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The Power of Public Ideas
Edited and contributed to by one of America’s most respected political and economic thinkers, and containing essays by an impressive roster of experts, The Power of Public Ideas offers a controversial, timely, and incisive analysis of the impact of the public interest on governmental policy making.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
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139 people want to read
About the author
Robert B. Reich
58 books1,288 followersRobert Bernard Reich is an American politician, academic, and political commentator. He served as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997. Reich is a former Harvard University professor and the former Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. He is currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy. Mr. Reich is also on the board of directors of Tutor.com. He is a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security. He is an occasional political commentator, notably on Hardball with Chris Matthews, This Week with George Stephanopoulos and CNBC's Kudlow & Company.
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June 8, 2018
An intriguing book that squarely aims at the more conservative 1980s politics of self-interested, free-market thinking. The authors seek a more communitarian (although the word is not used) basis for politics, public affairs, and public discourse, albeit from a liberal perspective.
The introduction makes the claim that the basis for public affairs (at the time) is self-interested individuals competing with each other and moderated by government, whose role is to adjudicate this competition when markets act inefficiently. This politics assumes no single public interest and avoids any effort to engage the public to arrive at one. This prevailing model is useful when there is consensus about a public policy problem, its solution, and who should solve it but is less helpful without these conditions. The introduction claims that more public issues fall into the latter category and that a deliberative democratic approach based on determining what the public interest is and finding solutions is preferable. In this conception of public affairs, the government’s role is to provide alternative visions of solutions, discuss them, and broaden the debate. Democratic processes are not only about aggregating known individual interests but include asking questions, posing problems, offering explanations, and suggesting choices. The bulk of the individually-written chapters in this edited collection reflect upon different aspects of this approach.
Gary Orren critiques the assumptions underlying the self-interested politics model, finding that whether using a microeconomic or pluralist approach, citizen’s self-interests do not always inform their political choices, but rather their values do. He points out that the two other models assume the pre-existence of values prior to the competition they describe and have no interest or nothing to say about how individuals form those interests and how they might change. He believes people are motivated on the big public policy issues by their feelings, reflecting social connections and attachments and their desire to be part of something bigger than themselves.
Steven Kelman says that while self-interest motives people, so does the desire to help others. Individuals may follow the two impulses in different aspects of their life; self-interest when engaging the market but helping others in public affairs. He reviews the faults of the self-interest model and finds that it either relies on an implied common interest or privileges those with resources, even if those without resources have a more intense interest in an issue. The best model is one that constrains self-interest and promotes public interests and those who act in the public interest.
Mark Moore reviews examples of public ideas and their impact on how government solves problems. Using alcohol consumption, he says that when the problem is viewed as a minority overdrinking (alcoholics) and causing disturbances, the set of solutions is narrowed to criminalizing individual behavior. When one looks at it as a broader problem of “normal” people and the overall health concerns, the solution becomes more societal (limiting ads, imposing taxes) that the majority would find less palatable. He then turns to his critique of how policy is developed. He believes it is too academic and that an approach solely using data, strict definitions, and scientific methods, while useful, fails to take into account the societal and political contexts in which these policies will have to be accepted and implemented. In many cases, a logical idea fails to take root because of the failure to develop the idea with the societal and political context in mind.
Philip Heymann makes the case that while government may act narrowly to solve a particular problem, it is also expressing a value in its action. He believes citizens want a government that does more than provide goods and services but also reflects, if at least not punish, their values. He realizes that there are problems with this approach: by going beyond instrumental action and getting into values, the government could alienate some citizens and potentially not even be able to carry out its instrumental functions. In other words, the culture wars may interfere with basic governing. Additionally, expressing ideas simply to expand their reach may hide an issue’s true complexity and nuance. In the end, he wants a political culture that asks questions of simplified ideas and analogies so that extreme versions are not implemented.
Michael Sandel reviews rights-based liberalism and communitarianism. He states that liberalism does not judge citizen preferences but finds ways to adjudicate among them, leading to a moral relativism that defends preferences as neutral that cannot privilege one over another. However, he notes, the critique of liberalism is that it does privilege some values over others: tolerance and freedom. He notes that some strains of liberalism have attempted to inject some basic rights that ground the concept, but their addition leads to the question of why other rights are not fundamental. In the end, process becomes key for liberalism: people should be able to seek their good so long as it does not interfere with others seeking their good. Communitarians question prioritizing individual rights over the greater good and that individuals must be seen in relation to citizenship and the common good.
Robert Reich focuses on policy making at the administrator level and its evolution to a process-oriented approach that does not allow public debate. He notes that initially elected officials provided administrators broad authority to apply their expertise to policy problems. As the administrators’ values became decreasingly shared with the citizenry, the policy making model switched to administrators as mediators of interest groups seeking to maximize overall benefits. Reich critiques this approach as providing benefits to well-resourced preference groups with strongly held views. It also presumes a preconceived idea of the public policy problem and therefore the range of solutions to it. While these approaches can be in tension, both can lead to policies that lack broad public support. Additionally, he notes the framing of an issue influences how approaches to other issues are framed. His alternative is civic discovery, in which a public official initiates a discussion and opens the debate to citizens, perhaps even courting controversy. Using this approach, citizens own both the problem definition and the solution. He points out the limits of the approach (e.g., costlier, goes against expectation that leaders provide solutions, messier) but also notes it should be used in conjunction with traditional approaches, and is most useful in situations where no technical solution exists but is rather a matter of values.
Giandomenico Majone examines how public deliberation can combine with policy analysis. He first describes two types of analysis: maximizing outcomes by weighing costs and benefits and analysis based on arguing concepts and assumptions. The latter will not provide a formal proof but can convince an audience. The former works if there is reliable data. The former must assume there is a policy problem exists and its contours are known. The latter can begin the process of determining if there is a policy problem prior to setting goals to solve it.
Ronald Heifetz and Riley Sinder discuss political leadership and tie most closely to Reich’s chapter. Their thesis is that traditional ideas of leadership shape the way governments solve problems and that this approach restricts and diminishes the public’s capacity to address complex problems. The traditional view is that a leader takes a position, even if unpopular, explains the position, and rallies support to win approval. People want a leader to solve their problems. However, the leader cannot solve all of their complex problems and will eventually disappoint them because she cannot constantly meet their expectations and will eventually fail. If successful, the people will look to the leader even more and expect them to deliver solutions, which weakens the populace’s ability to address problems that require their participation. To aid their analysis, the authors lay out a typology of problems and determine that some can be solved by the traditional view of leadership: problems with a known definition and technical solution. If the problem is known but the solution is not, the leader can show that there is a problem, but needs the populace to help implement a solution. In the most complex case, the problem is not even known and the leader cannot define it – only the populace can. In this case, the leader seeks to get the populace to do its work: determine the contours of the problem and search for solutions. The leader may catalyze the process of problem definition and solution formulation, but cannot do the work of the populace.
Martin Linsky examines the role of the media in the public policy process. He notes the media do not like to see themselves as part of the policy process but he argues their centrality in it. The media view is that they are outside of public affairs as objective reporters, not participants. He critiques the media for their view of what is news and objectivity. For the former, he argues that the media are biased towards covering discrete events disconnected from the larger issue rather than looking at underlying causes. On the latter, he sees the current view of objectivity as the result of the business of media, when wire services were looking for short items to sell to many media outlets. It that context, it made sense business sense to stick with “just the facts” that could be written and transmitted quickly and reprinted or integrated into a story by the receiving outlet. He then goes on to distinguish between objective reporting and objective journalism. The former is the basis for journalism – getting the basic facts right. But do the media report incorrect information if faithfully presented to them by an actor? Do they provide context that something was said but is not true? In our current situation, this has salience. In his view, an objective journalism provides context. He concludes that news organizations need to accept they are players in public affairs and their choice on what to report has an impact.
So how does this counter-balance to microeconomic-informed, adjudicated self-interest politics hold up? Did it respond well to the problem at the time and does it have salience today? To the extent that politics has always relied upon big, simple ideas to sway the public, the authors’ concern over the lack of public ideas is overblown. Politicians in the last decades have espoused big ideas the public can embrace or reject: FDR’s New Deal, Johnson’s Great Society, Reagan’s smaller government, tax cuts, and standing up to the Soviets, Bush I’s Kinder, Gentler Nation, Clinton’s Third Way, Bush II’s compassionate conservatism, Obama’s Hope, and Trump’s MAGA. How these public ideas developed would be a subject for these authors to critique. There is little evidence that widespread public debate guided these leaders to develop these big ideas. They appear to be wholly top-down affairs that are proposed by the leaders and either accepted or rejected by the citizens.
The introduction makes the claim that the basis for public affairs (at the time) is self-interested individuals competing with each other and moderated by government, whose role is to adjudicate this competition when markets act inefficiently. This politics assumes no single public interest and avoids any effort to engage the public to arrive at one. This prevailing model is useful when there is consensus about a public policy problem, its solution, and who should solve it but is less helpful without these conditions. The introduction claims that more public issues fall into the latter category and that a deliberative democratic approach based on determining what the public interest is and finding solutions is preferable. In this conception of public affairs, the government’s role is to provide alternative visions of solutions, discuss them, and broaden the debate. Democratic processes are not only about aggregating known individual interests but include asking questions, posing problems, offering explanations, and suggesting choices. The bulk of the individually-written chapters in this edited collection reflect upon different aspects of this approach.
Gary Orren critiques the assumptions underlying the self-interested politics model, finding that whether using a microeconomic or pluralist approach, citizen’s self-interests do not always inform their political choices, but rather their values do. He points out that the two other models assume the pre-existence of values prior to the competition they describe and have no interest or nothing to say about how individuals form those interests and how they might change. He believes people are motivated on the big public policy issues by their feelings, reflecting social connections and attachments and their desire to be part of something bigger than themselves.
Steven Kelman says that while self-interest motives people, so does the desire to help others. Individuals may follow the two impulses in different aspects of their life; self-interest when engaging the market but helping others in public affairs. He reviews the faults of the self-interest model and finds that it either relies on an implied common interest or privileges those with resources, even if those without resources have a more intense interest in an issue. The best model is one that constrains self-interest and promotes public interests and those who act in the public interest.
Mark Moore reviews examples of public ideas and their impact on how government solves problems. Using alcohol consumption, he says that when the problem is viewed as a minority overdrinking (alcoholics) and causing disturbances, the set of solutions is narrowed to criminalizing individual behavior. When one looks at it as a broader problem of “normal” people and the overall health concerns, the solution becomes more societal (limiting ads, imposing taxes) that the majority would find less palatable. He then turns to his critique of how policy is developed. He believes it is too academic and that an approach solely using data, strict definitions, and scientific methods, while useful, fails to take into account the societal and political contexts in which these policies will have to be accepted and implemented. In many cases, a logical idea fails to take root because of the failure to develop the idea with the societal and political context in mind.
Philip Heymann makes the case that while government may act narrowly to solve a particular problem, it is also expressing a value in its action. He believes citizens want a government that does more than provide goods and services but also reflects, if at least not punish, their values. He realizes that there are problems with this approach: by going beyond instrumental action and getting into values, the government could alienate some citizens and potentially not even be able to carry out its instrumental functions. In other words, the culture wars may interfere with basic governing. Additionally, expressing ideas simply to expand their reach may hide an issue’s true complexity and nuance. In the end, he wants a political culture that asks questions of simplified ideas and analogies so that extreme versions are not implemented.
Michael Sandel reviews rights-based liberalism and communitarianism. He states that liberalism does not judge citizen preferences but finds ways to adjudicate among them, leading to a moral relativism that defends preferences as neutral that cannot privilege one over another. However, he notes, the critique of liberalism is that it does privilege some values over others: tolerance and freedom. He notes that some strains of liberalism have attempted to inject some basic rights that ground the concept, but their addition leads to the question of why other rights are not fundamental. In the end, process becomes key for liberalism: people should be able to seek their good so long as it does not interfere with others seeking their good. Communitarians question prioritizing individual rights over the greater good and that individuals must be seen in relation to citizenship and the common good.
Robert Reich focuses on policy making at the administrator level and its evolution to a process-oriented approach that does not allow public debate. He notes that initially elected officials provided administrators broad authority to apply their expertise to policy problems. As the administrators’ values became decreasingly shared with the citizenry, the policy making model switched to administrators as mediators of interest groups seeking to maximize overall benefits. Reich critiques this approach as providing benefits to well-resourced preference groups with strongly held views. It also presumes a preconceived idea of the public policy problem and therefore the range of solutions to it. While these approaches can be in tension, both can lead to policies that lack broad public support. Additionally, he notes the framing of an issue influences how approaches to other issues are framed. His alternative is civic discovery, in which a public official initiates a discussion and opens the debate to citizens, perhaps even courting controversy. Using this approach, citizens own both the problem definition and the solution. He points out the limits of the approach (e.g., costlier, goes against expectation that leaders provide solutions, messier) but also notes it should be used in conjunction with traditional approaches, and is most useful in situations where no technical solution exists but is rather a matter of values.
Giandomenico Majone examines how public deliberation can combine with policy analysis. He first describes two types of analysis: maximizing outcomes by weighing costs and benefits and analysis based on arguing concepts and assumptions. The latter will not provide a formal proof but can convince an audience. The former works if there is reliable data. The former must assume there is a policy problem exists and its contours are known. The latter can begin the process of determining if there is a policy problem prior to setting goals to solve it.
Ronald Heifetz and Riley Sinder discuss political leadership and tie most closely to Reich’s chapter. Their thesis is that traditional ideas of leadership shape the way governments solve problems and that this approach restricts and diminishes the public’s capacity to address complex problems. The traditional view is that a leader takes a position, even if unpopular, explains the position, and rallies support to win approval. People want a leader to solve their problems. However, the leader cannot solve all of their complex problems and will eventually disappoint them because she cannot constantly meet their expectations and will eventually fail. If successful, the people will look to the leader even more and expect them to deliver solutions, which weakens the populace’s ability to address problems that require their participation. To aid their analysis, the authors lay out a typology of problems and determine that some can be solved by the traditional view of leadership: problems with a known definition and technical solution. If the problem is known but the solution is not, the leader can show that there is a problem, but needs the populace to help implement a solution. In the most complex case, the problem is not even known and the leader cannot define it – only the populace can. In this case, the leader seeks to get the populace to do its work: determine the contours of the problem and search for solutions. The leader may catalyze the process of problem definition and solution formulation, but cannot do the work of the populace.
Martin Linsky examines the role of the media in the public policy process. He notes the media do not like to see themselves as part of the policy process but he argues their centrality in it. The media view is that they are outside of public affairs as objective reporters, not participants. He critiques the media for their view of what is news and objectivity. For the former, he argues that the media are biased towards covering discrete events disconnected from the larger issue rather than looking at underlying causes. On the latter, he sees the current view of objectivity as the result of the business of media, when wire services were looking for short items to sell to many media outlets. It that context, it made sense business sense to stick with “just the facts” that could be written and transmitted quickly and reprinted or integrated into a story by the receiving outlet. He then goes on to distinguish between objective reporting and objective journalism. The former is the basis for journalism – getting the basic facts right. But do the media report incorrect information if faithfully presented to them by an actor? Do they provide context that something was said but is not true? In our current situation, this has salience. In his view, an objective journalism provides context. He concludes that news organizations need to accept they are players in public affairs and their choice on what to report has an impact.
So how does this counter-balance to microeconomic-informed, adjudicated self-interest politics hold up? Did it respond well to the problem at the time and does it have salience today? To the extent that politics has always relied upon big, simple ideas to sway the public, the authors’ concern over the lack of public ideas is overblown. Politicians in the last decades have espoused big ideas the public can embrace or reject: FDR’s New Deal, Johnson’s Great Society, Reagan’s smaller government, tax cuts, and standing up to the Soviets, Bush I’s Kinder, Gentler Nation, Clinton’s Third Way, Bush II’s compassionate conservatism, Obama’s Hope, and Trump’s MAGA. How these public ideas developed would be a subject for these authors to critique. There is little evidence that widespread public debate guided these leaders to develop these big ideas. They appear to be wholly top-down affairs that are proposed by the leaders and either accepted or rejected by the citizens.
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