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4
Thinking About Policy Choices
working analyst. If he is designing a program for welfare reform, he must take account of the capabilities of the state bureaucracies that will implement the program. If he is drawing up safety regulations, he must understand the administrative and judicial processes through which the regulations will ultimately be enforced. Nor will we discuss the natural sciences here, even though understanding how pollutants spewing from tailpipes mix with pollutants escaping up chimneys may be critical for drawing up a set of environmental regulations. In short, understanding and predicting how the world will actually behave is essential for any process
Ir; of policy formulation. Our concern here, however, is with ~~decision V j maker should structure his thinking about a policy choice and with the analytic models that will aid understanding and prediction, not with all the . disciplines that couldconceivably provide helpful information.
- Most of the materialsin this book are equally applicable to a socialist,
capitalist, or mixed-enterprise society, to a democracy or a dictatorship, indeed wherever hard policy choices must be made. In deciding whether a vaccine should be used to halt the spread of a threatened epidemic we need not worry about the political or economic ideology of those innoculated. Nor will the optimal scheduling for refuse trucks depend on whether it is capitalist or socialist trash that is being collected.
Questionsof values are, nevertheless, a critical and inevitable part of poli