Why do government policies fail so often?
Policy needs to focus on results first. Unfortunately, it rarely does.
The following is an excerpt from my second book Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. You can order e-books at a discounted price at my website, or you can purchase full-price ebooks, paperback, or hardcovers on Amazon.
Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
See also my other articles on reforming the policy-making process:
Why do government policies fail so often? (this article)
Despite the American government spending almost 50% of GDP, it is difficult to point to many real policy successes over the last 50 years. Think about it; what would you consider to be a great accomplishment of government over the last 50 years to be? And remember, I am talking about results, not legislation or spending.
The fundamental problem is two-fold:
Our political system has not identified policies that actually work.
People involved in politics do not care. Ideologues think that they care, but they actually only care about their ideas, not what works.
The problem is not bad people. The problem is a bad implementation and evaluation process.
At its core, democratic governance involves the following process:
Citizens raise problems that they think the government should solve.
Policy experts propose solutions to those problems.
During elections, candidates decide which issues they want to prioritize and their proposed solutions to those high-priority problems.
Voters choose their favorite candidate.
Elected officials attempt to form majorities to pass legislation on the few problems deemed the highest priority.
Bureaucrats implement those solutions.
Everyone cheers and then goes home!
Our political system is pretty good at bringing problems into the political arena and then prioritizing them according to popular opinion. Our political system is also pretty good at throwing up a wide variety of plausible solutions. That is a start, but it does not complete the process.
Our political system is unfortunately very poor at implementing solutions that actually work and then iterating based on results. The American people know it and are gradually losing confidence in our governing institutions.
Elected officials, campaign donors, activists, and their allied media outlets do not care that the policies they so avidly promote are very unlikely to produce results for the people. Most of them are so sure that they know what works, that they assume their opponents are idiots, corrupt, or stupid.
Most people in politics believe that all that they need to do to solve problems is to show courage and fortitude in the political struggle. When that struggle finally leads to the desired legislation, they cheer and then just move on to the next issue.
Hold on. Identifying problems, and their possible solutions, and implementing them is the easy part. The really hard part is figuring out what works. Many activists claim to care about people, when what they actually care about are their ideas.
Imagine if entrepreneurs, who play such an important role in promoting progress, had a similar mentality. They start out with a great idea of how to solve a problem that other people want to be solved. Then they form a company. And then… they cheer, pat themselves on the back, and go home?
Sorry, that is not how it works.
Experienced entrepreneurs know that the hard part has not even started. They still have years, or more likely decades of hard work to define a business model, experiment with new technologies, raise capital, hire workers, identify customers, and market to those customers. And even after all of that work, the vast majority of companies fail to make a long-term profit.
The same goes for engineering, another profession that plays an important role in promoting progress. When senior executives or the marketing team come up with a “great idea” for a product, experienced engineers know that this is just the beginning of a long arduous process that may or may not succeed.
Unfortunately, great ideas rarely lead to success. Everyone with any experience in business, engineering, or technology knows that there is a huge gulf between a great idea and a profitable product. In politics, great ideas get implemented, but then no one looks at the results. In business, it is all about results, and “great” ideas are a dime a dozen.
Some portray business as cold-hearted because all business leaders do is focus on the bottom line. But not caring about results is the height of self-indulgence. If you do not care about results, you do not care about people. It is results that affect people’s lives, not good intentions.
Some less idealistic elected officials and campaign donors do not care about results for different reasons. While they claim to care about the people, they mainly care about building coalitions. They do not care about the ideas themselves as long as they can construct a majority coalition to pass legislation.
In some ways, this is a very pragmatic attitude, but it can often degenerate into power politics for its own sake. In practice, this attitude becomes all about using the power of the government to tax, and distribute money and jobs to one’s supporters in return for their votes. This is very similar to the viewpoint of the old corrupt urban machines that used to dominate the politics of American cities.
What most people do not realize is that government bureaucrats have a huge amount of latitude as to how to implement legislation. Despite often being hundreds of pages long, Congressional legislation is often vague about many important points. And Congress often deliberately leaves important points vague as they do not want to get too bogged down in the details.
Congress focuses mainly on the intent of the legislation and who receives the money and jobs. Most Congresspersons are not interested in the details of implementation or the evaluation of policies because they are more interested in pushing through the next round of legislation.
No one in our political system has the incentive to focus on results, even though results are what people actually care about. Most regular people do not want to be involved in politics. In fact, they hate politics. They just want to live their lives and have government solve those problems that they cannot solve through their own efforts.
Both the idealists and the machine politicians are wrong. It is results that matter because it is results that affect people’s lives. Rather than focus on intentions and who receives the money and jobs, we would be much better served as a nation if our political system focused more on results.
Experts Do Not Know
Some people claim that we can solve the problem by deferring to experts. They claim that our political process is bad at solving problems because politicians do not listen to experts. Policy issues are very complex, and it takes deep expertise in one domain to truly understand what works.
My formal academic training is in the field of Public Policy. I received a Ph.D. in Political Science and Public Policy from Brown University. I taught many university-level policy courses when I was a professor. I think that it is correct to say that I am an expert in a number of policy domains, including many that are in this book. I have a deep respect for the importance of policy knowledge.
However, I am here to tell you that experts are just as fallible as non-experts. The fundamental problem is that modern societies are extremely complex, policy impacts span across many different domains, and no one person is an expert on all of those domains. More to the point, experts often base their opinions on the same ideological assumptions that political activists do.
Another fundamental problem is that, on issues that are relevant to public policy, experts often disagree. This should not be a surprise. Where experts are in total agreement, this is generally on issues that are not problems that government wants to solve. Experts agree that the Earth is a sphere, but this is not particularly relevant to any policy issue.
Unfortunately, the view that we should defer to experts often degenerates into something like a Cult of the Expert. What this actually entails is deferring to a sub-group of experts who have the same ideological assumptions as the people who are promoting the Cult of the Expert. So behind the Cult of the Expert actually lurks the Cult of the Ideology.
Even though experts are just as ideologically biased as the rest of us, this does not mean that they do not have a role to play. Experts are excellent at presenting policies that might work. If we listen to a wide variety of experts with differing ideological biases, we greatly increase the chances that one of them will work.
But how do we sort through all the conflicting policy proposals that experts make so that we can identify the one that actually works?
In my next post, I will explain what I think is a path forward to create a result-based policy-making progress
The above was an excerpt from my second book Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. You can order e-books at a discounted price at my website, or you can purchase full-price ebooks, paperback, or hardcovers on Amazon.
Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
See also my other articles on reforming the policy-making process:
Why do government policies fail so often? (this article)