On the basis of this analysis one can possibly arrive at an overall conclusion that policy evaluators operating on a high level of professional responsibility should seek to develop optimum policies and to do optimum research. Optimum policies maximize societal benefits minus societal costs. Optimum research maximizes beneficial new knowledge minus the costs of obtaining it. Those are high and often impossible goals to achieve. By seeking them,
however, policy evaluation is likely to achieve more than it would with any lesser set of goals.