Posts Tagged “policy”
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 • 22nd Oct 2009 • Living, Thinking • game theory, names, nomenclature, policy, teaching
Over on Cheap Talk, Jeff recounts being taught game theory by Matthew Rabin:
As if to remove all illusion that what we were studying was connected to reality, every game we analyzed in class was given a name according to his system of “stochastic lexicography.” Stochastic lexicography means randomly picking two words out of the dictionary and using them as the name of the game under study. So, for example, instead of studying “job market signaling” we studied something like “rusty succotash.”
I like this idea. To some extent, it reminds me of the operational names used in military and police circles, such as the Met’s ‘Operation Bumblebee’ or ‘Operation Trident’. Working in the government policy process and knowing the degree to which a scheme for X may end up actually being a scheme for Y (but still called the X Scheme) I would welcome the neutrality of abstract nomenclature.
Ross • 7th Oct 2009 • Learning, Thinking • economics, food, health, MPA, new york, nutrition, policy, policy analysis, public health, usa
Via the blog Cheep Talk, I came across a good example for the policy analysis unit of my Masters course.
The New York Times reports that although people say that they make healthier choices when calorie-counts are displayed on fast-food menus, based on evidence from their receipts, the opposite is in fact true. At least in some areas, people are, on average, ordering more calories than before the labelling requirements were introduced.
This is a useful counter-factual for the type of ‘libertarian paternalism’ promoted in Sunstein and Thaler’s pop-policy book, Nudge.
For what it’s worth, I think that this example may be skewed by the demographic in the poorer areas in which receipts were collected. Perhaps people are maximising their calories per dollar. This is, in many ways, the natural human instinct.
The recession may also play a role here. I would be interested to know if this receipt-collection exercise had a control – a measurement of whether calorie consumption had gone up in similar cities where these measures had not be introduced. Without that, how can you rule out the possibility that people comfort-eat in a recession?
Ross • 5th Jul 2009 • Learning • funding, policy, politics, public life, think tanks
John Blundell, the departing head of the Institute of Economic Affairs writes in today’s Sunday Times of his quest to keep the IEA ‘clean’ through strict donor rules, including:
- No corporate money tied to projects either explicitly or implicitly
- No taxpayer funds
- No FTSE 100 company to give more than 2% of budget [I assume he mean's IEA's budget]
- No corporate sector (eg oil, banking, pharmaceuticals) to give more than 5% [of IEA budget, I assume]
He mentions how he had received offers of tax-efficient funding in return for his extension of scholarships/bursaries to the donor’s progeny (he refused: “Sorry, no deal”). He also thinks that politicians have become more guarded in their dealings with think tanks since 1997.
Ross • 27th May 2009 • Learning, Thinking • development, policy, teenage pregnancy
One of the most illuminating insights from the study of economics is that of man as a rational maximiser of utility. Putting aside the valid quirks of organisational limitation and bounded rationality, inherent bias and behavioural economics, the idea that people do what they do because it works for them is very powerful. It’s also very democratic and empowering. People don’t do things you think of as bad or wrong because they are naive or foolish, they do it because, for them, it makes sense.
Treating people as rational means giving them credit to know what’s best for themselves, rather than adopting paternalist policies. If you want to change behaviour (itself a dubious objective requiring much caution) you have to do more than simply educate people. Education only changes behaviour when there was a lack of information before. If there was no dearth of information, education is just the annoying imposition of another viewpoint. It will have little impact except to waste money and annoy those being ‘educated’.
If you really want to change behaviour, give people credit for knowing their own minds, don’t tell them what to think, but change the incentives. This sometimes offers radically different policy solutions.
This theme has recurred a couple of times in the last week: once when examining UK government policy on teenage pregnancy (as part of my MPA studies) and once when reading an article about the book Portfolios of the Poor in The Economist. In the former case, I was struck that government policy both aims to make life better for teenage mothers – providing them with better facilities, better housing, better job and educational opportunities – while also trying to decrease the numbers of teenage mothers through education. Lisa Arai makes a good case that this doesn’t conform to a rational model, where teenage girls have children because that offers them a better life option. In the latter case, people living in poverty have been shown not to be financially naive spendthrifts, but highly sophisticated, rational consumption-smoothers. Applying rational models to these policy challenges produces very different solutions.
In what other areas would assuming rational behaviour make a huge policy difference?
