Day: 8 March 2018
Understanding Policy Better

Another paired post – following the argument that policy should be deprecated, this is a much more positive – and remarkably concise – set of statements about what policy is (with some useful hints about what it might be).
Forget policy — start with people
Beatrice Karol Burks – Designing Good Things
This is a short polemic against the idea of policy, and by extension against the (self) importance of those who make it. It clearly and strongly makes an important point – but in doing so misses something important about policy and politics.
It is certainly true that starting with people and their needs is a good way of approaching problems. But it doesn’t follow that anything called policy is necessarily vacuous or redundant. Policy making, and indeed politics, is all about making choices, and those choices would still be there even if the options to be considered were better grounded.
None of that makes the practical suggestions in this post wrong. But if we forget policy, we forget something important.