That makes even more relevant the kind of problems Steven Brams identified in his
2006 Presidential Address to the Public Choice Society. Taking seriously the Public
Administration perspective would have meant inducing from the very beginning a different
orientation to the evolution of the Public Choice program. If that was feasible or even
desirable may be a matter of discussion. Yet one thing is clear: if one makes the applied
level the starting and focal point, then the theoretical and empirical research efforts become
an instrument for a problem and practice-driven approach, focused on specific governance
problems and dilemmas, as seen and interpreted through an explicitly articulated and
explicitly assumed normative framework. That is fundamentally different from an
approach that starts with a ‘‘positive social science’’ ideal and remains to the end in the
confines of its underlying logic that relegates the applied concerns to a mere follow-up
phase, a different enterprise in the intellectual division of labor, constantly praised but
never taken seriously. One could easily see in all of this the roots of the current predicament,
as described by Brams: a long series of efforts at analytical and empirical analyses
for their own sake that, when it comes to their normative and practical relevance, ‘‘never
tire of finding fault with a policy or program but do not propose constructive alternatives’’
(Brams 2006, p. 246). So the connection between the symptom and its root cause is easily
to establish, albeit indirectly and evoking a counterfactual argument.