Should identification of public issues and discussion of public policies resemble coaching a football team? This evolving set of essays goes by the name runorthrow.com. That is the decision coaches make when confronted with their team's lagging offensive efforts. Your team has the ball. It is fourth down on your opponen's 20 yard line with five yards to go for a first down in the closing minutes of a game which you are about to lose by one touchdown. Should the coach tell the quarterback that the next play is to throw the ball or should the coach tell him to hand off the ball to the most able runner? The coach already knows quite a bit not only about the strengths and weaknesses of the team, but also about the strengths and weaknesses of their opponents.
The quarterback is an experienced and successful passer. He can throw the ball both short and long. Pass plays have won many of your games this season. But today your team&#s passing game has not been entirely reliable. Since you have won more games by throwing than running, the first task is to identify why that strategy is not working today. Is the quarterback not being given enough time to identify a receiver and throw the ball accurately to that receiver? Does the quarterback have enough time, but the defense is managing to cover every eligible receiver so there is no one to whom the quarterback can throw the ball without the likelihood that the pass will be intercepted? Does the quarterback have enough time and there are receivers, but today the quarterback's aim and timing are off and the passes are not good enough to be caught? Even if the coach can identify in this fashion why passing has not been successful, does that mean that there is no choice but to run with the ball?
The unhappy owner of the team might say to the coach - why not just run the ball, throwing the ball today isn't working? The coach replies - "I believe deeply in the majesty and promise of a passing strategy, win by throwing I always say: running is primitive, throwing the ball is divine." I suspect that the owner's response would be at the least to reprimand the coach but even more likely that the owner would fire the coach right then and there. From the point of view of the owner who wishes to win, ideology is not a rational basis for choosing whether to run or throw in present circumstances.
If the quarterback has been rushed by the opposing team's players so quickly that accurate passing has not been possible, the coach might decide to add to the number of your team between the line and the quarterback to provide additional defense and therefore additional time. To do so, however, would limit the number of receivers available. Depending on the effectiveness of the defensive efforts of your opponents in covering receivers, the additional time would not be helpful. Nevertheless, if your diagnosis of the game is correct, providing more time to the quarterback might work and might be worth trying. Similarly, if the problem is that all the receivers are being covered too closely, changing the running patterns of the receivers in unexpected ways might be the appropriate change. if the quarterback is having a bad day, it may be time to substitute that backup quarterback who has looked good in practice. That only beings the process of choosing the appropriate play in present circumstances.
Developing and implementing sound public policy requires a willingness to assess data continuously and acknowledge when a present course of action is not achieving its goal. It requires the courage to take a chance on new strategies if the existing strategies are failing. It requires persistence to continue with strategies that do not have public support but are in fact gradually resolving a festering problem.
So - that is what these essays, or blogs, is about. Looking at present strategies in public policy, measuring their successes and their failures and presenting alternative policies which may have a greater likelihood of a predominance of better impacts over impacts that do no or do only little harm.
In public policy, we never know when it is fourth down. We never know whether this will be our last decent shot at formulating successful public policy. But it may be fourth down now - shall we run or throw? But that is a metaphor. What choices do we have about current major problems: inadequate demand in our economy because, in part, of income inequality; inadequate employment opportunities matching the abilities and interests of a significant number of people seeking work; inadequate income in terms of contemporary costs of food, shelter, education and just about every other necessity of life; a physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, transportation sorely in need of reconstruction; global climate change which threatens to dramatically change facets of the natural systems on which we rely; global turmoil, both economic and geopolitical, which has the possibility of spilling over our national borders. And that list does not exhaust the challenges.
The goal of this series of essays is not to come up with solutions - it is to examine alternative policies designed to respond to the challenges with consideration of the benefits and burdens of each. In the end, there is such thing as a free lunch. We need always to assess how much a policy will cost and what resources are available. The costs and rsources are not measured solely in dollar terms.
Raders have probably already thought - why two? In football, the coach could decide to kick. A long time ago, I was told by the most successful retail entrepreneur I have every known that if I wanted to make a sale, make certain that the buyer was guided to two choices. Among customers given three choices to deal with, he said, most buyers will walk away, unable to decide. If there is just one choice, the buyer will go elsewhere to shop. But given two choices, it was likely that the prospective buyer would both make the choice and buy and would be comfortable in owning the choice, that is, the buyer would believe that they had exercised their will in making the purchase. I think that this insight holds true as well in the development of public policy. There may be an infinite number of policies to solve any given problem, but it facilitates the possibility that lawmakers will be able to confidently make a choice of policy if two alternatives are presented. If that premise is wrong, then these essays are an idle intellectual exercise. Then again, perhaps they will provide an incentive for others to develop different choices, adding to the public understanding though perhaps not advancing the probabilitiy of any choice being made.