of change Market exchange; Ideas, persuasion, and individual quest to alliances; pursuit of maximize own power, own and others’ welfare welfare, and public interest 36 Policy Paradox exchange, which is in turn motivated by the individual quest to improve one’s own welfare. Through market exchanges, the overall use and distri- bution of resources changes. In the polis, change occurs through the interaction of mutually defin- ing ideas and alliances. Ideas about politics shape political alliances, and strategic considerations of building and maintaining alliances in turn shape the ideas people espouse and seek to implement. In my model of the polis, I emphasize ideas and portrayals as key forms of power in policy making. This book is not so much about how people collect and deploy the traditional resources of power—money, votes, and offices—but how they use ideas to gather political support and diminish the support of opponents, all in order to control policy. Ideas are the very stuff of politics. People fight about ideas, fight for them, and fight against them. Political conflict is never simply over material conditions and choices but also over what is legitimate and right. The pas- sion in politics comes from conflicting senses of fairness, justice, rightness, and goodness. Moreover, people fight with ideas as well as about them. The different sides in a conflict create different portrayals of the battle—who is affected, how they are affected, and what is at stake. Political fights are conducted with money, with rules, with votes, and with favors, to be sure, but they are conducted above all with words and ideas. Every idea about policy draws boundaries. It tells what or who is included or excluded in a category. These boundaries are more than intel- lectual—they define people in and out of a conflict or place them on differ- ent sides. In politics, the representation of issues is strategically designed to attract support to one’s side, to forge some alliances and break others. Ideas and alliances are intimately connected. Finally, the interaction between ideas and alliances is ever-changing and never-ending. Problems in the polis are never “solved” in the way that economic needs are met in the market model. It is not as though we can place an order for justice, and once the order is filled, the job is done. (Indeed, some modern economists have puzzled over why even material needs seem to grow even as they are fulfilled.) As Plutarch wrote: They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some end in view, or something which levels off as soon as that end is reached. It is not a public chore, to be got over with; it is a way of life.12 12 Plutarch, cited in Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Avon Books, 1982), p. 109. Part ii GOALS 2 Equity The most famous definition of political science says it’s the study of “who gets what, when, and how.”1 Distributions—whether of goods and services, wealth and income, health and illness, or opportunity and disadvantage— are at the heart of policy controversies. In this chapter, we will describe issues as distributive conflicts in which equality is the goal. Keep in mind that in a distributive conflict, all sides seek equality; the conflict comes over how the sides envision a fair distribution of whatever is at stake. To see how it is possible to have competing visions of equality, let’s imagine we have a mouthwatering, bittersweet chocolate cake to distrib- ute in a public policy class.2 We all agree that the cake should be divided equally. The intuitively obvious solution is to count the number of people in the classroom, cut the cake into that number of equal-sized slices, and pass them out. I’ve tried this solution in my classes, and, believe me, my students always challenge my equitable solution. Here are some of the challenges: 1. Some say my solution is unfair to the people left out of the class in the first place. “I wouldn’t have skipped class last week if I had known you would be serving chocolate cake,” says one. Students not even taking the course come up to me in the halls: “Unfair!” they protest. “The catalog description sounded dull. If it had men- tioned cake, we would have enrolled in your course.” My cake is featured on gourmet.com and students from around the world e-mail me: “We would have applied to your university if we had known you were a gourmet chef.” All these people describe my solution as equal slices but unequal invitations. 1 Harold Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936; 2nd ed. with postscript, Cleveland: World Publishing, 1958). 2 My inspiration for this analysis of equity came from Douglas Rae, “The Egalitarian State: Notes on a Contradictory System of Ideals,” Daedalus 108, no. 4 (Fall 1979), pp. 37–54; and Douglas Rae et al., Equalities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). 40 Policy Paradox 2. Some say my solution is unfair to the high achievers. These stu- dents think I should give a pop quiz, then divide the cake according to performance on the quiz. ‘A’ students get big pieces, ‘B’ students get small pieces, and ‘C’ students get a taste so they know what rewards await them if only they work harder. Of course, there aren’t any ‘D’ and ‘F’ students in my class, but if there were, they would get nothing because they haven’t earned cake. The propo- nents of this solution describe it as unequal slices for unequal merit but equal slices for equal merit. 3. Some of my colleagues buttonhole me the next day. This is a Pol- itical Science Department course, they say, and your cake should have been shared in accordance with the department’s hierarchy. The chairperson sends me a memo proposing the following div- ision of any future cakes: Your undergraduates: crumbs Your graduate teaching assistant: mouthful All other grad students: work on our research while we eat cake Assistant professors: slivers Associate professors: wedges Full professors: wedges with extra frosting Chair: wedge with extra frosting, and a linen napkin This solution might be described as unequal slices for unequal ranks but equal slices for equal ranks. 4. A group of men’s liberationists stages a protest. Women have always had greater access to chocolate cake, they claim, because girls are taught to bake while boys have to go outdoors to play foot- ball. Moreover, chocolate cake is more likely to be served in courses taught by women than men, and those courses draw proportionately more female students. In short, gender roles and gender divisions in society combine to make gender the de facto determinant of cake distribution. The men, who comprise only one-third of the class, propose that men as a group should get half the cake, and women as a group should get the other half; unequal slices but equal social blocs. 5. One semester, all the students in my public policy class had just attended a three-course luncheon, which, mysteriously enough, did not include dessert. Several of them thought my chocolate cake should be treated as the last course of the luncheon. They pointed out that some students had managed to commandeer two shrimp cocktails, pick all the artichoke hearts from the salad, and grab the rarest slices of roast beef from the platter. Shouldn’t the  Equity 41 other students—the ones who had only one shrimp cocktail and overcooked roast beef, not to mention the vegetarians—get bigger slices of my chocolate cake? This solution, which I had to agree seemed fair, might be called unequal slices but equal meals. 6. Every year, a few students come forth saying they hate chocolate. There’s always someone who is allergic to chocolate. And another who says he was born without the crucial gene for chocolate digestion, and though it would do him no harm to eat my cake, he wouldn’t derive any nutritional benefit from it either. These students think I might as well reallocate their portions to those who can truly appreciate the cake. Their solution might be called unequal slices but equal value to recipients. 7. The business majors in the class want no part of these compli- cated solutions. Give everyone a fork, they yell, and let us go at it: unequal slices (or perhaps I should say “hunks”) but fair competition with equal starting resources. 8. One semester, I was caught with only enough chocolate to make a cupcake. It couldn’t really be divided among the large number of people in my class. The math whizzes proposed an elegant solu- tion: put everyone’s name in a hat, draw one ticket, and give the whole cupcake to the winner. They had a point: unequal slices but equal statistical chances of winning cake. 9. Just when I thought I finally had an equitable solution, the student government activists jumped up. In a democracy, they said, the only fair way to decide who gets the cupcake is to give each person a vote and hold an election for the office of Cupcake Eater. Democ- racy, they claimed, means unequal slices but equal votes. Now look back at what happened in the chocolate cake saga. We started with the simple idea that equality means the same-size slice for everyone. Then there were nine challenges to that idea, nine different visions of equality that would result in unequal slices but equality of something else. Here is the paradox in distributive problems: equality often means inequality, and equal treatment often means unequal treatment. The same distribution may look equal or unequal, depending on where you focus. I use the word “equality” to denote sameness and to signify the part of a distribution that contains uniformity—uniformity of slices, or of meals, or of voting power, for example. I use “equity” to denote distributions regarded as fair, even though they contain both equalities and inequalities. Let’s examine the challenges more carefully to see how they give us some tools for thinking about what equality means. Every distribution 42 Policy Paradox has three important dimensions: the recipients (who gets something?), the item (what is being distributed?), and the process (how is the distribution carried out?). Challenges 1, 2, 3, and 4 redefine the recipients. Challenges 5 and 6 redefine the item being distributed. Challenges 7, 8, and 9 focus on the process of distribution. The Dimensions of Equality 1. Membership Challenge 1 questions the definition of membership in a community. It is all well and good to say that something should be divided equally, but the sticky question is, “Among whom?” Who should count as a member of the group  Equity 43 of recipients? Often, defining the class of members entitled to “equal treat- ment,” whatever that is, is the core of a political controversy. The American political system was designed to reconcile a severe con- flict over membership: who, among all the people living in the territo- ries, should receive representation in the new political system that was theoretically to be based on consent of the governed? “All men are cre- ated equal,” the Declaration of Independence had asserted, but when the founders set about drafting a constitution, slavery crashed headlong into philosophy. The Constitution embodied one of the most notorious para- doxes of all time. Slaves were defined simultaneously as human beings and material property. They were counted as people in censuses to deter- mine how many representatives to Congress each district would get. But each slave counted as only three-fifths of a person—not a person who merited representation him- or herself but a piece of human property that would amplify the representation of slaveholders. Even after the Fourteenth Amendment gave blacks the right to vote, under Jim Crow laws they couldn’t partake of all the “cake” the coun- try had to offer. They couldn’t live in certain neighborhoods, use certain public facilities, attend whites-only schools, and, in many places, they still couldn’t exercise their right to vote until the 1960s. The civil rights movement and the end of legal segregation were (and still are) efforts to redefine equality by changing the rules of membership. Some potent residues of racism still “disinvite” black citizens. In 2007, the Cherokee Nation held a special election in which its members voted that people of mixed Cherokee-black heritage and Freedmen (descen- dants of freed black slaves who had been held by Cherokees) were no lon- ger citizens of Cherokee Nation. Not only can’t these black and part-black people vote in tribal elections, they are ineligible to receive various kinds of federal and tribal bounty—medical, educational, and housing aid. Even if the courts eventually overturn the decision, the episode makes black Cherokees feel uninvited. As one of them said, “Even having the debate is a problem. You then become a lesser person because people get to decide whether you’re in or not.”3 Political communities often differentiate among their residents for the purpose of distributing both property and political rights. In some nations where Islam is the dominant religion (Iran and Afghanistan, for exam- ple), women may inherit only half as much from their parents as men, and 3 Evelyn Nieves, “Putting to a Vote the Question ‘Who is a Cherokee?’” New York Times, Mar. 3, 2007; Brian Daffron, “Freedmen Descendants Struggle to Maintain their Cherokee Identity,” Indian Country Today, Mar. 30, 2007, indiacountrytodaymedianetwork.com, accessed Feb. 17, 2009. 44 Policy Paradox where fundamentalist Muslim leaders rule, girls are banned from educa- tion and women are forbidden to work outside the home, even if they are widowed and have children to support. In European Union (EU) member states, social and political rights differ according to whether a resident is a citizen of the state in which he or she lives, a citizen of another EU member state, or a citizen of a country outside the union. These latter so-called “third-country nationals” have distinctly lesser political rights and social benefits. Within the United States, people who have been con- victed of a felony may never vote again in Kentucky or Virginia, even once they have served their sentence and completed parole, while in Maine and Vermont, felons never lose their right to vote and may vote by absentee ballot from jail.4 Immigration and citizenship policies turn on defining membership. They set the criteria for admitting new members and making them eligible