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Thinking About Policy Choices
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Should the federal government require oil-burning power plants to switch
to coal? Given the declining birthrate, should Memorial Hospital convert some of its maternity rooms to a cardiac unit? Should the state university develop a master's program in public policy? Should the Transport Authority extend the subway system to the outer suburbs? Should the United States stockpile grains to diminish extreme price fluctuations? To address. these questions one must ~ UI}5l..t:!".~.~a.:ll~,!!te,.1?~of Poli~y /1 v' analysis: introducing you to those principles is the goal ofthis book.
Our Approach to Policy Analysis
The approach to _p()licy analysis throllghout.this_pt:imer,js .. thatof the r::a1Or1aldecisloil" maker-who -lay's out goals and uses logical processes to¬eXprore the best way to reach thosegoals.rHejnayperform the analysis himself or he may commission others to do parts or all of it for him. The decision maker may be an individual or a group that acts essentially as a unit. We will not consider explicitly the situations in which several decision makers with conflicting objectives participate in a decision. Nonetheless, our approach should prove helpful to an individual who takes part in such a process of shared decision making, whether as a legislator deciding how to vote or as a bureaucrat trying to line up support for a proposal.
In any case, the ewhasis inJhisJ~Qok is on how decisions ou ht to ~e analy-z~Lafi(Lmade, rather than on the details e-information_Jh(lt sh(}uld serve as-inputs to the decisions. In establishing this framework we rely heavily on the analytic techniques developed in economics, mathemat¬ics, operations research, and systems analys~ctual practice, to be sure, policy analysis is much more broadly'eclectic:"drawing on a great variety of disciplines, including law, sociology, and political and organiza¬tional analysis. We will have little to say about these important comple¬mentary disciplines, although you should recognize their relevance for the