Ideas matter and ideas have consequences are phrases frequently heard in political discourse. Policy requires that a prescription of action be promulgated that produces tangible and desirable results soon afterwards. Policy analysis is serious stuff. Money is spent, coercive authority mobilized, all sorts of effects (some hidden or accidental) happen, and perhaps we even know what we are trying to accomplish. The task environment, the field of action, poses complications and gaps in knowledge, so we use shorthands, theories, and ideologies. All this is the field of policy analysis.
An example of an early policy analyst, who used theory and convincing ideas, to influence public policy is Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, the first academic chair in the nascent field of political economy and the founder of demography.
In the late eighteenth century, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus wrote a long and seminal essay about poverty and population, An Essay On the Principle of Population. He took issue with the optimism that his era's reformers, particularly his father, saw in education and in publicly supported charity as the path to a good society. Rather, Malthus argued that unchecked population growth would inevitably exceed food supply, driving more and more people into destitution and undermine all efforts to improve the plight of the poor. Population, he reasoned, expands exponentially (2, 4, 8, 16, 32) while food, the limiting factor of population, grows arithmetically (2, 4, 6, 8, 10). The gap between the growth of food and mouths to feed creates a population crash. Ecologists would claim that the population has exceeded its carrying capacity. The end result, famine, remains inexorable, a kind of iron law that is not responsive to policy remedies. Today, that doctrine is alive and well, known as die-off, which we will examine in the second part of the course, on sustainability.
Alas, said Malthus, the well intentioned but wrong-headed prescriptions of reformers would founder on the lack of restraint among the working people. Malthus's grim theory gained wide influence: it dampened social reform, provided a tidy explanation of poverty, exposed the futility of doing anything about underlying social conditions, and promoted popular discussion about public policy. His theory provided a rational of benign neglect. People starved; end of story. (The natural moral restraint exhibited by the upper-classes, argued Malthus, averted such a fate for folks like himself and his adherents.)
Others labeled the elaboration of Malthus's method of analysis the "dismal science." The label has been applied both to demography and to economics, fields of study which were not formalized when Malthus wrote, but claim him as a pioneering, seminal thinker. In fact, Malthus was given the first academic post in the new field of Political Economy, a chair at Oxford University, funded by the British East India Company. His theories about populationism, citing unbridled as the cause of poverty, and what was later dubbed benign neglect.
The field of public policy can now also claim the label dismal science. Malthus's argument that public policy intervention produces few real solutions, wastes resources, and engenders disappointment widely prevails today. The common belief appears to be that much that the government does is either done badly or disingenuously. This doctrine comports with the conservative ideology, refuting the liberal prescription of active governmental intervention. Ideas matter, have consequences, and persist.
The crisis of confidence in the efficacy of public policy may become a defining characteristic of our age. Our public paralysis begets the standing policy of benign neglect, the triumph of laissez faire. The patient's symptoms worsen; the cure is not available. Public dissatisfaction with the authors of national policy, the President and Congress, wilts to record lows.
Yet, no published textbook in public policy entertains the premise that public policy is failing to address the needs of the American people. After all, a course in public policy attempts to explain how government works, not how it fails to work. However, the collective doubt looms so large that this theme will be woven into the fabric of this on-line textbook. Hopefully, if we can ascertain how public policy might work better.
The dismal theory of benign neglect was invented by Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, an idea worth remembering here.
The Public Policy Cycle Web Site | Page: © Wayne Hayes, Ph.D. | ™ ProfWork |
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Initialized:
September 3, 2001 | Last Update: 5/25/2009