Ross • 6th Nov 2009 • Learning, Thinking • academic, governance, policy, policy transfer, television
You know that you have been studying too hard when one of your policy case studies comes from The Wire.
In this season, a maverick Baltimore cop, Major Colvin, in despair, stops enforcing drug laws in certain areas of the city. The local drug dealers love the policy, and refer to it as ‘Hamsterdam’ – citing a direct transfer of Amsterdam’s liberal cannabis policies. In reality, Colvin’s plan wasn’t very much like the law in Amsterdam at all. But the dealers obviously had their state-centric hats on that day – had they spent more time reading, they’d be thinking ‘maybe this is an example of the slow process of international, cross-jurisdictional policy learning’!
I think that films are a powerful way to develop case studies. The Mist is a paradigm of testing moral absolutism and Kant’s categorical imperative for a start.
Ross • 25th Oct 2009 • Learning, Thinking • academic, economics, Goodin, governance, government, MPA, Niskanen, politics, public administration, public choice, public policy
I volunteered to do a summary of a piece of non-core reading for my MPA class this week. The piece I chose was:
Goodin, R. (1982) ‘Rational Politicians and Rational Bureaucrats in Washington and Whitehall’, Public Administration, Vol. 60, pp. 23-41.
This paper is a discussion and reformulation of Niskanen’s model of decision-making. This model has apparently been very influential, especially with Keith Joseph.
First, the paper outlines what it was that Niskanen thought:
The bare bones of Niskanen’d model are very simple indeed. Basically, there are two types of actors: bureaucrats and politicians. The relationship between them is one of bilateral monopoly. The bureaucrats are the sole suppliers of public goods and services, and politicians are the only buyers of bureaucratic outputs. The goals of each actor are equally simple. Bureaucrats are aiming to maximise theor agency’s budget…. Politicians, in turn are aiming to maximise the votes cast for them at the next election….
Niskanen’s thesis is that, owing to special features on both sides of this bargaining game [namely the way that Congressional committees that authorise budgets are stuffed with those who benefit disproportionately from those budgets] public goods and services are oversupplied at a rate of anything up to twice what would be optimal in terms of citizen preferences.
As the paper discusses, this model leads Niskanen to recommend many NPM style government reforms, to enable bureaucrats to compete for resources.
Goodin applauds this model for its simplicity, but doesn’t think that it offers a good description of decision-making, for a large number of reasons, such as:
- He doesn’t think that bureaucrats would ‘bare faced lie’ about their budgetary needs, as this is both not lucrative (they need to be credible) and very high risk
- The Congressional budget approval procedure altered with the creation of the Congressional Budget Office and other reforms in the 1970s – these mean that budgets are considered in places other than just on committees of vested interests
- Niskanen doesn’t follow up the flip side of his argument and identify when budgets may be lower than desired, and bureaucratic outputs undersupplied. Goodin thinks that this would happen when issues fell between defined policy areas (e.g. Climate Change)
- Goodin doesn’t think that Niskanen’s answer – trying to get bureaucrats to compete – is sensible, because they would be more likely to collude with each other
- Goodin says that Niskanen’s simplistic view of bureaucrat and politican motivation is dated and does not reflect more modern thinking that people care about the policies they work on
As a result of these criticisms, Goodin offers an alternative model in which bureaucrats and politicians collude to overload oversight bodies with information, and use the ensuing confusion to bid for higher budgets. This results in the skewed spending around core programme areas, leaving too little for cross-cutting or broadly defined issues.
In general, this is a refreshingly clear article. However, I found it odd that it did not pick up on the one obvious criticism of Niskanen’s model that occurred to me straight away: Niskanen posits that as a monopoly provider of bureaucratic goods and services, bureaucrats would oversupply and overcharge. Indeed, it appears (from Goodin’s discussion) that he confused the two, or saw them as synonymous. But this is odd, given that it is a standard tenet of economic theory that monopolists undersupply and overcharge. If one grafts this assumption to Goodin’s rebuilt model, you get the worst of both worlds – a collusive bureaucratic-political machine that under-delivers and overcharges in core areas, and doesn’t deliver at all in non-core ones. Impartiality prevents me from commenting on whether this is an accurate picture of Washington or Whitehall.
Ross • 13th Aug 2009 • Learning, Thinking • academic, economics, relativity, space, special relativity, time, trade
Paul Krugman’s Theory of Interstellar Trade (.pdf) may be the best economics paper I have read. Figure II, in particular. Krugman notes that:
It should be noted that while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.
He goes on to develop the First Fundamental Theorum of Interstellar Trade:
When trade takes place between two planets in a common inertial frame, the interest cost on goods in transit should be calculated by using time measured by clocks in the common frame, and not by clocks in the frames of the travelling spacecraft.
As promised, this does make sense. What a fascinating paper.
Ross • 12th Jul 2009 • Learning • academic, politics, public administration
Much of the core reading for my ongoing Master’s degree is dry. Some is painful. Occasionally, however, you get a gem of a paragraph, such as this:
The common problem, I believe, is this: the nation-state is becoming too small for the big problems of life and too big for the small problems of life. It is too small for the big problems because there are no effective international mechanisms to deal with such things as capital flows, commodity imbalances, the loss of jobs, and the several demographic tidal waves that will be developing in the next twenty years. It is too big for the small problems because the flow of power to a national political center [sic] means that the center [sic] becomes increasingly unresponsive to the variety and diversity of local needs. In short, there is a mismatch of scale.
That’s Daniel Bell “previewing Planet Earth in 2013″ in The Washington Post in 1988. I think his core focus is on the US government. I have heard that this (with a UK/EU spin) is somewhat the theme of the Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan book, The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, which I have not read, but plan to.
