Decision making and implementation processes

¶ … Paradox: The Art of Political Decision-Making and Social Equity and Public Administration: Origins, Developments, and Applications

It is safe to say that both books have what could be termed "a liberal inclination" in that both Stone and Frederickson see their theories as people-centered, with all their attendant frailties and mistakes. Ironically, Stone makes much the same critique that some conservatives would, in that trust in "rational" decision-making leads to bad decisions, because economics doesn't explain policy. As a result, economics shouldn't dictate policy, because the reality is often very different -- and statistics, as it is often said, consists of lies, damn lies, and statistics.

This reminds me of an article I read in the New York Times, recently about the people who rise to the top in a meritocracy are somewhat righteously arrogant, having achieved a great deal. As Ross Douthat said in the New York Times, "meritocrats & #8230;become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world" (2011). I think it could safely be said of rational policy analysts that they share some attributes with meritocrats. In the trenches, as it were, administrators know that is never that simple: there will always be winners and losers, and you can never have perfectly equal shares of pie.

Herbert Simon said: "A 'good' public library, from the administrative standpoint, is not one that owns all the books that have ever been published, but one that has used the limited funds which are allowed it to build up as good a collection as possible under the circumstances" (1997). That sort of realpolitik seems like something that Stone would approve of, except that she'd like to substitute the "polis" model, which seems to be a more community-based, more particularly feminine-based set of politics, at least from someone conversant with Noddings' and Gilligan's ethics of care (Noddings, 2002). By the way, she explicitly followed up on the ethics of care model in an article in The Nation in 2000, "Why We Need A Care Movement."

Frederickson is also concerned with ethics, though not necessarily in the sense of feminist ethics of care. Like Stone, he sees what would be called rational policy analysis as inadequate for the situation at hand. Instead, he sees social equity as the "third pillar" of public administration, in that it should be as important as economics and efficiency. Public administration is often called the fourth branch of government, due to the power of regulations that administrators promulgate -- including those dealing with education.

Fredrickson insists that equal education creates equity, judged, ironically enough, using rational policy analyses. There is more to education, however, than a simple standard of living. Even David Lloyd George's quote "A young man who isn't a socialist hasn't got a heart; an old man who is a socialist hasn't got a head" deals with social equity in education. Though the young are more liberal, they are also more likely to be more accepting of equality in general (Jones, 2011), reflecting federal mandatory non-discrimination polices they've lived with their entire lives. Schools are generally assidious in their adherence to non-discrimination policies, because they depend on federal funding. Yet I don't see that Fredrickson has reflected on that point.