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CHAPTER
1
Background: Some Origins
of the Classical Model

In this chapter, we trace the evolution of what is today’s dominant policy

model, that of policy situations as rational decisions involving goal-
maximizing choices, whether the goal is to increase utility or some other
objective function. This history is traced from the Enlightenment onward
to the modern-day utilitarian theories of games and decisions. In this
treatment, we do not merely (temporarily) focus on the abstract theories
stemming from utilitarianism because of their theoretical merits. Rather,
we dwell on them to try and show how these theories have been used in
policy discourse to justify strong policy models and, sometimes, ideological
positions. In all this, it is important for the student to be aware of the
historical and epistemological underpinnings of these discourses to better
understand and, invariably, critique them. Toward the end of the chapter,
we hint at murmurs of the postpositivist and the beginnings of move-
ments away from the rational model. Part of this turning away leads us
to the discussions, and models, found in the latter part of the book.
However, this chapter, along with Chapters 3 and 4, are important even for
the rational model’s critics because we can best move forward and reform
policy practices by being thoroughly versed in the discourse and theory of
classic policy analysis.

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20 • Frameworks for Policy Analysis

Philosophical Tradition (1700s)

Descartes is the philosopher most commonly associated with the model of
the mental, that is, a radical separation of the person from nature. When
he posited nature as basically something that is entirely doubtable and
landed upon the conclusion that, therefore, the only thing that was indubi-
table was his own capacity to doubt, this signaled the strongest movement
toward an intellectual tradition that associated knowledge with pure
thought.

Yesterday’s Meditation has filled my mind with so many doubts

that it is no longer in my power to forget them… I convince
myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my deceitful memory
recalls to me. I think that I have no senses; and I believe that body,
shape, extension, motion, and location are merely inventions of
my mind. What then could still be thought true?…have I not
thereby convinced myself that I did not exist? Not at all; without
doubt I existed if I was convinced for even if I thought anything.
Even though there may be a deceiver of some sort…he can never
make me be nothing as long as I think that I am something. I am
something real and existing, but what thing am I? I have already
given the answer: a thing which thinks.
From Descartes’ Meditations, 1641
In the most emphatic way, Descartes was paving the way for a tradition
that associated truth seeking, analysis if you will, with mental life. The
human person was, in his conception, definable only as res cogitans, the
thinking being, inasmuch as everything else had to be laid open to doubt.
This concept of knowledge as the mental is a striking movement away
from any notion that knowledge might be embedded in experience (which
involved sensory input, emotion, moral reasoning, and aesthetic sensibility).
In fact, this led to scientific traditions that, for centuries onward and to
this day, categorized emotion and other nonmental sensations as mere
affect.
The model of thought, of course, stems from much earlier. For example,
consider the following passage from a text from the Sung Dynasty.
I sat quietly by the desk in my official room,
With my fountain-mind undisturbed, as serene as water;
A sudden clash of thunder, the mind-doors burst open,
And lo, there sitteth the old man in all his homeliness.
Chben, from Suzuki, 1962
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Background • 21

It is the notion of the mental (or contemplative) life, freed from the
vagaries of nature. At any rate, the model upon which learning and, as we
will see, policy analysis, is founded begins with the notion of thought as,
while acting upon and influenced by material reality, essentially independent
of it. But, of course, the mind itself is, among other things, material reality,
a notion to which we are just beginning to return. As an aside, one cannot
help but note the parallel with current notions of the World Wide Web as a
freely floating medium, existing independently of any place. But of course
it is not since each and every bit of information on the Web necessarily
must lie in at least one computer’s hard drive. Ideas, like bits, have a home.
These realities will have implications for our analysis, as we see later on.
At any rate, Descartes made the argument, in the deepest way, for two
important notions: first, the notion of the person as essentially and ulti-
mately individual, and second, the notion of the individual as essentially a
thinking thing: res cogitans. Knowledge is ratio, truth arrived at through a
mental process. But what, then, of external nature? When Descartes pon-
dered upon a melting slag of wax, surely he could not have thought those
thoughts if not for the reality of something like wax? Such was the debate
that ensued between the rationalists, of which Descartes was the foremost
voice, and the empiricists, who included in their number writers like John
Locke and David Hume. The latter insisted that nature and material reality
were the ultimate source of knowledge and that, by itself, the mind would
have no knowledge whatsoever unless it came to it from outside. The
empiricists likened the mind to a blank slate that knew only what was
written into it through sensory experience. Descartes would say that we
know that two and two equals four by reasoning, while Locke would say
that we know it by observation, e.g., that I am as full after eating two two-
egg omelettes as I am after eating one four-egg omelette (ceteris paribus).
Kant attempted to bring both fields together by stating that nature did
exist and did create in us knowledge, but not by nature’s own action.
Rather, all knowledge of nature was possible because the mind is able to
create categories to which sensory input could be assigned (Kant, 1787).
The mind is, prior to any experience, equipped with the capacity to classify
and order, e.g., to assign a notion of proximity to objects seen by the
human eye. Thus, the myriad points of green, yellow, and red light coming
to our sense from a tree can be understood by the human mind as belong-
ing to one object (the tree) and not just a jumble of sensory input like dots
swirling on a TV screen. This was an even more radical conceptualization
than Descartes’ since, in Kant’s concept, the mind was the organizer of the
universe. The universe did exist, but only through the categorical process
of the mind that gives it meaning. Perhaps we can appreciate more fully
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22 • Frameworks for Policy Analysis

how completely radical this concept was by considering what central event
marked the beginning of the European Enlightenment in the first place:
the printing of the first encyclopedia, a systematic classification and ordering
of knowledge. This was a radical notion, that we could essentially define
truth, reality, and the universe through none other than our individual,
mental capacity for classification.
But the primacy of individual reason still left important problems
to solve, e.g., morality. First of all, while we certainly can believe that an
individual can figure out the best course of action or the most reasonable
depiction of the truth for her or himself, how could a group of individuals
do this together? That is, since we exist as social beings, how does a society
reason? How do we engage in moral reasoning, which is reasoning applied
to social reality? How do we arrive at the summum bonum, or the good of
all of society, not just the individual?
Kant posited that reasoning individuals, through cogitation, should be
able to arrive at some basic truths and that all individuals should be able to
arrive at the same conclusion. This is because some principles hold regard-
less of context (i.e., outside of the particularities of a person’s experience).
These universal rules were true universally and regardless of the particu-
larities of a time or place or person and, as such, held independently of
experience. These truths are a priori or prior to experience and, so, are
universal. For example, consider Kant’s categorical imperative:

Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will
that it should become universal law.
Kant, 1785
which Kant posited as the universal rule by which we derive other universal
rules.
Thus, all that was required was to be sufficiently thorough in our cogi-
tation, whether done as individuals or by many persons together, and we
should arrive at these a priori principles, the summum bonum. The practical
difficulty with this prescription, of course, is that it is notoriously difficult
for different people to agree on the same first principles. Could a group of
people who cannot even agree on a choice of pizza ever possibly find a
way to come to the same conclusions about more fundamental questions
like Social Security? How practical a prescription is Kant’s for the formu-
lation of public policy? In Chapter 8, we take up the application of Kant’s
deontological and other ethical theories to the area of public policy.
At around this same time, there arose a voice from across the Channel,
and his promised a prescription for public policy that seemed much more
amenable to actual application. Taking his cue from the empiricists,
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Background • 23

Jeremy Bentham sought to ground social principles on reasoning processes

that did not involve more than individual thought. Starting from the
individual, Bentham posited that the course of action that was best for an
individual is none other than that which gave this individual the greatest
pleasure or benefit. But what of society? By a process of philosophical
induction, Bentham reasoned that, inasmuch as what was best for one
individual was the maximization of one’s greatest pleasure, what would be
best for society was whatever resulted in the sum total pleasure, aggregated
over all individuals in that society. The implied mathematical operation is
not merely an allusion. Bentham really did propose a moral calculus: to
divine the best state for society, one only needs to find out which action
gave the largest sum of pleasures, added up over all the individuals in society.
To do this, pleasure (or its negative, pain) had to be commensurate — and
one had to have ways to actually measure it. Otherwise, one could not
carry out the additive operation. This stemmed directly from Bentham’s
empiricism, in that, in place of the moral reasoning proposed by Kant,
Bentham’s was simply an exercise of measurement. Simply measure the
amount of pleasure or pain for each individual, then simply add up all
these measurements over all the individuals, and this gives us the implica-
tion for society as a whole. In Bentham’s words, the summum bonum
consisted in securing “the greatest good for the greatest number” (Bentham,
1789). This notion was further developed by John Stuart Mill, who took
up the utilitarian tradition after Bentham.

According to the greatest happiness principle, as above explained,

the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all
other things are desirable — whether we are considering our own
good of that of other people — is an existence exempt as far as
possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in
point of quantity and quality…I must again repeat what the assail-
ants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that
the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is
right in conduct is not the agent’s own happiness but that of all
concerned.
Mill, 1863
This was the first principle of utility, or the basic tenet of the school
of Utilitarianism, which has exerted its powerful influence over the policy
sciences ever since. This was an important step for policy analysis because
this prescription allowed one to bring in the notion of a societal, collective
will simply by replacing it by an ersatz society, the aggregate, thus bringing
to full circle the model of the reasoning individual. We begin with some
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24 • Frameworks for Policy Analysis

principle by which an individual might arrive at some judgment. Then

instead of problematizing how to extend this reasoning process over many
individuals, Bentham simply substituted a different individual, the “collec-
tive,” whose opinion on a matter was simply the register of the sum of
individual valuations of good or bad for each person in the collective.
Instead of attempting to find a common ground among a thousand people,
one simply posited a collective individual whose likes and dislikes were the
simple aggregation of the likes and dislikes of the thousand.
But Bentham’s operational solution, to mathematize away the moral
problematic, also introduced other problems, such as “How do we measure
good and bad, pleasure and pain?” These were not traditional objects that
one could measure with an instrument in empiricist tradition. Doubtless,
if Bentham had available during his day, the type of sensors we have today
to record electric impulses from our nervous system, he or one of his
students would certainly have tried actual measurement. What Bentham
and his student J.S. Mills essentially prescribed was to measure societal
good and bad by simply having each person express the level of good or
bad experienced by an individual as a result of some action. That is,
instead of simply measuring inanimate objects, utilitarianism involves the
measurement of subjective cognitions from animate and reasoning subjects.
It is almost as if a boulder reported its own weight back to us. Utilitarianism
introduced the notion of a social calculus: the treatment of moral questions
involving good and bad as empirically commensurable things while not
departing from the primacy of the individual, because good and bad were
subjective claims made by animate subjects.
Utilitarianism also underscored another important notion: that of the
individual as a self-satisfying automaton. That is, each individual need not
ponder on the welfare of society as a whole or even of the person next to
him. The social calculus took care of that and left to the individual the
simpler operation of determining only what was good or bad for him or
herself. The only input to this social calculus is the individual expressions
of personal welfare. Persons only had to concern themselves with their
own good or bad. This is the notion of the person as a utility maximizer.
Having been freed from the Kantian obligation to think universally (i.e., to
seek the good of all), each person need only worry about individualizing,
which, taken to its logical end, simply meant that the dictum is for each
person to simply opt for actions or states that maximized their individual
good or utility.
We see then, stemming from the Enlightenment thinkers, a number of
distinct schools of thought, all of which contributed, in their own ways, to a
number of central notions that are influential in policy analysis to this day.
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Background • 25

1. The basic unit of analysis is the individual, and knowledge is arrived

at by the individual.
2. The basis for morality is reason, and social questions can be treated
as exercises in reason.
3. Individuals tend toward seeking individual utility.
4. Society can be treated, analytically, by understanding it as a collection
of individuals.
5. Scientific empiricism can be brought to bear on social questions.
This has led to modern institutional models based on the assumption
of the atomistic, self-directed, personal utility-maximizing individual. We
should note that even Mill’s model (as suggested in the previous excerpt)
did not posit this utterly individualistic notion of the person but, instead,
conceived of the person as someone with an inclination toward the social
good, at large. The former, versus the latter, conceptualization of the indi-
vidual has come to dominate policy thought today.

Modern Decision Theory (1940s On)

While Bentham and other Enlightenment thinkers introduced the first
glimmers of the mathematization to the field of policy, it was not until the
twentieth century that its most formal and utterly mathematical formula-
tion would appear. In 1944, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern
published an altogether monumental book: Theory of Games and Economic
Behavior (von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944). In this treatise, von
Neumann and Morgenstern (vN–M) took some of the same concepts that
grew out of the Enlightenment and proceeded to systematically build up a
number of powerful theories based on them. Over the rest of the chapter,
we discuss the basic conceptual movements that stemmed from this treatise
and their further development as others proceeded to develop these basic
models. We leave for the succeeding chapters, however, the actual theory in
its detail. While the history of the classic rational model spans many, many
writers, we have space enough to treat just one of the more recent branches,
that of the decision sciences. It is not possible to cover the many intellectual
schools that revolve around the rational model, including the empiricists,
later to be followed by positivists (e.g., Comte) and logical positivists (e.g.,
Carnap). We do not even venture into the rich history of scholars who
helped shape the course of public policy curricula, e.g., Lasswell and others,
which any policy student should feel obliged to become familiar with
(Laswell, 1970). Instead, to focus in on the assumptions behind the rational
model, stated in their purest and starkest form, we simply concentrate on
the decision model that came out of the original work of vN–M.
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26 • Frameworks for Policy Analysis

In their book, vN–M posited two basic models for judgment: that
employed by the individual and that employed by a group of individuals.
The individual, in this rarified formulation, was simply a walking register
of utility whose judgment and action was governed by the principle of
utility maximization. That is, starting from the utilitarian prescription of
self-satisfaction, vN–M built their theory upon the supposition that each
person in society can be modeled as an ideal utility-maximizing machine.
In the following two chapters, we concentrate on those particular policy
models that derive from the fundamental work of vN–M, noting that these
are simply a part (though, an important part) of the diverse approaches
and frameworks that are linked to the rational model.
The theory of individual judgment is now known as decision theory.
This model provided the mathematical description of individual utility
maximization. To do this, vN–M modeled “judgment” as ineluctably a
choice among competing alternatives. Each alternative would be judged by
the individual and, ultimately, valued and assigned its level of utility. The
individual would then, having evaluated every alternative and assigned
them scores (utility), simply pick that alternative that gave the highest
score in the individual calculus. This is the mathematical equivalent of
Bentham’s utilitarianism. The extension to multiple individuals is the same
operation as Bentham’s. Having calculated the utility to each individual
from an action, we simply add up the utilities over all individuals and
choose the alternative that gives the highest aggregate utility. But, again,
the extension to many individuals is done by simply positing one “collective”
individual whose utilities are simply the sum of all individual utilities. This
assumes a centralized decision maker, capable of making these judgments,
choosing the solution, and making sure that the choice is carried out. The
centralized decision maker is, of course, simply the logical extension of the
reasoning individual. Instead of the individual person, posit the individual
state.
What if there is no centralized decision maker capable of choosing and
enforcing one course of action for all members of society? What if each of
a thousand individuals, instead of being given one course of action deter-
mined by the state, had enough liberty to choose a thousand different
individual courses of action? That is, what if these thousand individuals
engaged in private decisions, and not public decisions as posited in deci-
sion theory. With regard to a transportation example, a public decision
might mean the choice of a public transport measure that, automatically,
all in society would receive, whereas a private decision might mean the
individual choice of a car or a choice of whether to use the car, bus, or feet
to get to work each day. The second theoretical frontier created by vN–M
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Background • 27

formalized the modeling of this second type of judgment, where each indi-
vidual was free to choose his or her own solution. How would we model
the kinds of consequences that might result given that each individual was
free to choose? This body of theory is known as game theory. Again,
vN–M model the individual as a simply utility-maximizing machine.
Figure 1.1 depicts the development of theory that stemmed from vN–M
onward, mentioning some authors whose work is discussed in the succeed-
ing chapters. Of course, we should always keep in mind that the decision
sciences represented in the figure are simply one “branch” of a much larger
set of traditions revolving around the norm of rationality that emerged
from Enlightenment thought.
The social calculus, decision theory, has developed into two related, yet
sometimes distinct, sets of methods known as multiattribute utility (MAU)
on the one hand and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) on the other. The main
differences are the attempt to simulate, within CBA, actual markets, which
entails the measurement of all values in terms of currency. This brings
to the fore questions about the influence of income or ability to pay on
valuations of costs and benefits. Other difficulties with CBA involve the
fact that the real significance of a dollar to a given person varies with that
person’s utility or the payoff received. That is, utility is nonlinear with
currency. On the other hand, CBA may be intuitively close to human cog-
nition owing to our everyday experience with actual markets. MAU does
not bring everything to the level of currency and uses units of utility that
may be nonlinear with currency. Moreover, there is more attention, paid in
MAU to the functional form of the social aggregation equation. For exam-
ple, utilities might not be simply added across the range of things being

von Neumann - Morgenstern

Decision theory Game theory

MAU Social choice BCA

(Arrow, Sen) Cooperative Noncooperative
(Shapley, Nash) (Nash)

Bayesian, subgame perfect equilibria

Prospect theory Bounded rationality (Harsanyi, Selten)
(Kahneman, Tversky) (Simon)

Fig. 2.1 The “family tree” of decision sciences.

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28 • Frameworks for Policy Analysis

valued or across the range of individuals being considered, but might be

aggregated using other functional forms (e.g., multiplicative). At any rate,
this branch of the hierarchy encompassing both MAU and CBA basically
involves the expression of individual utility in terms of numbers, or cardinal
utility. This allows us to simply add (or use some other mathematical
operation) the utilities to get at the collective answer.
There is another branch, social choice theory, that stems from the indi-
vidual person model and, yet, does not involve cardinal utilities. This theory
is based on expressions of personal preferences not in the form of numerical
valuations but simply as rank orderings. That is, given a set of alternatives,
the decision maker does not assign cardinal values to each alternative but,
instead, merely orders them in terms of most to least preferred. In other
words, in social choice theory, preferences are expressed in ordinal,
not cardinal, terms. Ordinal data are simpler and less information rich
than cardinal information and, so, are easier for people to determine. Note
that cardinal data automatically lets one rank order alternatives — this is
what we mean by cardinal data being richer in information. How does one
aggregate preferences across individuals then? Not by addition but by
some other social choice rule. The easiest example is that of voting, which
involves people registering ordinal information. A social choice rule used
to aggregate a group of individuals’ preferences for, say, a president might
be a majority of the votes or some other rule. The ease with which these
calculations are carried out can come at a price. In particular, later theo-
rists like Arrow and Sen have provided examples by which counterintuitive
results would result and, in fact, have provided proofs that there is no
social choice rule that would never produce counterintuitive results (Arrow,
1951; Sen, 1970).
There are yet other variations that we could not fit into the hierarchy.
For example, one school posited that frail, imperfect humans could not
possibly live up to the ideal of a perfect, utility-calculating machine. Thus,
this school, including people like Hebert Simon, posited the notion of
bounded rationality and the prescriptive principle of satisficing rather
than maximization (Simon, 1957). We should also note the contribution
of Savage who posited that humans, not having access to perfect informa-
tion, could still proceed by the expected utility mode of reasoning by
employing subjective probabilities in situations of uncertainty, which is a
distinct modification of what had been, to that point, a frequent notion of
uncertainty (Savage, 1954).
As depicted in Figure 1.1, an important development in utility theory
came to be known as prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979).
Prospect theory developed out of observations, mostly by cognitive
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Background • 29

psychologists, of systematic departures from the expected utility hypothe-

sis. For example, when put in hypothetical situations wherein subjects had
to weigh an expected loss of some amount versus the foregone gain of the
same amount, subjects routinely chose one over the other. These heuristics
and biases, these researchers concluded, were systematic and built into the
very cognitive framework of the individual. The important thing to note,
at this point, is that, though it is a significant movement from expected
utility theory, prospect theory still can be thought of as firmly entrenched
in the basic class of models that stemmed from vN–M.
On the right side of the hierarchy, game theory branches out into several
different fields. Starting from the basic premise of vN–M of trying to
model outcomes from multiple utility-maximizing decision makers, each
making independent decisions on their own, vN–M posited two types of
games. The first, cooperative game theory, assumes that the individuals
can coordinate their individual actions by agreeing on mutually binding
contracts, and that this group can enforce any such contract. Such a contract
would specify the payoffs that each player would get from the contract. At
any rate, cooperative game theory studies the different “contracts” that
might result from a given situation and the properties of each type.
On the other hand, suppose that these individuals, even if they could
specify an agreement, had no way of enforcing such a contract? The reasons
may be numerous: There is no authority for enforcing the contract, there
is no feasible way to monitor each player to ensure that each does follow
the contract, etc. When this is the case, we are left with a game in which
each player acts purely as an individual. An individual may adjust his or
her actions depending on how others act or are poised to act, but there is
no coordination between individuals. When this happens, what we have is
a set of individuals each pursuing his or her own utility-maximizing strat-
egy without any thought of the consequences for the other individuals.
This field is known as noncooperative game theory. Von Neumann and
Morgenstern showed how you could predict solutions, i.e., equilibria, for
zero-sum games involving two players. Zero-sum simply means if one
player gains an extra dollar, then the other player loses an extra dollar.
Equilibrium simply means that rational players can figure out what their
optimal strategies are and, moreover, can figure out their opponent’s
optimal strategy, having no reason not to play this strategy. That is, given
that both players are rational, we can expect them to land in the same
equilibrium each time, playing the predicted actions and obtaining the
predicted payoffs.
Later pioneers in game theory have extended the vN–M models in
different ways. In noncooperative game theory, Nash proved the existence
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30 • Frameworks for Policy Analysis

of equilibria for more general games that are non–zero-sum and that
involve even more than two players. While he proved the existence of these
so-called Nash equilibria, these are not necessarily unique (Nash, 1950,
1951). Later theorists, i.e., Selten and Harsanyi, extended this model to
include the effect of uncertainty, resulting in the concept of Bayesian Nash
equilibria.
On the side of cooperative game theory, theorists such as Shapley
produced a number of noteworthy solution concepts (or ideal formulas
for “contracts”). Gillies and Shapley introduced the notion of a core,
which is the set of possible contracts that are satisfactory enough for any
player or subgroup of players such that none of them could do better by
not joining in on the contract (Gillies, 1953; Shapley, 1952). Later on,
Shapley proved the properties of the most well-known cooperative solu-
tion concepts, later on named the Shapley value, and showed how such a
formula possesses some desirable properties or axioms (Shapley, 1953).
We include Nash on this side of the field, also, since he formulated an
axiomatic approach to characterizing a solution concept for two players
(Nash, 1950). We see more of these theories in detail beginning with
Chapter 2. For now, suffice it to note that all these currents of thought
sprang from the original work of vN–M. For now, you might use Table 1.1
to keep track of this rich ground.
The important thing is to keep in mind the manner in which concepts
from the 1700s and earlier have been formalized and embedded in these
more modern models. Most important is the fundamental adoption of the
model of choice by vN–M. That is, social judgment is modeled as the
choice of the best alternative from a field of possible alternatives. These
alternatives already exist and are known — hence, the natural use of the

Table 2.1 Models Produced by the Theory of Games and Decisions

Decision Theory Game Theory
Cost-
Multiattribute Benefit Social
Utility Analysis Choice Cooperative Noncooperative
Individual Individual Individual Groups can Individuals
preferences preferences preferences make and cannot have
are expressed are are enforce binding
as cardinal expressed expressed contracts. contracts and
utilities. with with only act
cardinal ordinal individually
monetary rankings.
values.
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Background • 31

word “analysis” to describe this concept. Judgment is modeled as the

search for the one optimal path, solution, or concept from a field of alter-
natives. Within this field, one only needs to deduce which one member is
“best.” This involves a process of evaluating each alternative and choosing
one. Moreover, analysis, in this model, ends with the final choice.
There are typically many factors that are involved in weighing the merits
of any alternative. For example, in choosing a home, one has to consider
not just one factor (e.g., price), but others like safety, aesthetics, peace
and quiet, proximity to the park, etc. The models that vN–M developed
assume that one can bring all these diverse factors onto the same plane
of comparison. That is, all of these elements (price, safety, etc.) can be
expressed in the same units of utility (or, as in the case of CBA, in dollars).
Another important feature of these modern models, then, is the assump-
tion of commensurability. That is, any factor can be measured along a
scale of utility or value. This strong empiricism has consequences for the
way policy analysis is carried out, as we see further on. Since everything
can be measured and expressed as value, then we can compare everything.
For example, we can compare a house that is cheap but with no view to
another house that is expensive but that has a great view of Mt. Fuji. This
notion of comparability goes hand in hand with that of commensurability.
(Actually, in Chapter 2, we discuss how, so long as everything can be com-
pared, we can often derive cardinal measures of worth.) At any rate, realize
that without the ability to compare, the model of social judgment as
choices between alternatives would not be possible. That is, in vN–M’s
universe, anything can be compared with anything else, and, moreover,
these comparisons can be made by comparing cardinal values attached to
each alternative. If you believe that comparisons cannot be made or that
measures cannot be formulated, e.g., resetting the speed limit requires
being able to compare lives lost with dollars saved, then you cannot use
these models.
Even more fundamentally, analysis is essentially a mental or cognitive
exercise. One can perform these calculations removed from a situation.
In fact, in some circles, the common wisdom is that analysis should be
performed by neutral observers who are not too familiar with or too
personally involved in the situation. Decisions are best made, in this for-
mulation, by the analyst as res cogitans, the thinking thing removed from
nature but able to ponder it from an epistemological distance.

The Postpositivist Turn

In Chapter 4, we begin to talk of a turning away from the strongly positivist
nature of classic policy thought, beginning with the hermeneutic tradition
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32 • Frameworks for Policy Analysis

and leading to the more recent school of poststructuralism. For now, we

simply note that all the while that both the rationalist and empiricist
schools were developing systematic systems of philosophy leading to the
present bodies of classic theory we find today, there were numerous voices
that reacted to the reductionisms of the classic models. One will readily
recognize in the Kantian, Humean, and Benthamite systems the strong
notion of a separation of the internal from external (or, similarly, of mind
from nature). In Part II of this book, we take up systems of thought that
do not so irreconcilably posit two independent spheres of reality. We also
should recognize the strong notion of the summum bonum (whether
couched as philosophy or social policy) as an objective principle if not fact
(although Hume would altogether reject the idea of mere fact). When one
is willing not only to set aside the grandness of the summum bonum but,
moreover, accept its permanent absence, what system of thought might we
be led to? While some of these alternative accounts have, by now, become
standard fare in the realm of theory, they still have to work their way
firmly into the policy disciplines. In this book, particularly from Chapter 4
onward, we attempt to chart these movements. We then glimpse some of
the frayed edges of both the rational and postpositivist movements, and
attempt to propose new directions in Part III.