Policy paradox

What Hacker News says

1. phobosanomalyOct 2020
   Public policy is tremendously complex, and difficult to do well.

   Before boiling down large, complex government programs to simple dysfunction and corruption, I recommend a read-through of Deborah Stone's book Policy Paradox. It gives you some idea of what real policymakers are up against in the real world. The city managers are optimizing for the preferences of a million people in a city with geographic restrictions and tremendous external factors at play.

   https://wwnorton.com/books/Policy-Paradox

   "Policy Paradox offers a needed alternative (or complement) to economics-based or rational choice books that treat policy making and policy analysis as distinct from one another—the former as a messy political process, the latter as a clinical, "rational" exercise."

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2. pdfernhoutJun 2017
   See the book: "Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making" by Deborah Stone for an exploration of this issue of resource arbitration and politics.

   One simple example she uses is how do you divide up birthday cake? Equal pieces? What if come people arrive late to the party after you start cutting the cake and giving out pieces? What if some people are full but others have not had dinner yet? What if some people don't like the pieces with chocolate icing?

   While we can be "objective" within a set of established priorities, we can't be objective about designing a set of priorities. Albert Einstein wrote on this in "Science and Religion" about how science can tell you about what is and how it is all connected, but it can't tell you what should be.

   One other point Stone she makes is that when people are on the outside of an organization they want transparency of the decision making process -- while then the same exact people move to the inside of an organization they suddenly have many reasons why they want decision should be opaque. "Yes, Minister" has a great comedy episode on that called "Open Government".

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3. ghufran_syedSep 2016
   Read "Policy Paradox" by Deborah Stone. She gives a great example, where she describes bringing in a cake to class for her students to share - all would no doubt agree that the distribution of cake should be 'fair'...but that means many different things to different people.

   Equal amount per student present ('unfair' to absent students)? Equal amount per student enrolled ('unfair' to those who made the effort to come vs those who didn't). Amount of cake proportional to body mass (unfair to small students)? Amount proportional to grade? Amount proportional to degree of historic injustice to a minority? And so on.

   The point of course being, there is no such thing as 'fair', only that policy makers (and the voters who vote for them) need to balance benefits and harms to different groups, and make a set of choices that have the most benefit and least harm, according to some set of priorities.

   I think it's unhelpful when the implicit criticism of the "people who need help" is that they are too stupid or too evil to know what's good for them. We might want to at least explore the possibility that they value the freedom they feel they might lose from increased welfare above the purely monetary benefits they might gain.

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4. roundsquareSep 2009
   The general argument against adults having even consensual sex with minors is that they aren't able to judge the consequences (emotion, physical, societal, etc...) for themselves and can be easily manipulated, thus the need to make this illegal.

   > I'd say that the "to each their own" argument works really well in many situations.

   Agreed. The dividing line is generally around an action affecting someone else. If it does, then there is the possibility that we should make it illegal.

   Of course, this can become more nuanced. At the risk of getting (slightly) off topic, Deborah Stone's book Policy Paradox (http://www.amazon.com/Policy-Paradox-Political-Decision-Revi...) has an interesting discussion.

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